Chris Dede on NeoMillennial Learning Styles

Today and tomorrow I am attending CoSN’s Inaugural CTO Clinic hosted by The Consortium for School Networking (CoSN), the Texas K-12 CTO Council, and Plano ISD

NeoMillennial Learning Styles: Beyond Websites to Distributed Learning Communities
Chris Dede
Harvard University
Chris_dede at Harvard dot edu
www.gse.harvard.edu/~dedech
Chris has this as an online web presentation, but unfortunately it was posted with a non-standards compliant web presentation tool (MediaSite Live)

The evolution of education
– shifts in the knowledge and skills society values
– development of new methods of teaching and learning
– changes in the characteristics of learners

Emerging info technologies are reshaping each of these
– we read books like ““The World Is Flat” and are struggling to understand what that means for ourselves and our students
– what are we now expected to produce in schools?
– The menu has broadened tremendously for teaching and learning
– We know powerful teaching and learning depends on the pedagogies, not on only the technologies
– The nature of the students who walk in our doors is changing

Personnally Chris has a 19 year old, 14 year old, and 6 year old spanning the generational

Now does have a 45 second version of his talk
– Panasonic market video has good intro, setting the frame for the challenge of education

What kids do outside of schools looks much more like what 21st century knowledge workers do
– contrasts sharply with what most kids are doing in schools

Personally, I have not paid much attention to learning styles until recently
– Howard Gardner reminds us of how aptitudes shape our learning styles
– If I was tutoring someone, I would definitely want to know about learning styles
– But most of the time we are working with groups, so we use a “lawn sprinkler” approach, throwing things on different learning styles

Now we are seeing evolution of a media-based learning style
– focuses on the types of media we use
– these learning styles typically describe how people are SIMILAR rather than different, based on the different types of media they like to use

Pundits often make this sound generational
– 1960s folks are supposed to passive learners
– kids born after 1982 are millennial learners, etc.

In fact it is not related to age, it is related to the media you are using every day in your everyday life that shapes the media learning style you like
– MY THOUGHT: I REALLY AGREE WITH THIS

I am going to be anecdotal
– teenage daughter who comes home, opens her textbook, opens web browser, six IM windows, fires up iPod
– clearly some of this is distracting
– I remember
– some of this is very clever: my daughter and her friends form a think tank, pool knowledge, subdivide the problem and do the homework quite well

1- Web rewards comparing multiple sources of information, individually incomplete and collectively inconsistent

Things they are doing in this that knowledge workers do
– Mindlessly accumulating OR seeking, sieving, and synthesizing information

multi-tasking can be good or bad depending on how you use it

2- Digital media and interfaces encourage multi-tasking
(superficial, easily distracted data gathering OR a sophisticated form of synthesizing new insights)

Now CISCO has given all its people IM, because if they need information they can get it
– it is very effective, but can lead to a nervous breakdown!
– There can be too much cognitive overhead that overwhelms
– The media seems to naturally lead us into this environment

Evolution toward distributed learning (this is a SEA CHANGE)
– not learning across distance
– I think that term is obsolete (to talk about distance)
– I think all learning in the future will be seen as distributed

Sophisticated methods of learning and teaching
– guided learning by doing
– apprenticeships, mentoring
– learning communities

World to the desktop
– accessing distant experts and archives for knowledge creation, sharing and mastery
– this is the world we are most familiar and comfortable with
– 2 new interfaces are emerging that in 20 years will be as important as the desktop world is now, and they complement

Multi-user virtual environments
– immersion in virtual contexts with digital artifacts and avatar-based identities
– this is like the Alice in Wonderland going through the rabbit hole of the computer screen

Ubiquitous computing
– wearable wireless devices coupled to smart objects for “augmented reality”
– lets users infuse the virtual world with your real world every day

What is a MUVE
– a multi-user virtual environment
– a representational container that enables multiple simultaneous participants to access virtual spaces configured for learning
– this provides a very interesting virtual

Everquest, America’s Army, the SIMS, the Star Trek games, etc are all examples from the gaming environment
– interesting that now I have a lifestyle choice on the menu

Everquest game has 77th largest economy: over 120,000 fan-fictions online about Harry Potter

Now there are relatively equal genders playing these games, also many different ages (not just young people)
– these are enormously engaging
– people can really get hooked, spend a tremendous amount of time and energy
– learning environments inside these are really excellent: guided learning, active learning, apprenticeship

MMOG: massively multi-player online games and complementary fan-fiction offer rich learning and identity….

But basically all the content in here now is JUNK

River City – Interface
– we want to keep the engagement and the powerful learning mechanism
– we don’t want to build games that are have scoring systems, winners and losers, etc
– we want to put in deep academic content and higher order skills and see if we can make this work

After 7 years of NSF funding, I’d like to show you want we have come up with
– our curriculum is called River City
– a research based MUVE

Is a huge gap between what is needed to understand complex phenomena in the real world and study in science fair projects, and what is typically in the curriculum and the scripted science lab
– very difficult to teach what we need to teach with traditional methods
– MUVES are very engaging, helps with collaboration and hypothesis forming, and provides national level standards
– River City curriculum has students collaborating to explore and learn, they work in teams to develop hypotheses

River City interface has various
– in 7 states have used this with around 7000 students

Findings:
– students are very engaged, and beyond the novelty value: you can’t kill someone or have a relationship with someone in River City
– students are very engaged because they are drawn into the storyline

our goal was to reach the bottom third of students
– many students by middle school have already given up on themselves and their future in school (given up on schools)
– wanted to see low performing students gain even faster
– our studies are showing that students who were failing or getting D’s in school, rated very low by teachers in their ability to understand higher order content, are being rated very well (As and Bs) by their students
– in other words: these kids are not stupid, we’ve just been dumb in the ways we’ve been teaching them

Using inquiry, interesting types of information technology fluency, many businesses are interested in this

Why is this working?
– it’s not the technology: it just enables powerful content and pedagogy
– powerful models: guided inquiry learning with active construction of knowledge

Situated Learning
– constellations of architechtural, social, organizational, and material vectors that aid in learning culturally-based practices
– – apprenticeship: the process of moving from novice to expert within a given set of practices
– legitimate peripheral participation (tacit learning similar to that involved in internships or residencies)
– eventually you end up in the center of the community doing very neat things

Situated learning has always been hard to impossible in schools, because schools have been ISOLATED from the world
– this gives us a chance to be situated but not so complex and unwieldy that it is not digestible

Learning communities
– we know very good teachers are good about setting up relationships with students that is not just expert to novice
– everyone is a contributor to a community that is trying to understand something (different parts of the elephant, stone soup approach to making meaning from a complex situation)
– we know a lot about doing that F2F, we know little about doing that in a mediated way (when media stands between us and the face to face environment)

So we are studying distributed learning communities, people are interacting via media
– range of participants’ skills and interests goes beyond geographic limitations

Complexity of the environment is very engaging for students
– students design their experiment upon a problem they have identified
– students enjoy the challenge of working on their own, rather than just being told what to do (DEVELOPS INDEPENDENT LEARNING ABILITIES AND SKILLS)
– Students identities are shaped in positive ways toward efficacies in scientists (students perceive themselves as capable and able to be scientists)
– Designed around collaboration
– Students realize there is more than one reason why people are getting sick (recognizing complex causality)
– Case studies have documented students who have been “failing” and given up on learning, who now see themselves as capable and have not given up on learning

We are studying scaling up River City, looking for districts and schools
– teachers get a stipend
– if enough are in driving distance, can hire a trainer to give local support
– grades 6-9
– Email Chris if you are interested
– This is not a product, not commercializing this, we are researchers investigating the strengths and weaknesses of this container

Ubiqutious computing involves wandering around with smart cell phones, gaming devices, etc.
– this opens up interesting possibilities
– one to one student to tool ratio
– I don’t believe we are going to 1:1 in education: I don’t believe our country has the political will to do it, buy devices for all students
– So my collegues and I are studying wireless handheld devices that have 60% of the power of a laptop, but cost about 1/10th
– WMD = wireless mobile devices
– Wireless mobile computing: instant on, anytime, everywhere, everywhere, and in the hand of the user

“Smart objects” and “intelligent contexts” enable “augmented realities”
– motors were really a topic of conversation in Victorian society

Automakers now spend more on silicon than on steel
– as these devices become smaller and smaller, and cheaper and cheaper, they are disappearing into the woodwork
– Animism: was a major type of theology across the planet, where people thought everything had a soul
– Take away the theology, and we have now the opportunity to create animistic worlds for better or for worse
– Movie: “The Minority Report” with Tom Cruise (society is always watching his eyeballs to identify him, and once identified they are beaming commercials to him)

If we are principled about this, however—we use these in ways that WE DECIDE, our reality can be different

Augmented reality
– each team has a GPS device
– GPS knows your real location
– Team walks around and investigates
– The immersive simulation combines physical world and virtual world contexts

Example: head of teacher ed program at MIT by Eric ____
– Mystery@MIT
– Players briefed about rash of local health problems linked to the environment
– Provided with background info and video briefings
– Need to determine source of pollution by drilling sampling wells, interviewing virtual people, accessing virtual databases, analyzing water….

Map screen
– handheld device shows your map (in real world) as well as other virtual resources
– when you get to different real places, you have access to other types of virtual info: virtual people as text file, or a video clip that may have visual and auditory clues
– what people will tell you depends on who you are / what your role is (reporter, engineer, etc.) – also based on what the person already knows
– designed around an elaborate jigsaw pedagogy
– sometimes have to talk to the same person twice to really understand something
– You can also do magic: drill virtual wells, shallow or deep, analyses conducted can be superficial or deep
– Students have to manage their resources just as real environmental engineers have to manage their resources
– Ultimately students work together to figure out what is happening and how MIT should intervene

MY THOUGHTS
– we should design projects like this based on the real world
– we should have kids go through these, and then design their own problems and environments
– these can then be contributed freely to a global, open source database

This project emphasizes the importance of DISCOURSE in science (AKA CONVERSATION!)

Lots of different folks have done these projects: GT students, regular students, environmental engineering students at Harvard

Conducting Desktop Research
– triggering of media events at specified locations
– library to web documents
– machine shop to video interviews with personnel

Chris’ 11th grade daughter in an all-girls science project did better than any other group ever had
– they divided themselves into groups and were organized
– they seem to have generalized their strategies for homework collaboration via IM and the web, and used those strategies for mystery at MIT

A different world of pedagogy
– experiences central, rather than information as pre-digested experience (for assimilation or synthesis)
– knowledge is situated in a context and distributed across a community (rather than located within an individual: with vs. from)
– reputation, experiences, and accomplishments as measures of quality (rather than tests, papers)

These activities take a VERY DIFFERENT MODEL OF PEDAGOGY
– most of what we do in school is teach students how to manipulate pre-digested information
– in the knowledge economy, most of the time people have to try to understand complex phenomena: not problem solving, problem finding
– situated learning is the only type of learning where you can enable people to do problem finding

Why are the students who are failing are doing better when we give them something more complicated?
– this doesn’t seem to make sense

We need to give kids

You don’t just need experience: because if that was the case the real world would be enough
– we have to make it complicated enough
– we need to challenge them to work together
– we want people to learn school with everything inside of themselves

ASSESSMENTS:
No one plays a game and writes a paper to find out who won
– it is your reputation, your accomplishments, etc that tell how successful you were
– how do we reliably and in valid ways develop assessments that do this

The only reason for doing this is to reach students who even now are not making it out of high school, or our making it out in the wrong career

What are new-millenial learning styles
1- fluency in multiple media, valuing each for the types of communication, activities, and expressions it empowers (this goes beyond “millennial” learning styles, which center on working within a single medium best suited to one’s own unique characteristics. This is like a toolbox, choosing the tool best for the purpose and context.)

Chris’ distributed learning course uses lots of different modalities

2- It isn’t info as knowledge and experience: it is this collaborative experience to understand

“They are just learning garbage outside of school, so we have to give them something good to learn”

I DISAGREE WITH THE ABOVE POINT TO A DEGREE

Implications for professional development
– co-design: developing learning experiences students can personalize

?Co-Instruction
Guided Social constructivism and situated learning
Assessment beyond tests and papers

Beyond McLuhan
– when I was growing up, the big guru of media was Marshall McLuhan
– lots of his ideas were valid: the medium shapes the message
– Media shape their participants (we see this much more in our lives today) – Chris admits he cannot write now without a word processor, he used to think for 2 minutes before writing because of how hard it was to change it. Now he thinks for 15 seconds and then writes, he writes by revision—no one told or taught us to do that, but it is a media-based learning style. Now there is no going back!
– Infrastructures shape civilization: we can think of terrible worlds that flow out of these environments, even poor families have these tools in the entertainment sphere because they want to ESCAPE their reality, but the challenge to us is to give them tools so they can TRANSFORM the real world. (I SAY AMEN TO THAT)

Whether we get a good world or a bad world is going to be shaped more by the people in this room, than by the politicians
– it is education that determines this
– whether media shapes them, or they shape media
– that is the key

MY THOUGHT: THIS IS WHY WE HAVE TO HAVE STUDENTS CREATING MEDIA

It isn’t the content, it is the pedagogy
I am wrong a lot, but I use iterative pedagogy
– I made a mistake with MOOs when I assumed that English language learners and poorly skilled English speakers wouldn’t do well in those environments
– we found that because this is team based and teachers are smart in composing teams, they make sure each team has a reader on it, at least one student who knows about computers, one student that cares about gaming, etc.

Need to help students have the space and the scaffold to learn and …

MY QUESTION: WHAT ABOUT TEACHERS WHO SAY THEY HAVE NO TIME FOR THIS, BECAUSE THEY HAVE TO COVER THE CURRICULUM AND GET KIDS READY FOR THE TEST

It would have been much easier to put this into schools 10 years ago
– from day 1, we have had to say national standards, high stakes test: what are the standards and skills that speak to these
– science fairs, project based learning: inquiry being an important skill
– Now we go to schools and we say this is a SUBSTITUTE curriculum: not a supplement, and say that in 20 class periods we will cover about the same amount of content you would cover with traditional methods
– But we say we’ll help you with your subpopulations, getting them interested enough to come
– We can get attendance in some contexts up from 50% to 80%
– This is something that says you’ll do no worse than even, and we think we can give you something that might help your stuggling students
– And something that is very interesting to look at

Once you have wireless and every kid as a wireless device, PDA, etc
– 7 years from now we’ll be able to just use wireless and the mobile devices that students have

We’ve experimented a lot with age range because we are inventing this as we go along
– this is like the early days of cinema, when filmmakers were filming plays
– because of our content: kids under 6th grade enjoy it but don’t seem as developmentally ready for the abstract reasoning that is involved
– tops out at around 11th grade
– grades 6-9 work here, for something really designed for grades 7-8
– also adapting this for special education populations

Also studying transfer
– big problem: we teach people to do something on the test, and then people
– we think situated learning can help with transfer
– so we build river city 50 years later

2ND QUESTION: ARE YOU LOOKING AT DEVELOPING AN ENVIRONMENTAL SHELL WHERE KIDS AND TEACHERS COULD CREATE THEIR OWN MUVE?

The gaming people could care less about this
– I am on the board of the LucasArts foundation, but they are not interested in this
– Only viable, sustainable model is a commercial one in our society
– Singapore wants to modify this and build Singapore-River City

We deliberately have made something that kids can’t do from home
– we are not building something that has the teacher at the center of it
– the environment is a place
– the kids come out of the environment confused

SOUNDS LIKE THERE IS A LOT OF COGNATIVE DISSONANCE

Recommend this is done in schools not at home

So many other researchers are bailing out of schools, many are designing things for informal learning

ActiveWorlds is the environment we use, and we do refer kids who are interested to that scripting world

If you enjoyed this post and found it useful, subscribe to Wes’ free newsletter. Check out Wes’ video tutorial library, “Playing with Media.” Information about more ways to learn with Dr. Wesley Fryer are available on wesfryer.com/after.

On this day..