Campus Technology Insider Podcast December 2021
Listen: Cutting Through Ed Tech Hype in Favor of Research-Driven Improvements
00:12
Rhea Kelly: Hello and welcome to the Campus Technology Insider podcast! I'm Rhea Kelly, editor in chief of Campus Technology, and your host.
How will emerging technologies impact the future of education? While it's easy to get caught up in the hype around trends such as the metaverse and artificial intelligence, true progress comes in slow, incremental improvements in using technology to inform teaching and learning. That's according to my guest Neil Heffernan, professor of computer science and director of the Learning Sciences and Technologies Graduate Program at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. In this episode of the podcast, we talk about augmented reality, intelligent tutoring systems and the need for better research infrastructure in ed tech. Here's our chat.
Hi Neil, welcome to the podcast.
01:08
Neil Heffernan: Thanks for having me, Rhea.
01:11
Kelly: So I thought maybe first, you could introduce yourself and your background and tell me a little bit about the work that you do.
01:18
Heffernan: I'm a professor of computer science at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. And I guess I'm best known for actually the gentleman that founded ASSISTments with my spouse, Christina Heffernan. And we have about, I think during the pandemic we were up to half a million children actually doing their nightly homework and daily math, math assignments, actually online. And we do all sorts of experiments to try to actually figure out how to optimize student learning. And we write lots of papers about it.
01:46
Kelly: Great. Yeah. I'm planning on asking a lot more about that in a little bit. But I wanted to start with a buzzword that I've been hearing a lot lately: the metaverse. So can you talk a little bit about what the metaverse is, and its potential for education?
02:00
Heffernan: My first instinct is, is to throw all sorts of cold water on this, Like, I like, like so … I don't know, we have such trendy hubby things that just kind of bubble up. And so I'm like, what ,we're all talking about the metaverse because actually, Mark Zuckerberg decided to name rename his company? And like, and I'm just like, as far as I can tell, this is just yet another bad trendy thing that … And in education we get these things whether you're, maybe when I was a kid, whether you're left brained or right brained was like totally what everyone wanted to try to figure out and then do education differently because of it. And, and so anyways, I'm, so I'm kind of negative on this super hype element. At the same time, I am a professor that actually, you know, does artificial intelligence and trying to actually figure out what is the, you know, what are the next cool ways we can use artificial intelligence. But when I explain to you how I use, like artificial intelligence, I think like, I think we're like so far away from some of this hype, like 100 years away from this hype, right? Like we know, sure, AI has improved in certain ways, and I teach AI, but the practical applications of this seem to be way over the top.
03:21
Kelly: Yeah, well, you know, I see a lot of people drawing the parallel to the virtual world Second Life, which years ago, there was so much hype about. I mean, there were universities spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to build their virtual campuses. And then of course, it like, just seemed to fizzle. So I don't know, is this metaverse idea a Second Life 2.0? Is it different? Is it potentially more viable? Or is it the same thing over again?
03:50
Heffernan: So I think it's the same thing all over again, the, the hype that actually happens. Like I'm, I kind of relate this to the field of intelligent tutoring systems. So in theory, if you were going to have some, I guess in some metaverse, second life actually crazy thing, like the next conversation is then going to be, how does education look differently in this metaverse, right? And like, I've certainly, I stay on Zoom all day long or in Gather Town for some of our conferences. And so I feel like, I kind of know … But, you know what this reminds me of? I was actually at an NSF fundees meeting, where actually all of us are funded, actually, faculty members. And there's this competition for what's going to be the next big idea for educational technology. And one of them, one of them was augmented learning, actually, you know, augmented reality sort of stuff. And then I was pitching small improvements in actually ways we give feedback to kids while they're doing their math homework. And I lost the competent, context, contest, like the virtual reality augmented reality because everyone's running around with their little smartphone and they're, that Pokemon app that actually was so popular when you were holding up your phone and looking at through it and, and so anyways like, but when I go look at real education and the, the uses of these technologies is so pitifully far behind actually, you know, the, the hype. And so I'm, I'm, maybe I'm just grumpy.