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As a way of sponsoring experimentation in the use of information technology in instruction and learning, Harvard's Office of the Provost provides assistance in the form of funds to support innovative applications of IT. In this interview, Wirth Professor Chris Dede, one of the innovation grant recipients, discusses the potential of handheld devices to enhance teaching and learning. HGSE doctoral student Ed Dieterle joins Chris Dede in the interview.
Q: What are some of the examples of the kind of leverage you anticipate handhelds might provide in the classroom? Chris Dede: Many people are excited about one-to-one computing for students, and innovations like Maine's laptop initiative illustrate the types of exciting things that start to happen when students have 24/7 access to powerful technologies, when teachers can count on that as part of their design of instruction. However, if that takes place with laptops, it's very expensive, and not every school is equipped to make that kind of investment. Part of what makes handhelds so exciting is that they have, perhaps, 60% of the capability for learning at about 10% of the price. This next generation of handheld devices, in particular those that are Pocket PC-based, has the kind of raw computing power that laptops may have had 2-3 years ago, even though screen sizes are much smaller and full-sized keyboards are a peripheral add-on. This array of features means that they will be used a little differently than a laptop is used. For example, outside of classrooms, handheld devices allow a vision of learning called ubiquitous computing, where the virtual world travels through the real world with you. This is in contrast to sitting at a desktop and interacting with a device. Students walking through their own community can take advantage of a digital-camera attachment, or a probeware attachment measuring temperature or pressure or motion, or a graphing calculator to help them to understand something that's taking place within the community—and then bring that back inside the school setting. We're just beginning to understand the possibilities that handhelds present inside and out of schools. Ed Dieterle: Newer generations of handhelds also include GPS (global positioning systems), giving users the capability of mapping out exactly where they are, in relation to locations, other objects, and other people. Dede: We had a field trip in my T-502 class recently to MIT to experience an outdoor curricular unit called "Environmental Detective," designed by Eric Klopfer from MIT's teacher education program. Learners walked around the physical campus in which a virtual chemical spill was present. You could go to different spots to interview various people virtually. You could do probes and analysis of groundwater virtually, and then you could put together a strategy for where the spill was coming from and how to contain it. That's an exciting and intriguing possibility that GPS-based handhelds open up.
Q: Of the contexts that you're investigating—graduate student learning, ongoing professional development, and lessons taught by preservice teachers—which do you think is most likely to embrace the innovation offered by handhelds? Dieterle: My guess is graduate student learning. More and more students are coming to HGSE with this technology, and when students start bringing their handheld devices to class everyday for various reasons—note-taking devices, etc.—they will start to integrate it into the class, even if the professor isn't trying to use it as a part of the class. Dede: Our initial implementations are targeted to our own graduate students and our own formal courses because those offer the structured environment that both lets us design a very controlled learning experience and also study it. The second time through we offer the handhelds in, say, the methods courses in teacher education, then we can look at those students in turn taking it out in school settings and starting to get a sense of that. Q: Casting your mind out five years to 2009, how does this change the way graduate student education is conducted at HGSE? Dede: One theory about learning that is prominent when you look at technology use is the concept of distributed cognition. A very simple example of this would be graphing. It's tremendously boring to plot out a set of axes, and put all the little points onto them. By the time the graph is finished, students are bored and couldn't care less what it represents. This isn't to say that students shouldn't have to construct a couple of graphs because you don't want it to be magic. But once they've done that, they should never have to do a graph again because there is no workplace setting in which people ever do graphing, given the productivity tools we have. That's a very simple example of distributed cognition: a tool doing low-level things that it can do well, to free a person to do the high-level, creative, interpretive, inquiry-based things that people do well. The recent report by the Partnership for 21st-Century Skills makes clear that these kinds of person-tool partnerships underlie not just representational skills like graphing but many higher-order skills like problem-solving, learning how to learn, and collaboration. Where I think handhelds fit into this distributed cognition concept is that right now, people at the Ed School can do distributed cognition only when they are sitting in a chair at some sort of device, or in very simplistic ways when they are accessing a PDA productivity tool. But in five years, we can imagine these portable wireless devices enabling a whole range of sophisticated individual (and group) distributed cognition. And I think that that could make this place very exciting, because it would enhance learning in everything people do, instead of technology being valuable only when you get to that special technology spot. Dieterle: Five years from now, more and more students who come to HGSE will have already incorporated this technology or something like it into their daily lives. It will be exciting to see how they are able to implement their personal productivity into their pedagogy, and how classes here help them explore those ideas. Q: How has HGSE's Learning Technologies Center made this kind of research possible? Dede: I could not have conceived of submitting a proposal to the Provost's Office without the assistance of both the technology infrastructure at the School and the skilled support infrastructure. The Provost's Office would not have funded, for example, the provision of wireless services; however, they were willing to fund wireless devices given that the School had already made that investment. We faced complex choices in what to buy, given the range of devices and accessories possible. Without very strong, skilled support from the LTC, we could not have made those decisions. And without that support on an ongoing basis, we could not maintain these devices and keep them in good operating order. This is a case where an initial investment in a general capability—having a Learning Technologies Center—allows all sorts of returns in terms of the ability to go out and get more specialized grants, for which the LTC is foundational. For More Information
HGSE News, Harvard Graduate School of Education
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