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Four Questions for 6110

Feeling that I need to address these questions directly in brief, least I forget:

a) How can the Web be an interactive educational tool?

As they say in math classes...

"Certainly this is obvious..."

But when we look at the question closely, we need to figure out at what level the interactivity exists.

With web sites that promote community involvement, the learning takes place by taking part in the community.

For sites that want to promote a behaviorist model of learning, aka present the material, provide status quizzes and evaluation, feedback, and retesting, the web can not only simplify this process, but can make it economical as well. (See www.sakaiproject.org )

And educational games and activities deployed via the web can be an incredible source of learning, as my 7 year old can attest to. I like to point people to Danny Hillis' keynote at the game developer conference a couple of years ago. Danny, one of the recognized leading thinkers of our generation, ( See his online technetcast) hits it on the head more than anyone I've heard or read on this subject.

b) How can a web master design and develop an interactive educational web site?

The key to developing any good application is to work closely with those that know the application area. Whether the teacher in the education space is the developer or not, the process needs strong skills in design and software engineering, as well a strong understanding of the educational domain, and learning process that the application is trying to encapsulate.

This will be the bane and Achilles heel of any process where the educator is trying to both teach and create interactive web based learning environments. What NEEDS to happen, is the tool set needs to come up a level from the simple flash development environment, and classes of applications need to be identified so that the educator can use templates to create their material similar to templates used in powerpoint. I've seen a few design templates available for flash development, but much more needs to be done in this area.

c) How can the Internet technology be more effectively taught in the classroom, and what are some of the impediments that hinder its use?

I may go into more detail on this topic later, but two simple changes need to occur.

1) School districts need to get over the idea of internet being a threat, and learn how to manage the process of access and child privacy issues. This seems to vary greatly from district
to district, and seems very dependent upon a single technical administrator, who sets the district policy. I think the more progressive districts are starting to understand this, and are working on ways to manage this.

2) Students need to be both consumers and creators of information, and learn how to create information in this environment.

d) How can educators or web masters use Flash to increase the interactivity level in their Web design?

See above. For educators to use flash effectively, the toolset needs to come up a level into the learning environment. While this will potentially limit creativity, it will streamlinethe creation process.

By bobk at 2005-11-16 14:24 | bobk's blog | login or register to post comments

Rambling response to one small point

I agree, schools need to get past seeing the internet as a threat, and I think many have. The bigger problem is what you addressed earlier, how does one use the internet and computer technology for education. As yet the technology does not exist to replace the classroom, but it does exist to create tools that can be used in the classroom and in support of the classroom.

The tools you want to see built may suffer from the problems other educational software seems to too often have... no classroom educators were involved in the guiding of its design. I'm thinking of a colleague, who in doubt of his career goals, took a year off from teaching to explore his options. At one point he was working with a company who was developing a tutorial program for elementary school students. These engineers and programmers had no clue as to what the average 10 year old could do and were constantly setting tasks by unrealistic state standards, not considering any educational realities. What a 5th grade student "ought" to know and do and what one does know and do really have no relationship to each other as the standards are rather arbitrarily derived many bureaucratic and political levels away from the actual student and have no real bearing on their life outside of school.

Any tools made for educators have to be simpler than what is offered for PowerPoint and designed by actual educators. I know many teachers that won't use PowerPoint because they find it too hard (too steep a learning curve). People need to have the interface match what they are used to and the machine adapted to them (people should not ever be asked to adapt to the machine) and that takes minuets not hours to learn. It takes 5 years of college and two years of on the job training (or their equivalent) to become a teacher in California. Adding yet another requirement is not feasible for a position that demands many hours of unpaid overtime. Just when are they supposed to learn how to use the basic machine (none of which are intuitive despite the claims), much less how to program the lessons and lesson support they would want their students to use on the machines?

I think the internet, and the portion of it that is the world wide web, may offer some part of a solution to this via the developing model of subscription software. Rather than making modules that are sold separately, the entire subject can be developed from preschool to latest developments in a field and then offered via a monthly or annual subscription that is accessed via ones network connection.

Feedback from the instructor can be used to guide development (such as the customized development of specific reports, forms, tasks, and lessons from a subscriber that then go into the general library of searchable tasks that can then be further modified as others request changes, etc.) In this way a student can learn at whatever level of development they are at and then move to the next or stop as appropriate. You don’t need to purchase Math Blaster for intermediate grades only to find it is really middle school level work, too hard for the students, and can't be modified. One can simply have them use Math Blaster by assigned subject/skill (and if necessary have specific lessons built by the developer, based on existing modules, at the instructor/subscriber' request). If student A needs to master multiplication while student B needs long division and student C needs to “get” expressions you simply have them work on what they need. If a special needs student needs the multiplication lesson modified to match their IEP (or better still the teacher recognized need) then the teacher either uses the tools you suggest to make the modification or requests it from the subscription service. The modified lesson is then made available to other subscribers (lowering the development time and costs).

I like the model… we just need more companies to adopt it, develop it, and price it reasonably.

Ramble/Rant Over…

End Communication

--Eric/Saturnine

By Saturnine at Sat, 2005-11-19 13:54 | login or register to post comments

Bridging the teacher / technologist perspective

Eric,

I think that is great feedback. What I am trying
to suggest is a model where the educators closest
to the classroom begin to create the required content
in a collaborative fashion.

As far as powerpoint, coming from industry, I would
argue that most, if not all students, by their senior year,
and hence their teachers, will soon be required to understand
how to create some form of multi media presentation.

Currently at the high school level I here that much of the
lecture material is presented via powerpoint. Granted, not
all, as I've seen some excellent teachers that don't even
go near their computers, but I think that is the exception.

My wife, for instance, is in her second year of teaching
anatomy in HS. She spends an incredible amount of time
scouring the internet for existing material - photos, diagrams, etc.
In a year or two, I am guessing that she will have her course
down pat. What I see as interesting is the process that she
goes through to organize her lectures and powerpont
presentations - a learning process in itself, and not
unlike what goes on in open source development. What I'm
proposing is to learn from those open source communities
that have spent a lot of time creating the environments for
developing software, and apply those same techniques to
creating coursework for the classroom.

Examples of this for LMS systems include moodle.org and sakai,
and drupaled. What I'm saying is that the infrastructure
tool/system creators need to think creatively with the content
creation folks - both those that make tools for creating content,
or create syndication and taxonomies around educational material,
and those that actually create the content, to create an integrated
system that includes infrastructure tools and the actual content.

I believe that today's teachers, and school districts, can learn much
from the internet alpha geeks, and begin to gain control directly over
their own course material. But I think it needs to be approached from
the process level, rather than having individual teachers learn the
tools and methods in a vacuum.

Read some articles on the open source software development model. Even
though you may not understand the lingo in terms of the technology, you
might find the process of software creation interesting. Just replace
the word "software" with "educational material" every time you see it.

It's that idea of collaboration and common, open standards that made the internet
what it is today, and caused it to happen as fast as it did. Imagine what may
happen when today's educators truely pick up on that.

By bobk at Sun, 2005-11-20 19:56 | login or register to post comments