Professor Michael Twidale will speak this Friday, February 27, at a lightning symposium hosted by the University of Illinois College of Education. The event, Toward an Illinois Learning Sciences Design Laboratory, will launch the new Illinois Learning Sciences Design Laboratory (ILSDL), a venture developed by campus leaders in response to recommendations made in the 2013 Visioning Future Excellence at Illinois Outcomes Report. The work of the ILSDL will include developing and applying theories of learning that will guide the creation and use of transformational tools that support education.
In his talk, titled "Computational Metacognition," Twidale will discuss the way people use and learn to use computational technologies.
Abstract: As computational resources become ever more abundant, we see changes in the way people learn how to use, tinker, tailor, adopt, combine and modify them. Such activities are not restricted to the Computational Elites—we see elders exploring genealogy databases and families coordinating inter-generational interactions of video calling, photo-sharing and holiday planning. Tech learning is often a social activity, synchronous and asynchronous, co-located and remote, with colleagues and strangers. There won't ever be enough time or resources to teach everyone every application they will use. So instead can we teach computational metacognition—the skills of how to teach yourself a new technology? Some people seem to be really good at learning new technologies—and some aren't. Is there really a tech gene? Isn't it more likely that the people who are good at tech learning have acquired a set of skills and that the people who aren't so good lack some of them? Are there certain misconceptions about computers and how to use them that prevent productive, efficient learning? Much focus is on helping children learn new technologies and use new technologies to learn. That is all noble and good. But what about the non-techie grownups? Should we be investigating how to help them? Or is our plan to wait for them all to die off? It is now rare to use a single program to do a task; we often have several open at once, copying and pasting data across. This allows for new kinds of innovation. Cobbling together Twitter, Google Docs, e-mail, a database, and a few web apps to get your job done better does not make you a Steve Jobs, but imagine what could happen to our economy and society if tens of millions of people started doing more playful learning for innovation.
Twidale joined the GSLIS faculty in 1997. At Illinois he concurrently holds appointments with the Department of Computer Science, the Information Trust Institute, and the Academy of Entrepreneurial Leadership. His research interests include computer-supported cooperative work, computer-supported collaborative learning, human-computer interaction, information visualization, and museum informatics. Current projects include studies of informal social learning of technology, technological appropriation, metrics for open access, collaborative information retrieval, low-cost information visualization, ubiquitous learning, and the usability of open source software. His approach involves the use of interdisciplinary techniques to develop high-speed, low-cost methods to better understand the difficulties people have with existing computer applications and so to design more effective systems.