A Carbon Nanotube Simulator with an ink interaction interface for enhanced collaboration and instruction.
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By Krishna Madhavan, Purdue University
In the same way that cyberinfrastructure is revolutionizing the scientific landscape, it is also set to revolutionize learning in the information age. Today, science, technology and engineering curricula, even at the nation's most technologically advanced universities, rely in large part on pedagogical practices that have their genesis in the pre-Renaissance era. The sounds of "It worked for me! Why should it not work for my students?" reverberate throughout pedagogical circles. But the current generation of students is growing up in a very different environment than we, the current generation of educators, did. They live in an information age, where technology is an intrinsic part of how they live and learn.
If we take a holistic view of information technology, we can see pedagogical shifts that may take place at all levels of education. Daniel Atkins, the newly appointed director of NSF's Office of Cyberinfrastructure, recently highlighted the immediate need to rethink the face-to-face time that faculty members get with their students. In a talk at the TeraGrid 2006 conference, he pointed out that if cyberservices provide students with access to almost all the data and information that faculty members are going to "lecture" about in their classrooms, simply treating classrooms as information delivery space will no longer work. Cleverly hidden in this call to action was the need to take a critical look at not only what happens within the classroom, but also how students today live in the real world.
Online and video podcast versions of a nanoHUB presentation. |
Atkins' challenge calls for an innovative strategy that incorporates the best of traditional pedagogy with new paradigms that reflect our times. This is a strategy that I call "educational engineering"—a philosophy that treats education as a grand challenge scientific problem that is best solved by applying cyberinfrastructure tools to make authentic, inquiry-based learning an intrinsic part of students' lifestyles. This philosophy is built on the fundamental tenet that learning experiences of the future will be multi-sensory and completely engaging, and will use technologies and significant computational power invisibly and continuously. Educational engineering calls for the development, deployment and better contextualization of scientific cybertools to extend the classroom virtually into the daily lives of students. Furthermore, this approach recognizes that cyberinfrastructure provides us with an opportunity to show our students the relevance of what they learn in class in their daily lives, while simultaneously increasing structured and unstructured time on task.
The nanoHUB, a TeraGrid science gateway developed, deployed and maintained by the NSF-funded Network for Computational Nanotechnology, has already adopted this pedagogical philosophy. For example, many nanoHUB seminars, online lectures, and learning modules designed to encourage students to try simulation tools online are available as video and audio podcasts. These new services are already being used extensively. Over 1,000 downloads of the video podcasts have been recorded within two months of their introduction, while more comprehensive learning modules that use simulation tools have been viewed by over 1,300 users in the last year. Intuitive user interfaces that allow easy and quick interaction with simulation tools have tripled nanoHUB simulation usage to almost 3,000 users by the end of June 2006. These are clear indicators that there is a significant demand for the nanoHUB philosophy of lowering barriers to entry and coupling next-generation cybertools with cyberservices that extend research into the educational community.
The nanoHUB team is also examining the development of educational middleware that uses scientific-grade tools and techniques to extend nanoHUB services into students' daily lives. Furthermore, in collaboration with the TeraGrid Education, Outreach and Training community, Purdue University is leading an effort to explore how learning can be more of an overt requirement in middleware development. Ultimately, this effort is aimed at engineering learning to a point where the mental schemas for deeply engaged scientific study are seeded early and repeatedly among the next generation of scientists.
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