Information Technology Research and Education, Teaching, and Learning Report on Two NSF-Funded Workshops

Introduction

With support from the Experimental and Integrative Activities Division (EIA) of the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate (CISE) of the National Science Foundation (NSF), SRI International conducted two invitational meetings whose objective was an in-depth discussion of research issues at the interface of information technology and learning science research. The first meeting was organized by Dr. Nora Sabelli and took place March 4-6, 2002, at the Rickeys Hyatt Hotel in Palo Alto, California. The second meeting was organized by Dr. Chris DiGiano and took place July 16-18, 2003, at the Centennial Hotel in Boulder, Colorado.

The meetings consisted of a series of panel discussions on topics suggested by awards made by the Information Technology Research (ITR) Initiative. The awards were chosen by the workshop organizers for coherence around special topics and for relevance to learning research and to education. Participants were members of the learning sciences research community who had worked extensively with technology and computer science researchers with direct connections to learning sciences and education. Three parallel objectives drove the selection of invitees: (1) to produce a series of commentaries that EIA will be able to use in conversations with proposers and principal investigators, (2) to seed an expanded collaborative community of researchers, and (3) to identify promising new program areas for NSF. Since the organizers expected that there would be other meetings where different aspects of information technology and learning sciences would be explored, the list of invitees was kept small to encourage open discussions and no attempt was made to be entirely inclusive.