Colleague Alumni Magazine | Graduate School of Education and Psychology | Pepperdine University

The Golden Age of Education

GSEP Explores Future Learning Environments

If society was on the verge of a golden age in education, how would we know? What if a golden age was only one of many possible paths we could follow, but by no means inevitable? By having a sense of what is possible in the future, we can imagine it more clearly, we can shape it, and we can hasten it. The process of understanding what the future might hold can have a powerful effect in shaping what the future will hold. One of the defining themes this year for the Education Division of the Pepperdine University Graduate School of Education and Psychology (GSEP) is Future Learning Environments. Through various research and development efforts, GSEP is poised to play an important international role in helping to shape new directions for schools.

For example, GSEP’s Online Master of Arts in Educational Technology (OMET) program has been a widely copied pacesetter in opening up not only the content areas of educational technology, but also in creating the communities of practice that are increasingly viewed as crucial to future learning. The image that many hold of technology as a way of isolating students with faces glazed in front of a screen is giving way to recognizing the profound possibilities of technology to bring people together in meaningful ways we never thought possible. The OMET program features what visiting professor Dr. Margaret Riel has dubbed “learning circles” that form online (virtual) and face-to-face (“F2F”) communities that are well poised to advance the University’s mission of purpose, service, and leadership. The learning circles approach in OMET is the subject of an expansion grant to Riel by the American Evaluation Association (AEA). In fact, the virtual/F2F approach to building these communities has been shared in other programs within GSEP, and one of the challenges that the Education Division faces involves incorporat ing such innovat ions systematically in its interdisciplinary offerings. The division’s overall array of graduate programs in teacher education, organizational leadership and change, administration, and educational technology models the kind of cross-disciplinary thinking that will be needed in structuring future learning communities.

The OMET experience and the Education Division’s structure are two elements of a broad set of initiatives explicitly advancing future learning communities. This past June, associate dean of education Dr. Eric Hamilton cochaired a symposium at Germany’s well-known Knowledge Media Research Centre (KMRC) on the role of social software (multiplayer learning and game environments, Facebook, Wikipedia) in future learning environments. This symposium was supported by a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to Hamilton and a grant from the German government to KMRC director Friedrich Hesse. At the symposium, Hamilton outlined a theory for future learning communities. The theory involves themes that use terms like “sightlines,” “self-regulation,” “modeling,” “hybrids,” “personalization,” “interactional bandwidth,” “cognitive density,” and “flow.” Not all of these have an especially futuristic sound or feel to them, but large shifts hinge on each. This framework has been shared in conference keynote addresses in England and was a principal feature of other symposia Hamilton led in Japan, Singapore, and Uganda in 2007, with additional support from NSF and Microsoft Research.

Much of this work involves technology, but compelling environments of the future will be characterized by new ways of thinking about learning. Here again, Pepperdine is exerting a leadership role. A recent book coedited by Hamilton, Foundations for the Future in Mathematics Education, includes chapters from an international slate of authors sharing research on a more systems- and need-driven approach to teaching one of our country’s education trouble spots, mathematics instruction. Technology is not the main driver—that there are collaborative teams structuring mathematical solutions to real problems is much more important. The approaches discussed in this volume form the basis for a large engineering consortium grant from NSF, involving Pepperdine, the U.S. Air Force Academy, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Minnesota, Purdue University, California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, and the Colorado School of Mines.

Another initiative directed at future learning communities is a complex research and development project funded by a new grant to GSEP by the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute for Education Science. This project, called Agent and Library Augmented Shared Knowledge Areas (ALASKA), is high-tech oriented and uses new notions of how teachers might function in the future. ALASKA integrates various technologies such as intelligent tutoring systems with animated avatars, collaborative networks, tablet computing, and digital libraries of instructional content created by teachers and students. Pepperdine is carrying out this project with Granada Hills Charter High School in Los Angeles Unified School District. One element of ALASKA will be implemented in a calculus course that Hamilton will teach in Seaver College in Spring 2009, and will include research funding both by Seaver and Microsoft Research. ALASKA represent s an opportunity to blend emerging technologies in unique ways. One question the grant poses is, “How can virtual humans advance the educational interaction of real humans?” There are many other ques t ions about how combinations of new technologies can create high-performance learning environments whose possibilities are only vaguely understood now.

To understand the broad array of possibilities, a sizable group of international leaders has worked together to formulate an international virtual network of researchers who explicitly focus on future learning environments. Many of these pacesetters met at the Graziadio Executive Center this past March, and numerous projects have emerged from that meeting, including an effort to advance some of the work at Pepperdine in meetings that Dr. Hamilton will lead in Uganda and South Africa this fall.

What might the future hold? Pepperdine holds a mission of purpose, service, and leadership with a firm conviction that scholarship and faith feed one another. GSEP is uniquely positioned to help advance and carry out a creative vision for the future within this mission, one that reflects a humane, redeeming, and high performance set of possibilities that may indeed reflect and help lead to an exciting new era for schools and learning.