Teaching with the Web:
Project-based Learning and Distributed Curriculum

Roger B. Blumberg
Scholarly Technology Group
Brown University

Prepared for New England Teachers Conference (NETC '97)
Providence, Rhode Island -- November 4, 1997
http://www.stg.brown.edu/pub/slides/roger/netc97.html

• Evaluating Educational Technology: Preliminary Distinctions
• What the Web is
• Kinds of information for Educators on the Web
• The opportunity for collaboration
• The challenge of teaching with networked technology
• References

Note: There are a few Plug-ins you'll need to properly view (and hear) all the materials in this presentation.

Evaluating Educational Technology: Preliminary Distinctions

Although studies about the impact of technology on K-12 education continue to appear, none have revealed anything significantly different than Cuban [1986], and most reveal only a lack of innovation in the evaluation of the new technologies. There are, however, things we can say with some confidence, even at this preliminary stage of evaluating efforts to successfully combine good teaching with networked technologies:

1. Instructional Goals must drive the choice of technology, even as the results of teaching can significantly alter those goals. Thus a preliminary classification of educational technologies (after Means [1994]) may be useful.

• Exchange of information and communication between individuals (1:1; 1:many; many:1; many:many).
  • Electronic mail (e.g. rbb@brown.edu)
  • Listserv (e.g. wwwedu)
  • Newsgroups (e.g. sci.edu)
  • FTP server (e.g. STG's server)
  • Web "conferencing" (e.g. NCSA's HyperNews)

• Electronic tutor
  • Educational software (e.g. CoVis)
  • Instructional television (e.g. MCET's Take Off! program)
    • An aside about Distance Education and Tele-Learning
  • Instructional hypertexts (e.g. MendelWeb, Victorian Web)
  • Instructional multimedia (e.g. Real Audio presentations)

• Electronic tool I
  • Applications (e.g. MS Word, Adobe Photoshop, Matlab)
  • Clients (e.g. Eudora, Fetch, Netscape)
  • Groupware (e.g. Lotus' Domino)

• Electronic tool II
  • Reference "books" (e.g. Brown's Virtual Reference Collection)
  • Archives (e.g. Shakespeare's complete works at MIT, and the new OnLine Books at CMU)
  • Data sources (e.g. GIS Data Sources and the United Nations' InfoNation)
  • Collaborative learning environments (e.g. The Reader's Mendel, Diversity University)

• Entry
• Adoption
• Adaptation
• Appropriation
• Invention

3. If it is no coincidence that all our identified "best and promising practices" are teacher-made, the question "How do we train teachers?" may not be nearly as important as "How do we share examples to inspire teachers?" Remember Cuban, referring primarily to film and television in the classroom:

"The exhiliration/scientific-credibility /disappointment /teacher-bashing cycle described here drew its energy from an unswerving, insistent impulse on the part of non-teachers to change classroom practice." (Cuban [1986], pp. 5-6)

4. Thus far, the effective use of networked technologies seem to foster/build practices and habits not typical in the history of classroom technology use (after Fulton [1997]):

• Development of desirable meta-skills (e.g. motivation, autonomy, collaboration).
• Introducing new kinds of content (e.g. Dalton's Archeotype)
• Introducing advanced content earlier (e.g. calculus@internet)
• Fostering collaboration between school and community (e.g. distance mentoring)
• Development of competence for the 21st century.

What the Web Is: a system of distributed hypermedia.

• distributed because the "documents" reside on computers throughout the network.
• hypermedia because the "documents" are often (though not always) in a variety of digital media formats, linked to one another, and accessible within a single "browse".

Kinds of information for educators on the Web

• There are well-developed libraries of on-line books, clearinghouses for on-line articles, as well as more news than fits in print.
• Lists of Education Sites and Resources are common, as are searching tools, but there are problems of pointers that point to pointers, not to mention problems of reliability and quality.
• There are Regional Educational Laboratories, and Regional Technology Consortia, funded by the Department of Education. These are increasingly important sources of technology plans and research about teaching with technology.
• There are course materials, and webs built upon topics as well as primary texts and interactive electronic textbooks.
• There are "laboratory" resources, as well as databases of various sorts, interesting forms of text retrieval, and in the last six months the appearance of "streaming" multimedia presentations.

The opportunity for collaboration

• Before the Web, collaborative communication systems included listservs and internet newsgroups. Although these can be archived on the Web in useful ways, they do not necessarily facilitate rich collaborations.
• But the Web also allows for the construction of collaborative hypertexts and interactive tools, as well as a variety of collaborative activities. For example, HyperNews can be used for Web-based "conferencing", and has some major advantages over the listserv and newsgroup model, and simple data collection systems are easily implemented (from the technological point of view at least). Richer (more expensive) Web-based document and project management systems are rapidly evolving as well.
• Finally, integrated Web-Moo systems, like Diversity University, have begun to be used for important educational activities, and these systems allow for several varieties of synchronous and asynchronous communication with document management.

The real challenge of teaching with networks (it has little to do with the equipment!)

• How does the role of the teacher change in project-based learning, and tele-collaborative projects?

• What does it mean to "teach", "learn" or "be taught" a subject like history, given the availability of competing narratives and access to the combination of new media and primary sources?

• (How) should the division of labor in educational institutions (from the production of teaching and learning materials, and curricula, to the evaluation of what happens in education) change in the face of education with networks?

• What is the purpose of "schooling" in the 21st century?

References

Cuban, Larry. Teachers and Machines: The Classroom Use of Technology Since 1920. (Teachers College Press, 1986).

Fulton, Kathleen. "Technology in the Classroom: Panacea or Pandora's Box?" Written Testimony Submitted to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Subcommittee on Technology (May 6, 1997)

Means, Barbara. "Using Technology to Advance Educational Goals." in Barbara Means (ed.), Technology and Education Reform: The Reality Behind the Promise. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1994), pp. 1-22.

Sandholtz, Judith Haymore, Ringstaff, Cathy, and Dwyer, David C. Teaching with Technology: Creating Student-Centered Classrooms. (New York: Teachers College Press, 1997)

In order to take full advantage of the sites referred to in this talk, you'll need the following (free) Web plug-ins:

• The Real Audio Player 3.0 or later (from Progressive Networks).
• Live Math (from MathView Online)
• Shockwave (from Macromedia)

© 1997 Scholarly Technology Group, Brown University
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