LISE 8 is sponsored by DuPont Center for Collaborative Research and Education

Educators today confront the challenge of motivating and informing a generation of what Marc Prensky has labeled "digital natives," students who have grown up with digital technology as a constant feature of their lives. According to Prensky, digital natives have developed an entirely new cognitive style because of their immersion in digital technology.

The impact of this generation of digital natives on education was already apparent twelve years ago, when Congress held hearings on educational technology in the twenty-first century. In his testimony at those hearings, Christopher Dede, then professor of education at George Mason University, offered some predictions about how the internet was likely to influence students' educational experiences by 2015. While some of those predictions have already begun to take place, his central theme that "emerging forms of distributed learning are empowering the reconceptualization of K–12 education's mission, process, and content" is still open to discussion.

This conference will build on last year's conference on twenty-first century science education and offer an interim assessment of the impact of new media technology in the classroom.

Practicing scientists already appreciate how much new technology has changed scholarly research and communication. As rapidly as the science landscape is changing, there are also dynamic forces for change at work in schools and classrooms. School buildings and classrooms of the future may look very different than those we inhabit today because of the way that new media are integrated into them. Will curricula and methods evolve to meet new demands? What impact will new technologies have on student learning? Every day science teachers face questions like these about content, pedagogy, assessment, technology, classroom facilities and infrastructure, diversity of learners, and the nature of the learning process itself.

We may well even anticipate a convergence of education and leisure for many students as they become more connected to a distributed learning network. This too may be an important area of attention for teachers and informal science educators because the challenge of the future is unlikely to be a shortage of information available to students, but difficulty in sorting through the incredible mass of information to find what is reliable and effective in spurring further learning.

Some of the issues LISE 8 will address include:

• How are new media likely to be integrated into classrooms in the future?
• What will be the limits on access to new technology for underrepresented groups in science?
• What kinds of early experiences with media are most likely to produce sustained student interest in science?
• Can new media and technology communicate higher order thinking skills and foster inquiry-based learning or will they be primarily useful for evaluation and drill?
• Will massively multi-layer online games (MMOGs) and massively multi-player online role playing games (MMORPGs) become a teaching tool in informal or formal science education?
• Will new sensory technologies make it possible to make "virtual" learning just like "hands on" learning?
• Will new media and technology make distance learning and virtual classrooms central features of more people's education?