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Web 2.0 In Action
'That Which Weaves Together': The NSF Cyberlearning Report
8/20/2008
The National Science Foundation issued its Report of the NSF Task Force on Cyberlearning on June 24, 2008 -- "Fostering Learning in the Networked World: The Cyberlearning Opportunity and Challenge." The purpose of the report is to create "A 21st Century Agenda for the National Science Foundation," but in fact the agenda can be applied to all of higher education in the U.S. http://www.nsf.gov/publications/pub_summ.jsp?ods_key=nsf08204The report quotes Michael Cole's 1996 book, Cultural Psychology: A Once and Future Discipline (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), presenting "context" as "that which surrounds us" and "that which weaves together." The Web now surrounds us, but how do we weave our new world together? The report provides ideas for higher education in the STEM disciplines to do so.
The Significance of the NSF Report
The report is an invaluable addition to our understanding of the impact of the technology explosion of this century: seven pages of key references -- more than 150 of them; the report is written by 12 prominent authors who speak authoritatively, and very readably; it is an important recognition of where we are; and, it speaks with urgency about education recognizing that the knowledge infrastructure has changed more rapidly than education has been able to adjust to.
The report urges the NSF to "emphasize the transformative power of information and communications technology for learning, from K to grey." (p. 7) It reflects the building consensus that educational institutions should no longer think of how to adapt technology to the existing curriculum, but how to transform the enterprise to thrive in the changed knowledge infrastructure.
The Stages of Human Interaction
On page 11 of the report, we find a graphic from Roy Pea and Jillian Wallis representing the stages of human interaction over the millennia, from face-to-face to symbol mediated to communication mediated to network mediated and, finally, to cyberinfrastructure mediated. The graphic shows that today's students take part in all five mediations.
We can imagine a circular arrow connecting recursively the cyberinfrastructure stage back to legacy human values of orality and social connectedness ("face-to-face"). The Web is not only new, it has grown enormously because in some ways it's an antidote to the distancing factors so prominent in the age of the automobile. Web technology brings the world back to human scale.
The report laments how slowly education has changed in response to the great opportunities of cyberlearning (see excerpts below, all from page 12):
-- [Since A Nation at Risk,] "Few of the innovations tried over the ensuing 25 years have resulted in large-scale systemic change in education. Despite the revolutions wrought by technology in medicine, engineering, communications, and many other fields, the classrooms, textbooks, and lectures of today are little different than those of our parents."
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