Effective Examples of Educational Technology and Priorities for Future Investment

Panel discussion moderated by James J. Duderstadt, President Emeritus and University Professor of Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan. James Duderstadt believes recent efforts to digitize scholarly journals, along with Google’s massive digital library enterprise, “could be as important as the Internet in changing the scaffolding for learning and scholarship in the world.” In this final panel of the iCampus series, Duderstadt asks his colleagues to take up the question of how to propagate or scale up successful initiatives in educational technology, so that they have a transformative impact on higher education.

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Sowing the Seeds for a More Creative Society

Mitchel Resnick explores how new technologies can help people (especially children) learn new things in new ways. His Lifelong Kindergarten research group at the MIT Media Lab has developed a variety of educational tools, including the "programmable bricks" that were the basis for the award-winning LEGO MindStorms robotics construction kit.

Resnick demonstrates the creations of children who participated in special engineering and software designing courses. He had posed the challenge of inventing something that could be useful to them in everyday life. The results included such unique items as an odometer for roller blades, a diary security system, an automatic toilet paper dispenser and a mobile, wearable juke box. Resnick has launched Computer Clubhouses in locations around the world where kids often have no access to computers. He believes that “success for an individual or a country as a whole will depend on acting creatively.”

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