Integrating the Web and the teaching of technology: Cases across two
universities
John
Eklund Faculty of Education
PO Box 222, Lindfield NSW 2070
University of Technology,
Sydney
(Formerly of The University
of Sydney)
Email: j.eklund@UTS.edu.au
Peter
Eklund
Department of Computer Science The University of
Adelaide Adelaide SA 5005
Email: peter@cs.adelaide.edu.au
Keywords:
Web, Technology Education, Collaboration, Student-Centred Learning
Introduction and theoretical underpinning
The Web is both a recent innovative technology and a tool through which
student's investigative and research skills may be applied across many
domains. The added benefit of harnessing the medium in the teaching of
computer literacy and computing studies is that the process of acquiring the
skills readily capitalises on the incidental learning of more declarative
elements of content. The learner as explorer, working productively to a
negotiated and self-defined goal, often working in small groups, is an
illustration of constructivist models of teaching and learning.
In the constructivist tradition, the central notion is of individual
knowledge being constructed according to a learner's particular knowledge
state (Jonassen, 1991), or personal understanding of the subject area.
Understanding of the
structure of an area has been shown to be highly individual, through the use
of learner generated concept maps (Jonassen & Wang, 1993; Spoer, 1994). The
similarity in the node-link structure of hypermedia environments such as the
Web and learner's cognitive models, i.e. models of how people acquire,
store and retrieve not just information but "knowledge" or "concepts" has
been previously noted by a number of writers (Jonassen, 1992; Spoer, 1994).
The implications for teaching practice are clear: Student-centred and
project approaches, often working in small groups provide students with
better opportunities to let the learning experience, the content, and the
skills integrate to their own knowledge state, background and experiences.
As is often noted, constructivist approaches to teaching and learning have
much in common with, "...approaches recommended by progressive educators
since the early part of this century." (Walker & Lambert, 1995, p. 4). They
are not entirely new, and some writers (Jacobs, 1992) convincingly argue
that modern student-centred approaches are fundamentally no different to a
history of attempts from the discovery based learning of Socrates. Perhaps
it is just that the new networked technologies provide more opportunities
for self-directed, activity-oriented and task-engaging work, and this in turn
allows
students to construct their own meaning from the work undertaken.
Defining knowledge in changing technologies
Besides a faith in constructivism as a learning theory, there are three
further motivating forces for the adoption of student-centred learning in
teaching with technology. Firstly, information technologies seem to defy the
rules of a "hierarchy of knowledge" commonly found in other subject areas.
Students may "know" more or have more advanced skills in a specific area
than older, more experienced learners or even than their teachers. This
experience is quite common in technology education. One reason is that
student's prior experiences differ widely, another is that information
technologies (IT) affect people, and matter to people, in very different
ways. Given the fact that we can expect our students to have such varied
backgrounds, the narrow delivery of content characteristic of more
traditional teacher-centred delivery styles is clearly limiting.
Secondly, the empowerment provided by the use of IT is in some senses it's
own motivating force, and makes the lesson structure traditionally provided
by the teacher less important. Student's use software as a suite of tools to
extend their capabilities; these tools become inseparable from their
"intelligence", a rough measure of their ability to think, solve problems
and to adapt to new problem situations. It could be argued that these
important skills and attitudes in our students can only be engendered by the
teacher's use of them. It has been noted (Crawford, 1995) that "...teachers
conceptions of the nature of knowledge and how it is acquired shape their
use of the exploratory software and networked information." (Crawford, 1995,
p. 7).
Thirdly, with the rapidly changing emphasis in technology we believe that
removing the emphasis on a curriculum and providing opportunities for
students to engage in learning current trends and recent developments in IT
will provide them with a more relevant and current knowledge. "The idea of
uncoupling the classroom and the curriculum is not new, nor is it
necessarily tied to the growth of IT but is based on pedagogics and
curriculum outside of schooling" (Bigum & Green, 1993, p. 8). These
approaches not only support a constructivist model, but develop student's
investigative skills (Pennell and Deane, 1995, [HREF8]
). Acknowledging the rapidly
changing nature of information and documentation, the Web provides
access to
a resource of current thinking and knowledge of markedly varying
quality and structure.
In order for it to be a useful resource, it challenges the learner to use a
range of information handling skills such as search tools and critical
thinking skills, in an effective way.
It seems that there is in
educational computing literature a general agreement on the interpretation
of these technologies into classroom methodology. As Mason (1995, [HREF7])
notes, the Web provides an appropriate vehicle to challenge the traditional
stand-and-deliver information-presentation model of teaching.
The benefits of collaboration
The need for collaboration in this model are found through the social
construction of knowledge. While the Web taken alone may not directly
support social interaction and collaboration as some suggest (Lambert and
Walker, 1995), we contend that it provides an appropriate platform for
group work and project approaches, in a similar way to the traditional
library assignment in Secondary School. In a tertiary setting, this area
provides great opportunities for action research (see Eklund, 1995b,
[HREF5]). Such classroom
organisations are particularly appropriate in the case of teaching computing
studies and computer literacy because of the obvious opportunities for the
course leaders and demonstrators
to use the technology to teach about it, but also because
these higher order thinking and problem solving skills are all that can be
practically taught in an area whose domain and emphasis changes so rapidly.
The organisation of the virtual classroom (see Tiffin and
Rajasingham,1995; and The KUMC Virtual Classroom [HREF9])
and the electronic collaborative classroom (see Marjanovic,
Cecez-Kecmanovic & Bonner,1995) involves making students more active in
learning,
increasing motivation and providing a framework where they may place
their own work, resulting in greater satisfaction and improved learning
outcomes. Hammond, Hintz, Szewcow and Alexander (1995, [HREF11])
describe the outcomes
of a CAUT funded pilot study to help students in Computing Science solve
complex computing problems by developing more appropriate ways of thinking
and better problem solving techniques. Their
study suggests, "... providing innovative group learning experiences
involving collaborative learning, especially computer conferencing, and by
using technology to 'extend' the normal classroom, students can overcome
their previously-learnt strategies faster and more successfully than when
only experiencing traditional ways of learning." (Hammond, Hintz, Szewcow,
Alexander ,1995, p. 230, [HREF11]). This is a valuable study but is restricted to students
with a strong technical background in computer science. In contrast, in
this project we focussed on a research question that both
novice computer users, with little or no prior exposure to the Web, would
produce similar work as those with a strong technical background .
Implementation: Integrating the Web and the teaching programs
Students at SU were Computer Science graduates studying teaching methodology
in Computing Studies. As a student cohort, they were a highly motivated
group with reasonable
technological skills. The students at
Adelaide represented the opposing end of the spectrum, having limited
experience with computers and none had prior exposure to the Web as an
information resource - this was evident from an entry questionnaire. The
computer
literacy course was a new course in the curriculum, delivered by the
Computer Science
Department but exclusive of undergraduates in computer science. The course is
non-competitive, results are satisfactory/unsatisfactory, a fact that
proved popular with
the students, and is offered a level I subject on the Arts calender,
meaning that it
can be taken by students from any faculty in the University (other than
majors in Computer
Science). At each
site, students worked firstly individually and then were encouraged to
work cooperatively in small groups to produce
projects on assigned topics. The Web was used as the principle information
resource, a
a search tool, and finally as the medium for publication of projects.
The
process of integrating the Web as a subject materials resource in the
classroom at SU has been previously reported (eg Eklund, 1995a, [HREF6]; Nott et. al ,
1995), and involves the use of searching and browsing to find relevant
materials, using those materials within the classroom, perhaps by their
integration into the design of specific lessons, and publishing the outcomes
on an appropriately linked Web page. This implementation often involves
students finding interesting and relevant sites, suggesting specific ways in
which the material may be used in their discipline, and compiling these into
an indexed Web document. This practice appears widespread within Tertiary
and Secondary teaching.
With respect to this project at SU, only 7 students [HREF4]
were involved in the
DipEd Computing Studies Method course, taught over 24 weeks at 3 hours per
week. Mid 1995 an electronic journal (Compute-Ed, [HREF1]) was set
up to
facilitate publication of quality student work from this and other courses.
Teaching with a Web-based journal as a resource and as a focus for the
publication of exemplary student work emphasises the process of
collaboration, and provides a focal point for reporting. The tasks that
students were asked to perform throughout the semester [HREF3] generally involved small
group investigations on selected, often negotiated, items of content. The
particular expertise and interests of students was exploited, and they were
encouraged to apply their prior knowledge to the selected content. The Web
was used as a resource in each case, although in most students were expected
to use alternative sources as well. This was often necessary. Some tasks
were done and assessed individually, and in these students were encouraged
to use email to present drafts to each other, to gain feed back and begin
discussion. This had limited success as some students did not easily find
email access outside of class time. Nearly all tasks involved some form of
reporting, either through producing a one-page summary handout for the
class, publication in the electronic journal, or a short talk.
Computer literacy [HREF10] is a
new course offered for the first time in 1995
at AU. It is a level I course intended to
service undergraduates with sufficiently generic skills in computer
use for their work and study. The course aims to provide a basic
understanding of
computer packages with a sub-text of "taking the fear out of computing".
At AU, it was decided early that the computer literacy course should
avoid the more traditional
computer programming curriculum delivered by computer
science departments. The type of introductory programming courses that
provide general exposure to programming as a service to engineering and
mathematics
students in Fortran, Pascal and Ada are already available in the
University calender.
This aside, computer literacy students are exposed to the
type of logic required to write programs using Microsoft Excel. Conditional
texts
and function definitions within Excel are taught and the instruction
emphasises that
the process is similar to the logic required when computer programming.
However, the prime objective of the course is to give students enough
background
to make an informed choice of the type and cost of
personal computer they might need for their work or study: both in
terms of hardware and software. The students also get a feel for the
software on the commercial market. Both Macintosh
and PC machines were used in order to give students the broadest
range of experience and a feel for both the Windows and the Macintosh
desktop. An
emphasis on human-computer interaction issues tries to imbue graphical user
interface design
principles from the end-user perspective - a generic skill which we find
desirable in the workplace.
After exposure to the rudimentary spreadsheet, word processing and
email tools the entire class was asked to research a given topic using
the Web. The topic was given in lectures before the Web laboratory classes
in order for the students to ruminate on the subject. The students were
asked to use the Web to discover what a computer virus is.
The background of the 60 students enrolled in Computer Literacy varied
markedly.
Faculties of Law, Medicine, Arts, Engineering, Science and Maths where
represented and the only cohort excluded from enrolment where Computer
Science majors. The students were split into 6 lab groups with each group
meeting at a different time with a different lab assistant. A close and intimate
teaching relationship between the instructors and the students was encourage
by asking students to remain with a given lab time. The demonstrators were
carefully
chosen at the beginning of the course, as much for an experience with
Macintosh and
Windows equipment as for their ability to reinforce positive computing role
models.
In the week beginning the Web practicals and lectures, students
were encouraged to experiment with Netscape as well as using it to
complete the required assignment on computer virus. Once a satisfactory
definition of
a computer virus had been found and a number of current viruses
named, students were asked to package the information into an email
message and send it to the course instructor. Feedback was provided
on an individual basis and any questions that were raised in the emails
were later dealt with in lectures.
In the following week the students were formed into groups of
six and asked to produce a collective repository of
information on a given subject which would later form the basis
for a Web document of their own. Pictures where taken of each of the
groups of students and scanned. The digitised photos would
form the front of the final project document. In total 13 groups produced
Web pages
[HREF2]. Six topics of interest from the curriculum were chosen to
provide a control but
no two groups that researched the same subject attended the same lab class.
The topics were "satellite remote sensing", "ATM switches", "teaching and
publishing
using
the Web", "Web robots", "privacy and security of the Web". The groups
where encouraged to
write narrative on the topic but also to note useful Web sites that
could later be included as active links in their final documents. In this
way the notion of a URL is reinforced. The lab focused on research and
collaboration. Students were forced to produce a editorial and agree
on the narrative for their pages. In the following week, the
mechanics of creating
a Web page and marking up the page would be demonstrated. Each group
emailed a copy of their narrative, including the URL addresses
of related pages, to the course instructor. Again, in
order to avoid unnecessary exposure to skills of only limited utility, the
lab demonstrators marked up each of the group
documents using a skeleton template
prepared by the instructor in HTML. It seemed appropriate to shield students
from mark-up languages which are conceptually important but
practically irrelevant to learn. The URL addresses where converted
to active links in situ, a GIF file of the digitised group photo included and
the Web documents loaded on the server. The students were asked to watch
the evolution of the Web pages for other groups over the next few days to
observe the construction of the site as other student group work came
on-line.
Evaluation
The evaluation of this undertaking was sourced from reports from the seminar
leaders, both about the participation in the course and the quality of the
final work produced, as well as the student's formal evaluation of the
course. It was impossible to compare outcomes from the courses at SU and AU
with previous year's work, as this was not available, or was the first
course of its type. Instead, we used an informal between group analysis,
comparing results across campuses. At SU, the most notable aspects of the
evaluation were that students felt that: 1. they received a lot of help and
advice on learning most/all of the time; 2. the assessment was based
little/none of the time on what has been memorised; 3. it is not possible to
get through the course by working hard at exam times little/none of the
time; 4. the teaching staff motivated them to do their best work all/most of
the time; 5. ideas were related to other subjects all/most of the time; 6.
they have learned to think critically most/half of the time; 7. they learned
to work independently most of the time; 8. the lecturer was open to student
opinion all/most of the time; 9. they were encouraged to participate in
tutorials all of the time.
Seminar leaders provided further convincing, if often anecdotal, evidence
that the restructuring of both courses had been a success, they invariably
reported that while it took some initial formal lesson preparation, the
lessons ran in such a way as to allow them to help groups on an individual
basis, and that they themselves found the experience a valuable one from a
learning and learning about teaching perspective.
The computer literacy students at AU, on the other hand, were not required
to give a
formal presentation of their work but demonstrate an understanding of the
issues involved
in designing and creating a Web document. This reinforced the type of
skills required for the process and more in the nature of graphic design than
a high degree of technical ability and computer literacy. The emphasis is
therefore
on the editorial content of the page. An understanding of
what the Web is and what it might evolve into were placed higher on the
discussion agenda than say the impact of the development of a Web language
like "Java". Developing
an analogy of what the Web was and might become seemed more insightful as
an understanding of what impact the information highway (and eventual
superhighway)
might have. One insightful student suggested that the Internet was like
Amplitude
modulated (AM) radio, the main commercial radio vehicle of the 60's and 70's
became a more specialised forum for interest groups once Frequency
Modulated (FM)
radio become wide-spread. Another suggested that ATM networks
and the superhighway (once constructed) will do the same for Web access as
the digital mobile phone network had on the analogue network, i.e. force
down the
access costs as well as change work practises.
When asked "what were the best aspects of this subject, and why?" in the formal
student evaluation of teaching survey, 32 written comments were recorded from a
sample of 32 students. Of these 25
praised the use of the Web as a teaching tool which in one students words
"demystified
the cyper-jargon of the mainstream press". None of the survey students had
any negative comments
about the use of the Web in practicals. All the students survey agreed to
strongly agreed
that they had understood the concepts presented in the course and 30 or the
32 students
had a positive attitude to the course in the exit survey.
Conclusion and implications
This article has described instances of the integration of the Web into
tertiary teaching programs in Computer Literacy at AU and Computing studies
at SU. The theoretical basis, rationale, method and results of the
implementation are reported. From the evaluations conducted we conclude that
results with student centred, collaborative learning using the Web were
encouraging, with student's gaining worthwhile skills and knowledge
through both individual and small group work. Some evidence for the implications
for curriculum & assessment for the approach described in this article were
also noted in the courses. In some assessable items, it was difficult to
obtain a reasonable spread of scores for students when they were working
collaboratively. Scores in these cases had to be shared. Thus a careful
evaluation schedule needs to be included, incorporating some individual
work, for course which requires a fine qualitative assessment. Additionally,
we need to consider the means and procedures of assessing student's effort
and participation, two important indicators for measuring the acquisition of
skills and attitudes.
Directions for further work
We began a co-operative undertaking between SU and AU predominantly to
compare experiences in re-structuring traditional forms of IT
course delivery using the Web as a vehicle for student collaboration and
publication. To this end we wished to compare the enthusiasm and outcomes
of the use of the Web as a teaching resource for both computer novice students
and more advanced graduate students. In this aspect, there seems little reason
to vary teaching strategies involving Web use as an information resource.
We hope to further extend the across campus link in 1996 with
the students directly sharing material from one university to another
through the use of small groups composed of students from both SU and AU,
working on agreed topics and using email to collaborate on Web sites of
their own design. The complementary skills basis of the two student cohorts
makes this a useful experiment. Not only does collaboration across sites foster
work practices which reinforce Web technology and good teaching practice,
but it also provides an opportunity for the students studying teaching
methodology to examine the process of learning and collaborating
from a younger student's perspective. These reflective practices about the
nature of learning and thinking form an important part of the teaching
knowledge for these trainee teachers. We also hope to implement more a more
formalised and rigorous evaluation of future work.
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URL: http://www.cs.adelaide.edu.au:80/~peter/CL/photo_gallery.html
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URL: http://mackie.edfac.usyd.edu.au/projects/comped/DipEdProject.html
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URL: http://www.scu.edu.au/ausweb95/papers/education4/pennell/
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URL: http://www.kumc.edu/instruction/Vir_Clas/vir_clsrm.html
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URL: http://www.cs.adelaide.edu.au:80/~peter/CL/cl.html
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Copyright
John Eklund, Peter Eklund © 1996. The authors assigns to Southern Cross University and other educational and non-profit institutions a non-exclusive licence to use this document for personal use and in courses of instruction provided that the article is used in full and this copyright statement is reproduced. The authors also grant a non-exclusive licence to Southern Cross University to publish this document in full on the World Wide Web and on CD-ROM and in printed form with the conference papers, and for the document to be published on mirrors on the World Wide Web. Any other usage is prohibited without the express permission of the author.
AusWeb96 The Second Australian World
Wide Web Conferenceausweb96@scu.edu.au