www.projectpioneer.com
·
Implement
decentralized research method (work collaboratively)
·
Analyze the
efficiency and applicability of distance collaboration (different countries)
·
Create an
interdisciplinary project approach to curriculum development, creating a more
relevant and efficient curriculum.
·
Integrate
emerging (open source) and high-end technology in the educational arena.
·
Develop an
online learning environment.
·
Study the role
of technology in enhancing and promoting ongoing learning.
Below
is an excerpt of a dialogue between myself (asking the questions) and Jecel M.
Assumpção Jr. (answering them, sometimes seriously, sometimes playfully). This
dialogue reflects some very important aspects of the role technology is playing
in our project, and consequently in the learning activity. It shows the types
of research that can be done both collaboratively and long distance. It also
reflects how the medium allows for easy access to stored information, where I
could just use the emails directly and include the information in this
analysis. It also allows for easy access to metacognitive activities, where I
can organize my ideas and reflect on them, both individually and collectively,
allowing them to grow and develop.
Due
to the collaborative nature of this project (six team leaders, each one with
their own specialty), my initial ideas have been greatly enhanced and enriched.
Each project leader has contributed to the idea pool, as well as helped guide
students as they develop their work. We hope this project becomes a model for
technology integration in a more modern educational setting, where new pedagogies
will start having a larger role in our student’s educational process.
These
are some of the initial questions we asked ourselves, in starting this project:
·
(CMA) Can open
source become a new tool in designing interdisciplinary, situated based, real
life projects that can integrate into the curriculum?
·
(Jecel) To be
"interdisciplinary", the programming part must not be too intrusive
in order not to scare off those with less technical interests.
·
(CMA) (Study
the use of Self as a programming tool to encourage student's thinking at higher
levels).
·
(Jecel) Self
is meant to stimulate people with less abstract mindsets (you can *see* the
objects right there on the screen, and not just imagine them from looking at
the source text).
·
(CMA) Will it
promote higher level thinking skills, augment student learning?
·
(Jecel)
Programming is the most natural environment for learning certain "powerful
ideas". It provides a vocabulary for mental processes and helps people to
actively think about learning strategies.
·
(CMA) Model
collaborative learning using technology in what it best lends itself? Adequate
the activities to the medium?
·
(Jecel) The
computer can mimic any existing or imagined media (paper, LP records, TV,
etc..). With an infinitely malleable media, I see no reason to adapt the
activities to it except for the limits of our imaginations.
·
(Jecel) In the
past, this wasn't quite true - the technology was limited and couldn't do all
was wanted. That phase ended in the early 90s.
·
(CMA) Focus:
pedagogical aspect - integrating technology into the curriculum.
·
(CMA) Outcome:
Curriculum integrating new technology in a new way (not merely adjusting it to
the traditional uses). Online unit geared towards distance learning and online
collaboration. Open ended and not content based. A tool that students can use
to promote problem-solving skills, decision-making and research methodology.
·
(CMA)
Assessment: Measure student skills before and after.
·
(Jecel)
Objective measurement is *very* hard. List of facts = easy. Skills = nearly
impossible.
·
(CMA)
Qualitative analysis. Self-assessment through rubrics. If students reached a
functional model of a colony.
·
(Jecel)
Careful - mistakes are better learning experiences than successes! A
non-working colony might mean a failure or it might not.
·
(CMA)
Scalability of the unit - if it can be used in the classrooms, not just as an
after school activity.
·
(Jecel) Not
without major changes in the classrooms.
·
(CMA) How can
I measure success?
·
(Jecel) If the
students come back for more :-)
·
(CMA) In what
ways is this innovative?
·
(Jecel)
Students haven't had a chance to build their own tools since the early phase of
the PARC Smalltalk project in 1974... Time to try again!
·
(CMA) How can
this prepare students with better real world skills?
·
(Jecel) They
might very well be building a colony in Mars in 2030 ;-)
·
(CMA) To what
point does the medium influence and mold student thinking and learning?
·
(Jecel) Quite
a lot! "If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail".
·
(CMA) How can
I encourage students to become independent learners?
·
(Jecel) Learn
to let go. Don't be frustrated if things go in unplanned directions.
·
(CMA) Seekers
and analyzers of information?
·
(Jecel) Don't
spoon feed them all the facts they need for the next task.
·
(CMA) Action
takers?
·
(Jecel) I
don't think that can be taught. It certainly can be discouraged by making kids
sit quietly in a desk for several hours every day.
·
(CMA) How can
I measure their capability to transfer knowledge to a new context?
·
(Jecel)
time_to_learn(new_context) < time_to_learn(old_context)
Once
we had established our initial research questions, we worked together to search
for research that would support our initial hypothesis and statements. In this
paper I will be referring to the results of that research, citing the authors
and their findings, all of which support Jecel’s answers. This also is a result
of distance collaboration (very much facilitated by the presence of the web)
and easy access to data (stored information, as many papers were readily
available on the web as well).
This
collaboration will improve even further once access to high bandwidth becomes
more widespread. It will allow for even deeper levels of collaboration, such as
allowing two users in different countries do browse the web together by sharing
the same computer screen, while talking to each other and seeing each other on
video. They will be easily able to collaborate on documents and other applications;
such as it is now possible with Microsoft Netmeeting. Even with the lower
bandwidth we have today, we have already been working using this tool.
One
of the main goals of the Pioneer Project is to integrate such collaborative and
research tools into everyday educational activities. Through the Mars
Millennium Project we hope to create a very friendly collaborative user
environment that will empower the students to become real researchers and
programmers. The research I have found supports us in this pursuit. One example
is the question below, by Harris. It is a question that should be always asked,
no matter what the medium being used:
·
Will this use
of the Internet enable students to do something that they COULDN"T before?
Will it allow students to do something that they COULD do before, but BETTER?
(Harris, 1998) These are questions we are constantly asking ourselves. We don’t
want to use technology for the sake of technology itself. We want technology to
be a tool to empower students, not to control them.
We
chose the WebQuest format, due to the fact that it lends itself to an
interdisciplinary approach, as well as authentic learning situation, where the
students become researchers. The students are challenged to work together to
solve a common problem, where each one contributes with a unique amount of
knowledge, being that one becomes dependent on the expertise of the other. This
is a strategy that makes perfect use of what the Internet has to offer today,
both as a communication and collaboration tool, as well as a research tool. Our
goal was perfectly summarized in yet another email I received from one of the
major specialists in the integration of the Internet in the classroom: “The
ultimate goal is, through the use of WebQuests and other tools, to develop students
capable of posing and solving their own essential questions, and proceeding
without the benefit of scaffolding. Going beyond WebQuests means that students
would recognize that any problem must be attacked from multiple perspectives.
They would have the skills to recognize the critical roles necessary to solve a
particular problem. They would define their own roles, locate their own
resources, and form the questions that would allow them to pursue their role.
Then they would develop individual expertise based on their roles, come back to
the group, and the process of problem-solving, share what they had learned, and
together construct a new body of knowledge that may not have existed before.”
(Wolinsky, 1999)
Thinking
skills that a longer term WebQuest activity might require include these (from
Marzano, 1992): comparing, classifying, inducing, deducing, analyzing errors,
constructing support, abstraction, analyzing perspectives (Dodge) This matches
perfectly with our goal to use the technology as an empowering tool, through an
environment that opens an opportunity for acquiring higher level thinking
skills.
The
model we chose is also in accordance to research by Johnson et.al (1993), in
integrating cooperative learning through emphasizing lesson coherence. The
prepared lesson has a beginning, middle, and an end. To begin the lesson the
teacher presents a practical, real world problem or provocative issue that
intellectually challenges students. Everything that follows is organized around
solving the problem. The problem is presented first. Then concepts and rules
are presented second. Teachers pose provocative questions and allow students to
adequate time for reflection. (Johnson et. al, 1993)
In
this particular activity, we also decided, based on previous experience and
supported by research (Johnson et. al, 1993) to assign specific roles, as a
scaffold in an initial phase, so that students wouldn’t get lost when starting
their vast research, and were confronted with the great amount of information available
to them. According to Johnson et. al, the teacher assigns students roles. After
each item, the roles are rotated so that each student fulfills each role once.
(Johnson et.al, 1993). By following this format, the students would be exposed
to different responsibilities and perspectives, acquiring a more global view of
what is required of them, as well as practice different uses of the online
environment, becoming more savvy with the technology.
Tools,
no matter how powerful their educational potential, don't directly help our
students to learn. What's important is how we use the tools to assist teaching
and learning (application rather than operation). Seymour Papert dubbed the
kind of thinking that successful technological integration was learning the
hardware and software as "technocentric thinking" (1987). Teachers
should plan an educentric application for the powerful tools. (Harris, 1998).
We decided to give our students access to two forms of online tools. The first
tool we offered them was the listserve (ppioneer@listbot.com).
The choice was made based on the fact that most of them already were used to using
email, and we wanted them to have a tool with which they would feel comfortable
with right away, so that they could concentrate on the content rather than the
medium. We were pleased to see we made a very successful choice. Students have
been exchanging an average of 80 emails a day, exchanging good resources,
ideas, and debating the different points of the challenge. This tool was also
fundamental for the successful implementation of the project, for all
participants are now far from each other (students are on vacation, teachers
are in different cities and even countries!). Without the technology, this
project could not have started at all until February of 2000. Also, this was a
tool that allowed students’ access to experts in the varied fields, including
the organizers of the official Mars Millenium Project. Technology here played a
role in compressing time, space, and content. In other words, students could
work together even when they were physically separated, and learned more than
they would have alone, in a shorter period of time, because they were exposed
constantly to guidance and to each other’s ideas.
The
one disadvantage of the listserve is that it doesn’t organize the information,
being that sometimes the questions will be asked more than once, filling
participant’s mailboxes and frustrating those who already have seen the
question before. That is one of the constraints of this type of collaboration
tool. In order to provide a more organized tool for the ideas to develop, the
project organizers created the forum found in our website. The questions there
are organized by threads, and the answers are stored under each question. That
not only has the advantage of making the information easier to find, but also
makes the information readily accessible for further analysis and metacognitive
processes, allowing students to learn through their own mistakes and accompany
their own development.
We
are at this moment in the process of studying an easier forum format to use.
The one we adopted requires going into too many screens (bad affordance), and
is not supporting student performance. Due to the difficulty in logging in and
navigating, students have not yet adhered to this new medium. They still are
preferably using the listserve, even though the facilitators have encouraged
them daily to move their discussions to the forum. This is a very good example
of how a great tool can be undesirable due to problems in affordance. We are
restudying the design to make it as user friendly as possible, so that the tool
doesn’t get in the way of learning.
Research
also shows that implementing the same activity in different classrooms can have
very different results. There are many biologically-, psychologically-,
socially-, historically-, and temporarily-rooted differences among student's
receptivity to educational activities. (Harris, 1998) The same can be said for
different medium, as we found out with the listserve and forum. This is
something we will have to be really careful with if we want to create an activity
that will be successful in any classroom. It has to be open and flexible enough
so that teachers can adapt to their own conditions, assuming ownership of what
they implement. The type of activity we want to design would serve as a
scaffold, to get other teachers started in using technology well. The idea is
for them to grow away from this and develop independence and new ideas of their
own, enriching even more the knowledge pool. The web is the perfect medium to
allow such flexibility, adaptability and sharing at all levels. In Harris
(1998) we find support for this:
We
know from both experience and research (e.g. Rogers, 1995) that tweaking
someone else's idea isn't nearly as satisfying, or as effective, as designing
an activity that fits the unique combination of factors that present themselves
in any particular classroom at any particular time. Reinvention; the process of
taking something like a new tool or idea and making it our own in its
application, is very important to both teachers and students. Feelings of
ownership are crucial if new tools are to continue to be employed in ways that
will benefit users. This is what is known as true adoption of the innovation
(Rogers, 1995).
This
is where our Biotechnology Project (http://www.colband.com.br/ativ/nete/biot)
went wrong last year (1999). The Biotechnology Project was yet another project
started in 1998, implementing the same model of learning and technology
integration. The success of the project was great with the first group of
students, yet totally unmotivating for the second group (1999). We found out
that this was due to the fact that the students didn’t feel as if the project
were theirs. They thought they were working on the last year’s students’ work.
Not assuming ownership discouraged them from putting any effort into
contributing to the knowledge building that had started, even though they were
offered and had access to the same tools and resources. This will be corrected
in 2000, when new students will be presented with unique challenges that will
motivate them to assume ownership and benefit from the activities offered.
We
also are making available to students, on the project website, access to
images, experiments, and progress reports based on their discussions. These
reports are being elaborated by a professional evaluator who is part of our
team, with the objective to help students analyze what they are learning, where
they came from, how far they’ve come, and call attention to points they need to
pay attention to, so that their research has scientific validity. Thanks to the
immediacy of the web, the students can all have access to this information as
soon as it is ready. It is published on the site on the same day as it is
finished, allowing for updated information. Once again technology allows the
use of information that is only useful if shared right away. And we don’t have
to depend on others to do that. The web has allowed us to become publishers and
authors, being able to help our students in a more efficient way.
Our
theory of learning is implicit in our design. According to Duffy and Jonassen,
instruction should provide contexts and assistance that will aid the individual
in making sense of the environment as it is encountered. (Duffy & Jonassen,
1992)
Constructivists
focus on the process of knowledge construction and the development of reflexive
awareness of that process. Evaluation in the constructivist perspective must
examine the thinking process. One possible type of student evaluation activity
would ask learners to address a problem in the field of content and then defend
their decisions.(Duffy & Jonassen, 1992) That is what we’ll be asking our
students to do as they prepare the presentations for other groups. The progress
reports provide the reflection on the process.
Smith
et. al (1994) were experimenting with creating a simulation environment that would
be easy for children to use, based on a graphical user interface. They raise
some fundamental questions, such as: How can people tell agents what to do?
More generally, how can ordinary people, who are not professional programmers,
program computers? This problem--the "end-user programming
problem"--is an unsolved one in computer science. In spite of many
previous attempts to develop languages for end users, today only a small
percentage of people are able to program. Why are most people unable do it, in
spite of all the attempts to empower them? Is programming inherently too
difficult? Or does the fault lie with computer scientists? Have we developed
languages and approaches best suited to the skilled practitioner, languages
that take months or years to master? The authors take the latter view: computer
scientists have not made programming easy enough. (Smith, Cypher, Spohrer,
1994) This is one of the challenges we propose to meet. That is why we chose to
use Self to program a virtual colony. We also feel that the problem is not in
the programming itself, but in how it is taught and designed. Even though these
authors take a position totally against teaching any programming language, we
feel that this is not totally necessary. As long as the programming language is
something students can identify with and understand, using analogies they are
familiar with, we feel they are ready to develop a world using a simple
programming language. Of course we are dealing with older students, high school
level, which are more mature cognitively and have successfully reached logical
reasoning skills. We also believe that teaching programming will enhance their
cognitive processes, further developing their logical reasoning, sequencing and
correlation of cause and effect skills. It will also give them the capability
and freedom to explore their potential and ideas, testing them out, because
they will be capable of working the variables and their relationships. This is
based on our previous observation of how many of our students taught themselves
basic programming languages such as HTML, Java and Perl. This tells us that
they are eager to be able to develop their own environments, with freedom to
choose what they would like to see there, not be confined to what some other programmer
has determined.
Again,
according to Smith et.al (1994), today, over 100 million people use computers
to write letters and reports, draw pictures, keep budgets, maintain address
lists, access data bases, experiment with financial models, play games, and so
forth. Children as young as two years old can use a mouse and paint with
programs like KidPix (a child's painting program, at one time the world's best
selling application) or explore worlds like The PlayRoom (a child's adventure
game). So computers are not inherently unusable. The key observation is that
most of these applications are editors: with them, users produce an artifact by
invoking a sequence of actions and examining their effects. When the artifact
is the way they want it, they stop. (Smith et. al. 1994) Smith et. al make it
clear that the problem is not in the technology itself, but in its constraints
and affordances. If we can circumvent these obstacles, we can provide a rich
learning environment. That was also Papert’s idea when he created Logo (http://papert.www.media.mit.edu/people/papert/
), which unfortunately was not taught the way it was meant to be. This is
another interesting thing we have observed happening. Even though the medium is
new, in the beginning, it is still used in the “traditional” manner, both by
students and teachers. So even though they have the right tools to really go
beyond drill and practice, we still have to help them make the pedagogical paradigm
shift, showing them how to use these new tools in an innovative way. After all,
we are dealing with people, and dealing with years of training in one
direction. We can’t expect the learning to change magically when the new tools
are presented. We have to be prepared to kill old habits and misconceptions, at
the same time that we are modeling the new pedagogies. We have to help teachers
and students rethink what education is about, and what the end product should
be. The tools are there only as support to this mentality change, because they
help organize and provide an adequate environment for such learning.
Smith
goes on to say that they have come to the conclusion that since all previous
languages have been unsuccessful by the criterion described here, language
itself is the problem. It does not matter what the syntax is. Learning another
language is difficult for most people. The solution is to get rid of the
programming language.(Smith et.al, 1994). They used a totally graphical user
interface (GUI). Since our students are older, we are going to use a GUI, but
also give them access to the source, giving them the choice and possibility of
going further in their learning experience. That will help make their learning
self-paced, with no limits as to how far they can go. We are dealing with
encouraging the acquisition of higher level thinking skills in an authentic
learning situation. We are not saying that this is the only way to teach. Other
pedagogies are better for other types of learning, as are other environments.
That’s why we have to be very clear on what we are trying to teach, so we know
how to best reach our goals and objectives. Different strategies are adequate
for different types of learning. Our focus is very specific for a very specific
audience. We want to provide a higher level environment for students who are
almost ready to face real world challenges in their professional lives,
believing that one of the goals of education is to prepare citizens who are
ready to contribute to the community they live in.
According
to the research, the following are the most important principles for solving
the end-user programming problem.
·
Visibility: Make everything relevant to people's
operation of a computer system visible on the display screen. This is the
single most important UI principle. People have an easier time understanding
what is going on and what to do next if things are visible than if things are
kept internal to the program and hidden from users. Without visibility it is
almost impossible to achieve an easy-to-use interface. Visibility has a couple
of related principles:
·
Interactive
vs. batch: Establish a
cause-effect relationship between user actions and system semantics. When users
do something, show the effects immediately. Systems that do not are confusing.
·
Modeless
vs. modal: A
"mode" is a state of a system in which user actions are interpreted
differently than they would be ordinarily. Systems get in trouble when either
(a) they have many modes or (b) their modes are invisible. Both confuse people,
leading to (usually unpleasant) surprises at the results of actions.
·
Copying and
modifying vs. creating from scratch:
Allow people to copy and modify existing items in a system as a way to create
new ones. It is often easier to start with something that works and figure out
how to modify it than to create the same thing from scratch. Revealingly, this
is the way most professional programmers work. (This is exactly what SELF is
best at).
·
Seeing and
pointing vs. remembering and typing:
Allow users to point to entities on the display screen with a pointing device,
instead of making them describe the entities by typing text. It is the
foundation for the popular concept of "direct manipulation."
·
Concrete
vs. abstract: Make the
entities presented to users concrete. People have an easier time with the
concrete than with abstractions. (SELF offers objects that can be seen, helping
visualization).
·
Familiar
user's conceptual model:
Cast the concepts in a system into terms the user can understand. When faced
with a new situation, people try to apply their existing knowledge to
understand it. This is the inspiration for the use of metaphor in computer
interfaces, especially the so-called desktop metaphor invented for the Xerox
Star by the first author.
·
Minimum
translation distance: One
principle of utmost importance for programming environments but not so much for
other applications was proposed by Sloman: minimize the conceptual distance
between people's mental representations of concepts and the representations
that the computer will accept. In our opinion, the failure to do so is the
single biggest reason that languages designed for children such as Logo and
Smalltalk have not attained wider use. Time and again we have watched children
try to accomplish simple programming tasks such as making a fish swim away from
a shark, only to be frustrated by the difficulty in having to deal with
coordinate systems and vectors. The most articulate representations are the
ones that minimize this translation distance. Of course this is also a
principle of good program design: create data structures and operations that
are close to those in the problem domain.
·
In summary,
the GUI eliminated command lines by introducing visual representations for
concepts and allowing people to directly manipulate those representations. It
has empowered millions of people to use computers. Today, all successful
editors on personal computers follow this approach. But most programming environments
do not. This is the reason most people have an easier time editing than
programming. (Smith et. al, 1994)
Why
simulations? Again,
according to Smith et.al (1994), they are a powerful tool for education.
Simulations encourage unstructured exploratory learning. They allow children to
construct things, supporting the constructivist approach to education. Alan Kay
contends "We build things not just to have them, but to learn about
them." He quotes the philosopher Cesare Pavese: "To know the world,
one must construct it." Scardamalia argues that children learn best when
constucting things. They enter Vygotsky's "zone of proximal
development." Simulations such as SimCity and SimEarth allow children (of
all ages) to construct unique microworlds, giving them a sense of ownership in
their creations. They can observe and modify and experiment with these
microworlds. Children are the "gods" of their worlds. This pride of
ownership and feeling of power are compelling qualities that motivate even professional
programmers (Smith et. al, 1994). That is EXACTLY what we believe, and that is
why we made the choice of using SELF and building a virtual colony.
However,
Smith et.al go on to say, most simulations today do not permit users to modify
their fundamental behaviors and assumptions. For example, one cannot alter the
fact that if one puts in a railroad in SimCity, the pollution problems go
away--not exactly a realistic consequence. This inflexibility is the reason
that most school teachers do not use SimCity as a teaching tool, even if they
are studying city building. It does not model what they want to communicate.
Simulations that do allow fundamental modifiability, such as numeric
simulations built with Stella, require extensive programming skills. Few
children or teachers can or want to do it. (Smith et. al, 1994). Students want
to feel they can have some control of their environment, so they can test
hypothesis and create something they feel they have an ownership of. We feel it
underestimates students’ capability to say they cannot learn programming.
That’s why we have chosen to include programming in the project, using a
language that will be very close to the GUI, but that will also allow them to
have access to the source code. In other words, we’re trying to include the
best of both worlds.
Smith
already said that what is needed is a way for children without programming
knowledge to have more control over the behavior of simulations. What is also
needed is a way for teachers to tailor simulations to support their curriculum
goals. (Smith et.al, 1994). Using Self will allow us to empower our students
without having to learn an excessively hard language. They will be using a GUI
(graphical user interface), at the same time that they will be empowered to go
to the source and troubleshoot and adapt the program to their specific needs,
giving them the ownership they need. Self is designed to support exploratory
programming. One of the strengths of object-oriented programming lies in the uniform access to different kinds of stored
and computed data, and the ideas in SELF result in even more uniformity, which
results in greater expressive power. An object in SELF would be created by
cloning a prototype. (Ungar and Smith, 1991). This is what makes it ideal for
our proposal.
When
we heard of the Mars Millennium Project (MMP), we knew right away it was
perfect to help us answer our questions. It provided an authentic
problem-solving situation, where students were encouraged to work
collaboratively, and use the web as one of the main media to obtain and develop
information. We just adapted it to our specific needs. This is yet one more activity
that has its success based on accessibility of information, only possible
through the web. It would never have reached the scale it has if it depended
solely on other traditional media. It is a project that makes use of updated
information (such as was the case of the Mars Polar Lander), video, audio,
contact with experts, stored information giving any data students need to learn
about Mars, and much more. No traditional media could have provided such a rich
research and collaboration environment.
This
is what you can find at the website:
“The
Planetary Society (TPS) welcomes you to a journey of inspiration and discovery
as we explore Mars through the visions of artists, scientists, engineers, and
astronauts who have turned their creative energies into wonderful paintings,
stories, music, architecture, intelligent machines, human space flight, and
much more. Even now, robotic spacecraft are engaged in brave missions to learn
more about the "red planet". We are happy that you are joining us as
we plan for the long–term adventure to Mars.
Initially,
intelligent machines will pave the way by measuring important properties of
this remote and alluring world. Later, humans will make the trip and establish
the first colonies. We want you to gather information from this website and
from your mentors, think about it carefully, creatively try your hand at
designing a small village on Mars for 100 humans, and then submit your ideas.”
(http://mmp.planetary.org/tour/welco2.htm
)
MAKING
A CASE FOR COLLABORATIVE ACTION RESEARCH
Visit any medical school
and what you feel is "electricity," says Richard Sagor, executive
director of the Institute for the Study of Inquiry in Education (Camas, Wash.).
"It's the electricity of a group of people exploring their passion. It's
the electricity of a learning organization," he exclaims.
That same passion could be
part of any school's culture, says Sagor, who shared his ideas with members of
ASCD's Signature Schools program earlier this fall. What's needed to inspire
such enthusiastic exploration of teaching practice is collaborative action
research, he says.
Through collaborative
action research, teachers identify a shared goal for improving student
learning, Sagor explains. Teachers then create an objective rating scale to
"show what it looks like" when students have reached the target.
The passion, Sagor suggests,
comes when teachers are given the authority to put their own theories to the
test--to use the instructional approaches they think will help students reach
the goal, even when others disagree. Holding differing opinions is healthy,
Sagor states, and educators shouldn't be afraid of conflicting viewpoints. When
there is division, "educators should say, 'Oh, good, we've got a
researchable situation.'"
In adopting such a
philosophy, educators feel professionally empowered-and students benefit, Sagor
states. Schools that encourage teachers to engage in collaborative action
research, he affirms, inspire teachers "to creatively pursue solutions to
improve student learning."
Richard Sagor is the
author of the ASCD book, *How to Conduct Collaborative Action Research.* For
information on this book and other action research resources, visit the ASCD
Online Store at http://www.ascd.org .
Sagor
expressed the importance of collaborative research, and we have already felt
the benefits of such efforts, as we teachers planned the project. We hope to
pass this on to our students to. That is why we have proposed the following:
Students,
using tools given to them through a special program created for that purpose,
will create a virtual world environment. Even though the program will have some
basic settings, it will be up to the students to build upon that. It will be
required that the students learn basic programming in object-oriented language,
in order to modify and adapt the tools offered them to make them more adequate
for the Mars environment. The tools offered will be appropriate for Earth. They
will also need programming skills when building the colony, in order to create
the buildings and whatever they see necessary for survival in the environment
they will research about.
The
students will have to research all about Mars, because in the program they will
have to input the data of the environmental conditions where their colony is
going to have to survive. They will have to find out the atmospheric gases,
temperature, humidity, etc.; as well as the soil conditions. They will input
their data into the program that will then recreate the environment for them,
simulating the world they will face.
The
students can work individually or in groups. There will be instructions
appointing the different roles existing in building the space colony, and
usually should require teamwork. But if a student is willing to take on the
whole challenge by himself, he can do so.
The
students will be able to save the program where they have stopped, as if it
were a game, picking up from where they left off the next time around.
The
work environment will offer several different challenge levels, so students of
all ages can participate in some way. After the teams have put in all their
data, the computer will simulate the results of their choices, giving them
feedback on their success. If the colony doesn't work out one way, they can
experiment with the variables to see if they can be successful another way.
There
will be a component where the students will have to justify their choices, to
avoid that they just keep "guessing" to try to get it right. They
will have to provide evidence as to their research in order to continue
(similar to the Science Sleuths software by Videodiscovery).
Once
the teams are satisfied with their colonies, they can showcase their virtual
world on the web. Others interested can visit this world. The visitors can
either just walk around, or collaborate and build their own structures. The
colony will be an ongoing process.
Students
will always have a choice of starting from scratch, inputting the variables, or
building upon someone else's work. After the initial success, new challenges will
be proposed, such as change in population, change in political system, change
in climate, and so on.
The
biggest asset of this program is that it will have an open source component,
giving the students the ability to modify the environment to their needs. That
will give them independence and room to grow. One team's world may turn out
very different from another team's world. They will not be constrained by
limits imposed by the initial programmers. This will be an option, for those
who like the challenge. If the student doesn't want to get involved at such a
complex level, the program will offer enough tools to get a basic colony going,
as long as the data is correct.
We
have adopted the constructivist approach to learning. Technology lends itself
really well to this pedagogy, according to research:
A
constructivist trainer doesn't strip away the natural complexity of a subject.
Instead, multiple perspectives are brought to bear. The goal of a
constructivist-learning environment is not the accurate transfer of content
from the instructor to the learner. Instead, the learner is given tasks and
opportunities, information resources and support, and is encouraged to
construct their own version of the content, subject to revision through
feedback. Many paths through the lesson are allowed and collaboration with
other learners is stressed over lonely individual learning. A constructivist
use of technology presents information to the learner in multiple forms from
multiple sources and invites the learner to make sense of it. (Dodge, 1996).
A
constructivist approach is more learner-focused, and less teacher-focused. The
instructor's role moves toward being a coach and orchestrator of resources, and
moves away from being the sole source of information. The emphasis is on case
studies, problem-solving, and the creation of meaning. The World Wide Web lends
itself beautifully to constructivist, active learning. (Dodge, 1996).
It
has been suggested by Ibrahim and Franklin (1995) that the pedagogical use of
the Web can evolve along two major axes: a closed corpus of material where the
technology is used mostly for its hypermedia and distance delivery
capabilities, or an open corpus approach which exploits the enormous amount of
information that is accessible via Internet, whether or not it has been put
there for educational purposes. An organized structure of links has then to be
superimposed on the domain to allow guided educational explorations. These two
axes can be alternatively or complementarily followed. (Eklund et.al, 1996)
·
Cross-globe
communication - Interpersonal Exchange (Harris, 1998)
·
Time
compression (facilitating the formation of correlations) (Rothkopf, 1998)
·
Multimedia as
a way to share information (Rothkopf, 1998)
·
Vast amount to
stored information (Rothkopf, 1998)
·
Access to
real-time data collection
·
Help systems
to increase efficiency (Rothkopf, 1998)
·
Allows for
active search for knowledge
·
Practical =
access to experts in the fields (Rothkopf, 1998)
·
Reactive,
allowing for individualized construction of knowledge, based on your background
and prior knowledge (Rothkopf, 1998)
·
Records the
learning process, allowing for metacognitive analysis
·
Convenience
(Rothkopf, 1998). It is easy to use.
·
Motivational:
students love to use technical innovations, feeling challenged to learn more.
·
Allows us to
elaborate educational activities that give students maximal return for the
amount of time and effort that all of us must expend to ensure success.
(Harris, 1998)
·
When we do use
these new tools, usually it will only be "worth it" for us to do so
if they can be applied in new ways to help new and worthwhile things to happen
in our classrooms. (Harris, 1998)
·
According to
Harris (1998), There are 18 telecollaborative activity structures that she's
identified to date. They group themselves into three genres of educational
online activity:
·
Interpersonal
Exchange
o
keypals
o
global
classrooms
o
electronic
appearances
o
telementoring
o
question-and-answer
activities
o
impersonations
o
Information
Collection and Analysis
o
information
exchanges
o
database
creation
o
electronic
publishing
o
telefieldtrips
o
pooled data
analysis
·
Problem
Solving
o
information
searches
o
peer feedback
activities
o
parallel
problem solving
o
sequential
problem solving
o
telepresent
problem solving
o
simulations
o
social action
projects
·
Constrains
contexts - someone decides for you what you can see and do (Rothkopf, 1998)
·
Requires
training to be used: Most teachers still don't use it do to lack of knowledge
of how to use such a system
·
More difficult
to measure competence for these abstract skills
·
Unclear help
systems (Rothkopf, 1998)
·
Problems with
authenticity of stored information (Rothkopf, 1998)
·
Access
problems: bandwidth limitations in other countries
·
Language to be
used when developing a global learning activity. This is illustrated by the
fact that even though discussions so far have been in Portuguese, the student’s
native language, the website and instructions are in English, so that
professors and students in the US can participate and follow what is happening.
Also, the students will be translating their presentations for the judges to be
able to evaluate what they have done. The two Appendixes in this paper are an
example of the type of information the students have access to in their native
language. These will be translated at a later date so that US users can also
use this information if they decide to join the project.
The
lessons explained by the authors of the Habitat will be taken into
consideration when we build our virtual world. This research will be made
available to students, so that they use technology in the best way possible,
allowing them to go through a rich learning experience.