Keynote: Productive Entanglements: Shaping Learning in Rapidly Changing Technological Worlds

From the CSCL Program Committee: After surveying the landscape of the most prominent researchers in CSCL, we are incredibly grateful to host Alyssa Wise as CSCL keynote speaker, with her wealth of wisdom and experience, especially as a boundary spanner between fields, strong voice, and forward looking vision. In this keynote, Dr. Alyssa Wise examines how research-based learning technology innovations can have impact in a rapidly evolving technological ecosystem, where the forms of change we care about are often slow, relational, and socio-culturally complex, while edtech, big tech, and AI systems move quickly into classrooms. Examining lessons learned through her own work on learning analytics, an earlier wave of fast technological change, Dr. Wise traces three approaches for shaping impact: (i) flexible coupling to let slow, situated research influence systems already in motion, (ii) human-centered design stances of agency, actionability, values, and a systems-level view to structure stakeholders’ participation toward valued use and impact, and (iii) theory-guided sensemaking to connect fast streams of data and information to constructs, models, and mechanisms that make inferences useful for learning. Turning to the present moment, the talk addresses the need for collective infrastructure to support these approaches. Drawing on her work directing the LIVE Learning Innovation Incubator at Vanderbilt University, Dr. Wise considers how interdisciplinary hubs can support research, technical development, implementation, entrepreneurship, and partnership in ways that make consequential impact more likely. Together, these examples frame productive entanglements as arrangements that help researchers shape fast-moving systems while preserving the judgment, theory, and relational accountability central to the learning sciences and CSCL. Dr. Alyssa Wise is Professor of Technology and Education at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College, with a courtesy appointment in Computer Science in the College of Connected Computing. She also serves as Director of the LIVE Learning Innovation Incubator , Vanderbilt’s interdisciplinary hub for impactful learning technology innovation. Her research productively integrates tools of computational data science, theories of learning sciences and collaborative learning, and practices of human-centered design to build and study analytic and artificial intelligence systems that promote powerful learning for individuals situated in social context. She also conducts mixed-method investigations into how educational practices are being reshaped by new sources of data and the growing availability of new generative artificial intelligence capabilities. Dr. Wise holds a Ph.D. in Learning Sciences and M.S. in Instructional Systems Technology from Indiana University, as well as a B.S. in Chemistry from Yale University, was previously a Professor of Learning Sciences and Educational Technology and Director of the Learning Analytics Research Network (LEARN) at New York University and has worked in industry, with non-profits, and in classrooms across the Americas. https://tinyurl.com/alyssawisescholar https://peabody.vanderbilt.edu/bio/?pid=alyssa-wise https://lab.vanderbilt.edu/live https://www.linkedin.com/in/alyssawise