5 grand challenges for the 21st Century

From Kaput Center Wiki

What are the directions from this group? Where are we moving? What can we do as a group?

• need to move beyond PI curiosity-driven researcher.
• engage in national programs; catch up to technology and pace of social change; re-dress the problems we have caused as part of a larger education system
• if we rewrite standards in 50 yrs time, what do we expect to see?

From Roy Pea's article on Characterizing Grand Challenges:

1. Understandable
2. Challenging
3. Useful
4. Testable
5. Incremental

Contents 1 Ubiquity of technology 2 Data visualization 3 Students as co-participants in building predictive & explanatory models 4 Characterize particular ways of thinking in mathematics as a human activity

[edit] Ubiquity of technology

Make technology ubiquitous in support of subject based learning.

• Challenge of double innovation: asking teachers to do something new and asking them to use these powerful new tools with almost no resources to do them at once.
  • either enhance great teaching or enhance pitfalls or problems

• Ubiquity of technology
  • ability to make meaning
  • Structure
  • implementation in schools and effective use
  • transparency
  • focus on activity - tool is not at foreground, activity is
  • Impact
  • awareness of choices made

• Jere: interactivity and discourse are essential but not just mediated by teacher; access to chunks of information does not have to be restricted to teachers (watching lectures on podcasts). Teacher practice to radically change. Access to expertise.

• SH: Always an interface when using computers. ‘inter-social-face’ has to be mediated by something or somehow. So what does it mean for it to be transparent?
  • Device becoming less prosthetic
  • Communication rising to the surface
  • Transparency of software: software seen less as software and more as a co-action with user

• Make technology ubiquitious in support of subject based learning

[edit] Data visualization

(Mentioned by Jim)

• making sense of large data sets
• understanding dynamics of complex systems
  • is this something that becomes standardized?—SH
• How do we develop complex thinking in children? (Could be haptic...)
• Complexity not complicated-ness
• Would there be a mathematics implicated
• For informed citizenship and develop the next community of complexity scientists
• Location of expertise

[edit] Students as co-participants in building predictive & explanatory models

• Jere: how do we get students as co-participants in building explanatory and predictive models
  • "we’re not using the energy of kids in education"
  • challenge of co-participation is finding something that is interesting to children and adults
  • language of agency

• what do you do about teachers—how to get teachers to not be afraid of students going beyond what they can do and encourage that

• what are the co-active constructs?

[edit] Characterize particular ways of thinking in mathematics as a human activity