What can two days in Washington D.C. discussing the aspirations and academia behind Cyberlearning reveal? A boat load.

The Cyberlearning 2015 event is put on by CIRCL (led by SRI International in collaboration with EDC and NORC) to support and advance the works with projects in the NSF Cyberlearning Program and cyberlearning-themed projects across NSF to support, synergize, and amplify their efforts.
As a huge fan of UCLA’s Louis Gomez, it was empowering (and fun) to hear him talk candidly about innovation, the importance of equity, and the “zone of wishful thinking” as space between good ideas and improving lives. 
Justine Cassell from the Human-Computer Institute at Carnegie Mellon (@cmuhcii) was evocative in her keynote discussing her work with tutor simulation and rapport building with young students, noting that culture is not a set of buckets into which you can drop people; people have many cultures.

We got to spend several hours working with groups on specific impact areas that hold promise for researchers, educators, non-profits and industry to affect the projects NSF funds with this initiative.  We were particularly engaged in the sessions on collaboration with teachers, revealing methods for attraction, adoption and co-design for research and edu projects, and the broader scope of Cyberlearning, with it’s potential to offer a “Grand Challenge” to create test beds to rapidly test, deploy, iterate and scale findings and projects.
We participated in the Gallery Walk featuring several interesting works, where we demonstrated Adagio (@AdadioIS) -a remote audio mixing tool – to show visitors how the power a gigabit network impacts learners. 
Cristobal Cobo (@Plan_Ceibal) talked about redefining the boundaries of learning, Jim Kurose, AD for the Directorate for CISE from @NSF applauded the researchers in the room and implored them to keep doing the noble work that has inspired his long career in academia and with NSF, and throughout the two-day event, we heard dozens of PechaKucha style project talks.
And to cap things off,  visitors and live streamers got a mind-blowing and inspiring peek inside Theo Watson’s (@theowatson) interactive, embodied work (@designio), including a new, large-scale installation that will open at New York Hall of Science in June.

Hearing and participating in this event, especially as the news spreads about the four new Google Fiber cities, we see the opportunities for wider technology adoption and the imperative to seed learning innovations, and we take great pride in our opportunity to partner with these folks whose theories and research shape the genres of Cyberlearning, and offer us great parallel work streams.