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Thoughts on Digital Equity: Justin Reich

By Matt Weber
11/14/2011 10:50 AM
2 Comments

candidate discusses his HGSE research with the #edtech community.

 

Justin Reich is a fifth-year doctoral student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and the project manager for the Distributed Collaborative Learning Communities project. The DCLC project is funded by the Hewlett Foundation Open Education Resources initiative, and Richard Murnane and John Willett are the principal investigators. The DCLC team investigates issues of excellence, equity, and analytics in the use of social media in K-12 settings. Justin keeps a blog and a record of DCLC papers and resources at edtechresearcher.org .

Justin is also a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and he will be the luncheon speaker on January 17th, giving the talk, “Will Free Benefit the Rich? How Free and Open Education May Widen Digital Divides.” The talk will be given live at Harvard and streamed live on the web.

Justin is the cofounder of EdTechTeacher, a social venture devoted to helping teachers and schools leverage technology to support student-centered, inquiry-based learning environments. EdTechTeacher hosts a series of summer workshops on the campus of Harvard University for teachers and school leaders and works with schools and districts throughout the year in the Teaching for the 21st Century program. This March, they will host a winter conference at the Microsoft New England Research and Development (NERD) Center.

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  • Cable Green

    Justin:

    Very interesting – and a great video. I wish more research was summed up so nicely.

    (1) Your research reminds me of “knowledge gap” research:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_gap_hypothesis

    http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/search/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=ED383009&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=no&accno=ED383009

    (2) Be sure to add a CC BY license to your YouTube video – lead by example ;)

    Cable Green
    Director of Global Learning
    Creative Commons

  • NB

    I enjoyed your video and love your enthusiasm for your research, but am a little concerned by the way you frame the ‘problem’. You seem to be worried that already advantaged students will use the material to ‘race ahead’, which is implied to be somehow detrimental to the disadvantaged students.

    I don’t believe that learning should be viewed as a zero-sum game where one group of students benefit at the expense of others. If free and open online educational resources can improve learning for advantaged students by 20% while also improving the learning of disadvantaged students by 10%, shouldn’t we celebrate the overall improvement that the technology enables, and work to bring the benefits realized by the latter cohort up to the same level as the first?

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