media-5

Transcriber:	Shu Jung (shu_jung @ hotmail.com)
Brief Bio:	fourth year music student
Date finished:	2005/06/04
Proofreader:	Nety Chen
Brief Bio:	M.S. Communication, Indiana State U.
Date finished:	17/06-2005

Hello, my name is Steve Lerman, and I will be giving a 15 minute lecture.  And then what I will try to do during this lecture is give you a broad overview about some of the innovations in the educational uses of technology.

Let me first introduce myself a little.  I am a professor at MIT; I’ve been here about 26 years.  And I currently direct an interdisciplinary research center called the Center for Educational Computing Initiatives.  This is a center that cuts across all of MIT’s schools and departments and tries to undertake innovative research in how different technologies, computer technologies and communications technologies, can be used in educational settings.  Most of our work is in higher education, but occasionally we do do projects that are beyond that scope.

What I thought I would do is first give you a little bit of a sense of some of the opportunities that we as a group have been exploring.  They really have to do about changing how we think about teaching and learning.  And so, I have shown a slide up here which contrasts two different ways of thinking.  On the left side, as you look at it, are what you might think of more traditional ways of thinking about educational processes.  On the right side are some of the ways in which we want to transform that thinking.  So for example, we often talk about teaching, but I would rather focus more on learning and what the student learns rather than what the teacher teaches. Rather than thinking of a teacher necessarily, one could think of an individual who acts more like a mentor or coach in certain settings. Students are really learners; they may not be students in a formal sense.  They can be people in industry trying to acquire new skills, or they can be individuals at home.  We normally think of teaching as a synchronous process – you and I are at the same place and the same time, while we are learning.  When in fact, at least right now, we are not. I am teaching this lecture, or this piece in a studio, here at MIT, and you are watching it somewhere else at a totally different time.  So, a lot of teaching and learning can be thought of less as a synchronous activity, and more of an asynchronous one.

Too much of education, at least in my view, is passive.  We put students in classrooms and or lecture halls in higher education and we talk to them. There has been a strong move to changing that relationship where the student becomes far more active, an active participant in his/her own learning.  And we have also gone very much from a scheduled learning, there are classes at certain hours, to much more ability to learn on demand, whenere you need it and whereen you need it. And finally, we often think of a set of materials for teaching – a set of lecture notes that we hand out to students for example.  Actually now, there is much more interest in focusing on students working towards some goal.

Now no single transformation we are working on has all of these attributes simultaneously. But they represent for us a direction that the research lab I direct is trying to head in.  I thought that the best way to illustrate some of that is was to talk a little about some of the projects.  The work that goes on at the Center for Educational Computing Initiatives (CECI) really falls into three different intersecting areas.  One area is enabling technologies. Not all the technologies that we need to help people learn better are necessarily available today.  And so there is some element of the research that looks at technology that can help students in different ways - things that enable new ways of learning and teaching.

A second broad area is applications – building real world educational software and communications technologies and applying them to actual learners.  Most of the activity that we do in the center in fact falls into this area of applied research.  Looking at opportunities for how we might improve education, building things that helps students and then putting them in classroom settings.

The third area is one might think of as evaluation or assessment, as it is sometimes called.  And that really gets at the question, fundamentally, “So what?”. If the goal is to improve education, then one has to ask hard questions about does a technology actually help?  Do people actually learn differently, or better, or faster? And even that is not sufficient.  The types of questions one has to ask really are more fine grained  drained. Who learns better?  What types of materials are better taught with a particular technology than by conventional means? How much does it cost, both to create the technologies and to use them?  How does that compare with traditional educational settings?  So it is not sufficient simple to do things and argue the way one has and say “Well, I think that works”.  Many of the projects that we do have fairly detailed assessment plans associated with them.  Where the goal, as best as possible, is to make some inferences, about learning outcomes, and how both students and teachers use the materials to effectively help the students learn.

Well, with that, I would like to tell you about a couple of the projects going on in my lab.  Not all the projects are ones I direct myself.  The first example I want to give you is directed by Professor Peter Donaldson. He is the head of the literature section at MIT and is a Shakespearean scholar.  He has been working on a project based in my lab, directing this project for actually several years which is an attempt to give students access as part of the educational process to a much wider array of materials that they can use to help learn about Shakespeare and his work.  They call this project the Shakespeare Electronic Archive.  And while I will only be able to tell you a few things about it right now, I would actually like to illustrate by a very simple example.  One of the things that Professor Donaldson wants to do is to give students exposure to the fact that the body of Shakespearean literature, the plays in this case, which he focuses on primarily, is not really a fixed body. That is there is no single authoritative version of the Shakespearean plays.  In fact, these were living plays.  They were plays that people performed and that Shakespeare himself probably changed.  We do not have anything written in Shakespeare’s own handwriting. We don’t know what he wrote.  What we do know is what was published, some of it contemporaneously during his life.  And there are actually multiple versions of some of the plays. And perhaps the most famous of all lines in one of the plays is from Hamlet. And in a version, a printed version called the first folio edition, Hamlet says “To be or not to be, that is the question.”  This is the line that those of us who grew up in the English speaking world all learned.  And that is the way that we all thought about Hamlet.

But, what Professor Donaldson tries to do is make students aware that there are multiple versions. So what he has done is digitize some of the existing copies of the earliest printed work of Shakespeare.  So the slide that you are looking at now has a first folio edition slide, and this is actually a digitized version at high resolution of that particular quotation from Hamlet, and then it goes on in the normal way.  Well it turns out that there is another edition, called the first quarto edition, which in its earliest printed version, actually predating the Folio Edition, says “To be or not to be, aye, there’s the point.”  It’s a different line to the one that we all learned.  And what Professor Donaldson wants to do is explore the subtle questions about, well first of all, which is right.  Well the answer probably is both - at various times these were performed.  Why are they different?  How did they come that to be different?  What might have happened, we don’t know for certain, but what might have happened to lead to these two divergent editions?  Now if you look at the Quarto and Folio Editions there are many cases where there’s significant divergence – not so much as only a single line, but in fact groups of lines.  The Quarto Editions are highly condensed, the Folio Editions probably come closer to the full play.  But what he wants to do is not so much tell the student what is right or wrong, but stimulate a very different discussion evolving around these close to original source materials. This is the best that we have in terms of source materials.  And so he has actually created digitized editions of all of the plays, the full first Folio and the first Quarto, and actually there is another round of publications called the second Quarto editions.  He’s gotten access to the very small number of these that actually exist today, and he’s created high resolution digitized versions of them with permissions of the owners, and he uses those as discussion materials. And then he has carefully indexed those against things like the Oxford English Edition of the plays.  So what he has created is a highly linked set of materials that can serve as the foundation for a very different discussion then would normally go on in a Shakespeare course.

This is a screen that you will probably have trouble seeing right now, but this is an example of a complete interface.  You get at these materials through a web browser. And what I want to illustrate here, on the right side you will see part of a performance.   In addition to looking at the plays, he has digitized versions of the actual performances of the plays, focusing particularly on Hamlet. And he has been able to get access to a whole range of Hamlet performances, including some that aren’t even in English.  One of them is a Swedish performance.  And so he is able to link the text of the plays to the performances of those plays, and then compare how different actors have interpreted important roles.  This then leads to a very different discussion because a play is not a piece of text.  A play is a living thing that is meant to be performed by actors in a particular setting. Different actors, with different directors, interpret the words of Shakespeare; to the best we can reconstruct those words, differently. And he wants to bring, early in a student’s education, this idea. 

And finally he has also brought together a body of thousands of pieces of art that relate to the Shakespearean plays, some of it is contemporaneous to Shakespeare’s time, the Elizabethan era, and then others are renderings of various plays in different time periods when they were performed.  Or pictures of different actors or different settings.  And so he is able to bring to bear a rich extensive body of materials to talk about Shakespeare with his students.

Another project is something we have been working on which tries to bring together a collection of film about modern China. When I say modern China, I really mean revolution and later China.  We have been working with a film company called Long Bow Productions.  Long Bow is an independent documentary film production company that does perhaps the best independent documentaries about China.  They have won many awards for in their work.  They have graciously made available their complete film library.   Not just their documentaries themselves, but the films that they used before they cut together the documentary.  For every hour of documentary there may be 100 or more hours of source video and film.  And they have agreed to allow us to work with them.  They of course still own the film, but to digitize portions of it, and then to create on the internet various representations of it so that people can search these archives.  And we have been working with them to develop what I call a prototype – we have not yet done a complete project.  But I want to show you some pieces of this on slides.  So one of the things that we have done is create a searchable archive.  And what we have done with them, actually they have done did most of the work in creating these indexes, is created a two-tiered indexing hierarchy.  There is a set of topic areas – things like actions, places, people, education, history, festivals – and for each of those categories we have created a set of key words. And we have indexed portions of their film collection against those key words down to small segments.  So a single documentary might have as many as 20-50-100 segments each of which was indexed separately.  So this is the search screen, so the a user can put together a search across various topics, for example one of the documentaries they did had a segment that went into a village, a rural village, and interviewed many of the older women who had, of course, grown up as young girls before the revolution. And these were women who had gone through the traditional foot binding that was not uncommon in pre-Mao China.  And they talk about the ceremony and the effects on them and how it was perceived, and why they did it, and what their parents thought.  And these interviews were also translated. And so one might be very interested in studying this that to understand pre-Mao China, pre-revolution rural China.  And these materials will allow students to go in and look at those sorts of questions.

Here is the result of that search, a sample of the media.  Every piece of media, every small video clip, and eventually every picture, every image has a set of records associated with it.  And this is a summary of the set of records, so the student gets a summary about the records, where it came from, what documentary, or what part of a larger piece of film or video it came from, and then, most importantly, they can watch that sample of the media.  There is a little video player on the right side of the screen which that allows the student, or the professor teaching the materials to bring up those materials and show the students.  So this allows the students to explore these materials on their own, asynchronously, to do research basically into these materials.

Another thing they have done is created what they call tours.  Professor Peter Perdue has been working on this.  He is in the History section of MIT’s Humanities department.  And Professor Perdue has created from these materials what we are calling tours. A tour is an organized walk, basically, not a physical walk but a virtual walk, through a collection of materials.  And so what he has done is organized subsets of the Long Bow collection into meaningful multimedia essays.  And so here is a screen from a tour we put together about Tiananmen Square.  Tiananmen Square has enormous historical significance in China.  It's, of course, the place the revolution was declared by Mao, it was the place of the pro-democracy uprising that most of us are familiar with, and it has a central place in the political and economic history of China.  So what he has done is organized basically an essay around the geography around of Tiananmen Square.  This is highly stylized, on the left side of the screen, a highly stylized view of the square. And then students can move around through that and as they do, they get segments of a longer essay that has text and video and still images. So here, once they are in the tour and in the square, they can read the hyperlinked essay which has text, and each part of the essay has links to various media that are also in the archives.  In this mode, either the student can self-study, work on  his or her own, or often Professor Perdue will use these materials in the classroom, and use them to launch a larger discussion about what the students understand about from these materials.

A third project that I would like to tell you about is in Physics, for those who are not familiar with MIT, all MIT undergraduate students have to take two semesters of Physics. For many students this is the most regular rigorous exposure to the Physics they've ever had. In the first semester of Physics, they study what they basically might think of as the Metoni Metalline and Machanics. These turns out at the pace we teach it to be a difficult subject for some groups of the students. Professor Richard Larson working with Professor Walter Luwin who actually teaches this course may many times started at as taught in the past has have been developing something called "PIVoT" which is the Physics Interactive Video Tutor. The PIVoT project is an attempt to bring together a very large highly interlinked set of materials to help students who are trying to learn the Metoni and Metalline Mechanics. What they have done is, they've assembled a very extensive collection of video, texts, graphics and other materials, index them against the flow of the actual course itself, so as the course moves from lecturer to lecturer, each lecturer corresponds to a set a of keywords. In addition, they've done things like video-taped help sessions. Professor Luwin gives a basically hour long help sessions during most weeks. In the help session what he might do typically is solve between four and eight different problems that illustrate the key principles being taught that week. These are problems that look a lot like what you might have to do during the weekly assignment if you are a student in this course. So Professor Luwin goes through each of these examples and solve the problems and talks about the issues and strategies and in solving them and how they might relate to homework assignments that the students are trying to do during that week.

The video tutor also has a couple of elements. But before telling you about those let me go through some of the hypothesis that we have when I was testing about why these subjects are difficult and why these materials assemblesd as we assembled them might be useful. The first is Physics is difficult for many students. So they need to have much more ability to go over certain subjects again and again. The ideal is Ideally they each will would have a their personal tutor and that of course is not possible with hundreds of students taking this each semester.

Students who even don't have any difficulties, we believe they can learn in much deeper ways if they had access to a tutor who can present things in different ways to them. The traditional mould mode of teaching these materials - the lecturer hall, we believe has very low as one might think it as a bad oath, that is, it tends to be a one way flow of communication from the faculty to the student, it's highly confined, students have limited opportunity to ask questions, the whole lecture last 15 minutes three times a week. And so the lecturer is generally forced to move at a pace that works for a the typical student, which tends to be a bit slow for the very talented students, too fast for a the less talented or for students who are less familiar with the materials. The ideal Ideally students is are to be able to navigate through this material in ways that best suit their own pace. And also the reality is, that in large classes students have limited face to face contact with the teacher. They can go for to office hours, recitation hours in a smaller groups, but the truth is that for the most part most students learn in a relatively passive way. What PIVoT trying to do is to change that by providing an efficient economical selection of very rich media. What we have done is we take these problems, these help sessions, we've digitized videos of all the lectures, that's about a typical semester between 36-39 lectures. We have taken a textbook, one of the published textbook, and created an electronic version of that and then the most importance to do is that we've linked all the materials together so they are searchable. In addition, one of our graduate student, Steven Niemczyk, has been working on software agent which is a category of software that larger lodges on what people do what people say what they want, and makes forward predictions in does things that will be useful for the students in this case or whoever are is using them. So one of the software agents that Steven Niemczyk has developed watches what students have used in the PIVoT collection and then con combs through the collection and makes predictions about what additional things in the collection the student would find most useful at that moment. For example the student is looking at material that is very vast in a particular field say Angular and Momentum. The tutor would look ahead and say: "OK, I can find another materials that have a quality that they're highly advanced, that is they are have that is not more introductory, and they deal with Angular and Momentum". At the other hand, another student is looking through PIVoT collection and focusing most of his/her time on more introductory or more pre-requisite parts of the collection, the videos and is the materials, then the tutor will begin to identify that is a characteristic, and at least for the next few sessions would be presenting the possibilityies that the student could choose that match those criteria, so for each student, the tutor builds a model of that student's current state, what the smart tutor computer thinks they students know that they or doesn't know, and tries to present to that student options that is what the tutor thinks are the student's needs at that moment.

PIVoT has a software agent that guides learner, this agent keeps tracks of the student from session to session and offers advice to the student. The way last thing I thought I would tell you about is a broader look at educational technology at MIT. MIT has something called the Council on eEducational tTechnology. This is a council appointed counter for the point by Robert Brown, the provost, and has been leading periodically to try to help and guide MIT in a long-term strategy of how to use educational technology. This has been looking at the broad range of teaching options, basically this is the place where MIT as an university tries to look ahead and to determine what things make the most sense for us in as a the university in the area of educational technology. And the challenge here is that this turns out to be the area where there are probably many more options than we should or could pursue. The problem, and wonderful things, both problem and wonderful things about wonderful technologies in education is, that it opens up a vast array of possibilities, no one or organizations, or the MIT or public schools or for profitable universityies could possibly try all of them in an effective way. So everyone in this area field is trying to look ahead and decide given the strengthens and weakness of the organization, what small sunset subset of entire range of opportunities should they pursue. The Council on educational technology at MIT has been doing that for MIT helped a couple of consultants who actually volunteer their time, Andrew McKinney and Harminton has have both been the participants of this process. What we are trying to do is to isolate a few key areas that make sense for MIT to explore intensively.

Some of the challenges for a start that technology invented quickly, students and professors have shifting expectations. The generation students that are coming to university today have century essentially of broad up in Engineering grown up with the internet. Some of the first generation where internet has been part of their lives in their formative years, for most of the people at my age, internet came later and that's something we learned later, but it wasn't part of our early education experiences. Today's students, particularly that are arriving now in this decade, the internet has been with them, most of them not all of them have accessed to the internet throughout their at least middle and high school years. So they are used to use it as a resource for better or worse. In addition that there are several universities that respond to this opportunity with a their fore profit model, that is they spond span off the subsidiary units that some cases are profit making. The question for all the university is that is it has this been a sensible things to do and for MIT it doesn't make sense for us. MIT has ubdertaken a variety of experiments in educational technology, but we really feel at this point of time we need some sort of coordinated strategy. What we've decided or recommended actually, this is not a decision making body, much as a advisory body to the senior administration in MIT, we believed that MIT should use technology to enhance the core-educational experience and by that MIT as a residential based university where we teach relatively small numbers of students in intensive ways. That doesn't mean doing something differently doesn't make sense for some university or other organization, but one of the key finding or recommendation of this group is that what MIT should do is the leverage the opportunity of technology provides, to enhance what is already doing that we shouldn't become a global distance learning university with millions of students simultaneously for example. That might make sense for some organizations certainly the Open university, on the other United Kkingdom was founded on that as their basic model, but given MIT's course strengths and core-abilities, we decided what will make sense is to do focus two major things, basically these results means stretching certain barriers or certain areas that we now working at. First we should launch in has an enhanced version of our current researching development initiators initiatives in educational technology, and what we've seen in MIT in last year or two since this recommendation is made, is a steady ram pop of the types of innovations the level of global activity in educational technology innovation and now we have far more initiators initiatives, certain many more as I've showning you in this presentation and we've been able to get funding to do a wider range of things to explore different opportunities for improving our on-campus educationals as an experience for our students.

The second that's is something that's more sole subtle and that is to find different ways to use technologies to basically stretch the boundaryies of what needs , that means, to learn at MIT, and at its extreme one might think of a graduate education as a four year of initiation into a life long clubheld. Right now, students tend to think I come to university and I leave the university and for many of them they still get their sole contact is with when they get a little amuse alumni newsletters as elicitation solicitation for donations, that is, for many students today, the university experience is highly bounded within a four-year of interval.  We are thoroughly With that I convinced that is really not a very the best model, that particularly for our students who are intensively involved in the lifetime engineering technology about two third of our undergraduate students major in Engineering and roughly twenty percent more or less major Science. These are fields that change rapidly, and what the students hasve learned in their under  four-years of undergraduate experience will be to large extend outdated particularly the base knowledge--the facts, of course what we've really hoped is that they'll they've learned find a the way to learn that will last them in a lifetime. So what we are trying to do now is to shift into much more activityies to provide opportunities for life-long learning, working with our long-life alumni associations, we have concepts called knowledge updates that provide opportunities for learners beyond the four year experiences. We also have been trying to find ways to use technology to make it easier for students to be off the campus at various times. MIT has embarked an exchange program with Cambridge University, that allowed eventually at least fifty of our students there, and fifty of their students here, and part of what makes it that possible is to allow them the ability to take courses. MIT also has a large program with National University of Singapore and Nanyai Technology University, so they call it Singapore MIT Alliance that using technologies. We've been looking at the various options of four programs that we have now under study what is flexible as education options the life-long learning as we have talked about. We also think it is important to extend some of the computing capabilities that we have on campus to the larger community of learners. There are varieties of things that we have been planning working on find ways to extend out the digital infra-structureion of the university, a the library is another not digital resources. It turns out that there is a lot of complexity that are both technological age in nature, what happens will happened when we have ten times as many of people who are part of our digital community as we have now, and also frankly legal and Economic. The libraryies for example have licenses for writing a variety of digital materials, not all of which can be provided outside the campus because of the license agreements we have with various providers of these resources.

Well in the class session that I'll be given by Professor G. of course I will be talking more about the others I hope will stimulate the discussion, if you want more information on the slide on the contact information and you can contact me and when we do have class that I hope that will activate the interesting widely discussions about some of the issues before talking to you.

------------- The above text was transcribed by Carol Stroud & Shu-Jung Chan ---------------