Toward a Learning Technologies knowledge network

Abstract

The NSF-funded Center for Innovative Learning Technologies (CILT) is designed to be a national resource for stimulating research and development of technology-enabled solutions to critical problems in K-14 science, math, engineering and technology learning. The Center, which was launched at the end of 1997, is organized around four themes its leadership has identified as areas where research is likely result in major gains in teaching and learning. The Center sponsors research across disciplines and institutions in its four theme areas. It brings together experts in the fields of cognitive science, educational technologies, computer science, subject matter learning, and engineering. It engages business through an Industry Alliance Program and is also training postdoctoral students. CILT's founding organizations are SRI International's Center for Technology in Learning, University of California at Berkeley (School of Education and Department of Computer Science), Vanderbilt University's Learning Technology Center, and the Concord Consortium. Through its programs, CILT seeks to reach beyond these organizations to create a web of organizations, individuals, industries, schools, foundations, government agencies and labs, that is devoted to the production, sharing and use of new knowledge about how learning technologies can dramatically improve the processes and outcomes of learning and teaching. This paper describes the rationale and operations of the Center, and first year progress in defining a set of CILT partnership projects with many other institutions that came out of our national theme team workshops.

Reflections on the state of educational technology research and development

“…They target learner populations that have traditionally failed in academic subjects, such as urban middle school students (Horwitz & Christe, in press; Roschelle et al, in press; and White & Frederiksen, in press). And they test a variety of advanced technologies including artificial intelligence (Corbett et al, 1999), networking (Shneiderman, Borkowski, Alavi, & Norman, 1998), virtual reality (Dede, Salzman, Loftin, & Ash, in press), virtual communities, visualization and modeling, and hand-held computers (Pea et al, 1999). They take on challenging tasks related to scaling-up and nation-wide implementation, such as teacher professional development (Corbett et al, 1999;Shneiderman et al, 1998), cross-sector collaboration (Linnet al, 1999;Pea et al, 1999), and commercialization (Pea et al, 1999;Resnick, 1998).…”

“…And they test a variety of advanced technologies including artificial intelligence (Corbett et al, 1999), networking (Shneiderman, Borkowski, Alavi, & Norman, 1998), virtual reality (Dede, Salzman, Loftin, & Ash, in press), virtual communities, visualization and modeling, and hand-held computers (Pea et al, 1999). They take on challenging tasks related to scaling-up and nation-wide implementation, such as teacher professional development (Corbett et al, 1999;Shneiderman et al, 1998), cross-sector collaboration (Linnet al, 1999;Pea et al, 1999), and commercialization (Pea et al, 1999;Resnick, 1998). And these articles explore deep theoretical issues related to scaffolding and knowledge integration , visualization and the formation of mental models (Dede et al in press;Horwitz & Christe, in press;Kozma, in press;Pea et al, 1999;White & Frederiksen, in press), and technological support for problem solving (Corbett et al, 1999;Schwartz et al, 1999).…”

Finding the Ties That Bind: Tools in Support of a Knowledge-Building Community

“…CILT has been designed to address these challenges as a distributed center for fostering collaboration, research, and dissemination in learning technologies (Pea et al, 1999). The CILT organization was founded by four nonprofit and educational institutions (SRI International, the University of California at Berkeley, Vanderbilt University, and the Concord Consortium) in cooperation with industry and school partners.…”

“…The perceived challenges of the field-lack of cumulativity, lack of connection between research and practice, obsolescence, and disciplinary isolation-drove the goals and activities of CILT. The CILT leadership team set the following as CILT's goals: identifying areas of high potential for research and development, supporting rapid innovation, stimulating collaborative development in the selected areas, fostering interdisciplinary research and dissemination, and helping train new professionals in the field of learning technology research (Pea et al, 1999). CILT was envisioned as a learning community in which researchers, teachers, developers, and policy-makers would collaborate to share and build knowledge about learning, education, and technology.…”

Using the internet to improve university education

“…The scope of dynamic visualisation is even broader: Dynamic visualisation or modelling can help students better understand the interdependent structure of complex and dynamic systems (e. g. de Jong & van Joolingen, 1998). According to Roschelle and Pea (Pea et al, 1999), it is the next challenge for web-based education to make these already existing "advanced visualisation, simulation, and modelling tools (...) work with multiple students collaborating over the web." (p. 24).…”