LEARNING TECHNOLOGIES

As the demands placed upon education grow, technology offers tools to augment the student-teacher relationship and reinvent the classroom. Learning Technologies team projects touch the future by making technological tools accessible to educators and creating a global community of learners. The interaction between student and teacher is an indispensable component of the learning experience. However, increasingly, classrooms are crowded and the ratio of students to teachers is growing. At the same time, various studies--including, most recently, the Third International Mathematics and Science Study--have indicated that American students are falling behind their counterparts around the world in science and math performance. University instruction faces its own set of obstacles. The rate at which research generates new information is escalating rapidly, making it difficult for curricula to keep pace. Also, there are few experts in any given field in computing, and time constraints preclude their travelling and teaching or lecturing at locations around the country. These scenarios place unprecedented urgency on revitalizing the process of learning in the classroom, and have spurred the creation of the Learning Technologies team within EOT-PACI. Projects within this group examine the application of technology to enhance learning, from K-12 through graduate-level instruction. REMOVING BOUNDARIES TO LEARNING Among the technologies being explored by the team are those that support distributed education learning. This emerging paradigm enables teachers and learners to be physically present in different geographical locations. Distributed education technologies can help university curricula keep pace with discoveries in research, as an expert can develop and deliver a class to students anywhere in the country, from anywhere in the country. Distance learning technologies will also benefit the K-12 classroom, as activities are tied into investigations going on around the world. Using these tools, students can tune into and learn about a space mission, a polar expedition, a deep sea exploration, or other ongoing field research. PROMOTING COLLABORATION Closely tied to distance learning are tools that allow remote collaboration among students or researchers, at the same time or asynchronously. These types of technologies create learning environments wherein a student can access and manipulate information interactively with other students engaged in the same learning activity. Collaborative technologies can remove geographic or institutional boundaries that exist between populations of learners, and create learning communities based around disciplines. Online collaboration can also more fully integrate students into research, as they have the ability to share the discovery process with investigators anywhere in the country. MAKING RESEARCH MORE ACCESSIBLE The Learning Technologies team is closely coupled with the applications and technology development activities of the PACI partnerships. Some team projects are adapting PACI-developed tools to make them appropriate for use in K-12 or university classrooms. Others are concerned with making concepts in science and computing easier to understand by changing the way that information is presented to the learner.

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