Creating New Learning Communities via the Network
Abstracts from Project Submissions
The Collaboratory: Teaching and Learning in a Networked Environment
(Binghamton University)
VELCOM: A Teaching and Learning Stragegy for the Electronic Information Environment
(Indiana University/Purdue University at Indianapolis)
Summer Institute on Academic Information Resources
(Kenyon College)
National Teachers Enhancement Network
(Montana State University)
Simulating Future Histories
The NAU Solar System Simulation and Mars Settlement
(Northern Arizona University)
Meeting of the Minds
(Ohio State University)
Restructuring of the Undergraduate Accounting Curriculum
(San Diego State University)
The Electronic Seminar
(SUNY Empire State College)
An Internet Accessible Bankruptcy Law Learning System
(University of Arizona)
Classical Studies Multimedia Instructional Project
(University of Central Arkansas)
The Collaboratory: Teaching and Learning in a Networked Environment
Binghamton University
http://128.226.37.29/collab/index.htmA five-member team at Binghamton University is currently working on the design and implementation of a Collaboratory, a networked environment for scholars, librarians, and students to teach and learn through multi-leveled collaboration and interdisciplinary exchange. The Collaboratory links people, technologies, and information resources, and addresses how users deal with several problems: the rapid pace of socio-economic change, the availability of vast amounts of information in a variety of formats, and the revolution of networked information. Therefore, it also addresses the need to examine traditional library reference and instructional services along with identifying new skills for future information professionals.
Within a networked environment, the collaborative model can serve as the new paradigm for library services and the design of academic curricula for the global study of contemporary issues/current events and the development of knowledge in the social sciences. Linkages with the Collaboratory will include: libraries and academic units, local to international partners, and schools of Library and Information Science (LIS).
As grant opportunities were investigated by the entire team, three members collaborated on integrating use of the Internet and other information skills and strategies into the curricula of the Political Science Department. We started by introducing “information labs” for a course on US foreign policy. Students in the labs were encouraged to work in groups. Team members also taught a two credit course for the Political Science Department entitled “Information Skills for Public Policy Analysis.” In order to make our collaborative model visible, two members will be presenting a paper on educational partnerships in the electronic environment for a SUNY conference on teaching and technology.
We very recently received $6,600 from the 1994 Binghamton University President’s Innovation Award to implement phase one of the project: installation of work stations in the Bartle Library and in the Political Science Department, design of a Collaboratory Mosaic Home Page with the assistance of two library school interns, design of another course on US foreign policy that incorporates collaborative teaching and the use of networked information, and institutionalizing the course on information skills for public policy analysis in the Political Science Department.
Team involvement through growing partnerships were present at every stage of the development of the Collaboratory. After initial discussions, the theoretical aspect of the model was developed by an information educator, and the practical reference/instructional focus emerged from a practicing librarian. This partnership grew with the addition of the Political Science professor who initiated the opportunity to integrate networked information into the academic curricula. With the addition of the library systems administrator, a new course was designed and offered for credit by the Political Science Department. The formalized team was coordinated by another administrator and the entire team worked on grant proposals and the overall strategies for implementation.
The students in the information labs worked in teams in learning use of the Internet and evaluating resources for a paper on ethics and US foreign policy. Students in the “Information Skills for Public Policy Analysis” role-played membership in a task force appointed by the Governor of New York State, charged with presenting position papers on the impact of pending national legislation on New York state.
The course on information skills for public policy analysis was our most creative use of networked information. Students were asked to assume roles as practicing professionals confronted with complex contemporary issues and fast-paced current events. Networked information was introduced in order to demonstrate how its challenge can be converted into an asset with courses that include problem solving. Using the Internet , they searched databases and used sources that were more timely than print material, or not available in print and documents with varying ideologies and perspectives. Students determined the merit and usefulness of the information with regard to their particular position. Networked systems were used to capture and manage the information, and to produce their papers. Scholarly and professional print sources (i.e. books, journal articles) were also used. Students were introduced to group software for task force discussions.
VELCOM: A Teaching and Learning Strategy for the Electronic Information Environment
Indiana University/Purdue University at Indianapolis
Information technology is changing the way we live and work. Our graduates will need to work and learn effectively in an environment where social, organizational and intellectual patterns and practices are shifting rapidly in the context of information technology. This emerging electronic environment has five major characteristics that have implications for the way we teach and learn. It is computer-mediated, information-intensive, collaborative, indifferent to proximity (distributed), and rapidly changing in unpredictable ways. Many undergraduate courses, even those with technology as the subject or the teaching tool, continue to use a teaching model that runs counter to many of these characteristics and is individualistic, instructor and classroom centered, and oriented to print information. The purpose of this project is to develop a teaching and learning strategy that mirrors the electronic information environment by embodying these five characteristics. Thus the way students learn also becomes what they are learning. We call the teaching and learning strategy, VELCOM (Virtual Electronic Learning Community). We view VELCOM as a powerful undergraduate teaching strategy and the undergraduate version of the graduate course is under development, as is the application of VELCOM to another subject area.
The VELCOM strategy has seven objectives:
- to use commonly available types of information technology for communication in combination with traditional communication methods,
- to focus on the class as a community of learners, explicitly identifying activities and roles in learning communities,
- to focus explicitly on gathering, filtering, organizing and synthesizing information from a variety of human and material resources,
- to focus on involving people with varying experience and expertise regardless of geography,
- to focus on the ability to observe and analyze complex interaction in the electronic information environment as a basis for responding to rapid change,
- to provide a conceptual structure flexible enough to accommodate diverse content areas,
- to be adaptable to a range of generally available platforms and applications.
Although we envision VELCOM as a strategy that can be used with a wide variety of subjects, current development has been done in the context of a course entitled, The Electronic Information Environment. It has been taught twice, once as a joint class with students from the University of Illinois and Indiana University at IUPUI meeting electronically as one learning community. An undergraduate version is now under development and the use of VELCOM to teach a class in Special Libraries is now planned. Further joint classes with students from Illinois and Indiana are planned.
Summer Institute in Academic Information Resources
Kenyon College
http://enhanced-learning.org/mellon/The Summer Institute in Academic Information Resources enables faculty members, students, librarians and computing services staff to collaborate in developing new ways of utilizing information technology and resources in teaching and learning, focusing on the curriculum in the first two years. The Institute is a three-year project funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts.
- The Summer Institutes assist faculty members in learning how to integrate search strategies and information technology into their teaching and to pass those methods, skills and strategies on to their students. Faculty and student participants attend an intensive week-long workshop which includes demonstrations and hands-on instruction of information resources (bibliographic and full-text databases, Internet resources, courseware authoring, multimedia, and government information) and guided exercises in using the information resources. Discussions of pedagogical goals and technology issues are woven throughout the Institute.
- The Course Development Opportunities provide faculty, students and staff opportunities to engage in collaborative course development and redesign, aimed at bringing into the classroom a range of the pedagogical resources to which information technology provides access. Example: The Expansion of International Society course culminated in a research paper utilizing traditional and technology-based research tools such as local, national, international library catalogs; local CD-ROM and remote bibliographic databases; government information; up-to-the-minute- news feeds of global events; and Internet discussion groups.
The first of three Summer Institutes was held June 7 – 11, 1993. Attendance included 19 faculty and 2 students, with three courses being developed or revised. The second was held May 31 – June 3, 1994 and was attended by 10 faculty and 6 students, with five courses being developed or revised. The third Institute will be held Summer, 1995 with twelve courses to be developed or revised.
Many faculty participants and their students are making significant use of Usenet News, discussion groups, gopher, ftp, electronic mail, and multimedia as a result of the Summer Institute.
National Teachers Enhancement Network
Montana State University
http://btc.montana.edu/nten/The National Teachers Enhancement Network is a project jointly sponsored by Montana State University (MSU) and the National Science Foundation to create graduate credit science and mathematics courses that will be offered nationally to high-school teachers. Teachers are able to participate in the tele-computing course from any location by dial-up modem connections or Internet access. The courses are developed by teams of scientists, high-school teachers, and a science educator and are approved for 2 or 3 semester graduate credits at MSU.
Students connect to MSU via Internet or dial-up 800 number access and receive a front-end menu designed for the particular course in which they have enrolled. This menu is tailored for individual courses to include pointers to appropriate Internet resources for the course, library options, and automated file transfer. A conferencing software (CAUCUS) is used for the instructional part of the course. This software allows students and instructor to send private messages, as well as participate in conference “discussions” that most closely match what occurs in a traditional, non-electronic classroom situation. Students also receive an instructional kit that includes a variety of materials such as texts, syllabi, video tapes, and hands-on lab activities. In addition to the course discussions, students have the ability to transfer files, search library databases, access an on-line reference librarian, and obtain inter-library loan materials.
The Network provides high-school teachers with high quality graduate science courses. It also allows them to expand their professional network nationwide with other science teachers and active research scientists. The backbone structure of the Internet potentially involves scientists from all Internet sites, including National Labs, private industry, and academic institutions providing long-term mentor relationships for science teachers.
Currently nine courses have been developed and delivered nationally. Courses have been limited to 25-30 students to maximize the experience for both instructor and student. Waiting lists for registration have included 100+ registrants. Approximately 1/3 of the participants access the courses via the Internet and 2/3 use the 800 number connection. Participants are provided with manuals for how to access and use the network. Students also have phone and on-line access to a technical support person to address network problems.
Both student and instructor comments from pilot courses are extremely positive. Students report that they appreciate the quality of the courses and the ability to participate in a location and time schedule that works for them. They are enthusiastic about interacting with peers from around the country and the ability to have personal, one-on-one interactions with experts in the content area. Instructors have commented that they have been able to generate a great deal of student-student and student-instructor interaction using the electronic conferencing system. Some have even commented that the interaction is better than they would normally have in a face-to-face classroom situation.
One goal of the project is to establish a vehicle, format, and support for delivering quality electronic enhancement opportunities for science teachers. The flexibility of the system allows development and delivery of courses from a wide variety of institutions.
Simulating Future Histories: The NAU Solar System Simulation and Mars Settlement
Northern Arizona University
http://www4.nau.edu/anthro/solsys/The authors and their colleagues are engaged in the fifth iteration of a classroom-based socio-cultural simulation activity called “The NAU Solar System”. Instructors and teams of students in classrooms on twelve campuses are role-playing the development and interaction of human communities in a future Solar System; the NAU team will, once again, establish the first permanent human settlement on Mars. Interaction among the teams is facilitated by e-mail and an on-line Multiple User Domain (MUD) program, a text-based virtual reality, in which all students participate. Each team is evaluated in reference to local faculty member’s pedagogical objectives.
Meeting of the Minds
Ohio State University
Meeting of the Minds (MoM) is:
- an interdisciplinary design team at Ohio State University (OSU)
- a groupware front end for Mosaic, in turn a front end to the World Wide Web
- an approach to collaborative education that integrates telecommunications and face-to-face meetings.
MoM, which has been used in various iterations with two undergraduate, two graduate, two cross-university (one international) classes, is discussed in these three ways below.
An interdisciplinary design team: OSU has funded a design team to improve interdisciplinary understanding and to work in very rapidly changing (time sensitive) areas of inquiry. Our design team consists of a faculty members from the Communication Department and Public Policy School, a librarian in charge of Communication, Theater, and English, an Associate Director of our Academic Technology Service, the director, two programmers, and an evaluation specialist fro our center of Instructional Resources, and graduate and undergraduate students interested in collaborative inquiry.
A groupware front-end: We have developed MoM on the Macintosh platform, and will extend it to Windows in 1995. Using a client-server approach, MoM allows groups of students to share a workspace we call “working document,” which manages serial access to a group-authored electronic paper. It provides editing, commenting, and hypertext linking to “public documents,” which are the writings and arguments of individual students and works they reference in developing their thinking. WAIS-based searching on the working document and on the public documents helps provide access to large amounts of information.
Students submit their created and found documents using the MoM program which automatically converts to HTML-formatted documents that are deposited in a Mosaic-browsable database. We use documents to mean audio, still image, quicktime movie, and text-based material. From public labs at the university, or from properly-equipped home computers, students can submit any of these documents for sharing by the group. Each document is prefaced by a form that includes an abstract, key words, file size, file type, and who submitted the document. This form is what allows WAIS searches to operate productively across multimedia.
The class is broken into groups of 5-7 students who are given access to a password-protected Home page. They can read any of the other group’s Mosaic databases, but can only submit documents, edit, comment, and link in their own.
Collaborative Education: Our goal for MoM is to help make traditional lecture courses viable as multiple student-centered, interactive courses, and to make university education available to the new traditional student. In the case of Ohio State, the new typical student is 25 years of age, working more than 20 hours per week, and committed to family, work and community as well as university obligations. These time-poor students need strong out-of-class technical/social networks to leverage their time spent in the classrooms with fellow students and faculty. At this stage, we are only working with classes of 20 to 60 students, most of whom use public facilities rather than home. However, our university is making significant commitments to home-based access through site licensing on “Homenet,” a software package developed at OSU that supports SLIP connections to our campus computer resources.
Restructuring of the Undergraduate Accounting Curriculum
San Diego State University
In the late 1980s, the professional accounting community joined with educators on a national basis to stimulate accounting education reform aimed at developing skills and abilities for a changing environment. As a result, the School of Accountancy at SDSU decided to undertake a complete revision of its undergraduate upper division program. The culmination of this effort was the replacement of traditional accounting courses with three mandatory six-unit courses and one optional elective. One objective in adopting these courses was to demonstrate the interrelated nature of the various accounting subdisciplines. Another objective was to show how accountants are part of a larger, dynamic environment where whey must anticipate, understand and respond to the information needs of a variety of constituencies, both within and beyond the bounds of their organization. A third objective was to create a learning environment that included students as interactive participants in the process. University approval was granted effective for the Fall 1993 semester.
A team of six faculty members developed the initial approach, critiqued developed materials, and determined course methods in conjunction with technical academic support staff and library personnel. At the beginning of the Fall semester, a non-teaching member of the faculty team provided on-line demonstrations of VAXNotes Conferencing and e-mail to the students. This was expanded during the Spring and the demonstration included tours of the Internet showing connections to on-line library resources, gopher access, and Usenet. A computer lab manual was developed for Fall ’93 to introduce students to the LAN in the new Computer Lab equipped with Windows-base machines. Spreadsheet templates for projects that previously had been distributed by copying floppy disks are now stored on the server and students can upload these to workstation. The LAN also is connected to the campus backbone, allowing students Telnet access.
Over the course of the year, a specially assigned classroom has been outfitted with a Sony video projector, VCR, computer connection, CD-ROM capability and telephone line to support connection to the modem pool. An Ethernet connection to the campus backbone is planned.
Active learning techniques are the featured teaching methodology. There is little lecture from the faculty. Instead, cases with open ended solutions are discussed in class. Students are evaluated on both written work and oral class presentations. In-class teams and out-of-class teams are extensively used for homework problems, case discussions and write ups. All students use e-mail to correspond individually with classmates and faculty.
The Electronic Seminar
SUNY Empire State College
The purpose of the Electronic Seminar project is to develop and deliver asynchronous computer mediated courses in which students can have the intellectual stimulation of a seminar and access to appropriate learning resources from their homes. Begun in 1987, the project is now entering its third phase. In phase one, students and instructor “met” in text-based conferences, with limited physical meetings. All other resources and services were accessed off line. In the current phase two, classes continue to “meet” in text-based conferences, but they may also avail themselves of on-line advisement, degree program planning, and informal student-centered discussions. Phase two has also involved the integration of networked information and resources in courses, such that, in some courses, as much as half the student activities and evaluation depend on accessing, retrieving and using Internet resources or other networked databases and information services.
We are now embarking on phase three: migration of the Electronic Seminar from text-based delivery to full multiple media distance education, using a groupware platform and a hypermedia Internet search engine. One prototype course now in development, Africa and Its Peoples, will use a server-resident hypertext course guide with hot buttons that will open student access to graphical, audio and text supplementary resources via Mosaic. We will begin development of other prototypes in business and the social sciences in the fall. Even in phase three, our goal remains to reach students in their homes and link them with other students, facilitating teachers, and all the learning resources in the world.
We began this project with an instructor and a computer technician. As we continued from the first course, other faculty joined, as did an information resource specialist. Today, a course design team may also include instructional design, multimedia and video expertise. Students have also played an important role through their feedback, but some have also been members of course design teams. We even have a student who teaches an electronic seminar, and others who facilitate interest group discussions, both academic and social.
An Internet Accessible Bankruptcy Law Learning System
University of Arizona
This project is directed to combining technological, substantive, and information processing expertise to produce a system consisting of an Internet accessible information base upon which has been superimposed a user interface that facilitates the transformation of a wealth of information about a subject into meaningful knowledge about that subject. It began as a stand-alone instructional system implemented in Asymetrix’ Multimedia ToolBook. Federal bankruptcy law is the information domain. ToolBook is a powerful software package designed to support the development of hypertext and multimedia applications. The stand-alone version of the system attempts to exploit the potential of hypertext and multimedia to enhance the learning experience associated with using the system. For some time, it has been clear that educators must be thinking in terms of a distributed computing model that permits sharing instead of duplicating resources. The Internet of course supports such a mode. In recent months, it has become possible to use both hypertext (especially via the World Wide Web) and multimedia on the Internet. Using the stand-alone version as a template, we have developed a network-based system programmed in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML).
The system is accessed from a U of A Universal Resource Locator (URL) site. It is put into action with the Mosaic browser, a tool developed by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana which expands the resources available to the users on the Internet by providing them with a graphical user interface (GUI) for utilizing hypertext and multimedia applications. To employ the Mosaic browser, a learner needs readily available TCP/IP software and an ethernet connection. Specifically, the interface consists of a graphical representation of the major events in a bankruptcy proceeding and hypertext links that take the user into successive layers of substantive and procedural information that give the events and hence the overall process meaning. The Mosaic interface enables a user to search outside the learning system. To demonstrate the compatibility of more generic Internet tools with specialized interface packages, thereby maximizing the resources available to the users, we are working to activate links to Westlaw and Lexis, the major legal research databases, both of which have sophisticated search and retrieval software associated with them.
Classical Studies Multimedia Instructional Project
University of Central Arkansas
The State of Arkansas and the University of Central Arkansas have committed themselves to improving the quality of education by incorporating the new technologies into classroom instruction and library research. A major step in this direction was taken in 1993 with the establishment of the Instructional Development Center at the University of Central Arkansas to promote innovative approaches to undergraduate instruction. This project was made possible through a grant from the Arkansas Department of Higher Education.
As a result of the initial project, the Department of Higher Education has granted the University of Central Arkansas $80,000 which has been matched by the university, to establish a Multimedia Resource Center. The purpose of the project is to introduce faculty to the utilization of the new technologies in classroom instruction and library research. This project begins on July 1, 1994.
As a segment of that project, our team intends to introduce multimedia technology into the courses in the Department of History which deal with ancient history and classical studies. The pilot project will focus on the history of Ancient Greece, an upper division course that will be offered in the spring of 1995. The materials developed in this course will then be incorporated into the Ancient Civilization and World History survey courses offered in the fall of 1995. The second stage of this project will be the development of similar materials for Roman history.
In addition to the traditional lecture format and library research assignments, this project will utilize available multimedia CD-ROM technology, Internet resources, and customized electronic multimedia materials from the Multimedia Resource Center. The two available CD-ROM packages that will be utilized are: Athena: Classical Mythology on CD-ROM, and Perseus, the multimedia interactive database designed to facilitate the study of archaic and classical Greece. The Athena database (available June 1) will be enhanced with maps, images, and photographs provided by the Multimedia Resource Center. The Perseus database will be enhanced by accessing materials available through the Internet (the Harvard Perseus Project and other resources). The classroom work station will also be provided by the Multimedia Resource Center.