CILT99 Presentations

Community Tools

Web Technologies and standards for Distance Learning

Geoffrey Fox
Syracuse University
http://www.npac.syr.edu/DC

Lessons from use of Collaboration Systems in Education and Training We give some technical and methodological lessons from use of TangoInteractive in a variety of distance learning scenarios including ongoing teaching at Jackson State Miss. from Syracuse and the Saturdasy Java Academy offered to middle and high school students in Boston, Houston, Starkville and Syracuse. 1) Integration of synchronous and asynchronous modes is simply addressed by using web-based material which can either by directly mounted or made available through web-linked databases or server backend scripts as in NCSA's Biology Workbench. 2) Importance of an underlying document object model which allows sharing of material in a way that respects both the profile of the user and the structure of the data. We show how this can be used to provide cross disability interfaces. 3) Detailed analysis of TangoInteractive's shared JavaScript model as used today shows strengths and weaknesses of current W3C proposed DOM. We suggest changes based on a shared layer using XML and JavaScript, which appear sufficient to provide universal access to education. 4)we note that it appears easier to provide cross disability interfaces to web material respecting the W3C DOM than to general Java applets and similar high end authoring systems which lack constraints of a DOM. 5) We discuss implications for role of Professor/Teacher as lecturer and Mentor.

Collaborative Learning Through Robotic Building

Danelle Hoffa
http://www.legomindstorms.com

As "smart toys" and online "communities" jockey for kids' attention and consumer dollars, creating technology products that invite kids to use their imagination means more than just embedding a computer chip or facilitating chat rooms and members-only areas. Linda Dalton discusses the research, development and philosophy behind the success of LEGO MINDSTORMS Robotics Invention System, an evolution of the LEGO system of play that allows inventive young minds to design, construct and program robots that move, act and think on their own. Dalton will describe how LEGO MINDSTORMS has kept pace with the proliferation of the Internet as an alternative learning environment, by creating an online exchange for young minds to share their robotic inventions and build upon one another's creativity. Dalton provides concrete examples of how LEGO MINDSTORMS is creating both a new breed of consumer product and an online gathering space where learning is based on construction rather than instruction, and where kids not only understand technology but become creative masters of it.

Ted Kahn, Linda Ullah
http://www.designworlds.com

Over the past year, Linda Ullah and her 3rd-6th grade GATE students at Edenvale School, an elementary school in a very low-wealth community in San Jose, California, have been carrying on an online collaborative Web design project with Tania Callegaro, Eliana Fredo, and other teachers and their high school students at E.E.P.S.G. Dona Idalina Macedo Costa Sodre School in Sao Paulo, Brazil. This project involved students in both countries collaboratively studying ecological concerns related to water pollution in order to bring about a cultural and political understanding between the students involved in both countries. The collaboration involved students and teachers at these two schools collaboratively co-designing a Web resource site about the history and nature of problems of water pollution in both San Jose and Sao Paulo, focusing on creating and using art and poetry (both in English and Portuguese) to communicate their understanding and learning: http://www.garlic.com/~lullah/brazilus/water.html

The Edenvale-Idalina collaboration was one of the major successes that emerged from Web andemail-based "matchmaking" for an international conference/workshop for teachers and educators fromdeveloping and developed countries, called "The Art, Science and Technology of Learning (ASTL): Designing Learning Environments for the 21st Century" : http://www.migal.co.il/teleproj/ . The ASTL Conference, held in the Upper Galilee region of Israel in November, 1997, conference brought together six educational coaches or mentors" together with over 40 teachers and educators from 14 developing and developed countries. Participants were chosen after partnerships had been created over the Web, based on the promise of interdisciplinary educational project proposals for providing exemplary educational experiences to students and teachers in both the developing and developed countries. Ted Kahn was one of the conference chairs for this workshop, as well as mentoring the development of the Edenvale-Idalina collaboration which emerged.

The Edenvale-Idalina collaboration is an exemplary model of hands-on, "just-in-time learning" for the students and teachers of both schools. For example, the participants discovered a Web resource that does first order translation between English and Portuguese, as well as other languages. The project has raised the level of cultural understanding of both communities, while also providing the teachers in both countries with a virtual community and "hands-on" approach to ongoing professional development-- in the service of creating a shared Web-based "DesignWorld" to expand their own learning horizons well beyond the walls of their individual classrooms and schools.

Web-based, Asynchronous Discussion in Residential University Courses

Charles Kerns
Stanford Learning Lab

The Stanford University Learning Lab studied the application of a web-based, asynchronous discussion system in residential university courses for the past two years. One of the questions addressed in the study was--why use computer-mediated discussion tools in support of courses that meet for face-to-face discussion. Learning Lab staff worked with faculty in several freshman lecture courses as they implemented curriculum activities making use of The Forum, an application developed in.the Lab, to facilitate communication, extend discussion, and prepare students for lecture and section meetings. Forum features include student photos alongside every posting and a split organizational system that gives instructors control over general subject headings. Course activities were monitored by the Learning Lab Assessment team. They interviewed students and faculty, studied postings, and reviewed data from the web server.

The initial use of The Forum was in a new course that attempted to transform the large, lecture class into a learning community. In this first course new curriculum activities were developed that had student team projects instead of exams, student panels substituted for some lectures, and a web site that provided a rich set of supplemental materials and on-line assignments. The Forum was a part of all these activities. After the initial trial, The Forum was offered to faculty in the existing freshman humanities courses. Faculty adopted the Forum in many different ways. There were mixed levels of integration into the existing curricula and mixed results in acceptance by students, posting behaviors, and success, as judged by faculty. The data is still under study but a preliminary review of findings will be presented.

Scholarship of teaching reconsidered in the TL*NCE; teaching and research in learning communities

Thérèse Laferrière, Alain Breuleux

This presentation will share results from Canada's TeleLearning Network of Centres of Excellence (TL*NCE), a collaboration between researchers, developers, and educators to design and investigate telelearning. We will focus especially on the professional development of educators in/with technologies, collaborative knowledge building, and the issue of bringing together educational practice and research through networked learning communities and collaboratives. In relationship with the professional development of educators in/with information & communication tools, the TL*NCE research program extends the Professional Development Schools (PDS) into telelearning networks for professional development (TL*PDS). The research, a design experiment, reveals the ecology of the networked learning community as based on the co-construction of the possibilities (the renewal of information and communication) and of new practices in teaching and learning. An important effect of the TL*PDS and in particular of this co-construction, is the recombining of research and teaching, centering around collaboration between learning teachers augmenting the language and knowledge of learning (e.g., the Educational Network of Ontario ENO/REO).

Using Note-Taking Appliances for Student to Student Collaboration

James Landay
http://guir.cs.berkeley.edu/projects/notepals/
(Also presenting in Ubiquitous Computing)

Student collaboration is important in courses that prescribe project-based learning in groups. We will describe how we used electronic note-taking appliances along with the.NotePals system to enhance this collaboration in both undergraduate and graduate courses. NotePals is a lightweight note sharing system that captures and provides access to personal notes, presentation slides, and documents of interest to a workgroup. Students will only be able to take advantage of shared notes when note-taking devices are inexpensive and pervasive. Consequently, we have developed note taking applications that run on inexpensive personal digital assistants (PDAs) and other ink-based capture devices, such as the CrossPad. Notes can be shared with other group members by synchronizing with a shared note repository that can be viewed using a desktop-based web browser. Its lightweight process, interface, and hardware distinguish NotePals from previous systems. We believe these advantages will support the use of this style of note taking in educational settings. We have built an initial implementation of the NotePals infrastructure and will describe the early usage of the system for both group and personal note taking by students. We are planning a larger evaluation of the system in a university course using CrossPads as our note-taking appliance.

Using comparative field research to inform socio-technical design: connecting communities and enhancing learning in project-based environments

Reed Stevens

I will discuss planned socio-technical design activities that build upon recent comparative analyses of a project-based classroom and a professional project-based setting (Stevens, forthcoming, 1999, 1997; Hall, 1995). Both settings involve people doing architectural design. As Schlager et al. (1996) have argued, "[t]o date little has been done to understand or elucidate the form(s) that the participation of outside experts should take, how to support it, or its implications for structuring education (243)." In short, our current technical capacities to connect communities far exceed our knowledge about how to do so in ways that promote learning. I will describe how comparative research of the kind I have done provides a unique and important framework for designing activities and technologies that appropriately connect distinct communities. The presentation will have four succinct parts: (1) a discussion of a classroom project-based design experiment that sought to foster the learning of mathematics through architectural projects, (2) a summary of comparative analyses that indicate a number of potential opportunities for enhancing the learning of mathematics in the classroom, (3) a proposal for how this type of comparative research hold promise for the iterative socio-technical redesign of existing classroom learning environments, and (3) a sketch of specific designs proposals and working principles.

On the basis of my comparative work, the proposals I will briefly discuss on are: (1) activity structures and tools than can be borrowed from the professional setting and tailored for the classroom setting, (2) ways that professionals can participate in web-based classroom activities that are sensible to professionals and beneficial for classroom learners, (3) how to strike a principled balance between the design of new technologies and the importing of older ones, and (4) practical personnel considerations for building connections (e.g. human mediators) between communities that foster classroom learning.

WISE on-line communities: Supporting Curriculum Design Partnerships

Jim Slotta, Alex Cuthbert, and Marcia Linn
UC Berkeley, School of Education
http://wise.berkeley.edu

The Web-based Integrated Science Environment (WISE) provides a powerful new form of on-line science curriculum. Each WISE curriculum project consists of a series of activities that involve diverse materials from the Internet, on-line classroom discussions, and even hands-on experiments. All student work is managed by our central server, and incorporated into assessments that are integral to the curriculum design. As we have progressed in our designs of WISE activities and assessments, we have also begun to study the difficult process of authoring effective curriculum. In earlier research, we found that the most effective curriculum is designed by partnerships of educational researchers, classroom teachers, and natural scientists. Such partnerships provide the right balance of expertise from diverse perspectives, and offer the participants a high level of scaffolding for their own processes of knowledge integration. WISE curriculum is extremely difficult to create, as it involves a novel form of pedagogy, new kinds of activities, Internet materials, and integral assessments. Based on our early experiences with authoring partnerships, we began to develop on-line community supports that respond to these difficulties. Our goal is to make the process of authoring WISE curriculum as straightforward and effective as possible, especially for first-time partners. To do so, we carefully observed the processes and artifacts of our early WISE partnerships, and then designed community tools that capture and support those processes and artifacts. We will present our latest version of a Web-based authoring partnership that supports the design of WISE curriculum -- from initial discussions of project topic all the way to classroom trials. Community tools are now highly functional, and include: electronic discussions, member profiles, collections of shared "bookmarks", html whiteboards, links to authoring tools, and version control of authored materials.

Successful Collaborative Online Networks

Fern Tavalin
http://www.webproject.org/exchange (click on projects).

Beginning with the belief that a collaboration between students, teachers, online mentors, and statewide stakeholders such as representatives from universities, museums, historical societies, etc. would lead to real improvements in student performance, online consortia have been forming in Vermont around the content areas of arts and humanities. These collaborative networks began with funds from The WEB Project, one of the first 19 Technology Innovation Challenge Grants, and most have been so successful in achieving their basic goal of improved student performance that continued financial support has shifted from the original federal funds to those of the schools and agencies who participate.

Through the course of the last four years, online discussions, which were at first superficial, have developed into in-depth exchanges where the improvement in learning is evident for both teachers and students. In the process, participants have identified three major lessons which, once addressed, have led to the improvements mentioned above:

Lesson 1. Back and forth communication is at the heart of our online dialogue. Participants do not naturally engage in dialogue; user tendency is to "talk at" others and most conferencing software reinforces the idea of a message board rather than a discussion. Guidelines established by the WEB Exchange network members, which are then reinforced by the computer interface design, quickly increase the communication. This is easier to promote in discussions that focus on student work and harder to achieve when discussion centers on ideas.

Lesson 2. The online activity needs to be an integral part of what is happening in the classroom (when classroom based). Online discourse goes deeper when it is keyed to specific educational goals. Networks establish these goals together, remembering to select only one or two in common so that there is still room to address locally based needs.

Lesson 3. Overarching standards from a state Framework can serve as a common mediator when discussing the quality of student work with community members or experts in the field. When mentors look at work, the standards and student, specific requests for feedback define the scope of discourse in a way that creates safety.

Portals: Findings from one year of classroom implementation

Kallen Tsikalas
http://www.edc.org/CCT/portals

This presentation tells the story of Portals, its integration and dis-integration in twelve classrooms around the country, and its possible impacts on the communities of teachers, students, and project mentors who used it. A suite of web-based tools and support materials, Portals was developed in collaboration with teachers in the Department of Energy's Adventures in Supercomputing (AiS) program and Arcus, Inc., with support from the National Science Foundation. Portals was based on two years of student learning research conducted within the AiS program and developed at the request of AiS teachers and coordinators who found CCT's prior research very valuable. They asked for a similar set of strategies and mechanisms.that teachers could use to assess students' learning during the process of developing complex computational science projects, rather than at the conclusion of this process. As Portals evolved through formative research with AiS teachers, its evaluative emphasis shifted, and its goals and structure became more flexible--to support and facilitate substantive communication between students and their project mentors, who, as research had shown, were a critical element in students developing successful computational science projects and integrating content comprehension with technical skills. In the fall of 1997, Portals was made available to approximately 130 teachers in 70 schools in five states. About half of these teachers also participated in live training sessions, and ultimately, twelve opted to use Portals in a multiplicity of ways that even we had not anticipated. The range of uses teachers found for this tool attests to its flexibility, but also had great bearing on its impact on building and strengthening the communities of students, teachers and mentors needed to support substantive project-based, computational science learning. This presentation details findings from research on the first year of Portals implementation.

Community Building at The Math Forum

Jody Underwood
Swarthmore College
http://forum.swarthmore.edu

After briefly describing The Math Forum, this presentation will first define what community building, or what might be called "the growing" of the Forum, involves. Following this, the evolution of the Forum from its roots in the Visual Geometry Project (e.g. Sketchpad) to its present status as an NSF-sponsored virtual resource center for mathematics educators and students will be overviewed. Finally, the dynamic relation between the user community and project development will be detailed.

The Math Forum community consists of a small number of Forum staff, over 400,000 web pages, volunteers (students, teachers, mentors, citizens) doing quality mathematics that is Standards informed. It includes: (a) Projects: Ask Dr. Math, Problems of the Week (elementary, middle school, algebra, geometry, and calculus), Teacher2Teacher, Internet Resource Center, (b) Partnerships with major mathematical associations and research consortia (SRI, NCTM, MAA, TERC), (c) Professional development opportunities: systemic initiatives, technology integration workshops, and standards-based mathematics reform. The strengths and needs of teachers and students inform project design and facilitation as they participate and help conduct Forum services. The Forum provides a highly effective model of informal professional development that serves educators at a number of levels. Many projects are initiated and created by reform-minded math educators who are invested in developing quality mathematics. The resulting database of resources and the scaling of these projects provide opportunities for many other teachers to reflect on their practice and develop classroom activities. Through their involvement, volunteers encounter effective models for facilitating student problem solving. Educators are attracted to The Math Forum for the quality of the mathematics.resources as well as the opportunity to be part of a knowledge building community. All together this makes for a knowledge building community that is attractive to educators because of the opportunities it offers to play a productive role and the quality of the resulting mathematical resources and professional experiences.

Studying processes of collaboration

Muffie Wiebe

My doctoral research is focused on understanding the processes of collaboration amoung working groups, especially in classrooms organised as communities of learners. It is centred on examining the group's negotiation of the task at hand, which I take to include both the emerging understanding of the work as well as the actions the group takes to accomplish the work. This requires an examination of how the group's conversations develop over the unit, and of how the group members are attending to one another and the various artefacts available to them (including paper and pencil resources as well as computers), and to the teacher and others in the classroom. One of my goals for this work is to produce findings on learning interactions which can inform the design of collaborative tools. In a current project, I am studying the research practices of a group of 5th grade students during a science unit on endangered species. The unit is designed to engage students in collaborative groups to produce a research report on the survival needs of a species and the causes of its endangerment. I am examining how the students' organization of their research activities progresses through the unit, as they shift from following the teachers' instructions quite literally to generating their own sense of direction about how to proceed and support one another in their research. In a proposed project, I will be examining two groups of 8th grade students during a mathematics unit on functions. This unit is designed to engage students in collaborative groups to model population biology. In the proposed study I intend to examine how the group coordinates itself to understand the mathematics involved in the modeling tasks, and how the emerging work is distributed and assessed by the students.