The document discusses four main challenges facing education in light of emerging technologies: 1) Building community in large-scale learning environments while emphasizing personalization, 2) Keeping formal education relevant given widespread information access, 3) Facilitating learning trajectories rather than momentary assessments, and 4) Adapting to increasingly diverse learners. It argues for cross-disciplinary collaboration between fields like computer science, behavioral sciences, and design to address these challenges, while maintaining diverse perspectives. Bringing all researchers into a single society could hinder progress by reducing diversity, though structures are needed to facilitate communication across communities.

1. Interdisciplinary Grand Challenges for the
Sciences and Technologies of Learning
An ISLS and CSCL Perspective
Alyssa Wise, Simon Fraser University, @alywise

2. A Pessimistic Snapshot of What’s Wrong
with Formal Education Today
Impoverished and/or
problematic
understanding about
learners and learning
Recalcitrant
educational structures,
punitive evaluation
systems
Unproductive
classroom cultures
Dysfunctional
engagement in
formal schooling
Sea of digital
information and
informal (learning)
interaction
opportunities

3. Emerging Technologies, Possibilities & Tensions
• Rise of large scale learning environments -> opportunities for
personalization and customized collaboration
• Growth of informal learning communities (maker-spaces, youth
publication…) -> alternative venues for learning and
demonstration of expertise
• Increased data generated digitally (from physical and virtual
spaces) -> opportunities for increased analytical insight
• Advances in computational discourse and other methods -> new
possibilities for tailored feedback and assessment
What we can
build
What is worth
building
What we can
measure
What is worth
measuring

4. Challenge 1 – Building community in learning
spaces in the face of the current emphasis on
scaling up and personalization
• Productive classroom cultures and informal
communities of practice foster efficacious and
engaged learners
• Time for interactive refinement of mental models
and knowledge practices, relationships, learners’
voices, agency and ownership key
• Focus on efficiency, economy, individualization
and scale threatens the time needed for
individual and collective sense-making
• Need for “slow learning”?

5. Challenge 2 – Keeping formal education relevant
in a world where information is everywhere
• Today’s students have greater access to information
than ever before (though this alone doesn’t
cultivate knowledge, wisdom, understanding)
• Increasing challenges to schools as the primary
venue for learning and demonstration of expertise
• Need to cultivate connections that penetrate the
classroom walls , how can formal and informal
learning become synergistic?

6. Challenge 3 – Facilitating and assessing
learning trajectories (not momentary states)
• Increase in data granularity and temporal analysis
techniques create possibilities to transform our
paradigms of assessment to look at growth
• Opportunities to thinking about learning pathways not
‘bite sized chunks’
• Important issues of data rights and privacy - what are
possibilities + dangers for “electronic learning records”?
• Role for student ownership and agency as learning
occurs across contexts, expanding repertoire of ways to
demonstrate / document expertise

7. Challenge 4 – Adapting to increasingly diverse
learner populations online and face-to-face
• Immigration and global mobility are making
classrooms are increasingly multi-cultural
• Online environments, especially at scale, offer
learning experiences to students coming with
widely different cultural backgrounds and
expectations
• Need for more robust ways to productively
take these differences into account

8. Working Together to Address the Challenges
• Need cross-community transactive memory systems
– Staying abreast of increasingly specialized and fragmented
research areas in connection to the big issues that matter
– Respecting our own and others expertise, the boundaries of
what we know + where other expertise resides, knowing
enough about others’ areas to converse productively
• Building and maintaining bridges
– Continue efforts between Computer Science, the Behavioral
Sciences and Design Sciences, foster cxns with Neuroscience
– Be aware of the pressure of big data towards quantitative
approaches – how do we integrate with insights from
qualitative, mixed methods, and design based research
approaches that provide different kinds of valuable insight

9. One Society?
• Would it lead to better progress towards these
challenges? Or hinder efforts?
– Reduction of diversity of perspectives, approaches,
expertise (or living in silos)
– With greater size, lose important elements of community
needed for collaborations to develop (see challenge #1)
– Domination of quantitative methods wont show the whole
picture, keeping these + design-focused folks involved
• Better Question How can we build structures that
facilitate researchers participating in and
communicating across multiple communities?
– Rotating co-location of conferences
– Joint journal issues / commentary papers
– Cross-community literacy learning opportunities

10. Image Credit: Modified from cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo of isole di brissago shared by mbeo

11. Image Credit: Modified from cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo of isole di brissago shared by mbeo

12. Image Credit: Modified from cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photos of isole di brissago shared by mbeo and Forth Bridge at dusk shared by Hilts uk