New online repository facilitates collaborations, innovations

BY B.J. ALMOND
Rice News Staff

Teachers and researchers who want to know some of the most innovative tools and methods in educational technology can learn from LESTER.

The Learning Sciences and Technology Repository (LESTER) is an online clearinghouse at Rice featuring leading learning science and technology (LST) projects, researchers, research organizations and funding agencies.

”Through this continuously updated database, users can discover valuable information about significant LST initiatives, such as research priorities, timelines, funding sources, personnel and sponsoring organizations,” said Lisa Spiro, LESTER’s project director.

”They might also find a tool that will facilitate collaboration with other researchers.”
With sponsorship from Microsoft Research, Rice’s ETRAC (Educational Technology Research and Assessment Cooperative) developed LESTER to help improve education.

”Without a resource like LESTER, researchers have a hard time tracking innovations, identifying areas requiring further research and implementing new learning technologies,” Spiro said. ”Because there is no community-wide knowledge of who is doing what, research in learning sciences and technology is uncoordinated, innovations are often isolated and on a small scale, and awareness of technology’s potential to enhance education suffers. LESTER makes it easier to collaborate and be innovative.”

ETRAC’s staff at Fondren Library created and maintain the LESTER database by gathering information about relevant projects, researchers, organizations and sources of funding at colleges and universities around the United States. The staff notifies researchers whose work is included in the database so they can update their own data and create new records.

”This approach involves the community in the project and allows for an even higher quality of information,” Spiro said. ”LESTER can be mined, analyzed and updated by researchers. And we anticipate a network effect: As LESTER offers more and more useful data, more and more people will contribute records and participate in the community centered on this collaborative information resource.”

Spiro compares LESTER to other online educational resource communities such as MERLOT and GEM that provide extensive, carefully cataloged records about educational content in a range of disciplines. But instead of concentrating on educational content, LESTER puts a sharp focus on technologies that can help realize the key principles of learning science.

LESTER should enable instructors and instructional designers to track developments in technologies and their application to teaching and learning. It also should help them identify gaps in current research priorities and experiment with new tools.

The database currently contains information on more than 265 projects, 290 researchers, 180 research organizations and 110 funding organizations. Spiro expects those numbers to grow as more teachers and researchers hear about this free resource at Rice, which was publicly announced Dec. 2.

To access LESTER, visit the Web site at <http://lester.rice.edu>.