The Bridging Work of Educational Informatics Supporting Innovations Across Virtual and Real-World Learning Environments

The Air Force community will see growing interconnectivity between the physical world and virtual worlds to better support or augment and bridge formal and informal learning and decision support across a lifelong continuum of service. The seams between virtual and physical systems will increasingly become ubiquitous in service to lifelong learning and support of Airmen. For example, advances in informatics, the science and design of interactions between natural and artificial systems, will provide the means for Airmen to explore new ways of using knowledge within immersive synthetic environments and then transfer the insights into better performance in the real world that can be less forgiving when mistakes are made. We will also increasingly see virtual and physical education systems bridged in support of formal classroom learning, mobile learning on-the-job, and on-the-job decision support systems. For example, operational systems will increasingly be designed and deployed to offer dual-purpose roles for on-demand learning and decision support. Such dual-purpose systems will help shrink the gap between our schoolhouses and workplaces and further leverages our resources smartly for developing future Airmen. Introduction: What is Educational Informatics? Educational informatics melds the study of computer science with analysis of learning information and knowledge, to address the interface between computer, learning, and assessment sciences in the design of interactions between natural and artificial systems supporting learning, instruction, and discovery. Informatics, and related application areas such as educational informatics, is an interdisciplinary field (Scheessele, 2007). There are multiple supporting or component sciences behind educational informatics: decision sciences, cognitive science, information science, and even management sciences. As an interdisciplinary field, educational informatics, deals with information, data, and knowledge in the domain of education —their storage, retrieval, and optimal use for problem-solving and decision-making in support of how people learn, instruct, and discover new knowledge. In short, educational informatics turns data and information into knowledge that people can