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Michelle Baker
KidCode is an innovative email-based software prototype that helps young children between the ages of 5 and 10 years of age develop an understanding of symbolic representation through communication. As such, it is among the first software offerings for elementary school children that takes advantage of emerging networking technology. The KidCode prototype consists of a sequence of two-person games which are set within the context of an electronic mail system. It is designed to encourage children to manipulate and explore symbolic representations for the purposes of communication, and to help young children develop an understanding of symbolic representation in many of.its manifestations through experiences creating codes and decoding the communications of their peers.
The ideas for KidCode grew out of research studies that indicate that children's difficulty with mathematics in school arises from the lack of opportunities they have to develop conceptual links between mathematics as a symbol system and mathematical concepts that can be used to describe the physical world. Whereas the development of mathematical thinking in young children and skill in basic counting and arithmetic can be quite advanced when posed in real world settings, their application in school math has seemed limited and often, resistant to further development. A child must develop competence with types of symbolic representations to master school mathematics and to advance in mathematics understanding. KidCode helps young children learn about symbolic representations in the context of exchanging secret messages with a partner. The goal of this presentation is to describe and demonstrate the KidCode software, to discuss the conceptual framework from which it was derived, and to present findings from formative research studies.
Representing learning transactions in networked learning communities; Who learns from whom?
Alain Breuleux, Janet Blatter, Thérèse Laferrière
We present our exploration of ways of representing socio-cognitive transaction patterns emerging from learning activities in three different networked learning communities: K-12 teachers, elementary school students, and university researchers. Our research within Canada's TeleLearning Network of Centres of Excellence and other funded projects (FCAR) currently faces next generation issues related to the development of learning communities and of technologies needed to support network learning within and across the three communities. These issues follow the successful formation of networked learning communities, and occur when problems no longer deal with establishing the communities. Our presentation suspends questions around "what" is learned in favor of questions around "agency" in collaborative knowledge building (i.e., Who learns from whom?). One such issue is the representation of activities between learners in a network. We are exploring models of representation that draw from sociometric structures (Moreno, 1958), activity theory (Cole & Engestrom, 1993) and actor network theory (Callon, 1991).
We present versions of these representations as applied to data from our research. The three communities in our data sets are not symmetrical in terms of their level of community development, the types of knowledge building activities and patterns of interaction, and this allows us to examine different moments of community establishment and functioning. We discuss the different issues that are revealed by these various representations, as well as how they can be articulated with one another and how they can be shared among members of the communities. With respect to the latter, we discuss visualisation issues related to how the representations are expressed and embedded within multimedia technologies. We are particularly interested in visual literacy issues - how the three communities construct and share their interpretations of these different.representations and how we can foster their understanding, what knowledge is needed to interpret and generate visualisations; how are various technologies and artifacts read by diverse, distributed agents.
Finally, we consider the communities' use of the representations for purposes such as monitoring, generating, summarizing, evaluating, and interpreting learning in networked communities.
Communications History -- Electronic Trade Routes for Learning
David Crowley
We've assembled -- and would like to expand -- our distributed team of researchers and teachers to develop and support web-based resources for teaching the history of communication technologies. The team now consists of education researchers, software developers, as well as editors of an internationally distributed textbook, website designers, and teachers at university, college, and high school levels, all of whom are interested in furthering development of research support tools and presentation support tools that can be utilized by teachers and students at any level to study and report on the many histories of communication tools, from cave painting to the printing press, and electronics from telegraphy to computing.
We'd like to promote this project as a networked collaborative effort and especially to take advantage of our growing electronic resources (virtual museums, low cost editing, bandwidth, digital copyright for collections, such as those of the Library of Congress and the European Union) for working with both text and audio-visual materials online.
Making Sense of the TeleLearning Marketplace
DJ Crowley
We would like to develop a poster session around our innovation research on telelearning innovators and their experiences in developing software and content for the so-called education marketplace.
Several key factors have emerged from our work which suggest a framework for managing and enhancing value for the telelearning market. We hope that organizing a poster session around these results can stimulate interaction with innovators at various stages in developing their own work and, additionally, provide opportunities for us to further expand/support our research network
Online Collaborations for Professional Development
Terry Dash
http://www.edc.org/LNT/
The Center for Online Professional Education (COPE) at Education Development Center, Inc. provides a series of face-to-face and online professional development activities for school and district leaders. A central goal is to develop an ongoing community of education leaders working together to address the changing needs of schools in the information age.
One key component of our program is an annual "Leadership in the New Technologies" summer institute, in collaboration with Harvard University, at which educators from around the world discuss technology as a tool for powerful teaching and learning. We also make extensive use of the World Wide Web, including database-driven Web pages and Web-based discussions. Our main Web site provides a resource library and a bimonthly online publication, Perspectives. The materials for both are drawn substantially from members of our community, which now numbers over 1000 subscribers. Recent Perspectives articles have discussed topics such as "A Multi-Age Mentoring Program for Girls", "Providing Technical Support For Teaching and Learning", "Professional Development: From Reports to Reality", and "Interviews with Linda Roberts and Cheryl Garnette from the U.S. Department of Education", among others.
We have also developed a series of online workshops. Utilizing both asynchronous and synchronous tools, including WebBoard, TappedIn, and others, the online workshops foster the exchange of ideas among geographically-distant practitioners. Recent workshops have covered "Policy Implications of the Internet in Schools", "Multi-User Virtual Environments: From Research to Classroom Practice", and "Helping to Meet the IDEA '97 Mandate", among others. From our online workshops, we develop models, methods, and tools that serve educators. In addition, we have begun to propagate these effective practices to school districts, enabling districts build their own capacities to develop and implement online professional development activities to extend their professional development programs.
An Analysis of Knowledge Mining: A Web-based Tool for Community Information Gathering
Carolyn Gale, Allison Moore
Vanderbilt University
http://canvas.ltc.vanderbilt.edu/kmine/poster/
Knowledge Mining is a process developed at Vanderbilt's Learning Technology Center that brings together current thinking of a community with a new asynchronous, Web-based communication tool. The goal is to quickly gather quality information related to a specific topic and synthesize the ideas into a single document. People knowledgeable about a selected, specific topic are invited to write a short description of important ideas about the topic plus relevant, key references. The result should be a large array of current, pertinent and useful information about a topic from a.variety of perspectives. This process uses a very structured mode of communication designed to quickly gather experts' unique thoughts about a topic. While Knowledge Mining is similar to other online discussion forums like bulletin boards, threaded discussion, and newsgroups, it differs in several distinct ways.
This poster presentation will discuss the process of Knowledge Mining, various topics and situations we are currently testing, and preliminary evaluations of the process.
Constructing Views of Knowledge
Mary Lamon
http://csile.oise.utoronto.ca
To prepare students for the knowledge age schools must reinvent themselves as knowledge building communities. New technology affords new ways of working with knowledge and new ways of working with others to create knowledge. However, the power of technology in transforming schools depends on how well the technology supports knowledge building and, more importantly, on its wise and effective use in instruction, curriculum and assessment (Scardamalia, 1995). Knowledge Forum™, second generation CSILE, is software designed to help students achieve extraordinary learning by providing supports for collaborative learning and inquiry. At the center is a communal database, created by students and their teachers that provides a forum for the discussion and the development of ideas. Students enter their ideas on any field of inquiry the class is studying. Everyone can read the notes and build on, challenge or comment on each others' ideas. Various note formats and supports are designed to enhance the potential of the communal database for collaborative knowledge-building.
One of the most distinctive technological features of the software is that contributors enter their notes into one or more database views. When individuals contribute ideas to a view, contributions are set in relation to others' ideas, and this communal context increases the chances that connections will bring people together in new and interesting ways, based on their ideas. Views become a public design space conveying the need and supports for bringing ideas and authors into new relationships. This poster describes two case studies on students' use of views. In the first, we describe how constructing views of their work in Knowledge Forum fostered students' understanding of their own knowledge construction efforts; in the second we describe how view replication helped elementary students use the knowledge advances made by high school physics students.
Innovative Use of the Web = Constructivist Learning Environment
Chin-Tang Liu
http://www.smsu.edu/ctl999f
This study is to present findings about the innovative use of a "Discussion Web" in a university level course. As the World Wide Web (WWW) has grown in popularity, educators have sought to embed this new medium into their courses. In this study, the authors created a constructivist learning environment in the form of a Discussion Web that allows near real-time communication among participants. Students participating in this learning environment showed a positive attitude toward the use of the Discussion Web. Other research findings, such as student achievement and anecdotal comments will be presented. We will discuss how we can make the learning environment be more instructionally beneficial to the learning and teaching process at the secondary and post-secondary levels. We will also share with the audience how this project has evolved over a two-year period, and is continuing to evolve today. The presentation will be followed by a demonstration.
Building a Virtual School
Terry Piper
This presentation describes the creation of the Virtual High School of Newfoundland and Labrador. The school, a project jointly conceived and run by Memorial University, the Vista School District, and the provincial Department of Education with federal
The Science Education for Public Understanding Program in Today's Classrooms
Laura Walhof
http://www.lhs.berkeley.edu/SEPUP/
The Science Education for Public Understanding Program (SEPUP) is an instructional materials development group at the Lawrence Hall of Science, University of California at Berkeley. SEPUP produces elementary and secondary science materials that highlight the science behind today's societal and environmental issues. Materials developed by SEPUP have been used by over 2.5 million students in grades 4-10 throughout the United States, and they have been adapted for use in several other countries, including Spain and Australia. SEPUP's approach to issue oriented science develops an understanding of the science and problem-solving processes related to social issues without taking an advocacy position. Accomplishing these kinds of goals and objectives for students requires the development of new kinds of instructional programs that focus on the individual and their rights, responsibilities, and expected actions as a member of a global society. The SEPUP staff is in the process of exploring the use of learning technologies in these types of materials for current and future development efforts. We strive to give the individual sufficient experiences so that he/she understands that science, as with all decision making processes, is a way of knowing, not just a set of facts to be memorized. Then, the individual is provided with experience dealing with situations, both simulated and real, that involve the concept of trade-offs and the responsibility of the individuals to themselves and current and future society. The investigations students undertake are chosen so that, in total, they help provide the student with an integrated understanding of the nature of science, its relationship to society, and how "scientific thinking" can be used to guide decisions about one's own life. "Projects" and in-depth investigations that consider issues from all points of view are not add-ons, but rather are a major component of all SEPUP materials.
Kosmeo: Supporting knowledge work in project-based learning
Doug Ward
MC^2 Learning Systems Inc. builds tools to support online project-based learning in K-12 education. Many projects have been produced by teachers, students, and instructional designers with our current product, Zebu™. We are currently in the final stages of development of a second-generation educational groupware tool that builds on lessons learned about technical and educational support for project-based learning. Kosmeo™ is a network-based Java application for collaborative project-based learning, where students and teachers build a database of multimedia representations of their knowledge. It allows teachers to provide structural and substantive support for learning activities based on required curricula and powerful pedagogical principles. It allows students to engage in online learning activities that are appropriate to their learning goals. A key goal in the design of Kosmeo is to help students and teachers get beyond the surface-level, task-orientation commonly found in project-based learning, and to focus on building deep and shared understanding. In Kosmeo, learners can treat multimedia representations as "knowledge objects" which can have explicit knowledge-oriented properties, a history, and can be shared, manipulated, modified, displayed, and reflected upon. Participants are provided with guidance in creating and using specific types of knowledge and discourse moves to advance toward their learning goals and curricular outcomes. Kosmeo offers tools for adding value to information as students build knowledge through basic text, graphic, video, etc., as well as annotated references, graphical organizers, and synchronous or asynchronous discussions. With Kosmeo, learners can engage in knowledge-centred activities that are appropriate to any knowledge domain.
Our poster will present the design of Kosmeo with examples of possible uses, and the rationale for our approach. Our aim will be to discuss with other participants how Kosmeo could become a platform for further innovation through classroom implementations, research partnerships, and integration with other complementary software.