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.htm
A 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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