"Questions for Research"
Status: Done ✔Co-edit by Fabrizio Terzi & Federico Monaco
Note: If you want your work to be considered for the live event, the deadline is earlier, as you will want to submit your final project by 3/27/16, 5:00 PM UTC.Researching an educational intervention is not always a priority depending on the type of project, but it serves a variety of important purposes. One is to learn about how new types of technology can improve learning and engagement, thereby advancing the educational technology field. But even if that’s not your goal, research on learning outcomes or best practices in implementation can encourage people to choose your product and help them use it more effectively.
- Were there learning gains over time in content knowledge or skills?
Students identified laboratory classes, or practicals, as the main place where skills and knowledge were developed. This suggests that learning with new digital tools should focus on enhancing and potentially increasing the practical components of subjects. But practical classes are under threat. Student time in costly laboratory classes is being cut along with budgets to train properly laboratory tutors. While lectures are relatively cheap to deliver, musical students are saying they have a narrow focus on content knowledge and practice techniques. Students are uniquely placed to comment on the learning outcomes of formal & informal learning. They have experienced the curriculum and instruments. And as efforts to reform and provide this technology, students’ perception of their learning gains can greatly inform this. Conservatories of Music help students learn. But students can help music educators learn too.
- What types of projects did the technology enable students to complete?
The Gate" or "Learning City point" project intend to act as Public local and online open space to contributions from scholars and citizen belonging systems thinking. The setting of the space in the park, is intended to be explicitly inter-trans-disciplinary, and expression of a "mesh" vision and attentive in identify and describe the processes of co-generation and recursion in community of practice . In addition, those who are doing their project goals, the public space is designed as a meeting and streaming performance dedicated to musical studies, with a special focus on theoretical frameworks, models, and field research on the specific areas of Education.
- How did teachers feel about incorporating the technology into their curriculum?
Schooling still operates in the 19th century. We need to revolutionize everything about schooling. Technologically, much of what needs to change is less front-end than the back-end systems. From taking attendance to tracking free and reduced-price lunch to data analytics around special education, it is all pretty primitive. We also must make our systems of delivering education more openly available so that innovation can occur. In other words, we need more open-source intellectual property so that worldwide we improve schooling faster and more efficiently.
In general, technology enhances student outcomes by forcing us to make our processes more explicit. So much of what we do is intuitive — we get into habits based on what has worked in the past, and those habits aren't always the best way to do things going forward. The more we try to automate what we do, the more we have to take all of those habits and assumptions and spell them out to the point that a computer can make sense of them. Yes, we get the benefit of having technology do things that would otherwise have to be done manually, and we get analytics to help us make better decisions, but we also get a clearer view of ourselves. Technology forces us to be brutally honest with ourselves about what we do, how we spend our time and resources, and what outcomes we achieve. It makes it hard to hide behind assumptions. We're currently getting technology to work for us in this way on a number of fronts. We're redesigning the way we record live piano and other digital instruments, grades, attendance, and classroom management. We're professional development, and performance management data into systems that can merge that information with our scholar outcomes. We're just finishing up a project that takes information about buildings, sections, staff, co-located schools and a ton of other constraints and gives principals suggestions on how to most efficiently schedule classes and maximize student opportunities for extracurricular classes.
We are particularly excited about a newly developed system that augments educators’ observations with inferences from machine learning. To our knowledge, this is rarely if ever done in brick-and-mortar schools, particularly at the pre-k to 12 level. The system uses state-of-the-art modeling procedures to create interactive data visualizations that go far beyond dashboards. Dashboards aggregate data. Our system distills data into actionable insights.