CILT99 Demonstrations

Community Tools

E-Tutor Connected Learning

Martha Angulo
http://www.e-tutor.com

E-Tutor.com is a sophisticated Internet site that uses the power of the World Wide Web for learning. The program engages students in their own learning in four curricular areas: Language Arts, Mathematics, Science, and Social Studies. E-Tutor.com provides lessons for students in Early and Late Elementary School, Middle/Junior High School, and Early and Late High School. E-Tutor instruction enhances and enriches the education now provided by schools. The visual instruction is designed to include all curricular disciplines, balance the transfer of certain basic skills, and strengthen the value of.education. E-Tutor has been developed to assist students in learning the potential of the World Wide Web and to increase their knowledge base. The on-line Internet connections open a wide array of possibilities for learning, not limited to the confines of the classroom. Students anticipate new discoveries that lie ahead as they proceed through each lesson.

The on-line educational site provides lessons where students are responsible for their own learning. E-Tutor allows students to work at their own pace and to focus on areas of their choice from a large selection of specific subjects (23). The key to student success is engaging their interests. A wide range of topics, informational web sites, and interesting activities help to create a unique learning experience for students. Lessons are written by educators and reflect the National Goals for Learning. E-Tutor has over 300 lessons, with new lessons added on a regular basis. Students can choose from a variety of subjects in each of the curricular areas. Lessons and activities are fully integrated with the World Wide Web. In other words, students cannot fully complete the lessons without going to the Internet links provided throughout the body of the lesson.

A tour and free lessons are available.

Collaborative Environments for Learning

Lisa Bievenue
http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/Habanero

Collaborative technologies represent the next major break-through in communication for the Internet community, and these technologies have the potential to fundamentally change the way we think about learning. This presentation will provide participants with the opportunity to view two leading edge collaborative environments: netLearningPlace and NCSA Habanero. The key characteristic of these two frameworks that sets them apart from most other learning environments is that they each support both asynchronous and synchronous collaborative technologies. In addition, each of these environments is an extensible and flexible framework in which already existing software tools can be embedded.

NCSA Habanero is a collaborative framework and set of applications. It is an environment in which users can create and work in shared applications from remote locations over the Internet. The Habanero framework, or API, enables developers of groupware applications to build powerful collaborative software in a reduced amount of time. Habanero is written in Java; it will run under any operating system that supports the most recent version of the JDK. The Habanero environment consists of a client application, a server application and a variety of collaboration and visualization tools.

netLearningPlace is a collaborative environment focused on teaching and learning. netLearningPlace is an environment that integrates multiple tools for collaborative distance education, and just-in- time training. The framework provides a database back-end, synchronous and asynchronous communication, delivery mechanisms and file management tools. Using this modular framework, a standard Web browser, and an Internet connection is all that is necessary. netLearningPlace has been used to deliver entire university courses to remote and local students. NCSA Habanero is being used this spring in a course to facilitate collaborative modeling and visualization. By the time of this conference there will be some limited data to report on how effective each of these environments were as learning tools, as collaborative environments, and as course delivery mechanisms.

Building Blocks for Integrated Learning

Joe Clark

Solving complex problems often requires multi-disciplinary teams of experts and at the very least minds that stretch across the boundries of disciplines. Resources available generally are packaged in discrete disciplinary units. The demonstration will demonstrate a software management system connected to a database which is being developed for seamless access in support of interdisciplinary subjects like environmental sciences, oceanography and thematic topics.

WebConstellations: Online Digital Data Knowledge Construction

Ricki Goldman-Segall, Aaron Goldman-Segall Bond
http://www.merlin.ubc.ca

WebConstellations(tm) is a developing server-side web database system designed to enable communities of learners, educators, and researchers to catalog, describe, and meaningfully organize data accessible on the Web. The underlying metaphor for WebConstellations is stars and constellations-in WebConstellations, stars refer to pieces of data in the form of URLs; constellations are groups of stars and other constellations made meaningful by users. Some of the features of WebConstellations are: ï Users can create stars representing pieces of data and tag them with keywords. ï Users have private server space where they can upload their own data. ï Users can automatically catalog stars placed in their server space. ï The information represented by a star is a url, so users can gather data outside of their server space. ï Users can build constellations from both stars and constellations. ï Users can search on keywords to locate stars and constellations and build constellations from search results. ï Users can attach their comments/annotations to other users' stars and constellations.

WebConstellation is jointly developed by Bitmovers Communications Inc., http://www.bitmovers.com , and Ricki Goldman-Segall, Director of the Multimedia Ethnographic Research Lab (MERLin) and Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia. WebConstellations is based on Constellations 2.5, which was developed by Ricki Goldman-Segall and Lawrence Halff at MERLin.

In this demo, Aaron Bond, one of the members of MERLin, and Ricki Goldman-Segall, will demonstrate how WebConstellations is currently being used by various communities of inquiry as a tool for knowledge construction. We will also enter into conversations with people about how to customize WebConstellations for a variety of learning communities.

Internet-based Shared Expedition Environment

Jim Laffey
http://www.muexpeditions.org/

Internet-based Shared Expedition Environment (ISEE) is a collaboration of Motorola University and the Center for Technology Innovations in Education (CTIE) at the University of Missouri. Motorola University had developed and implemented a program called Explorations that brought children of Motorola employees together in a week-long residential program. During an Exploration teams of youth would work to solve an authentic problem confronting Motorola. The youth learned to apply a quality assurance process while taking on a substantial challenge, and developed their abilities to work in teams, frame ill-defined problems, undertake research, develop a solution, and present that solution to a Motorola team.

CTIE had created and implemented a web-based shared journal system for the teacher education programs at Missouri. The web-based journal system enables easy multi-media representation of experience, sharing of experiences across the Internet, and processes to facilitate support, reflection, and feedback. Motorola University and CTIE have collaborated in redeveloping the journal system into ISEE, so that it can support induction into the Motorola culture and facilitate internet-based experiences that map closely to the efforts of an Exploration. A key feature of an Expedition is the role of mentor who will use ISEE to guide teams of young participants as they take on the challenges of an Expedition. An 8 week pilot will be undertaken starting in late April around the theme of Telematics. Our presentation will demonstrate the key features of the ISEE system and describe lessons learned during the early parts of the pilot.

Collaborative Modeling for Curriculum Integration - An Example in Chemical Engineering

Matthew Realff

Collaborators: Dr. Pete Ludovice, School of Chemical Engineering, Dr. Mark Guzdial, College of Computing, Dr. Tom Morley, School of Mathematics, Georgia Tech

One of the critical problems of many undergraduate curricula is the lack of integration. While practicing experts and course instructors recognize that there is a relationship between calculus and later classes in engineering, students may not recognize this relationship. Instead, students often demonstrate inert knowledge (Brown, Bransford, Ferrara, & Campione, 1983), where knowledge clearly learned in one context seems only to be used in examinations and not in real problem-solving. We are exploring the potential of collaborative spaces to encourage cross-curricular integration and to promote transfer of learning between courses and disciplines. In addition, we have run pilot studies on students collaborating between classes, such as seniors in a chemical.engineering control course with sophomores in an applied mathematics course. Explicit demands are placed on the students to collaborate, for example by sharing data. We are advocating the use of a common notation, a forum for students to get and supply help in this common notation, and a resource library that integrates across classes. The technology consists of a collaborative space constructed in a CoWeb (Guzdial 1999) where students provide the content in the form of project cases, discussions, and tutorials and where graduate students index the material to identify cross-curricular ties. The key challenges we face are:

To promote the ownership and development of the CoWeb by the students themselves, particularly in the highly competitive environment of an engineering school.

To engage the community outside of specific courses, in other disciplines, in the environment so that it can expand beyond a narrow focus of a few Georgia Tech courses.

To use the CoWeb to promote learning by the course instructors so that the barriers to cross-course activities and transfer are lowered.

To develop and apply appropriate assessment measures to the technology to understand and document the effects of the system on student learning.

The space is fully editable by the community of course instructors, teaching assistants and students, and in fact anyone with web access. We believe that is of relevance to the theme team of "Tools for Learning Communities" that is developing software and methods for supporting virtual learning communities and collaborative learning on the Internet.

TAPPED IN On-line Community of Educators

Mark Schlager
http://www.tappedin.org

The TAPPED IN project is an NSF research testbed project that investigates how to establish sustainable and scalable on-line teacher professional development (TPD) communities. Our goal is to begin supporting education professionals during their pre-service education and continue to serve them as they become leaders in their professional community. To help achieve this goal, we have developed a Web-based virtual environment designed to meet the needs of our large and diverse community of education professionals (currently over 3000). Activities occur in virtual rooms that provide a basic yet powerful set of communication mechanisms and support tools (e.g., whiteboards, notes, recorders, and shared Web viewers). TAPPED IN members can attend activities hosted by partner organizations, conduct their own activities, or expand their circle of colleagues by participating in real-time or discussion-board groups. We and our partners provide the tools, resources, and social support needed to supplement face-to-face events and sustain collaborative work. Our partners include nationally-recognized education organizations (e.g., Lawrence Hall of Science, Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance, Geological Society of America, American Association of School Librarians), educational Website hosts (e.g., Swarthmore College Math Forum, ED's Oasis), preservice and master's degree programs (e.g., Pepperdine Univ., Univ. of Illinois, Univ. of Wisconsin, Michigan State), and state and local education agencies (e.g., Kentucky Dept. of Educ., Los Angeles County Office of Educ.,.New Haven USD, Joint Venture: Silicon Valley Challenge 2000) and scores of small groups and projects around the country. By sharing TAPPED IN, the organizations enable their affiliated teachers to gain access to expertise, ideas, and resources that no single organization could provide by itself. The educators, in turn, can participate in, help shape, and take ownership of a familiar and supportive on-line home. We invite new content partners to contact us at contactus@tappedin.sri.com .

eduVILLAGE

Wee-Chee Sim

eduVILLAGE seeks to (a) provide learners a centralized access to repositories, project resources and library resources that supports project work, (b) provide a suite of online tools to help teachers to effectively monitor and assess project work processes, and (c) provide a suite of online tools for students to collaborate effectively online as part of the project work processes.

WebGuide: Computational Perspectives for Learning Communities

Gerry Stahl
http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~gerry/webguide

WebGuide is an interactive computer-based learning environment initially targeted to middle school project-based collaborative learning, but currently being used at the graduate seminar level as well. It provides a structured medium within the World Wide Web for students to conduct individual and group research and reflection. Like CSILE and similar systems, WebGuide is intended to support communication and collaboration within a learning community such as a group of students pursuing research. Although it supports threaded discussions, it is designed more for the collection and organization of related ideas. The technical innovation consists of a computational perspectives mechanism. This allows a shared information space to be seen from different perspectives. Each community member has their own personal perspective in which they can construct their own system of knowledge--their own "perspective" on the shared research. In addition, collaborators can form team perspectives in which they share ideas and develop team perspectives on the evolving state of understanding. Finally, there are comparison perspectives corresponding to each team and to the community as a whole, in which the ideas from multiple perspectives are brought together for comparison, negotiation and synthesis. The perspectives mechanism provides for the definition of a hierarchy of perspectives in which information is inherited from one perspective to another automatically. The WebGuide prototype has been used in two classes this semester. This initial experience has raised many important issues for software support of collaboration and has suggested a number of promising responses to these issues. The solutions involve a synthesis of social practices and software affordances..WebGuide is being developed by Gerry Stahl and colleagues at the Institute of Cognitive Science and the Center for Lifelong Learning & Design at the University of Colorado at Boulder, in collaboration with NOAA and the Logan School for Creative Learning.

Knowledge Forum™

Chris Teplovs
http://csile.oise.utoronto.ca/

Knowledge Forum™ is a second-generation version of CSILE (Computer-Supported Intentional Learning Environments), a problem-centered, collaborative knowledge medium that operates over a computer network. Released in late 1997, Knowledge Forum™ is the culmination of two decades of research in the fields of writing, intentional learning, and expertise. The heart of the system is a student-generated database of multimedia notes within which participants define collective problems of understanding and work together to advance communal knowledge. Unlike other electronic discourse systems, Knowledge Forum™ provides unique and distinctive supports for a wide range of high-level cognitive operations. Some of the program's advanced features include: drag-and-drop note referencing; note co-authoring; advanced search functionality; the ability to arrange notes in multiple configurations and against different backdrops using the view facility; a collection tool that allows the learner to cluster notes around core concepts; contribution folders that learners use to solicit ideas from others; 'rise above' functionality for synthesis and summary operations; drag-and-drop quotations with an automatic footnote facility. The software is currently being used at all levels, from grade 1 through University graduate classes.

Crit: Adding Your Own Comments and Connections to the Web

Ka-Ping Yee
http://crit.org/

Several hypertext linking features that are essential for supporting critical discussion and document annotation are missing from the World-Wide Web. The Crit software augments the Web with some of these features, including bidirectionality, extrinsic links, link typing, and fine-grained link ends, and hence enables the public annotation of any document on the entire Web. Not only is Crit the first working implementation to enable public annotation of the Web, but it also accomplishes this in a way that allows any user of any browser to participate instantly without installing any software. With Crit, one can walk up to a browser.anywhere, visit a random news article on the Web, and attach a note to the article which expresses agreement or disagreement with a specific word, sentence, or paragraph, possibly also connecting the article to other related articles or comments. One can even make annotations on the annotations themselves. Crit opens many interesting possibilities for learning communities and for collaboration on the Web in general. Some application areas for further exploration include group critiquing of articles on the Web, collaborative revision of documents, structured discussion and argumentation, and the support of group knowledge evolution. Crit went "on the air" in June 1997 and development continues. Although anyone can use Crit on public websites by simply visiting the public service at http://crit.org/ , one might also want to install a private Crit server for enabling annotations on private documents, or setting up a private collection of annotations visible only within a smaller workgroup. For this purpose, the source code for Crit is freely available for download.

Distributed Learning Trends Supported by Tool Development at IBM

Maryann Yeomans

The evolving demand for distributed learning is being driven by the availability of a variety of new, more complex technologies, as well the demand for more equitable access for the learner, teacher, worker, and parent. This increasing demand means educational institutions must search for better tools to facilitate and manage learners without increasing time pressures for instructors or substantially increasing administration costs. IBM's Pacific Development Centre (PDC), located in Burnaby, B.C., Canada, uses a distributed learning framework to describe the fundamental concepts of trends in educational delivery models. Under this framework, IBM has developed many tools and technologies that assist as well as support the learner, instructor, mentor, and parent. The PDC's development efforts in collaboration with educational partners has evolved into a holistic approach to distributed education that defines the need to re-use online content development, streamed objects, and multimedia components, in an intuitive, media rich, development interface.