Deliverable  D2.1.7 (Version 1.0)

The Kaleidoscope Scientific Vision for Research in Technology Enhanced Learning

Summary

Kaleidoscope is the European Research Network shaping the scientific evolution of technology enhanced learning (TEL). It integrates the leading research teams in the field, who work collaboratively across educational, computer and social sciences to transform the quality and reach of the learning experience. Kaleidoscope fosters innovation and creativity through the development of new technologies, methodologies and concepts, defining the challenges and solutions for interdisciplinary research.

Kaleidoscope’s goal is to inform knowledge transfer between education, industry, and the wider society. Through its scientific programme, Kaleidoscope is helping to build a dynamic knowledge-based economy for Europe, engaging with social, economic and political stakeholders at all levels. As a Europe-wide research Network our research is unusually broad-based and multicultural, a genuinely European vision for the role of technology in shaping our education policy, embracing the different perspectives of the member states.

At national level, across the EU, and within the Commission itself, there are common ambitions for education – education for all, an improvement in the quality and reach of education at all levels, personalized learning, improved high-level skills for the 21st century workforce – TEL can serve all these aims.

We see TEL in terms of what it can do for both formal and informal learning, serving the most ambitious aims for education. If ‘education for all’ is an objective, then we want to show how TEL can be a means to that end. If the aim is to improve the quality and reach of education, we can show where TEL has done that, and what more it could potentially do.

TEL research goes beyond the formal education sector to investigate fundamental questions of human learning and development. There is a productive interdependence between instrumental and fundamental research. Our understanding of learning and development informs the design of better learning tools and environments. Conversely, the deployment of these tools creates new contexts for learning, and raise further fundamental questions.

There has always been a gap between research and practice in education. Part of our mission is to use technology to bridge that gap by creating online communities of practice. The teaching community provides a natural test-bed for the resources, tools and environments being produced by the research community. The great advantage of the digital world is that we can share with each other the prototypes, the trial-runs, the data collected – the teaching community can become a dynamic part of the research community (see Annex 2: ART 3D on page 12).

Within Kaleidoscope, technology and pedagogy are considered together, as it is pointless, from a pedagogical point of view, to make ICT-based tools available if the educational strategies, and the activities the learners engage in, are not rethought. Technology can influence learning by fundamentally changing both the way in which it can be taught and learnt, and the nature of the discipline content itself.

The document also embodies its own renewal by describing the process established for the collaborative development of the Scientific Vision statement (see Annex 1). One advantage of a virtual collaborative network such as Kaleidoscope is that it has the means to do this through the collaborative tools being developed as part of its research. The final stages being inaugurated in this document will enable all participants to contribute to building a sustainable environment for iterative group collaboration on the complex problem of a Scientific Vision statement.

To reference this document: Kaleidoscope Scientific Vision, Version 1.0, March 2007,  http://vision.noe-kaleidoscope.org/public/deliverable/VisionSt.0705.pdf