[Asis-l] Major NSF Report on CyberLearning

[gerrymck]

Colleagues/

 I have learned about a recently issued major report that I
believe/hope will be of interest to many:

_Fostering Learning in the Networked World: The Cyberlearning
Opportunity and Challenge / A 21st Century Agenda for the National
Science Foundation_

 Report of the NSF Task Force on Cyberlearning

 [Christine L. Borgman (Chair), Hal Abelson, Lee Dirks, Roberta
Johnson, Kenneth R. Koedinger, Marcia C. Linn, Clifford A. Lynch,
Diana G. Oblinger, Roy D. Pea, Katie Salen, Marshall S. Smith, Alex
Szalay]

 June 24 2008 / Posted August 11 2008

Excerpts from Executive Summary

The Task Force on Cyberlearning was charged jointly by the Advisory
Committees to the Education and Human Resources Directorate and the
Office of Cyberinfrastructure to provide guidance to NSF on the
opportunities, research questions, partners, strategies, and existing
resources for cyberlearning. This report identifies directions for
leveraging networked computing and communications technology. It also
calls for research to establish successful ways of using these
technologies to enhance educational opportunities and strengthen
proven methods of learning.

Imagine a high school student in the year 2015. She has grown up in a
world where learning is as accessible through technologies at home as
it is in the classroom, and digital content is as real to her as
paper, lab equipment, or textbooks. At school, she and her classmates
engage in creative problem-solving activities by manipulating
simulations in a virtual laboratory or by downloading and analyzing
visualizations of realtime data from remote sensors.

Away from the classroom, she has seamless access to school materials
and homework assignments using inexpensive mobile technologies. She
continues to collaborate with her classmates in virtual environments
that allow not only social interaction with each other but also rich
connections with a wealth of supplementary content. Her teacher can
track her progress over the course of a lesson plan and compare her
performance across a lifelong "digital portfolio," making note of
areas that need additional attention through personalized assignments
and alerting parents to specific concerns.

What makes this possible is cyberlearning, the use of networked
computing and communications technologies to support learning.
Cyberlearning has the potential to transform education throughout a
lifetime, enabling customized interaction with diverse learning
materials on any topic-from anthropology to biochemistry to civil
engineering to zoology. Learning does not stop with K-12 or higher
education; cyberlearning supports continuous education at any age.

Full Report Available at

[ http://tinyurl.com/6ngdaz ]

Enjoy!

/Gerry

Gerry McKiernan
Associate Professor
Science and Technology Librarian
Iowa State University Library
Ames IA 50011

gerrymck at iastate.edu

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