ICT in Education

Thoughts on: Building Technology Support Learning Environments (Harper 1997)

August 31, 2007

Harper, B. (1997) Building Technology Supported Learning Environments. Paper presented at the Techno Expo, Professional Development Day, Catholic Education Centre, Parramatta. 2 May, 1997.

At first glance there’s not a lot new in this paper – a reasonably well argued pitch of constructivist philosophy and the need to embrace new learning strategies to make best use of new technologies.  From there though it does stimulate some interesting thought about the kinds of learning environments we can now create with technology.

Unfortunately, like a lot of the papers we seem to be reading in this class, 10 years of internet time has passed (which is like 30 years of real time) and it become necessary to extrapolate current tools (such as wikis) to the ideas in the paper, which aren’t able to dig into the potential of these things.

Harper (looking into the research) found that learning environments making use of technology had more use of:

• more project work
• more extensive projects
• more motivation for the writing process
• more group work and cooperative learning
• more interdisciplinary activities
• more opportunities for students to make choices
• teachers with a different philosophy of teaching.

He draws some interesting points from Dwyer (1995):

“…technology plays a catalytic role in opening the minds of teachers to new ideas about children, learning and their own role in the education process.”

This makes me think that the key to selling eLearning to resistant teachers is by showing how teaching with technology is different, new and exciting. (Useful for the 916 case study)  

Harper goes on to talk about visual metaphors for learning environments -

“With graphical and vidusal display coupled with large databases of resources, it is possible to explore an information space in whatever sequence appeals as appropriate to the user or to the specific task”

Which makes me ask – what if the learning space itself was customisable or at least selectable? – learners could choose their own metaphor from a set e.g a circus or an office or a swamp or a castle. Where is (or is there) the balance point between a “fun” metaphor vs a useful, authentic re-creation of a learning context. How much more useful/engaging is an office vs a castle?

Another question raised is that of giving learners access to rich multimedia resources but then always expecting them to construct their assessment items as text document. 

What if learners had options to present their project products in a number of different multimedia forms. – not just the actual multimedia project components but their reflection elements? Why shouldn’t a podcast be as relevant as an essay?

Harper sums up the constructivist push part of his paper by saying:

“… the key to success will be developing opportunities and situations where children can gather information, analyse the information collected, construct new knowledge from this information and then reflect on the outcomes” 

In looking at how we can develop technology supported constructivist environments, Harper looks at some instructional design goals from Marcy Driscoll. The following one sparked a question in me about feedback:

2. Provide for social negotation as an integral part of learning to allow insights to emerge through the group process that may not come about otherwise

Is there a difference between the feedback provided by a group to people’s work as individuals compared to their contributions to team projects. Are they less inclined to be critical in a group project as it means that they will have to redo something or will they be more critical as it can impact on their mark. I’ve noticed that the handful of comments that appear in our course forum are generally entirely positive and encouraging – is this because everyone’s right, noone wants to get into a stoush or people are more comfortable providing feedback when they agree with something.  

Harper goes on to examine some case studies as good examples of learning environments – Exploring the Nardoo raises some interesting approaches:

“In order to offer these facilities to learners, a sophisticated personal digital assistant was developed, allowing users to collect and save the full range of multimedia resources in the package including video, audio and graphic resources. Additionally genre templates were included to support students in their knowledge construction endeavours”

“The information landscape uses a geographic metaphor based upon a Water Research Centre and a navigable river environment”

The PDA tool allows the learner to assemble their resources in a way that makes the most sense to them – be they text, images, audio or video. There is also a capacity to create their own text notes. The logical next step is the ability to create image, audio and video resources.

Providing templates offers learners guidance on structure for their presentation, which seems pretty sensible.

This model sounds a bit like a Wiki precursor and makes me think that there might be new ways to approach the use of wikis.

What if you had a wiki where everyone had ownership of a particular area and others could make suggested edits but these would have to first be moderated by the area owner? Might you have a reputation system allowing the community to vote on who provides useful additions or suggestions? This is potentially rortable but worth considering.

This also makes me think of something on a slight tangent – a scoring system for online debate. Points for logical arguments, new ideas, expresssion, etc,  points against logical fallacies, abuse and so on.

So yeah, there are some interesting ideas here but more in the way they’ve helped me to wander down a few sidetracks.

Harper does manage to move on a bit further though after a couple of pages

Entry Filed under: 913, constructivism, education design, information landscape. .