Technology and 21st Century Learning

Stephen Heppell heads his own policy, research and practice consultancy, Heppell.net, at the virtual heart of a network of innovative collaborators worldwide, working together on a diverse range of 21st century focused projects from school design through software development to national policy. Heppell’s track record of effective radical learning projects reaches back 25 years and includes Learning in the New Millennium, an early 90’s project that pioneered broadband, mobile phones and online communities; Notschool.Net, a virtual school for excluded youngsters; Talking Heads, an online community of practice for all the UK’s headteachers, now handed successfully to NCSL; “Be Very Afraid” an annual children’s digital creativity event at BAFTA. Heppell’s projects are found all around the world, from the Caribbean to New Zealand. Heppell is professor in a number of institutions and is a respected regular in blue-chip and innovative boardrooms and in ministerial offices. He is a familiar face in the media around the world and is the current holder of the Royal Television Society’s Judges Award for lifetime contribution to educational broadcasting. Heppell explains how too many schools are still operating on models that were designed for the 19th century learner. In the new century, kids are drawn to new devices like iPods and cell phones, and to new modes of interacting like Facebook and twittering; teachers and schools have the opportunity to harness this natural fascination with technology by allowing and encouraging it to be used in the classroom. Indeed, even the notion of the classroom needs to be entirely re-imagined.

Elliot Soloway is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor at the University of Michigan and professor in the School of Information, the School of Education, and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Soloway is a principal investigator of the Center for Learning Technologies in Urban Schools grant, which has been created with four partners: Detroit Public Schools, Chicago Public Schools, the University of Michigan, and Northwestern University. The focus of the center’s activities is the creation of strategies for embedding and sustaining the use of computing and communications technologies in the science curriculum at the middle school level. The center has a four-year, $6 million grant from the National Science Foundation. As a member of the Center for Highly Interactive Computing in Education at the University of Michigan, Soloway is working to develop technology-embedded curricula for school-based programs, and has been in close collaboration with the Detroit Public Schools and the Ann Arbor Public Schools to produce a new generation of middle-school science curriculum that leverages the affordances of the emerging computational and communications technologies to uniquely scaffold students’ learning and support teachers’ instructional strategies. For 14 years, Cathie Norris was a high school mathematics and computer science teacher before moving to the University of North Texas where she is a professor in the Department of Technology and Cognition. Soloway and Norris advocate employing mobile computing devices – Palms, cell phones, and other handhelds – in the classroom. They argue that laptops and desktops do not adequately meet the needs of young learners. Acknowledging that purchasing and maintaining these computers is prohibitively expensive for districts already strapped for funding, the mobile computing solution puts the infrastructure costs on the carrier, not the school. Students can work alone, interactively with other students, or in combination with smart boards and other networking applications. Handhelds like the iPhone will allow for learning to happen anytime and anywhere. Recognizing the giant leap of faith that districts and schools must make to adopt mobile devices, Soloway and Norris are confident that the widespread use of mobile computing in the classroom is inevitable.