Papers

Personal computers make diagram, chart, and graph creation technically a lot easier: just plug in some data, choose one of the pre-defined presentation styles, and the software application churns out a pretty looking illustration. The result is a proliferation of abstract visual information, miscomprehension of which might have serious personal and civic implications. The general consensus is that “a picture is worth a thousand words.” But is it really true? In this paper, I examine the results from a small preliminary study which analyzes how much information individuals are able to extract from a set of complex diagrams and cross-reference it with public school instructional goals. In particular, visual symbolic processing is broken down into the ability to find information in a diagram; to use data in the diagram to generate new information; to create explanations of graphically presented information; to compare the usefulness of two diagrams presenting similar information; and to summarize the main ideas of a complex diagram. The subjects of this study ranged greatly in age and in levels of education. Yet, it was still apparent that higher level visual symbolic processing skills required in summarization and generation and inference of new information from existing data were the most difficult and led to the most numbers of communication failures. A surprising secondary result was a gender discrepancy in performance outcome, with female participants scoring significantly lower than their male counterparts. A planned larger study might shed more light on both outcomes.

In this paper, I examine student motivation and group dynamics for Internet-based learning materials. Student motivation and group dynamics play an important role in an instructional design. Student motivation can be improved through procedural goal alignment. Group dynamics specify whether the learning situation is collaborative, competitive, or cooperative. It notes the important conditions for these environments: the size of a group, the duration of the project, the scope of work, the individual time availability, the distribution of expertise among the group, the social status of group members, rate of communication/interaction among group members, and the distribution of work among members of the group. Online learning environments allow for collaboration, competition, and cooperation, but negotiating these interactions has to be more explicit since face to face meetings between members of a group are not possible. Recognizing the different forms of group dynamics and symmetries of member interactions is a necessary part of Internet-based learning environment design.

In this paper, I examine a taxonomy of internet-based learning materials and introduce The Situational Learning Matrix. The Situational Learning Matrix considers students’ goals for engaging with online educational materials versus the motivations of producers of those materials. I further discuss goal misalignment as a possible reason for failure of an online educational experience and provide an inventory of computer-based interactional and instructional objects.

This dissertation analyzes The Company Therapist project, an adult online group cooperative creative writing class. It uses Jonassen et al. (2003) criteria for meaningful learning: technology should be used to engage students in active, constructive, intentional, authentic, and cooperative learning. It examines a taxonomy of internet-based learning materials using The Situational Learning Matrix and focuses on the differences between cooperation and collaboration using the following variables (partly based on Dillenbourg (1999)): total project time, individual time, total work, individual work, group size, interaction symmetries, individual motivation, and rate of interaction. The dissertation further discusses the possible reasons for failure or success of an online educational experience and provides an inventory of computer-based interactional and instructional objects.

There are benefits and drawbacks to using the Internet to deliver educational opportunities. The structure of the curriculum can greatly increase the former and reduce the latter. My main goal was to design and develop an instructional structure that supports meaningful learning as defined above, takes full advantage of this medium, and caters to the needs of adult students that choose it as their preferred method for getting their education. The result of this design and development effort was The Company Therapist project, which ran continuously from 1996 to 1999. The product of this course can be found at www.TheTherapist.com. Using the data from this project, I’ve examined the differences between cooperative and collaborative group projects, student motivation, and goal alignment. I then discusses the instructional structures necessary to support these. I use The Company Therapist project as model of the design, development, and execution of an online course to teach creative writing to a group. I then explore taking this curriculum structure and applying it to a different circumstance with a different audience, creating a proposal for the History in The Making project.

Many high schools use the web poorly. We’ve all seen “brochureware” where the material could easily be replaced with a piece of paper, or “shovelware” where content is posted on the web with little thought as to how it is to be used. More insidious are the offerings of a number of commercial vendors which focus on the needs of the administration or faculty (i.e. tracking and assessment) rather than the real needs of individual students.

We envision the creation of an online workspace which wraps content with a collection of standardized tools and meta cognitive templates. For reasons of economies of scale, we think that this work should be developed with the input of each of the high schools and then shared among the schools rather than being developed from scratch by each institution. But each high school, and each instructor, would make their schools online space their own by filling it with their own curriculum-related content. This is particularly important when the curriculum-related content may have been originally developed for an older college-age audience.

We encourage serious attention to be paid to the opportunities of integrating online tools with traditional curricula. The online opportunity presented by the Early College High Schools is just too good to pass up.

Dr. Alan Kay provided the industry keynote for the workshop held January 17, 2003 at the University of California, Berkeley. Participants investigated both the technical and sociotechnical barriers and enablers associated with the use of multimedia, wireless technologies and other information technologies in education digital libraries and knowledge management.

This paper examines how temporal and spatial observation variables can drastically alter a visitor’s comprehension of the phenomena depicted by a museum exhibit. The focus is on a tornado exhibit at the Exploratorium, a museum of science and human perception in San Francisco (California). Videotaped recordings of 10 children interacting with the simulated tornado, field observations made at the museum, and an interview with a museum employee provide data. The 10 cases show how visitors can develop misperceptions about the exhibits and the phenomena they demonstrate. Some misconceptions were based on the faulty scripts of interactions with the exhibits. Some of the scripts were observed to be derived from observing other visitors and appropriating their ideas for interactions. Observations made by visitors are influenced by numerous factors, such as vantage point and time during which the observations are made. The visitors’ backgrounds in science and their general understanding of the phenomena are also important influences on perceptual focus. Eleven figures present case data. Appendix 1 classifies the visitors, Appendix 2 presents the theoretical background, and Appendix 3 contains nine sample screens from the exhibit.

Although research is an essential function in modern society, it is rarely taught explicitly in schools. To find out what beliefs are held and what strategies are used by sixth and seventh grade students in connection with their research skills repertoire, a set of written questions, interviews, and activities were designed. This thesis offers a detailed description of this study and some conclusions reached on the basis of the data obtained. In particular, I’ve found that some students do not remember ever being asked to do research in school. No two students in this study had the same idea of what is involved in doing research, and many believed it had something to do with taking notes. Several intuitive notions—p-prims—about the validity of data held by the majority of the students are described in this paper. For example: “bigger books are better,” “all text books are better,” “books written by white men with beards are better,” are all ideas expressed by children asked to decribe the best source of valid information and rate books according to the quality of information found within.