Educational Gaming Commons - Press Start

NMC KeyNote Address

Technology and the Global Commons

Diana Oblinger

The days of walled-off learning, where students are separated into grades, disciplines and physical locations, are giving way to programs in which students are encouraged to look beyond lecture halls, labs, and textbooks . Technology offers opportunities to bring together people, tools, and data in a global commons .

Creating a global commons requires more than removing barriers posed by subject matter, geography, economics, or age . It requires a new set of models that may challenge many of our historic assumptions about authority  and education.

Diana Oblinger is the President and CEO of EDUCAUSE, a nonprofit association whose mission is to advance higher education through the use of information technology. The current membership comprises over 2,200 colleges, universities, and education organizations, including 200 corporations.

My Thoughts

This was a high-level conceptual overview of the state of ed. tech. Diana talked about challenges and opportunities we face now and in the near future. One thing that stood out for me is the concept of contextual constructivism. Construstivists belive knowledge is self-generated; we should provide the opportunities for learning and ensure students are mentally prepped to learn. The contextual part (IMO) comes from a lack of success over the past 20 years in developing education that ensures both near and far transfer. Rand Spiro defined this a cognitive flexibility in the early 90's - it was the grail of instructional designers - design a learning situation so that the learner can walk into both closely-related situations AND (conceptually) distantly-related situation and apply what they've learned?

Well, good idea, but research and many efforts just haven't shown a good way or ways to do this. So the cynical side of me says that is an academic sidestep to avoid the "failure" of far transfer. But the optimist in me says that we thought it was a good idea, but research is quite mixed. So let's move on.

Related to this is the idea on involving students in complex, real-world situations. This is the context Diana was talking about. These are ill-structured problems, with no single solution, they're too big for one person to handle, and you need to justify your solution against other solutions.

Web 2, virtual worlds, and games all facilitate the development and deployment of ill-structured problems into the higher ed. curriculum.

My takeaway from this is the PSU is poised to move into this arena. We have or are establishing the infrastructures we need to provide the toolsets our students will need here. We have the instructional design expertise to assist faculty in using this technology well. What we haven't done is educate faculty in this area so they are mentally ready and accepting, and willing, to try curriculum changes that lead to the introduction of contextual constructivism. That's our big next step.

Notes:

Contextual Constructivism

We learn in context. Incoming students are experiential. Don't spend a great deal of time in class. 7.7% of time in formal learning. Rest of learning is social.

• Students growing up in a game-like culture
• Media creators.
• Contributors to knowledge.
• Collective intelligence.
• Most of our learning structures do not allow for these elements.

"Knowledge is created, not possessed."

Technology Environments Today

• Broadband a must. US is behind other nations.
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• We should create a universal broadband fund:

        - 1/3 federal

        - 1/3 state

        - 1/3 public and.or private entities

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• Working with systems, system-based problems is on the rise. These are complex, ill-structured problems. Context-based.
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LEARNING DIFFERENTLY

• Ag Society - know how
• Industrial Soc - know what
• Knowledge Soc - know who, where. Why - justify your position.

We haven't changed our learning structures to match a knowledge society.
We need to continue changing our physical spaces for learning.

Context is more important than we've thought. Traditionally, content is mostly separated from context. This may be a big issue.

Education 3.0

• Prof is orchestrator of knowledge creation
• Learning activities are flexible
• Institutional affiliations are loose
• Distributed research centers and organizations - web ties locations, instruments, grids, people together.
  •   - Repositories that are open to all.
  •   - Need to find a way so that cross-discipline opportunities are easy.
• Sensory-rich environments.
• Digital Storytelling
• Virtual Worlds
• Self-publishing
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Meta-Learning - Metacognition applied to learning.
We need to help students discover how they learn best.
We can wrap metacognitive activities around instruction.