Reflections on Lessons Learned: The Center for Innovative Learning Technologies

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Reflections on Lessons Learned The Center for
Innovative Learning Technologies
Roy Pea Stanford University AERA 2003 Chicago,
Illinois
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Introducing CILT
Mission To serve as a national resource for
stimulating research on innovative,
technology-enabled solutions to critical problems
in K-14 STEM learning
Concord Consortium
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Center for Innovative Learning Technologies

• Uniting people, technology, and powerful ideas
  for learning

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CILT Structure

• Core institutions, PI leadership council,
  Postdocs, and research community partners in
  projects
• Encompassing domains CILTs activities and
  programs fostered collaboration across
  traditional community boundaries.

Practice
Policy
Research Community
Industry
Vanderbilt
SRI
Concord
Berkeley
Stanford
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CILT Mechanisms

• CILT leadership defined Theme Teams for
  workshops and projects
• Visualization Modeling
• Ubiquitous Computing
• Assessments for Learning
• Community Tools
• CILT's conferences and workshops advanced the
  learning sciences and technology field
• Provided a collaborative forum in which the
  community met to assess the progress of the
  field, define research agendas, and initiate new
  partnerships.
• Dynamic firehose, poster and demo presentations
  presented new work and collaboration needs
• CILT conducted 13 workshops/conferences with more
  than 1,380 participants
• These four theme teams spawned other activities
• Synergy Project (integrating work across the
  theme-teams) and CILT NetCourses
• CILT Knowledge Network (CILT-KN, from Community
  Tools)
• Design Principles Database (from Visualization
  and Modeling)

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CILT Seed Grants
ICSAR (Interoperable Components for Shared
Active Representations (20-person seed and
related work)

• Workshops and conferences defined key areas for
  important new collaborative work through group
  brainstorming moderated by CILT leadership
• Participants determined areas of priority
  research by voting on poster-paper with sticky
  dots
• Defining seed projects People voted with their
  feet to form teams based upon personal interests
  in community-defined high-priority topics and
  worked for most of a day to define projects
• Seed grant teams proposed to be funded by CILT in
  a rapid turnaround process
• 60 CILT Seed Grants were awarded that involved
  researchers, industry, and educators from 169
  different institutions

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CILT Seed Grants (1997-2002)
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CILT Seeds

• The majority of the 60 seed grants continued
  their work beyond the seed grant funding,
  submitting follow-on proposals to NSF or other
  sources, or leading to other community-wide
  activities

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CILT Postdoctoral Fellow Program

• A postdoctoral program trained 8 scholars to work
  at the intersection of the sciences of learning,
  technology innovation, and technology
  appropriation in learning settings including
  schools.
• Postdoctoral scholars were distributed across the
  theme teams and institution, and stimulated both
  theme collaborations and research synthesis.
• Their contact with the members of the leadership
  team, their participation in all CILT
  discussions, and their role with respect to seed
  grants enabled them to situate their own research
  in the context of the field, to better understand
  the needs of the field, and to share these views
  with their junior colleagues.
• They also designed and led Netcourses on the
  themes for researchers and educators (6 weeks),
  most offered twice.

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CILT Postdoctoral Fellows

• Energetic!!!

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CILT Accomplishments
Raising the bar for what learning technology RD
can be

• Capturing, sharing and advancing the collective
  intelligence of the field.
• Promoting by requiring and seed funding
  generative cross-disciplinary and cross-sector
  partnerships.
• Training a new generation of leaders.
• Modeling new collaborative approaches to learning
  technology innovation Synergy
• Engaging industry in CILT projects for mutual
  influences to improve education through
  research-based innovations.

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Ten CILT Posters
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• Yoko Ono's Wish Tree is part of a series of works
  created in the 1990s, in which Ono uses actual
  trees as the primary element.
• Yoko "As a child in Japan, I used to go to a
  temple and write out a wish on a piece of thin
  paper and tie it around the branch of a tree.
  Trees in temple courtyards were always filled
  with people's wish knots, which looked like white
  flowers blossoming from afar.
• Yoko Ono asks that we, the audience, participate
  in this wish tree by identifying our desires and
  daring to write them down.
• Make a wish about learning technology futures and
  CILT-like partnerships. Write it down in this
  space.
• Ask your friends to do the same.
• Keep wishing until the Wish Tree is filled with
  wishes.