Understanding the impact of technology-based innovations and its effect on knowledge acquisition, cultural transformation, community infrastructure, and pedagogical practices requires a new paradigm of creative methodologies and multidisciplinary partnerships. The industrial model of education that served reasonably well in preparing workers for completing discrete tasks falls short of answering the new questions about complex phenomena and collaborative work processes that define the high-tech workplace. We believe new approaches are needed to study the redefinition of new learning contexts and the ways in which communities and their cultures are shaped and transformed. Community and cultural artifacts are now more broadly viewed as fundamental components of the learning infrastructure. If we accept the general lack of success in defining understanding as simply the ability to recall a set of facts, we are left with the difficult task of defining how we know what we know.
New innovations call for new methods.
New methods need to operate at a variety of levels. Approaches range from evaluations of wide systemic reform to microgenetic analyses of specific interactions. Some of these methods will not be familiar to the traditional scientific community, and other methods will seem tangential to the education reform community who typically employ large-scale statistical studies. For example, in response to ethnographic studies there will inevitably be resistance from more traditional experimental community that aims for an idealized version of a controlled experiment with a priori hypothesis. While the psychology community may view the context of learning as a confounding variable, it is precisely these factors we are trying to capture in design experiments while also recognizing that this makes it difficult for educational reforms to have direct and significant impacts.