David Rose

drose@cast.org
Founding Director/Chief Scientist, Cognition and Learning

CAST
40 Harvard Mills Square, Ste. 3
Wakefield, MA 01880
Phone: 781-245-2212
FAX: 781-245-5212

What are, to you, the key issues in creating learning resources that support your teaching style and your student's learning styles?

Key issues: 1) Flexibility - Need resources that can be adapted to individual student's needs but also to different content and styles of the teacher; 2) Half-full or emergent - Need resources that come ready-to-use with validated content and pedagogy but that are only "half-full", i.e. they can be further "filled up" with local and individually-relevant content and pedagogy. The delivered resources are "crystal buckets" into which new content and ideas can be poured and thus individualized and "situated" for better fit and relevance; 3) Progress Monitoring - Need resources that have formative assessment built in. That is, the resouce always includes a measure of its own effectiveness. That data is used to revise and redesign for greater efficacy. Also keeps track of efficacy for different individuals in order to recognize for whom the resource is effective and for whom not; 4) Networked (Web 2.0) - Need resources that are fully networked and taggable so that social construction and sharing of resources can be done in a "wisdom of the crowd" kind of way. The resources, and their links, get smarter with more users, not more used up.

What is your vision for the "textbook" of the future and what impediments do you see to realizing that vision?

My vision is that textbooks will play a better role in the future than they do now. Existing textbooks are too blunt an instrument - they are being used for purposes for which they are poorly suited and for students for whom they are poorly accessible. In the future, textbooks will play a less central role - there will be a wider array of learning materials - but they will play that role more effectively because they will be more carefully differentiated within the larger ecology of learning materials, and they will be much more highly differentiated in order to meet the needs of different teachers and students.

Describe briefly any research you have undertaken on teaching or learning.

A great deal of research on designing learning environments for students "in the margins" with existing learning materials and textbooks. Our approach is to design for students with "special needs" and to use modern technologies in order to make learning materials that are universally designed, effective for all students.

Have you created publicly accessible learning resources?

A large number of our accessible resources are described at cast.org - under CAST products. Others are already in the commercial marketplace from publishers: e.g. WiggleWorks and Thinking Reader from Scholastic. AMP from Pearson. Bobby from Watchfire. NIMAS, the national standard for accessibility has been developed at CAST and the home site for NIMAS is at CAST.org

How would you like to contribute to the workshop?

I am only able to attend the first evening. A colleague will follow up.

What would you like to take away from the workshop?

Connection to this community looking at the same issues that we are looking at for other domains.