IIT Institute of Design Receives $400,000 Grant from MacArthur Foundation to Design Personal Electronic Learning Record
The Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology today formally announced a two-year project to design and prototype a digital device to augment and improve learning assessment. Supported by a $400,000 grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the device, called an Electronic Learning Record (ELR), is intended to be both a mobile digital media product, and a suite of related services, that will enable students to create and assess personal portfolios of all their learning experiences, both in and out of school.
"Kids use digital media in their everyday lives, from World of Warcraft to instant messaging," explained Patrick Whitney, Director and Steelcase/Robert C. Pew Professor at the Institute of Design and the ELR's principal investigator. "Almost every aspect in their lives has changed radically because of digital influences. Most schools, however, lag far behind in this transition. Our hypothesis is that personal records, along with tools to encourage reflection and self-assessment, will help kids increase the effectiveness of how they learn."
Connie Yowell, Director of Education at the MacArthur Foundation, agreed. "The Electronic Learning Record is a critical component of understanding what young people are learning through participation in digital media, as well as a means of linking in- and out-of-school learning," she said. "Even more importantly, it focuses assessment methods on the needs and interests of young people -- it is kid driven. We think it will represent a new, mobile approach to assessment."
The ELR was one of several dozen concepts to emerge from the Institute of Design's "Schools in the Digital Age" initiative, which received seed funding from the MacArthur Foundation in 2006 as part of MacArthur's five year, $50 million Digital Media and Learning initiative. The ELR team will be led by Patrick Whitney, and will also include Professor John Grimes, a leading expert in interactive media, as well as teams of graduate students working in the areas of strategic design research, business management, interaction design, product design and large-scale systems design.
Over the 2007-2008 academic year, the project team will conduct simultaneous work in three areas: ethnographic research about students' daily learning activities outside the classroom; conceptual and behavioral prototypes of the ELR device; and a technology roadmap exploring the platforms and partners needed for further development.
For more information, see http://www.electroniclearningrecord.org, http://digitallearning.macfound.org, or contact Vincent LaConte, Director of Communications, at vince@id.iit.edu, or 312-595-4917.
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