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Tutorial uses are those in which the technology does the teaching, typically in a lecture-like or workbook-like format in which the system controls what material will be presented to the student. In our classification scheme, tutorial uses include (1) expository learning, in which the system provides information; (2) demonstration, in which the system displays a phenomenon; and (3) practice, in which the system requires the student to solve problems, answer questions, or engage in some other procedure.
Technologies for tutorial learning typically use a transmission rather than constructivist model of instruction. For this reason, although they have found their place in education and have the greatest rate of adoption of all types of technology within schools thus far, they are unlikely to serve as a catalyst for restructuring education. The focus of drill-and-practice computer-assisted instruction (CAI) on basic skills allows little room for the presentation of complex tasks, multistep problems, or collaborative learning. Intelligent computer-assisted instruction (ICAI), on the other hand, has the potential to deal with complex domains, to provide models of higher-order thinking, and to probe students' understanding, but it has seldom been well integrated into a school's mainstream curriculum. One-way video technologies (such as Ghostwriter or Square One) can be very motivating but are nearly always viewed as enrichment and have not instigated fundamental changes within schools.
Exploratory uses of technology are those in which the student is free to roam around the information displayed or presented in the medium. Many of these applications have incorporated the imaginative use of video. Exploratory applications may promote discovery or guided discovery approaches to helping students learn information, knowledge, facts, concepts, or procedures. In contrast to tutorial uses, in which the technology acts on the student, in exploratory uses the student controls the learning.
Exploratory applications can support the kind of student learning that is the goal of education reform. Video episodes and information resources can present complex, authentic tasks, engage students in active problem solving, require utilization and synthesis of knowledge from a variety of domains, and provide a context for collaborative learning activities. There are, however, significant practical limitations to many of these applications. First, from the teacher's standpoint, these exciting and imaginative applications are fine for enrichment but typically don't match the core curriculum. Hence, they may find a place in the "margins" of education but don't really transform the core. Also, exploratory applications with set episodes have a relatively short "shelf life." Once students learn how to solve, complete, or engage in the complex tasks required by the simulation or video, they are ready to move on to something else. Finally, there is the issue of scarcity: complex simulations and exploratory videos are expensive to develop, hence there are few. The problem is made worse by the fragmentation of the American education market, with its decentralized buying decisions and wide variation in curricula. Technology application developers have little hope of being able to match the curriculum of enough schools well enough to have a broad market base (Levin and Meister, 1985). Without such a broad base, they see little hope of recapturing a major investment. A factor that appears likely to change the economics of producing multimedia educational materials is the potential for a much larger home-use market. Many software publishers are starting to invest in products that can be marketed for both home and school use.
Tool uses, such as the use of word processors and spreadsheets, help students in the educational process by providing them with general-purpose applications to facilitate writing tasks, analysis of data, the location of information resources, and other uses. In addition to word processors and spreadsheets, applications include database management programs, graphing software, desktop publishing systems, Internet browsers, and video recording, digitizing, and editing equipment. When technology is used as a tool, the curriculum content resides not in the software but in the instructional activity within which the tool is used. The technology itself does not convey the content (except in the limited cases where the instructional goal is to learn to use the technology tool).
Used well, technology applications can support students' work on authentic, complex tasks. The tasks in which students apply these tools--library research, scanning media, talking to experts, recording information, writing or otherwise producing compositions--reflect the kinds of work in which they will continue to engage throughout their careers. The tasks are authentic and multidisciplinary. Additionally, students who use technology tools are active learners: choosing composition topics, doing fieldwork, and, at times, teaching the teachers. Students work collaboratively, not only with each other but with researchers and teachers. The potential disadvantage lies in the fact that little or no content knowledge is embedded in a word processing program, hypermedia tool, or Internet browser. The value of activities involving these technology tools lies in the instructional context supplied by the teacher, not the technology per se. Teachers and students need to avoid the temptation to spend large amounts of time on aspects of technology use that do not further learning goals.
Communication uses are those that allow students and teachers to send and receive messages and information to one another through networks or other technologies. Interactive distance learning via satellite, computer and modem, cable links, or other technologies is one example of communication uses.
Distance learning can give students and teachers access to a broad range of resources and support collaborative projects involving complex themes. Collection and sharing of scientific data, interactions with practicing scientists, and sending work to other classrooms or publishing student products over the Internet are examples of uses of technology for communication. Widely touted for the capability to bring a broader range of resources into the classroom, communications technology also provides a sense of authenticity and importance for tasks (e.g., writing, data analysis) that are often viewed as mundane when undertaken with the classroom teacher as the sole judge and audience.
Teachers can draw on technology applications to simulate real-world environments and create actual environments for experimentation, so that students can carry out authentic tasks as real workers would, explore new terrains, meet people of different cultures, and use a variety of tools to gather information and solve problems. Working on "authentic tasks," which Brown, Collins, and Duguid (1989) define simply as the ordinary practices of the culture, engages students in sustained exploration and provides multiple opportunities to reflect on the decisions made in trying to address the problem. With simulations, students can get involved with a problem, often through visual media, which provide integrated contexts and help students comprehend new ideas more easily (Hasselbring, Goin, Zhou, Alcantara, and Musil, 1992).
Simulations are student centered since students make decisions and see the results of their actions. The teacher is present, but in the role of coach, using discussion to prompt students to explore different aspects of the problem space, answering students' questions, and encouraging students to elaborate their thinking and listen to other points of view. Because the problem space is always accessible (unlike real-life situations), students can revisit and revise their conceptual understanding. The examples below illustrate how technology can supply a motivating context for learning activities and support student involvement in authentic tasks.
Voyage of the Mimi--The Voyage of the Mimi I, developed by Bank Street College in 1985, is a 13-part television drama that portrays the adventures of a group of young scientists who are studying whales off the coast of New England. The crew conducts scientific experiments and solves technical problems. A separate documentary portrays scientists engaged in their work. Four computer modules engage students in using navigation concepts and instruments, for example, to free a trapped whale. The modules also include a microworld ecosystem, a tool for measuring and graphing physical events, and a programming environment. A book version of the TV show, classroom activities, and additional resources are available for teachers. The Second Voyage of the Mimi focuses on archaeology and the culture of the ancient Maya in Mexico's Yucatan peninsula in a multimedia package including 12 television episodes and two software programs--Maya Math and Sun Lab. More recently, this approach was extended in Bank Street's Palenque project, a digital video interactive (DVI) prototype that provides for electronic as well as thematic integration of student explorations into various aspects of Mayan culture (Wilson and Tally, 1991).
Immigrant 1850--Developed by Project Zero at Harvard University, Immigrant 1850 provides students with access to a core set of computer-based activities in which they can adopt an Irish immigrant family and "live through" the complex decisions the family may have made in finding housing and a job, calculating finances, and shopping within their earnings. Students can use a database, spreadsheet, and word processor to calculate expenses and keep diaries (Morrison and Walters, 1989; Walters and Gardner, 1990; Walters and Gardner, 1991). Many teachers involved with the Immigrant 1850 unit used the existing materials as a starting point to create additional innovative learning environments for their particular students, drawing on additional technology applications (e.g., an extensive on-line, visual database) and corollary activities (e.g., tracking the population of American cities, Indian tribes in Texas, etc.). Researchers also found that some teachers used Immigrant 1850 as a model to create their own engaging computer-based curriculum units (Walters and Gardner, 1991).
Adventures of Jasper Woodbury--This series of video adventures, designed by the Cognition and Technology Group (1991) at Vanderbilt University, requires mathematical reasoning to solve complex problems in trip planning, probability and statistics, and geometry. Videos 17 to 20 minutes long provide natural contexts for learning mathematics, as well as geography, history, and science. Each video ends with a challenge, rather than a resolution. The information to solve the problem is embedded within the video, which can be reviewed and studied to pick out relevant information.
The Cognition and Technology Group asserts that by being video based, the learning experience is more motivating and allows for more complex problems than could be presented in a written or audio-only medium. Motivation and comprehension are further heightened through use of a story providing a realistic context and a familiar structure for the problems presented. The narrative format provides for the introduction of other subject matter topics; for example, the skill of map reading is used in an episode dealing with trip planning, thus providing links to geography and navigation. The learning format is generative; the stories in the Jasper series must be completed with a resolution provided by the students. Generating this resolution requires solving a complex mathematics problem. Data needed to solve the problem are embedded in the story itself, just as in other good mystery stories. The videos are created in pairs of related adventures so that students can transfer mathematical or reasoning concepts learned in one video context to new contexts.
The Jasper videos are available in a variety of media: videotape, videodisc, and hypermedia (Cognition and Technology Group, 1991). In the hypermedia version, students can engage in basic skills practice, change parameters of the original problem to generate an analogous problem (e.g., new locations, goals, etc.), and explore related mini-adventures.
Project GALAXY--The GALAXY Foundation has developed a set of curriculum materials and instructional strategies integrating television broadcasts, classroom hands-on activities, and communication with the project office and among participating classrooms via telefacsimile. Curriculum materials have been developed in both science (for grades 3-5 and K-2) and language arts (for grades 3-5). In both cases, the curriculum is structured around a series of television episodes in which a multiethnic group of preteens tackle, encounter, and reason about puzzling situations. Students are encouraged to fax their own suggested answers or approaches for the problems in to GALAXY Central. Some of the telefacsimiles are incorporated into later televised episodes. The television broadcasts are supplemented with teacher training, a teacher's guide, a student magazine, and a faxed response bulletin board that lists the names of students who sent faxes. In addition to these resources, the materials for science include hands-on science activities developed by the Lawrence Hall of Science (FOSS and GEMS) and take-home science kits.
Antarctica Project--As part of the Middle School Mathematics through Applications Project of the Institute for Research on Learning, students participate in a multidisciplinary project to design an Antarctic research station. Using architectural design software developed especially for the project, students practice mathematics skills as they deal with issues such as heat loss, building dimensions, and building costs. Students work in teams to develop their designs and then present their work to the entire class for review and critique. Teacher materials support linkages between the design activities and topics in the mathematics curriculum.
Model-It--As part of the ScienceWare project at the University of Michigan, Eliot Soloway and his colleagues have developed and field tested software that allows students to construct scientific models and simulations without having to master a programming language or advanced mathematics. Called Model-It, this software has been used thus far in a year-long ninth-grade thematic curriculum on the ecology of a stream. A digitized photo of the area being investigated (i.e., a local stream) provides a motivating, customized context. Students then hypothesize about the relationships among variables (such as the phosphate level and the amount of algae) and use the system to clarify and test their models. The system offers options of specifying the nature of the relationship between two variables (i.e., changes in slope) in simple language ("as stream phosphates increase, stream quality decreases by less and less") with the option to see what the graph of this relationship looks like. Real data can be entered into a table and then viewed as a graph for comparison with the graphs based on hypothesized relationships. Students can run their models and view meters showing the value of each variable and how it changes over time (Soloway, 1995).
Geometric Supposer--Geometric Supposer is a set of microcomputer software tools developed by Judah Schwartz and Michal Yerushalmy to teach high school geometry through a guided-inquiry approach. The Supposers, which are supplied on three floppy disks, allow the user to make geometric constructions of the sort created with a compass and straightedge (Wiske and Houde, 1988). Students engage in inductive thinking and have a chance to "reinvent" definitions and theorems and to explore new, interesting, and complex geometric ideas.
Collaborative Visualization Project (CoVis)--By fundamentally relying on information networks and remote multimedia services, distributed multimedia learning environments extend the limits of individual classrooms. CoVis is a testbed consisting of an advanced network that integrates telecommunications, multimedia, computing, and new collaboration software for investigation of the potential of collaboration and scientific visualization technologies. Two high schools, scientists, science museums, and a host of experts are developing project-enhanced science learning. Shared workspaces and two-way audio/video connections allow for collaborative visualization of science phenomena, data, and models. The project is crafting software applications--a Collaborative Science Workbench and a Science Learning Resource Directory--to sustain collaborative visualization activities across remote classrooms and other sites (Pea, 1993).
Video for Exploring the World (VIEW)--VIEW supports the use of video as a type of laboratory instrument. VIEW provides students with quick access to real-world data such as human and animal motion as well as the behavior of crowds, flocks, and traffic. Students analyze real phenomena rather than abstract models. Frame-by-frame viewing and time-lapse allow student to shrink and expand time to work with otherwise inaccessible phenomena. With the capability for digitizing video so that it can be shown on the screen, manipulated, and placed on the Internet, video is used as a powerful and exciting visualization tool for scientific investigations (Rubin, 1993).
Computer-Supported Intentional Learning Environments (CSILE)--CSILE was developed by Marlene Scardamalia and Carl Bereiter at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. It has been used in a research program within Toronto schools for over 5 years. CSILE functions as a "collaborative learning environment" and a communal database, with both text and graphics capabilities. This networked multimedia environment allows students to generate "nodes," each containing an idea, graphic, or piece of information relevant to the topic under study. Types of nodes students can enter include "problem," "my theory," and "new information." Nodes are available for other students to comment on, leading to dialogues and an accumulation of knowledge. Students have to label their nodes to be able to store and retrieve them; over time, they come to appreciate the value of a precise, descriptive label. In addition to receiving writing practice as they create their own nodes, students get practice reading the nodes generated by others.
In this project, researchers Scardamalia and Bereiter seek to develop a supportive discourse community by using the CSILE communal database as well as guidelines for students to formulate and test theories. CSILE is being used in nine sites, including elementary, secondary, and postgraduate levels. Findings indicate that CSILE students show significant advantages over control students on standardized tests, portfolio entries, depth of explanations, and beliefs about learning (Scardamalia and Bereiter, 1993). Previous CSILE applications have used local area networks within schools; implementations of CSILE communities across schools are planned.
Learning Circles--The AT&T Learning Network links classes from geographically diverse locations into "learning circles" to accomplish shared educational goals (Riel, 1991). Each classroom within a learning circle has the opportunity to design projects and request information from the other circle partners for projects such as how weather and seasonal patterns affect the daily lives of people in different locations, the influence of mass media on children's lives, and a survey of cities in transition (Riel, 1990a; 1990b). Students in New York, Australia, and Canada, as well as other distant locations, researched and then traded stories about the history of their own communities. After collecting the information from their distant partners via the telecommunications network, the students worked with the information they received-- analyzing, evaluating, synthesizing, and eventually publishing the project in a cooperative learning circle publication.
Research suggests that students are better able to function as intellectual critics for distant peers than for themselves or classmates and that they learn to write better when physical distance makes clear the need to provide explicit content for the reader (Riel, 1992). An additional advantage is that physical and sensory limitations become "invisible" in this medium. Hearing-impaired students in one learning circle class wrote to another class about what it is like to be deaf and how they are often treated as stupid (Riel, 1992). Riel also (1990b) found that the teacher became a learner alongside students, serving as a model of active learning.
TERC Network Science Programs--Over the past decade, TERC has been linking groups of classrooms to each other and to professional scientists who can help students explore pressing global questions. TERC's network science programs are based on the premise that students can carry out scientific investigations with real scientists and that computers can enhance this enterprise (Julyan, 1991). Students conduct experiments, analyze data, and share results with their colleagues by using a simple computer-based telecommunications network (Julyan, 1991).
Kids Network. One of the TERC network projects, the National Geographic Kids Network, involves students and teachers across the United States and in a number of foreign countries working collaboratively on science projects such as a study of acid rain (TERC, 1990). Students collect data on the pH of their local water, share the data with the other schools on the telecommunications network, and consult with scientists (Lenk, 1988). Themes of additional curriculum units are "Too Much Trash," "What's in Our Water?," "Weather in Action," "What Are We Eating?" and "Solar Energy."
TERC Star Schools. Another TERC network project, the Star Schools project, involves secondary students and teachers from across the country and recognized resource centers. These groups tackle compelling problems such as measuring radon levels in their schools, designing solar houses, collecting weather data, and exploring "mathematical chaos" (Berger, 1989). Teachers feel that this environment allows students to realize that important problems are complex and may have more than one solution.
Earth Lab--Directed by Denis Newman of Bolt, Beranek and Newman, Inc., this project created classroom environments in which students used collaborative workspaces to learn elementary earth science in much the same way as scientists do (Newman, 1992). All of the computers in the school were connected via a local area network (LAN) to a hard-disk drive, which allowed for central storage of data, text, and programs. Teachers created environments for teaching and learning that were decompartmentalized (Newman, 1990). The computer lab was increasingly used in a "heterogeneous manner," with groups of students from several classes working on different projects simultaneously. The communication technology designed to bring the school in closer contact with other parts of the globe, also appeared to reduce the barriers between classes within the school (Newman, 1990; 1992).
Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment (GLOBE)--Beginning in 1995, GLOBE will link students throughout the world in over 2,000 schools to each other and to a worldwide community of earth scientists. The program's goals are to promote students' awareness of environmental issues and the earth as a dynamic system. The design and implementation of GLOBE is informed by earlier projects in which networked classrooms around the United States and around the world have worked collaboratively to collect scientific data, aggregate it, analyze it, and discuss its interpretation. The project will test the effectiveness of networked technology for supporting science education on an international scale.
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