You're looking at one of the very first pieces of educational technology ever created. Sidney Pressey, in the early 20th century, built this testing machine, which later became known as the teaching machine. It was a simple multiple choice answer machine that would record students' answers and let them see later how they did. The big advance for Professor Pressey was to restrict the students' progress until they were able to give a correct answer. Early studies on this show that students actually learned from this, and that's when it became known as the teaching machine. Almost 100 years later, educational technology has come along a way, it's truly an exciting time to be doing research in this field. The purpose of my talk today is to talk to you about some of the exciting things that are happening, both within educational technology, outside of educational technology, that can have an impact on what we're doing in education. If you watch children today, if you look at their self-directed choices, how they spend their free time, you'll learn a great deal about what matters to them. What it takes to engage them and create interests. And so my hope today is to show you a little bit of this, and walk you through some major projects that I think are on the cusp of having a great impact. First, let me frame a little bit of where I'm coming from. When we think about experiences in general and specifically learning experiences, it's somewhat useful to think about these two ideas, one is future value and the other is meaning. So we want our educational interventions to have future value. And what that simply means is that this experience will help you at sometime down the road, this is going to come in handy. And the second piece is meaning, these are the things that matter to us. There's an emotional investment in certain experiences. And so when we think about these in isolation, we might think about algebra. Kids are told this has future value, they study algebra, some harder than others, but it may not particularly have meaning to many of them at the beginning. But then if we go on the Internet, and we look at what kids are looking up, and what makes them smile, we might find things like this, where school is misspelled on the road. Maybe not a lot of future value, maybe some, if you think about spelling, but in general a lot of times meaning is not exactly the same as having future value. So one way to think about this talk is that we're moving towards this intersection. We're thinking about the design and the creation of educational experiences that meet both of these needs for learners. And so if we look at the title of my talk, it's the orchestration of learning experiences. And so looking up the definition of orchestration, I'm choosing the second one, and you can imagine what number one is, but the second one is particularly interesting to me. It says, arrange or direct the elements of a situation to produce the desired effect, especially surreptitiously. So I'll come back to the surreptitiously part in a minute. But I want to first start with when you hear the word orchestrate, you probably think of this. This is Phillip Mann from the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra, a wonderful picture of him immersed in his skill, directing the orchestra and producing an experience for those who attend. You might also think of Hollywood, and you might think of Steven Spielberg, where they work very hard to craft an experience. Something that sets these apart is they can be both emotionally evocative, they can have future value, if lessons are learned from watching them, and they provoke thought. But the other thing to think about it is, they are also passive. So if we think about expanding this idea of orchestration to new contexts, we might think about the video game industry. This is a shot from EA Sports in Orlando. They work hard to craft powerful experiences that are highly interactive. They bring in the audience to make it participatory. And it's not just participatory, audience members in a video game can impact the direction of that experience, so I will talk about this a lot in this talk. We can also view teachers as orchestrating learning experiences, creating memories that last, that have future value for kids, that simultaneously have meaning. And so all of these situations share some qualities. And the focus of my talk here is to talk about what role technology can play in this. And there are a lot of misunderstandings of how technology's used in education. Some people just want to treat it as one thing, and say technology works, or it doesn't. And I hope what I share with you today counteracts that view. I believe it to be perfectly wrong, and I think that it is less about technology's presence or lack of presence, but more in how it's integrated, how it's used. Does it reflect needs, interests, and does it reflect the science of learning, which is what psychologists have been studying for 50 or more years now rigorously. If I could summarize one finding from 50 years of research on education, if I can boil it all down to one idea, it is that learning is more effective when it's active, when it's interactive, versus passive. And so this is why we're going in this direction, this is why you're seeing museums and schools getting kids to talk more, getting them do work on small group projects, getting them to do rather than receive. Doesn't mean that there isn't a time to receive. There is a time for telling, as we've learned from research, that there is a time to receive knowledge. But we have to think about it in the context of activity. This is a picture of one of my favorite places, this is the Boston Museum of Science. You may recognize it. When we think about museums, we often think about passive observation, as I mentioned earlier, with movies and music often, but museums have changed rapidly. And if you go into any, especially a science and technology museum, you'll find that almost every exhibit involves some sort of user activity, and this is true in Boston too. If we ask why do people go to museums, you get a wide range of answers. To socialize, this is a point of pride for my area, it's just something to do. It even, sometimes people talk about the weather, I go when it's nasty outside. So everyone has a favorite museum, when you ask someone about a town they will often send you to their museums and their cultural institutions. But in Boston it's incredibly active. And I'll point out one thing about this picture that I really like, and so they've shown a picture there, in the museum is actually Anakin's spaceship from the Star Wars prequel movies. And I learned something that day that I still remember, this is back in the 2000s when I went, Anakin's spaceship was made, it occurred earlier in time than the original Star Wars movies. So the producers of the movie had a challenge. They said, we now are making this movie now with current technology, but it occurred earlier in time than the original movie. So their solution was to go ahead and use current technologies, but the ship was inspired by 1950s sports cars. So when you look at the curves, you look at the design, it is supposed to trigger memories, but at the same time they were allowed to use modern computer graphics technologies in the movie. So going to a museum allows you to learn really interesting things like that, and to think more about the world around you. So when you look around this space, you see a little stage down there in the middle. You see the lower part is an x-ray exhibit that shows you how x-ray works and teaches you about the risks of radiation and so on. So these are busy places. And so I want to tell you, in this talk I will show you a little bit of some of the stuff I've done and I'm also going to talk about related work that's gone on. One of my favorite projects I've ever worked on in my life. This is work I did at the University of Southern California several years ago. And instead of showing you the actual result of the project, I wanted to first show you these children. These are fourth grade students from a Boston school, and the looks on their faces, their intrigue and their interest just says it all. This moment was the payoff for all of our years of work to create this exhibit. And we didn't just create it and hand it off. We did this in close collaboration with educators, staff and researchers at the Boston Museum. So this was a really intriguing project both from a research point of view and an impact point of view, where we can actually go and see it working on kids. So what it is is we built virtual humans, and that was one of the main research thrusts at the Institute for Creative Technologies, where I used to work. And the characters interact with visitors and talk to them about a variety of things. And what made them different is they weren't just teachers, they weren't just straight up pedagogical agents that helped you learn, they were actually fun. And so I'll say more about them later, but just as a hint, they could answer questions ranging from what is the absence of light versus do you have boyfriends. They could tell you about a wide range of things and they enjoyed it. Just because you're probably wondering what they did look like, this is what they look like. And so you might notice they look very similar. They're actually twins named after Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper, two famous computer scientists. That was one of our first goals was to communicate the very interesting fact that two of the most important computer scientists of all time were female. And so we chose our role models, Ada and Grace very carefully, and the twins were inspired by them. And the other thing to note is that, as twins, we only had to scan, so this is a scan of a human model that was chosen very carefully, working with visitors to the Boston Museum of Science. We only had to scan one person to get two characters. So it reminds me of the Ray Romano joke, he said he had twins, it saves money on photographs. So Ada and Grace were an exciting project to work on. Another part of it I'll share with you now is what was called the Science Behind. And so, sorry for being in my own picture twice here, but these are kids very interested in what you could do after talking to the twins or before, either way was fine. You could go around to the side and watch the AI software running. And it basically lifted the hood on the speech recognition, on the question answering engine, you could also watch the graphics being rendered. So this was to show kids there's no magic. There was a door with a computer behind it that we intentionally put a window on the door, so kids could see there's a computer back there. And so the Science Behind, this was one of our lessons learned, we had a fairly low percentage of people that actually chose to go around or even knew it was there. We had about a 30% visit rate to the Science Behind. So if we were to do this again, we might even put that up first. We might do something to make it much more prominent. But for the ones who went there, the stayed, they watched it working. And here's a close up of what you see. These are potential answers. We've got the rendering happening on the right screen there, the speech recognition on the lower part of that screen. Kids really enjoyed it. They could hear what the person talking to the characters would say and see what the computer thought they said. I also want to note, this came out right around the same time as Siri. So we were able to talk about Siri, what if Siri had a body? How would that enhance their communication with gestures, with facial expressions, with emotions. And you may have noticed, Siri became, after she was in popular culture for awhile, they added personality to her. So this is the natural direction for us to go with computer interfaces, is to make them more social. In fact, the name of this was Interfaces for the Museum Floor.
