Roy Pea at Becta's 6/11/2008 Research Conference

Source: NSF LIFE Centre

Vanessa Pittard gave a candid and impressive introduction today to this year's Becta Research conference. She and her team at Becta seem really to be getting to grips with building up and funding a long-term and wide-ranging policy-relevant research effort, one important aspect of which is the longitudinal approach that is being taken. The latter is now providing a much clearer understanding of what is happening on the ground in schools and colleges and how this is changing over time. (See Harnessing Technology Review 2008: The Role of technology and its impact on education. Summary; full report.)

Roy Pea from Stanford University gave the main keynote at the conference, focusing on the Report of the NSF Task Force on Cyberlearning¹, which I covered in September, which takes a long term, detailed, cross-sectoral view of what is happening at the intersection between learning and technology, and how this might affect provision in the long term. (Later this month a video of Roy's talk will be available on the Becta web site.)

The NSF report's focus is on learning in the sciences (broadly defined) rather than the humanities, but the implications of the report are not restricted to learning science.

Highlight points (all you can write when "live blogging", which I'm not fluent in). For a considered and retrospective treatment of Roy Pea's talk, and the one he gave the next day in Nottingham, which I also had the luck to attend, see this long post by Gráinne Conole.

• The proportion of time spent in formal lifelong and lifewide learning is small, dropping from ~18% when of school age to a tiny percentage of waking hours when adult. Thus informal learning is inevitably hugely important, but research on learning is largely concentrated on formal learning. (The diagram above provides a good way to understand the informal/formal learning split.)
• The need to "get inside the experiences of the learner" to understand (informal) learning.
• We need to know more about the power of
  
  • the social
  • the setting
  • imagination.
• We need to use learning technology to transform the STEM disciplines, so that, for example, teachers and students know how to harness large amounts of data. (Example - Galaxy Zoo, through which a mass of astronomy amateurs were engaged in fundamental science.)
• Instilling a platform perspective (a platform = a shared interoperable, extensible designs of hardware, software, and services).
• Need to emphasize the transformative power of technology at all levels, "from K to grey". Example Google Earth and the way it supports the participatory web.
• Establish "cyberlearning" as a discipline proper.
• Promote open educational resources, so that copyright stops "impeding the use and reuse of knowledge for learning".
• Leveraging the data produced by learning systems. (Yes! This chimes with Dylan Wiliam's keynote speech at ALT-C 2007, Assessment, learning and technology: prospects at the periphery of control Slides and video of the talk, captured as an Elluminate Live! session [~75 MB]. Text transcript [75 kB PDF]. Slides [400 kB PDF]. MP3 recording [12 MB].)²

¹ "Learning that is mediated by networked computing and communications technology" (which maps nicely against ALT's definitions of learning technology and learning technologist).

²I work part time for ALT.