On March 26 and 27, 2014, SRI hosted an intensive two-day workshop on “partnering for impact,” assembling a diverse group of 49 Cyberlearning researchers, entrepreneurs, teachers and school leaders, and government and foundation decision makers.
Recap of the Workshop
The participating experts called attention to the timeliness of identifying ways to work together to achieve deeper and more important educational impacts, especially given the rapidly changing landscape of learning technology. Tom Kalil, White House OSTP, addressed the group remotely about the power of “pull” in evoking innovative solutions to complex problems. While acknowledging the range and “blue sky” potential of current Cyberlearning research, the Workshop drilled down on the persistent issues that make progress slow, including: differences in priorities and communication among different stakeholder communities; intellectual property and data ownership issues; Balkanized market structure; school and district policy; and integration of systems with regard to both data and pedagogy.
Small teams were formed to devise innovative approaches to the identified challenges. For example, one team defined a broad public awareness campaign to help educators and the public understand “what learning looks like today,” especially in the way teachers and learners use technology. Another team conceptualized “EdKicker.com,” a crowd-sourced approach to funding innovative curriculum products, along the lines of KickStarter.com. Teachers with innovative ideas would get a small “kick” of seed funding from the broader community of stakeholders (developers, authors, teachers, researchers, parents, technologists, and other investors) to partner and support projects they would actually like to use to address recently adopted standards.
Other systemic solutions explored by workshop teams included addressing teachers’ need to build powerful communities around the work of integrating technology into school; the role of government and programs such as ARPA-Ed; and mechanisms for making Cyberlearning expertise available to innovative product developers, teachers, and schools. The CIRCL team plans to facilitate follow-on activities, including a Partnering for Impact panel at the upcoming Cyberlearning Summit and another panel about Cyberlearning’s potential at the Content in Context meeting of the American Association of Publishers.
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