Toward a Learning Technologies Knowledge Network
Roy D. Pea, Robert Tinker, Marcia Linn, Barbara Means, John Bransford, Jeremy Roschelle,
Sherry Hsi, Sean Brophy, and Nancy Songer
1
To appear in Educational Technology Research and Development, 1998.
Abstract
The NSF-funded Center for Innovative Learning Technologies (CILT) is designed to be a
national resource for stimulating research and development of technology-enabled solutions to
critical problems in K-14 science, math, engineering and technology learning. The Center, which
was launched at the end of 1997, is organized around four themes its leadership has identified as
areas where research is likely result in major gains in teaching and learning. The Center sponsors
research across disciplines and institutions in its four theme areas. It brings together experts in
the fields of cognitive science, educational technologies, computer science, subject matter
learning, and engineering. It engages business through an Industry Alliance Program and is also
training postdoctoral students. CILT’s founding organizations are SRI International’s Center for
Technology in Learning, University of California at Berkeley (School of Education and
Department of Computer Science), Vanderbilt University’s Learning Technology Center, and the
Concord Consortium. Through its programs, CILT seeks to reach beyond these organizations to
create a web of organizations, individuals, industries, schools, foundations, government agencies
and labs, that is devoted to the production, sharing and use of new knowledge about how
learning technologies can dramatically improve the processes and outcomes of learning and
teaching. This paper describes the rationale and operations of the Center, and first year progress
in defining a set of CILT partnership projects with many other institutions that came out of our
national theme team workshops.
Introduction
Federal research and development has for several decades contributed substantially to our
understanding of how to use information technologies to improve learning. New knowledge
provided by cognitive, social, and learning scientists, computer scientists, and subject matter
specialists studying learning has generated advances in our understanding of learning (e.g.,
Greeno, Collins, & Resnick, 1996). These developments have also led to new architectures for
interactive learning environments, and widespread recognition of the shaping roles of social
context, motivation, and teacher knowledge in determining whether learning technologies have
their desired effects (e.g., OTA, 1995). The most exciting results indicate that we can use
1
Roy Pea and Marcia Linn would like to thank the Spencer Foundation for support during their year at the
Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University, in which they developed the CILT
concept with the other authors. CILT is funded by National Science Foundation grant #CDA-9720384. We would
also like to acknowledge contributions to this article by the many authors of CILT partnership project proposals, and
by theme team leaders.
Pea, Tinker, Linn, Means, Bransford 2
technology to revolutionizes learning and provide discontinuous rather than incremental
improvements in education (e.g., PCAST, 1997). Young children can learn subjects thought well
out of their reach (such as calculus learning by inner city middle school students). Technology
can support learning outside of school (as in collecting scientific data in the field using hand-held
computers).
Results like these are largely fragmented, difficult to find and track even for research
specialists in these fields, much less those who could use such knowledge to powerful effect.
Commercial learning technology products are largely developed without awareness, much less
use, of these research developments. Similarly, research groups in universities often fail to use
new developments from industry (e.g., component software and groupware.). How can learning
technology innovations be fostered, and scaled at a national level? How can the engines of
change that computers and information networks represent be turned to knowledge networks for
fostering learning technology invention, testing, use, refinement, and commercialization? The
nation needs an integrated forum for building and sharing the wisdom and insights derived from
highly diverse sources— university and think-tank-based researchers, industry groups, and
teacher knowledge developed through their own innovations and implementations of learning
technologies in their classrooms.
The time is ripe for information technologies to make major contributions to improved
learning in science, mathematics, engineering, and technology (SMET) at all levels and for all
learners. The continued increase of performance in information technology, the huge growth in
networking technologies, our increasing understanding of learning and intelligent systems, and
the widespread concern for educational quality, standards, and technology utilization are
combining to make what could be a decade of educational revolution led by technology (Office
of Science and Technology Policy, 1997). Given these expectations, a coordinated, inclusive
effort to build an effective learning technologies knowledge network is needed to fully exploit
this opportunity because:
• Our work is increasingly complex. Whereas classroom-oriented tools have been the primary
focus of previous R&D, we believe that the field must make a crucial transition to focus on
ubiquitous access to information appliances by all learners, both in and out of school. This
focus means broadening the technology repertoire beyond desktop computers in schools and
exploiting diverse digital devices including new “learning appliances,” networking
infrastructures, and developments in distributed systems for anytime-anywhere learning.
• Broad collaboration is essential. Given this increasing complexity, few projects, institutions,
disciplines, or funders can encompass the range of expertise needed to mobilize the
combination of new technologies and new insights into learning to identify and solve real-
world learning challenges. Achieving major impact requires aggregating ideas and integrating
innovations. Innovation must start with an understanding of both educational needs and
technological possibilities and be based on technical trends, learning theory, changing school
realities, possible marketing arrangements, and dissemination strategies. Close collaboration
among a broad range of researchers, industries and schools is the only strategy that can marshal
these resources in a timely, effective manner.
• More interaction is needed. New studies of on-line communities conducted for a diversity of
industries indicate that the key to new market opportunities and increasing returns is to
combine content and communication. Hagel and Armstrong (1997) demonstrate how new
Pea, Tinker, Linn, Means, Bransford 3
value is created and captured in on-line communities by providing not only content but also
communication and search tools that enable community members to interact and build
relationships. There are surprisingly few opportunities for timely sharing of insights and
prepublications among potential learning technology collaborators with similar goals but
different professional affiliations.
• Field-initiated R&D needs coordination. The usual strategy of relying on funded field-
initiated projects to produce educational change needs to be supplemented with coordination
provided by the profession itself. Funders can rarely move quickly enough to explore
emerging opportunities created by technologies that can now go through two generations in the
time it takes to conceive, submit, and award a proposal. These long processing times favor
larger grants that then tend to be more risk-averse and, hence, less innovative. Because each
proposal is viewed in isolation, field-initiated R&D seldom forces the selection of a problem’s
best solution. In result, suboptimal strategies are pursued while promising research strategies
requiring sequential grants are difficult to sustain.
In summary, we need to explore flexible, quick, but thoughtful innovations that solve
important educational problems and draw from a wide range of expertise. These innovations
need to be winnowed and the best shepherded through several phases of development and
dissemination, with input from a range of actors and institutions. CILT was established with
initial funding from the National Science in order to provide these mechanisms.
Overview of CILT
CILT is a collaborative of organizations that have come together to create a unique
organization to respond to the opportunities and meet the needs described above. CILT has
devised strategies and organizational structures than can economically make progress on these
huge issues. This section describes the overall CILT structure.
CILT Mission
The primary CILT mission is to improve science, mathematics, engineering, and technology
learning for all learners K-14 through the innovative use of computer and communications
technologies. We see the highest leverage through stimulating the development and
implementation of important, technology-enabled solutions to critical problems in teaching and
learning. Our approach is to engage the collaborative efforts of a wide spectrum of people and
institutions. There is the need to coordinate the efforts of computer scientists and engineers,
education researchers, cognitive scientists, educators, industry researchers and developers, and
subject matter experts throughout the world. We want to attract to education, people from diverse
fields and institutions, including those in business, military, universities, and nonprofits.
To accomplish this mission, CILT defined the following objectives:
• Identify areas of high potential. Each year, the CILT leadership reviews and evaluates
educational needs and technology-enabled innovations in order to select four general themes
and a few specific multi-disciplinary partnership projects in each theme area with the greatest
potential for breakthroughs.
• Support rapid innovation. By convening annual agenda-setting workshops for “theme
teams” in these areas of breakthrough potential, CILT aims to coordinate and leverage
Pea, Tinker, Linn, Means, Bransford 4
developments in the learning technologies field, identify prospects for important
multidisciplinary prototype projects, and stimulate others to undertake similar R&D by
drawing attention to targets of opportunity.
• Stimulate collaborative development in selected areas. In each of the four themes
identified, CILT convenes meetings and fosters online discussions designed to share ideas and
build collaborations between diverse communities.
• Foster widespread research and dissemination. For each theme identified, CILT is
reviewing promising practices and selecting the best available technology for support, testing,
development, research, and broad dissemination.
• Train new professionals. On two-year cycles, CILT is recruiting, training, and supporting
postdoctoral fellows who will be an integral part of high-risk, high-potential multidisciplinary
prototype projects for each priority theme team identified.
CILT Leadership, Structure and Strategies
CILT operates as a consortium of four core founding institutions, with Roy Pea at SRI
International serving as CILT’s Director, and Marcia Linn (UC Berkeley), Robert Tinker
(Concord Consortium), John Bransford (Vanderbilt University), and Barbara Means (SRI
International) serving as co-principal investigators. Together they comprise CILT’s Leadership
Council, and set the Center’s long-range goals, select the most promising themes for
investigation, and assemble teams to pursue them. These four organizations each bring to CILT
a broad range of expertise and an international reputation for making effective and innovative
contributions to technology-enhanced learning.
CILT seeks to harvest the brightest ideas and best practices, and to then direct coherent
activities toward topics in greatest need of breakthroughs. To marshal the best resources, to
obtain crucial input, and to include leaders from many organizations, sectors, and disciplines, we
designed CILT as a national effort that relies heavily on invitational workshops and collaboration
technologies to make its activities inclusive. The Center’s primary work is being accomplished
by the mechanism of “theme teams”, each of which is contributing to the research and
development, communications, training, and evaluation objectives of the Center. The theme
teams coalesce insights and initiate new pilot projects that form a foundation for collaborative
development through an open but focused process. Theme teams coordinate research,
encouraging participants to build on each other’s innovations, carry out evaluations and joint
research, and critique each other’s technological environments. How did we come to the
Center’s theme team areas?
As a group, our CILT leadership team shares educational perspectives that emphasize the
importance of carefully designed activities that engage the learner in appropriating a combination
of skills, concepts, and mental models through active engagement in guided inquiry, exploration,
challenges, reflection, and communication. Technology can support these learning strategies by
providing access to new collaborators, mentors, and teachers; augmenting the range of inquiry
with more powerful and intelligent tools; “scaffolding” students as they visualize and model
complex situations; and underlying alternative, authentic methods of evaluating student
performance. Starting with this analysis of educational and technological needs, we searched for
“breakthrough” opportunities where our national collaborative structure could make major
contributions. To provide substance to our collaboration, we needed to identify opportunities
Pea, Tinker, Linn, Means, Bransford 5
close enough to reality that we could create prototype technologies that can be tested by our
colleagues in a variety of real classrooms and other learning contexts. At the same time, the
technology must not be transitory; we need to rely on its wide availability and continual
improvement over the next decade.
Weighing these criteria and surveying emerging technologies from these educational
perspectives, we identified four thematic areas with tremendous potential. They represent our
current judgment for the greatest potential for emerging technologies to make major advances in
science, mathematics, engineering and technology education. Each addresses an educational
challenge, identifies a breakthrough opportunity, and involves potentially important technologies
that can be quickly implemented and tested. These opportunities became the focus of the initial
four theme teams and are summarized below. Others may evolve in future CILT work.
• Visualization and Modeling. The challenges are that more diverse students need to learn
SMET concepts more deeply, just as these fields are becoming increasingly complex. The
breakthrough opportunity is that dynamic interactive images based on models may allow
broader access to understanding; modeling provides a unifying conceptual vocabulary across
the major topics of science and mathematics.
• Technology and Assessment Models. The challenge is that older testing practices undermine
efforts to implement new, more powerful ways of learning and teaching. The breakthrough
opportunity is that technology can enable embedded, ongoing assessment of developing
knowledge and reasoning skills, and support more authentic forms of performance and
portfolio assessment activities.
• Ubiquitous, Low-Cost Computing. The ubiquitous availability of computation and
networking could have a profound impact on education. The breakthrough opportunity is that
the right combinations of inexpensive portable computers, wireless networking, component
software, probeware, and learning tools and content software could enable many more learners
to engage in deeper levels of inquiry for learning across a wider range of contexts and time
frames.
• Tools for Learning Communities. The challenge is that significant innovation in education
requires more than a focus on the local process of learning. The breakthrough opportunity is
increasing learning through transformations in the social participation of learners in different
communities for knowledge building. These transformations may be enabled by network-based
collaborative learning tools, multi-user virtual environments and social information filtering.
These new connections may also support deeper engagement and ongoing professional
development for teachers, and engage disciplinary experts and parents in distributed learning
environments.
Achieving deep reform in SMET education requires integrating multiple perspectives into
each theme team’s work. There are of course cross-cutting issues that we view as important and
which we aim to reflect in CILT’s project portfolio, including equity, access, and gender (e.g.,
Chubin & Malcom, 1996); teacher development (e.g., Shulman, 1987); informal learning; and
cognition and instruction.