Technology That Finally Helps Learning

[Editor’s note: As a New Year’s exercise, we asked a select group of Xconomists to answer this question: “What’s the craziest idea out there that just might succeed?”]

That technology can actually play a significant positive role in education. The false promises go back at least 100 years—to extravagant claims by Thomas Edison. Certainly “computers in theclassroom” have contributed relatively little to this point—evenhighly principled attempts are yielding results that are, at best,controversial. (See the New York Times recently on Carnegie Learning.)

But one has to believe that there is hope, in the next 10 years, for advanced adaptive tutoring systems, and for games that embody entirely new approaches to interactive learning. Zoran Popovic at the University of Washington, whose Foldit protein folding game was recently credited with solving an AIDS-related molecular puzzle that had baffled scientists for a decade, has $15 million in research funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to study games for learning in his Center for Game Science.

Author: Ed Lazowska

Ed Lazowska holds the Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, where he also serves as the founding director of the University of Washington eScience Institute. His research and teaching concern the design, implementation, and analysis of high performance computing and communication systems, and the techniques and technologies of data-intensive discovery. He also has been active in public policy issues, ranging from STEM education to federal policies concerning research and innovation. He serves on the executive advisory council of the National Center for Women & Information Technology, and on the National Research Council's Committee on Women in Science, Engineering, and Medicine. He recently served as co-chair of the Working Group of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology to assess the government's $4 billion information technology R&D portfolio. He has been a member of the technical advisory board for Microsoft Research since its inception, and is a technical adviser to a number of high-tech companies and venture firms.