A Twist of Fate (The Asker Trilogy Book 3)

Peter Blakeborough

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Amazon Advertising Find, attract, and engage customers. Amazon Drive Cloud storage from Amazon. They are not intended to provide final answers or to define recipes for designing software or conducting research. They do not claim to confirm the hypotheses, propose the theories or formulate the methodologies they call for. Rather, they aim to open up a suggestive view of these bewildering realms of inquiry.

I hope that by stimulating group efforts to investigate proposed approaches to design, analysis and theory, they can contribute in some modest measure to our future success in understanding, supporting and engaging in effective group cognition. The 21 chapters of this book were written over a number of years, while I was finding my way toward a conception of group cognition that could be useful for CSCL and CSCW.

Only near the end of that period, in editing the essays into a unified book, did the coherence of the undertaking become clear to me. In presenting these writings together, I think it is important to provide some guidance to the readers. The fact that the theory presented in this book comes at the end, emanating out of the design studies and the empirical analysis of collaboration, does not mean that the work described in the design studies of the first section had no theoretical framing. They showed that people act based on their being situated in specific settings with particular activities, artifacts, histories and colleagues.

Shared knowledge is not a stockpile of fixed facts that can be represented in a database and queried on all occasions, but an on-going accomplishment of concrete groups of people engaged in continuing communication and negotiation. Furthermore, knowing is fundamentally perspectival and interpretive. The idea was that one could build a software system to support designers in a given domain—say, kitchen design—by integrating such components as a drawing sketchpad, a palette of icons representing items from the domain stovetops, tables, walls , a set of critiquing rules sink under a window, dishwasher to the right , a hypertext of design rationale, a catalog of previous designs or templates, a searching mechanism, and a facility for adding new palette items, among others.

My dissertation system, Hermes , was a system that allowed one to put together a DODE for a given domain, and structure different professional perspectives on the knowledge in the system. Software designs contained in the studies of part I more or less start from this approach: This theoretical background is presented primarily in chapter 4. Before presenting that, however, I wanted to give a feel for the problematic nature of CSCL and CSCW by providing examples of designing software to support constructivist education chapter 1 , computational support for learning chapter 2 or algorithms for selecting group members chapter 3.

The eight case studies included in part I provide little windows upon illustrative experiences of designing software for collaborative knowledge building. They are not controlled experiments with rigorous conclusions. Each study contains a parable: They describe fragmentary experiments that pose questions and that, in their specificity and materiality, allow the feedback of reality to be experienced and pondered. Some of the studies include technical details that may not be interesting or particularly meaningful to all readers.

Indeed, it is hard to imagine many readers with proper backgrounds for easily following in detail all the chapters of this book. This is an unavoidable problem for interdisciplinary topics. The original papers for part I were written for specialists in computer science, and their details remain integral to the argumentation of the specific study, but not necessarily essential to the larger implications of the book. The book is structured so that readers can feel free to skip around.

Part I explores, in particular ways, some of the major forms of computer support that seem desirable for collaborative knowledge building, shared meaning making and group cognition. The first three chapters address the needs of individual teachers, students and group members, respectively, as they interact with shared resources and activities.

Collaboration as Group Cognition

The individual perspective is then systematically matched with group perspectives in the next three chapters. The final chapters of part I develop a mechanism for moving knowledge among perspectives. Along the way, issues of individual, small-group and community levels are increasingly distinguished and supported. Support for group formation, perspectives and negotiation is prototyped and tested. The book starts with a gentle introduction to a typical application of designing computer support for collaboration.

It is a CSCW system in that it supports communities of professional teachers cooperating in their work. At the same time, it is a CSCL system that can help to generate, refine and propagate curriculum for collaborative learning by students, either online or otherwise. The study is an attempt to design an integrated knowledge-based system that supports five key functions associated with the development of innovative curriculum by communities of teachers. Interfaces for the five functions are illustrated. The next study turns to computer support for students, either in groups or singly.

The application, State the Essence , is a program that gives students feedback on summaries they compose from brief essays. Rather than focusing on student outcomes, the study describes some of the complexity of adapting an algorithmic technique to a classroom educational tool. The question in this study is: Developed for the American space agency to help them select groups of astronauts for the international space station, the Crew software modeled a set of psychological factors for subjects participating in a prolonged space mission.

Crew was designed to take advantage of psychological data being collected on outer-space, under-sea and Antarctic winter-over missions confining small groups of people in restricted spaces for prolonged periods. The software combined a number of statistical and AI techniques. This study was actually written earlier than the preceding ones, but it is probably best read following them. It describes at an abstract level the theoretical framework behind the design of the systems discussed in the other studies—it is perhaps also critical of some assumptions underlying their mechanisms.

It develops a concept of situated interpretation that arises from design theories and writings on situated cognition. These sources raised fundamental questions about traditional AI, based as it was on assumptions of explicit, objective, universal and rational knowledge. Hermes tried to capture and represent tacit, interpretive, situated knowledge. It was a hypermedia framework for creating domain-oriented design environments.

It provided design and software elements for interpretive perspectives, end-user programming languages and adaptive displays, all built upon a shared knowledge base. A critical transition occurs in this study, away from software that is designed to amplify human intelligence with AI techniques. It turns instead toward the goal of software designed to support group interaction by providing structured media of communication, sharing and collaboration. While TCA attempted to use an early version of the Internet to allow communities to share educational artifacts, CIE aimed to turn the Web into a shared workspace for a community of practice.

The specific community supported by the CIE prototype was the group of people who design and maintain local area computer networks LANs , for instance at university departments. WebGuide was a several-year effort to design support for interpretive perspectives, focusing on the key idea proposed by Hermes, computational perspectives, and trying to adapt the perspectivity concept to asynchronous threaded discussions.

The design study was situated within the task of providing a shared guide to the Web for small workgroups and whole classrooms of students, including the classroom where Essence was developed. Insights gained from adoption hurdles with this system motivated a push to better understand collaboration and computer-mediated communication, resulting in a WebGuide -supported seminar on mediation, which is discussed in this study. This seminar began the theoretical reflections that percolate through part II and then dominate in part III. The WebGuide system was a good example of trying to harness computational power to support the dynamic selection and presentation of information in accordance with different user perspectives.

Several limitations of WebGuide led to the Synergeia design undertaking. The WebGuide perspectives mechanism was too complicated for users, and additional collaboration supports were needed, in particular support for group negotiation. An established CSCW system was re-designed for classroom usage, including a simplified system of class, group and individual perspectives, and a mechanism for groups to negotiate agreement on shared knowledge-building artifacts.

The text of this study began as a design scenario that guided development of Synergeia and then morphed into its training manual for teachers. This study takes a closer look at the design rationale for the negotiation mechanism of the previous study. The BSCL system illustrates designs for several important functions of collaborative learning: These functions are integrated into the mature BSCW software system, with support for synchronous chat and shared whiteboard, asynchronous threaded discussion with note types, social awareness features, and shared workspaces folder hierarchies for documents.

The central point of this study is that negotiation is not just a matter of individuals voting based on their preconceived ideas; it is a group process of constructing knowledge artifacts and then establishing a consensus that the group has reached a shared understanding of this knowledge, and that it is ready to display it for others. A twentieth century fascination with technological solutions reached its denouement in AI systems that required more effort than expected and provided less help than promised. In the twenty-first century, researchers acknowledged that systems needed to be user-centric and should concentrate on taking the best advantage of human and group intelligence.

In this new context, the important thing for groupware was to optimize the formation of effective groups, help them to articulate and synthesize different knowledge-building perspectives, and support the negotiation of shared group knowledge. This shift should become apparent in the progression of software studies in part I. For this project, I worked with several colleagues in Boulder , Colorado , to apply what we understood of educational theory and approaches to computer support of collaboration to the plight of classroom teachers.

Constructivist approaches to learning were well established as being favored by most educational researchers. The problem was to disseminate this to teachers in the actual classrooms. Even when teachers were trained in the theory, they had no practical instructional materials to implement the new approach on a daily basis. There were few textbooks or other resources available; even if materials were located, the teachers would still have to spend vast amounts of time they did not have to integrate them into the classroom practices and the institutional requirements.

The Internet was just starting to reach public schools, so we tried to devise computer-based supports for disseminating constructivist resources and for helping teachers to practically adapt and apply them. We prototyped a high-functionality design environment for communities of teachers to construct innovative lesson plans together, using a growing database of appropriately structured and annotated resources.

This was an experiment in designing a software system for teachers to engage in collaborative knowledge building. This study provides a nice example of a real-world problem confronting teachers. It tries to apply the power of AI and domain-oriented design environment technologies to support collaboration at a distance.

The failure of the project to go forward beyond the design phase indicates the necessity of considering more carefully the institutional context of schooling and the intricacies of potential interaction among classroom teachers. Many teachers yearn to break through the confines of traditional textbook-centered teaching and present activities that encourage students to explore and construct their own knowledge. But this requires developing innovative materials and curriculum tailored to local students.

Teachers have neither the time nor the information to do much of this from scratch. The Internet provides a medium for globally sharing innovative educational resources. School districts and teacher organizations have already begun to post curriculum ideas on Internet servers.

However, just storing unrelated educational materials on the Internet does not by itself solve the problem. It is too hard to find the resources to meet specific needs. Teachers need software for locating material-rich sites across the network, searching the individual curriculum sources, adapting retrieved materials to their classrooms, organizing these resources in coherent lesson plans and sharing their experiences across the Internet. TCA maintains information for finding educational resources distributed on the Internet. It provides query and browsing mechanisms for exploring what is available.

Tools are included for tailoring retrieved resources, creating supplementary materials and designing innovative curriculum. TCA encourages teachers to annotate and upload successfully used curriculum to Internet servers in order to share their ideas with other educators. In this chapter I describe the need for such computer support and discuss what I have learned from designing TCA. The Internet has the potential to transform educational curriculum development beyond the horizons of our foresight. In , the process was just beginning, as educators across the country started to post their favorite curriculum ideas for others to share.

Already, this first tentative step revealed the difficulties inherent in using such potentially enormous, loosely structured sources of information. Teachers have to locate sites of curriculum ideas scattered across the network; there is currently no system for announcing the locations of these sites. They have to search through the offerings at each site for useful items. While some sites provide search mechanisms for their databases, each has different interfaces, tools and indexing schemes that must be learned before the curricula can be accessed.

They have to adapt items they find to the needs of their particular classroom: They have to organize the new ideas within coherent curricula that build toward long-term pedagogical goals. They have to share their experiences using the curriculum or their own new ideas with others who use the resources. In many fields, professionals have turned to productivity software—like spreadsheets for accountants—to help them manage tasks involving complex sources of information.

I believe that teachers should be given similar computer-based tools to meet the problems listed above. In this chapter, I consider how the sharing of curriculum ideas over the Internet can be made more effective in transforming education. First, I discuss the nature of constructivist curriculum, contrasting it with traditional approaches based on behaviorist theory. Then I present an example of a problem-solving environment for high school mathematics students.

The example illustrates why teachers need help to construct this kind of student-centered curriculum. I provide a scenario of a teacher developing a curriculum using productivity software like TCA , and conclude by discussing some issues I feel will be important in maximizing the effectiveness of the Internet as a medium for the dissemination of innovative curricula for educational reform. The distribution of curriculum over the Internet and the use of productivity software for searching and adapting posted ideas could benefit any pedagogical approach.

However, it is particularly crucial for advancing reform in education. The barriers to educational reform are legion, as many people since John Dewey have found. Teachers, administrators, parents and students must all be convinced that traditional schooling is not the most effective way to provide an adequate foundation for life in the future. They must be trained in the new sensitivities required. Once everyone agrees and is ready to implement the new approach there is still a problem: This concrete question is the one that Internet sharing can best address.

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I generalize the term curriculum to cover this question. Consider curricula for mathematics. There is a growing consensus among educational theorists that different students in different situations construct their understandings in different ways Greeno, This approach is often called constructivism or constructionism Papert, It implies that teachers must creatively structure the learning environments of their students to provide opportunities for discovery and must guide the individual learners to reach insights in their own ways.

Behaviorism and constructivism differ primarily in their views of how students build their knowledge. Traditional, rationalist education assumed that there was a logical sequence of facts and standard skills that had to be learned successively. The problem was simply to transfer bits of information to students in a logical order, with little concern for how students acquire knowledge. Early attempts at designing educational software took this approach to its extreme, breaking down curricula into isolated atomic propositions and feeding these predigested facts to the students.

This approach to education was suited to the industrial age, in which workers on assembly lines performed well-defined, sequential tasks. According to constructivism, learners interpret problems in their environments using conceptual frameworks that they developed in the past Roschelle, In challenging cases, problems can require changes in the frameworks.

Such conceptual change is the essence of learning: To teach a student a mathematical method or a scientific theory is not to place a set of propositional facts into her mind, but to give her a new tool that she can make her own and use in her own ways in comprehending her world. Constructivism does not entail the rejection of a curriculum. Rather, it requires a more complex and flexible curriculum. Traditionally, a curriculum consisted of a textual theoretical lesson, a set of drills for students to practice and a test to evaluate if the students could perform the desired behaviors.

In contrast, a constructivist curriculum might target certain cognitive skills, provide a setting of resources and activities to serve as a catalyst for the development of these skills and then offer opportunities for students to articulate their evolving understandings NCTM, The cognitive skills in math, for example, might include qualitative reasoning about graphs, number lines, algorithms or proofs.

My colleagues on the project and I believe that the movement from viewing a curriculum as fact-centered to viewing it as cognitive-tool-centered is appropriate for the post-modern post-industrial, post-rationalist, post-behaviorist period. Cognitive tools include, importantly, alternative knowledge representations Norman, As researchers in artificial intelligence, we know that knowledge representations are key to characterizing or modeling cognition. We have also found that professionals working in typical contemporary occupations focus much of their effort on developing and using alternative knowledge representations that are adapted to their tasks Sumner, Curricula to prepare people for the next generation of jobs would do well to familiarize students with the creation and use of alternative conceptual representations.

Teachers need help to create learning environments that stimulate the construction and evolution of understanding through student exploration using multiple conceptual representations. A stimulating learning environment is one with a rich ecology, in which many elements interact in subtle ways. In this section I present an illustration of a rich ecology for learning mathematical thinking that includes: A typical curriculum suggestion that might be posted on an educational resources listing on the Internet is the problem of regions of a circle: Given n points on the circumference of a circle, what is the maximum number of regions one can divide the circle into by drawing straight lines connecting the points?

For instance, connecting two points divides the circle into two regions; connecting three points with three lines creates four regions. This is a potentially fascinating problem because its subtleties can be explored at length using just algebra and several varieties of clear thinking. The problem with this curriculum offering as an Internet posting is that it has not been placed in a rich setting. To be useful, a fuller curriculum providing a set of conceptual tools is needed. For instance, a discussion of inductive reasoning brings out some of the character of this particular problem.

One expects the last of these numbers to be 32, but that last region is nowhere to be found. For larger n , the series diverges completely from the powers of 2. Here, inductive reasoning can come to the rescue of the hasty inductive assumption—if, that is, the problem is accompanied by a discussion of inductive reasoning.

Consider the general case of n points. Assume that the answer is known for n-1 points and think about how many new regions are created by adding the n -th point and connecting it to each of the n-1 old points. There is a definite pattern at work here. It may take a couple days of careful thought to work it out. It would also help if the sigma notation for sums of indexed terms is explained as a representational tool for working on the problem.

Perhaps a collaborative group effort will be needed to check each step and avoid mistakes. At this point, a teacher might introduce the notion of recursion and relate it to induction. If the students can program in Logo or Pascal programming languages that can represent recursive processes , they could put the general formula into a simple but powerful program that could generate results for hundreds of values of n very quickly without the tedious and error-prone process of counting regions in drawings.

It would be nice to formalize the derivation of this result with a deductive proof , if the method of formulating proofs has been explained. Now that students are confident that they have the correct values for many n , they can enter these values in a spreadsheet to explore them.

The first representation they might want to see is a graph of R n vs. On the spreadsheet they could make a column that displays the difference between each R n and its corresponding R n Copying this column several times, they would find that the fourth column of differences is constant.

This result means that R n follows a fourth order equation, which can be found by solving simultaneous equations. These include textual documents, drawings, equations, spreadsheets, graphs and computer program source code. The point of this example is that sharing the isolated statement of the problem is not enough. The rich learning experience involves being introduced to alternative representations of the problem: A curriculum in the new paradigm typically consists of stimulating problems immersed in environments with richly interacting ecologies, including: Perhaps a creative teacher with unlimited preparation time could put these materials together.

However, the reality is that teachers deserve all the support they can get if they are to prepare and present the complex learning ecologies that constructivist reforms call for. Computer support for curriculum development should make the kinds of resources shown in figure readily available. Curriculum planning for learning ecologies is not a simple matter of picking consecutive pages out of a standard textbook or of working out a sequential presentation of material that builds up to fixed learning achievements.

Rather, it is a matter of design. To support teachers in developing curriculum that achieves this, we must go beyond databases of isolated resources to provide design environments for curriculum development. It may seem to be an overwhelming task to design an effective learning environment for promoting the development of basic cognitive skills.

Group Cognition

However, dozens of reform curricula have already been created. The problem now is to disseminate these in ways that allow teachers to adapt them to their local needs and to reuse them as templates for additional new curricula. It is instructive to look at a recent attempt to make this type of curriculum available. Like the posting of curriculum ideas at several Internet sites, this is an important early step at electronic dissemination. It relies on a fixed database of resources that allows resources to be located but not expanded or revised.

Because its resources are stored in bitmap images, they cannot be adapted in any way by teachers or students. Because it is sold as a read-only commodity, MathFinder does not allow teachers to share their experiences with annotations or to add their own curricular ideas. Thus, of the five issues listed in the Introduction of this study, MathFinder only provides a partial solution to the issues of location and search.

An alternative approach is suggested by our work on domain-oriented design environments Fischer et al. A software design environment provides a flexible workspace for the construction of artifacts, and places useful design tools and materials close at hand. A design environment for curriculum development goes substantially beyond a database of individual resources. TCA includes a catalog of previously designed curricula that can be reused and modified.

It has a gallery of educational resources that can be inserted into partial curriculum designs. There is a workspace , into which curricula from the catalog can be loaded and resources from the gallery inserted. It is also possible for a teacher to specify criteria for the desired curriculum. Specifications are used for searching the case-base of curricula, adapting the resources and critiquing new designs. TCA allows teachers to download curricular resources from the Internet and to create coherent classroom activities tailored to local circumstances. In particular, TCA addresses the set of five issues identified in the Introduction:.

TCA is built on a database of information about educational resources posted to the Internet, so it provides a mechanism for teachers to locate sources of curriculum ideas at scattered Internet sites.

The TCA database indexes each resource in a uniform way, allowing teachers to search for all items meeting desired conditions. TCA includes tools to help teachers adapt items they find to the needs of their classroom. TCA provides a design workspace for organizing retrieved ideas into lesson plans that build toward long-term goals. TCA lets teachers conveniently share their experiences back through the Internet. Based on preliminary study of these issues, a TCA prototype has been developed. Six interface screens have been designed for teacher support: The teacher-client software interface for locating, searching and selecting resources and curricula: The Profiler , Explorer and Versions interfaces work together for information retrieval figure The Profiler helps teachers define classroom profiles and locates curricula and resources that match the profile.

The Explorer displays these items and allows the teacher to search through them to find related items. Versions then helps the teacher select from alternative versions that have been adapted by other teachers. Through these interfaces, teachers can locate the available materials that most closely match their personal needs; this makes it easier to tailor the materials to individual requirements.

The Planner , Editor and Networker help the teacher to prepare resources and curricula, and to share the results of classroom use figure The Planner is a design environment for reusing and reorganizing lesson plans. The Editor allows the teacher to modify and adapt resources. This is a primary means of personalizing a curriculum to individual classroom circumstances.

Finally, the Networker supports interactions with the Internet, providing a two-way medium of communication with a global community of teachers. Using the Networker , a teacher can share personalized versions of standard curricula with other teachers who might have similar needs. The teacher-client interface for adapting, organizing and sharing resources and curricula: To illustrate how TCA works, each of the five issues will be discussed in the following sections.

These sections present a scenario of a teacher using TCA to locate resources, search through them, adapt selected resources, organize them into a curriculum and share the results with other teachers. Imagine a high school mathematics teacher using TCA. More generally, she might want to discuss the ubiquity of patterns and ways to represent them mathematically.

TCA lets her browse for semester themes and their constituent weekly units and lesson plans related to these topics. TCA distinguishes four levels of curricula available on the Internet:.

A theme consists of multiple teaching units. A unit is described by its constituent daily lesson plans. A lesson plan might include a number of resources, such as a lecture, a reading, an exercise or project, and perhaps a quiz and a homework assignment. It might be a text, available as a word processing document. It could also be a video clip, a spreadsheet worksheet, a graphic design or a software simulation. Resources are the smallest units of curricula indexed by TCA. TCA lets the teacher locate relevant curricula by analyzing information stored on her computer about items available on the Internet.

Along with the TCA software on her computer there is a case-base of summaries indexes of curricula and resources that can be downloaded. These summary records reference curricula and resources that have been posted to Internet nodes around the world. In addition to containing the Internet address information needed for downloading an item, a record contains a description of the item, so that the teacher can decide whether or not it is of interest.

This happens without her having to know where they were located or how to download them. The items are then available for modification, printing or distribution to her students. If Internet traffic is slow, she may opt to download batches of curriculum and resources overnight and then work with them the next day. TCA provides a combination of query and browsing mechanisms to help a teacher select curricula of interest and to find resources that go with it. She can start in the Profiler Figure 3 by specifying that she wants a curriculum for ninth grade mathematics.

Then she can browse through a list of themes in the Explorer that meet the specification. If the list is too long, she can narrow down her search criteria. The teacher can click on this theme in the list. Her computer now displays summaries of the units that make up the curriculum for that theme. This list shows three weekly units. It lists all the resources suggested for that period: This is one way to locate related resources within curricular contexts. The teacher can also turn to the Versions component to find variations on a particular resource and comments about the resource and its different versions by teachers who have used it.

Notice resource 2 in the Planner , where students create a spreadsheet chart: Chart of ratios on a circle. The description contained in the case-base for each posted resource is organized as a set of 24 indexes and annotations, such as: Note that total class time and homework time are computed and teacher preparations for the resources are listed below the workspace.

The TCA Profiler allows a teacher to specify her curricular needs using combinations of these indexes. Resources are also cross referenced so that she can retrieve many different resources that are related to a given one. She can also find week-long units that build on geometric problems like this one, with variations for students with different backgrounds, learning styles or interests.

TCA allows her to search both top-down from themes to resources and bottom-up from resources to curricula. Adaptation tools are available in TCA for resources that have been downloaded from the Internet. The Planner component provides a design workspace for assembling a custom lesson plan and the Editor helps a teacher to adapt individual resources to her local needs. The TCA system can often make automated suggestions for adapting a resource to the specification given in the search process. For instance, if she retrieves a resource that was targeted for 11th grade when she is looking for 10th grade material, then TCA might suggest allowing her students more time to do the tasks or might provide more supporting and explanatory materials for them.

In general, she will need to make the adaptations; even where the software comes up with suggestions, she must use her judgment to make the final decision. While TCA can automate some adaptation, most tailoring of curricula requires hands-on control by an experienced teacher. Sometimes TCA can support her efforts by displaying useful information. For instance, if she is adapting resources organized by national standards to local standards she might like her computer to display both sets of standards and to associate each local standard with corresponding national standards.

In other situations, perhaps involving students whose first language is not English, TCA might link a resource requiring a high level of language understanding to a supplementary visual presentation. The adaptation process relies on alternative versions of individual resources being posted. The TCA VERSIONS component helps a teacher adjust to different student groups, teaching methods and time constraints by retrieving alternative versions of resources that provide different motivations, use different formats or go into more depth.

She can substitute these alternative resources into lesson plans; they can then be modified with multimedia editing software from within TCA. Included in the Editor is a reduced image of the spreadsheet itself. If a teacher click on this image, TCA brings up the commercial software application in which the document was produced. So she can now edit and modify the copy of this document which appears on her screen.

She need not leave TCA to do this. Then she can print out her revised version for her students or distribute it directly to their computers. In this way, she can use her own ideas or those of her students to modify and enhance curricular units found on the Internet. Just as it is important for teachers to adapt curricula to their needs, it is desirable to have resources that students can tailor. The lesson plan is a popular representation for a curriculum.

It provides teachers a system for organizing classroom activities. TCA uses the lesson plan metaphor as the basis for its design workspace. A teacher can start her planning by looking at downloaded lesson plans and then modifying them to meet her local needs. In addition to summaries of each resource, the workspace lists the time required by each resource, both in class and at home.

These times are totaled at the bottom of the list of resources in the Planner. This provides an indication of whether there is too much or too little instructional material to fill the period. The teacher can then decide to add or eliminate resources or adjust their time allowances. The total homework time can be compared to local requirements concerning homework amounts. TCA incorporates computational critics Fischer et al. Critics are software rules that monitor the curriculum being constructed and verify that specified conditions are maintained.

For instance, critics might automatically alert the teacher if the time required for a one-day curriculum exceeds or falls short of the time available. Once a teacher has developed curricula and used them successfully in the classroom, she may want to share her creations with other teachers. This way , the pool of ideas on the Internet will grow and mature.

TCA has facilities for her to annotate individual resources and curricular units at all levels with descriptions of how they worked in her classroom. This is part of the indexing of the resource or unit. Now she wants to upload her version back to the Internet.

The TCA Networker component automates that process, posting the new resource to an available server and adding the indexes for it to the server used for distributing new indexes.

a. Providing Guidance

In this way, the Internet pool of resources serves as a medium of communication among teachers about the specific resources. I conceptualize the understanding I have reached through my work on TCA in five principles:. The search process should be supported through a combination of query and browsing tools that help teachers explore what is available. Adaptation of tools and resources to teachers and students is critical for developing and benefiting from constructivist curriculum.

Resources must be organized into carefully designed curriculum units to provide effective learning environments. The Internet should become a medium for sharing curriculum ideas, not just accessing them. A system to assist teachers in developing curricula for educational reform has been designed and prototyped.

All aspects of the system must now be refined by working further with classroom teachers and curriculum developers. While the approach of TCA appeals to teachers who have participated in its design, its implementation must still be tuned to the realities of the classroom. The distribution of resources and indexes prototyped in TCA has attractive advantages. Because the actual multimedia resources text, pictures, video clips, spreadsheet templates, HyperCard stacks, software applications are distributed across the Internet, there is no limit to the quantity or size of these resources and no need for teachers to have large computers.

Resources can be posted on network servers maintained by school districts, regional educational organizations, textbook manufacturers and other agencies. Then the originating agency can maintain and revise the resources as necessary. However, the approach advocated here faces a major institutional challenge: The difficulty with this approach is the need to index every resource and to distribute these indexes to every computer that runs TCA. This involves a implementing a distribution and updating system for the case-base index records and b establishing the TCA indexing scheme as a standard.

The distribution and updating of indexes can be handled by tools within TCA and support software for major curriculum contributors. However, the standardization requires coordination among interested parties. Before any teachers can use TCA there must be useful indexed resources available on the network, with comprehensive suggested lesson plans. It is necessary to establish cooperation among federally-funded curriculum development efforts, textbook publishers, software publishers and school districts.

If successful, this will establish a critical mass of curriculum on the Internet accessible by TCA. Then the Internet can begin to be an effective medium for the global sharing of locally adaptable curriculum. Chapter 2 offers another fairly typical attempt to use the power of computer technology to support learning. Students need iterative practice with timely expert feedback for developing many skills, but computer-based drill and practice is not easy to implement in ways that are fun to use and educationally effective when the task involves interpreting semantics of free text.

It shows how a computer can provide a partial mentoring function, relieving teachers of some of the tedium while increasing personalized feedback to students. The software evolved through a complex interplay with its user community during classroom testing to provide effective automated feedback to students learning to summarize short texts.

It demonstrates the collaboration among researchers, teachers and students in developing educational innovations. It also suggests collaborative group use of such software. This case study is interesting not only for describing software design, implementation and adoption within a social context involving researchers, teachers and students, but also for its assessment of LSA, which is often proposed as a panacea for automated natural language understanding in CSCW and CSCL systems.

It is an idea that at first appears simple and powerful, but turns out to require significant fine-tuning and a very restricted application. Success also depends upon integration into a larger activity context in which the educational issues have been carefully taken into account. In this case, well-defined summarization skills of individual students are fairly well understood, making success possible.

Interactive learning environments promise to significantly enrich the experience of students in classrooms by allowing them to explore information under their own intrinsic motivation and to use what they discover to construct knowledge in their own words. To date, a major limitation of educational technology in pursuing this vision has been the inability of computer software to interpret unconstrained free text by students in order to interact with students without limiting their behavior and expression.

This feedback encourages the students to revise their summaries through many drafts, to reflect on the summarization process, to think more carefully about the subject matter, and to improve their summaries prior to handing them in to the teacher. Our software uses a technology called latent semantic analysis LSA to compare the student summary to the original text without having to solve the more general problem of computer interpretation of free text.

LSA has frequently been described from a mathematical perspective and the results of empirical studies of its validity are widely available in the psychological literature. To do this I describe how our software evolved through a two-year development and testing period. In this chapter I explain how our LSA-based environment works. There is no magic here.

LSA is a statistical method that has been developed by tuning a numeric representation of word meanings to human judgments. Similarly, State the Essence is the result of adapting computational and interface techniques to the performance of students in the classroom. Accordingly, this chapter presents an evolutionary view of the machinery we use to encourage students to evolve their own articulations of the material they are reading. Section 1 of this chapter discusses the goals and background of our work.

Section 2 takes a look at our interactive learning environment from the student perspective: Educational theory emphasizes the importance of students constructing their own understanding in their own terms. Yet most schooling software that provides automatic feedback to the students requires students to memorize and repeat exact wordings. Whereas the new educational standards call for developing the ability of students to engage in high-level critical thinking involving skills such as interpretation and argumentation, current software tools to tutor and test students still look for the correct answer to be given by a particular keyword.

In the attempt to assess learning more extensively without further over-burdening the teachers, schools increasingly rely upon computer scoring, typically involving multiple choice or single word answers. While this may be appropriate under certain conditions, it fails to assess more open-ended communication and reflection skills—and may deliver the wrong implicit message about what kind of learning is important.

Because we are committed to encouraging learners to be articulate, we have tried to overcome this limitation of computer support. The underlying technical issue involves, of course, the inability of computer software to understand normal human language. While it is simple for a program to decide if a multiple choice selection or a word entered by a student matches an option or keyword stored in the program as the correct answer, it is in general not possible for software to decide if a paragraph of English is articulating a particular idea.

While some researchers have been predicting since the advent of computers that the solution to this problem is just around the corner Turing, , others have argued that the problem is in principle unsolvable Dreyfus, ; Searle, The software technique we call latent semantic analysis LSA promises a way to finesse the problem of natural language understanding in many situations.

LSA has proven to be almost as good as human graders in judging the similarity of meaning of two school-related texts in English in a number of restricted contexts. Thus, we can use LSA to compare a student text to a standard text for semantic similarity without having to interpret the meaning of either text explicitly.

The retrieval problem arises whenever information may be indexed using different terms that mean roughly the same thing. LSA maintains a representation of what words are similar in meaning to each other, so it can retrieve information that is about a given topic regardless of which related index terms were used. The representation of what words are similar in meaning may be extended to determine what texts sentences, paragraphs, essays are similar in topic. The way that LSA does all this should become gradually clearer as this chapter unfolds.

Because LSA has often proven to be effective in judging the similarity in meaning between texts, it occurred to us that it could be used for judging student summaries. The idea seemed startlingly simple: Submit two texts to LSA—an original essay and a student attempt to summarize that essay. All that was needed was to incorporate this technique in a motivational format where the number is displayed as a score. Students would see the score and try to revise their summaries to increase their scores. In , we see Notes at end of book were a group of cognitive scientists who had been funded to develop educational applications of LSA to support articulate learners.

We were working with a team of two teachers at a local middle school. We recognized that summarization skills were an important aspect of learning to be articulate and discovered that the teachers were already teaching these skills as a formal part of their curriculum. We spent the next two years trying to implement and assess this simple sounding idea.

A companion paper Kintsch et al. Here I will just give one preliminary result of a more recent experiment I conducted informally, namely, to indicate the potential of this approach in a different context: This experiment was conducted in an undergraduate computer science course on AI. The instructor wanted to give the students a hands-on feel for LSA so we held a class in a computer lab with access to State the Essence. Once in the lab, students worked both individually and in small teams.

First they submitted their homework summary to State the Essence, and then revised it for about half an hour. The students who worked on part I individually worked on part II in groups for the second half hour, and vice versa. Of course, I cannot compare the number of drafts done on-line with the original homework summaries because the latter were done without feedback and presumably without successive drafts. Nor have I assessed summary quality or student time-on-task.

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However, informal observation during the experiment suggests that engagement with the software maintained student focus on revising the summaries, particularly in the collaborative condition. Interaction with the software in the collaborative groups prompted stimulating discussions about the summarization process and ways of improving the final draft—as well as the impressive number of revisions. Computer support of collaboration opens up a new dimension for the evolution of student articulations beyond what we have focused on in our research to date.

It would be important to develop interface features, feedback mechanisms and communication supports for collaboration to exploit the potential of collaborative learning. What did the students view on the computer screen that was so motivating that they kept revising their summaries?

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