Education Week - August 28, 2013 - 15

EDUCATION WEEK AUGUST 28, 2013 www.edweek.org
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LEARNING TECHNOLOGIES MEDIA LAB
Massively Open Real-World Adventures
For almost a decade, Aaron Doering has used technology
to provide students and teachers with a window into his
globe-spanning scientific adventures.
His GoNorth! project with the Learning Technologies
Media Lab at the University of Minnesota in St. Paul, for
example, connected more than 3 million participants to a
series of Arctic expeditions related to climate change and
its impact on local populations, according to information
provided by the lab. While Mr. Doering and his team rode
dog sleds across Greenland and other far-flung locales,
teachers and students followed along online, supplementing
classroom lessons with live chats, multimedia blogs,
and digital field reports filed by Mr. Doering’s team.
“This was back in 2004. Chatting in real time wasn’t
normal. Facebook wasn’t even around,” said Cassie
Scharber, who co-directs the lab along with Mr. Doering.
“The projects blew the doors open. It was like, ‘Oh my
gosh, we can do this.’ ”
But almost immediately, Ms. Scharber and Mr. Doering
said, teachers’ enthusiasm for Go North! turned into
a question: How can we do it ourselves?
“Everyone wants to be part of an adventure,” Mr. Doering
said, “but not everyone can get the grants” to pay for
an Arctic expedition.
Enter WeExplore, a new virtual environment and technology
platform from the lab that will allow classrooms
to conduct their own local expeditions and share the results
all over the world.
It’s like a massively open online course, or MOOC, with
a much greater sense of adventure and ownership, Ms.
Scharber said.
“This is more participatory, collaborative, and inquiryfocused,”
she explained. “We’re trying to challenge teachers
and students by giving them all the power.”
HARVARD UNIVERSITY
No Child Left Inside, or Offline
Researchers at Harvard University are hop-
ing that technology can help facilitate new
partnerships in the STEM subjects that help remove
the boundaries between K-12 classrooms,
the online world, and students’ surrounding
communities.
With EcoMUVE, Harvard now offers schools
access to immersive “multi-user virtual environments”
that let middle school students explore
the bottoms of ponds and the microscopic
activity in forests, all from a computer. The
university researchers are also piloting EcoMOBILE,
an augmented-reality application for
smartphones that aims to get students outside
to observe their own local ecosystems for techenhanced
field trips and science experiments.
The ideal, said Shari Metcalf, a project director
for EcoMUVE, is for the two technologies to
be used in conjunction.
“We’re making the argument that blending
virtual and real ecosystems can have a positive
impact on student learning,” Ms. Metcalf said.
“Environmental scientists have a motto of ‘no
child left inside,’ but understanding complex
causal relationships in a single field trip is really
hard.”
Significant school-based challenges to creating
truly blended environments for exploration
of science, technology, engineering, and math
remain, however. Rather than using technology
to create engaging, hands-on lessons that meet
curricular standards, said Ms. Metcalf, many educators,
squeezed by accountability regimes, still
approach EcoMUVE as a luxury to be deployed at
the end of the school year, after state tests have
been administered.
And teachers’ use of EcoMOBILE, she said, is
still limited by a lack of adequate technology
infrastructure in many schools and surrounding
communities.
“Connectivity and dead batteries are a huge
deal when you have 40 kids trying to connect
[to the Internet via smartphones] at a pond,”
Ms. Metcalf said.
BROOKLYN AERODROME
Doing It Yourself, Online
Before this July, the Brooklyn Aerodrome, a small company in New York
City devoted to do-it-yourself flight, had managed to formally reach only
about 100 students, mostly through occasional appearances by company
officials at summer camps and local museums.
Then the company’s founder, Breck Baldwin, connected with MAKE
Magazine and Google+, which teamed up this summer to host an online
“virtual summer camp” for tens of thousands of children all over the country.
According to information provided by MAKE, a publication devoted to
promoting hands-on learning through do-it-yourself projects, more than
7,000 people have taken part in the aerodrome’s “hangout,” with many
watching a live-streamed instructional talk and making their own gliders
at home, all while asking questions and sharing their results online.
For Mr. Baldwin, who has long hoped to expand the reach of his educational
offerings, the new platform was a revelation.
“We’re going to go heavier into digital [distribution] because it’s the easi-
est way to disseminate a lot of content quickly to a lot of people,” he said.
Mr. Baldwin said digital distribution also allows for complex concepts
of aerodynamics to be learned through the best possible combination of
media: some text and illustrations, a lot of videos, and frequent opportunities
to do three-dimensional modeling. He recently partnered with a New
York City high school science teacher to develop a curriculum that employs
all three techniques while seeking to incorporate rigorous academic
standards—and focusing on hands-on building projects.
The approach, he said, appeals to students’ attention spans and to the challenging
realities facing a small outfit with big ideas but a limited budget.
“We’re not going to hit a classroom in Kansas,” Mr. Baldwin said, “unless
we can do it online.”
Written by Benjamin Herold
Photos clockwise from top: Aaron Doering/Learning Technologies Media Lab, EcoMUVE project/Harvard
University, Breck Baldwin/Brooklyn Aerodrome, Swikar Patel/Education Week
Photocredit

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Education Week - August 28, 2013

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