Blog Reflection 1: STEM Expert Chris Dede (UNT Spring 2022 LTEC 3000)

 Q1: Can you please give an introduction of your selected expert?

    Chris Dede is the Timothy E. Wirth Professor in Learning Technology, Innovation, and Education Program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He is an expert in the field of Learning Technology with immersion technologies – such as digital education programs that simulate real world scenarios for learning key life and job skills – as his primary focus for the past 30 years.

Q2: Why did you choose Chris Dede as your expert?

    I selected Professor Dede because he has a large breadth of experience and research in a field that fascinates me. The concept of making learning environments more engaging, attractive, immersive, and most importantly effective for teaching valuable skills for life is a chief focus of Professor Dede’s work, and that project is exciting to me. An area of particular interest to me in the technology field is augmented reality along with the melding of digital and physical environments, and Professor Dede has spent a great deal of time and effort focused on how to leverage this and other immersive technologies to make the learning experience successful.

Q3: Can you give a summary of the expert’s work?

    Professor Dede began his professional career in education as Assistant Professor at the University of Massachusetts. He joined the Harvard University faculty in 2000 following his experiences as Full Professor at universities in Texas and Virginia. Over the course of his career Professor Dede has been focused on the intersection of technology, leadership, and policy. He has said that the technology piece is particular to how it can reshape education and training, the leadership piece is identifying how to put learning technologies in place and adapt them for optimization and enhancement, and the policy piece is concerned with obtaining approval to fund and allow for the development of educational innovations through technology. Two pillars of his work include 1) preparing people for jobs that are yet to be invented, and 2) devising and implementing methods for scaling innovative education programs through technology.

Dede recently co-authored the book The 60 Year Curriculum (Dede & Richards, 2020) which operates from the premise that shifts in technology and global events call for a stark change in the way the traditional education system prepares people for life. Dede contends that current day models in primary education, and undergraduate as well as graduate level curriculum primarily aim toward development of cognitive abilities, leaving large gaps in the development of interpersonal and intrapersonal skills, which he believes are vital tools for career success. The latter skills, Dede says, are learned more frequently outside of the classroom in real world situations at home and work, where people might acquire mentors or take on apprenticeships.

Professor Dede views his program for scalability of educational innovations in five dimensions. The first is Depth, which insists that any program eligible for scaling must a recognizable worth and be something that people are highly interested in.  The second dimension is what Dede calls Spread which in essence means the innovation is easy to implement widely for a reasonable and palatable cost. His third dimension, Sustainability, recognizes that the world is not perfect and so any educational program worthy of implementation has to be durable enough to work and work well under sub-optimal conditions. The fourth and fifth dimensions are Shift and Evolution. They have a particular interplay that rests on dynamics present across all the other pillars. When the people doing the on-the-ground implementation work make the inevitable adjustments to fit the educational innovation into their particular local context they feel that they have a hand in its crafting, and a motivation to see it succeed. This is of course understood as a part of the design, and also a divergence from the form of the program at its inception. And so, these local adaptations serve as feedback for the original designer of the program which provides opportunities to iterate and improve for greater efficacy.

Chris Dede also hosts a podcast featuring other academics and educators from around the world called Silver Lining for Learning, where his areas of study are explored in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and other global and societal events that impact education.

Q4: Can you provide an article or link to the expert’s work?

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