In thinking about the promises and pitfalls of using new media in education I keep coming back to challenges associated with speed.
How long has YouTube been around? Well, three PayPal employees started it in February 2005 and less than 20 months later Google purchased it for more than $1.6 billion (that’s roughly $24 million per employee). Obviously YouTube is a great attraction for teenagers, which is partly why Google acquired it. So it’s natural to think about how this new medium, and other web environments, could be incorporated into learning and teaching.
Unfortunately, it usually takes education developers, publishers, and practitioners around 20 years, not 20 months, to turn a new idea or technology into high-quality products and services that can be broadly disseminated in classrooms. Between an idea and dissemination are steps like figuring out what students can actually learn with the innovation, testing and refining interventions, crafting professional development for teachers, and also revising standards that articulate what students should be learning — often a highly political step that sometimes seems to go backward rather than forward.
The trouble, of course, is that once educators finally figure out how to adapt a new technology or medium, like YouTube or online video games, any number of newer ideas will have come and gone. So, for every opportunity that education capitalizes on, it may miss a dozen or more — and the lost opportunities may be increasing as the pace of innovation continues to accelerate on the web.
There is no easy solution to this problem that I can see; new web-based technology innovation and business development will always move ahead more rapidly than educational reform. But I think we can speed up the educational use of new technologies, and NSDL can be part of that change.
Take strand maps, a simpler technology than YouTube, for example. Strand maps, or concept maps, are visual representations that emphasize connections between ideas and processes, such as heat, the water cycle, and climate change. On the surface, this technology ought to help learning in all sorts of subjects. And there is some evidence that it does — but it is not very systematic and the ideas haven’t yet gotten into classrooms on a large scale.
One major reason for this is that a lot of researchers who’ve investigated strand maps have built their own tools and have often spent much less time testing and refining them in classrooms than developing them in labs. Effective use of NSDL could change this in a couple of ways.
Imagine that NSDL included a single robust strand map service (which it may do, very soon). Then, when a research team wanted to study learning using strand maps in a specific subject area, it could concentrate on experiments and avoid costly re-development of yet-another-strand-map-tool; in this way, results of the experiments from individual groups would be available to the community much more rapidly than before. On top of that, groups interested in strand maps for other subjects or other grades could conduct their experiments in parallel — and they could all use the NSDL communication infrastructure to rapidly compare their results.
This is one way that the NSDL could help educational technology research and development quickly test the effectiveness of new media, and keep pace with web kids — well, almost.
Dave,
Hallelujah! I couldn’t agree more that NSDL deserves a single, robust Strand Map Service that can support teachers and learners to locate and comprehend educational resources, and support cognitive scientists and other researchers to better understand the benefits of semantic-spatial displays on users’ cognitive processes. I think there are a couple of reasons why services like this appear to be adopted slowly relative to cultural or business phenomena like YouTube.
First, within the NSDL and NSF university-based research communities, there is a very strong self-help mentality. We are rewarded to invent new things, not to reuse things created by others. I think the NSDL program has made tremendous inroads in building a culture of collaboration and sharing and getting projects ready for the idea of building portals and learning environments from shared services, like the Strand Map Service.
Second, there are no standard ‘business’ mechanisms to reach, or pay for, service level agreements within NSF university-based research communities. Until recently, it was a leap of faith for another institution to build significant services on top of the Strand Map Service because there were no assurances that we would be able to sustain the operations of this web service beyond the life of the grant. Likewise, trying to put this Service on a more commercial footing, like a purchased service, would have been very difficult (impossible) within a grant-driven culture, as groups have to be able to predict at the time of writing their proposals which services they will use and how much they will cost. That is, there is no economic flexibility in the system - groups are committed for years in advance to a specific set of deliverables on a fixed (and fully accounted for) budget. Again NSDL has done the community a significant service by providing for a centralized operation, Core Integration, that can receive these individual innovations and commit to reliaby supporting them for a reasonble period of time. Without this type of support committment by CI, there will never be large-scale reuse of services in NSDL.
Finally, concerning your broader comment about the speed of the maturation of YouTube with respect to educational technologies, it all comes down to flexibility and money. YouTube is an interesting example. They received $11.5 million in venture capital in 13 months from Sequoia Capital. This is equivalent to the entire annual budget of the NSDL program. They also have a streamlined management structure and are not accountable to community processes and community governance, which are expensive and time-consuming. In short, they can do things at fundamentally different scales and speed; they have a much more nimble decision-making structure, and two orders of magnitude more money to innovate and market with. I have been thinking of late about the tendency of NSF to adopt community-based governance processes for large projects. The benefits of this approach are buy-in from NSF’s bread-and-butter consituencies of university-based researchers. The downsides are that for many educational innovations, this constituency is not the same as the intended user audience. Thus, projects are having to spend a lot of cycles and money to engage the research community, instead of focusing on satisfying their customer needs. As you say in your post, I am not sure how to resolve this dilemma.
Tammy,
Great points. One quick response that relates to how NSF and the academic culture do business. You are right that researchers are often incented to (re)invent rather than reuse. There is no way to change that culture over night, but you note a few ways that NSDL is already helping to solve this problem. IMO there are also a number of mechanisms funders, including NSF, can use to shift incentives. To begin, the Foundation and its reviewers need to know when proposals are really reinventing, not inventing, and decline (or redirect) them. Of course this assumes improvements in managing the knowledge the field is accumulating, so that everyone has easy access to the current state of the field (IMO NSDL could play a role here). Then I think NSF also needs to actively encourage reuse, telling a prospective PI, for example, not to build yet-another-strand-map tool, but rather to build a new service on it, or apply it in a particular area. For many programs I think “building on” or “applying” grants should be at least on a par, in terms of funding dollars, with “building new” grants. There is a precedent for this in the old CCLI adaptation and integration track that only funded work that built on previously developed educational materials.
You also touch on the community-based governance in large projects at NSF. I’m all for input from the community on key decisions that might affect, for example, the overall direction of the initiative or the design of the technical infrastructure. But not if the process unwinds without end; at some point the cost in terms of time exceeds the benefits in terms of buy-in. Perhaps that’s a good topic for a future blog posting!
[…] A lively panel presentation at last week’s NSDL Annual Meeting: Meeting Web Kids on Their Own Turf: Expanding Online Social Spaces for Scholarship, sparked a thoughtful converstaion between Dave MacArthur and Tammara Sumner regarding MacArthur’s post, Keeping up with the pace of the web in education in which he wonders about why significant technologies such as DLESE’s strand maps take so long to make their way into classrooms. You are invited to take a look and add your thoughts. Posted in Topics: General Jump down to leave a reply. […]
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A blog wouldn’t be a blog without the comments from other people - i think its a great idea.