Analysis of Share Globally paper
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[edit] Instructions
- Meet as a group in a VMT chat room and discuss the reading.
- Discuss a group statement about the reading that everyone can agree represents your group's opinion.
- Summarize your statement in the SUMMARY area of the chat room whiteboard.
- Post your group's statement below.
Make sure that you are logged in. You can create a timestamp with your individual name by deleting the words "Date and Time of posting" and typing ~ ~ ~ ~ (a sequence of 4 tildes, with no spaces).
[edit] Some issues to discuss
In general, a review of a research paper might include the following elements:
- A summary of the paper, stating the main point of the paper.
- A consideration of the appropriateness of the subject matter for venue (i.e., this course)
- A consideration of the paper's awareness of the relevant research literature -- is a major publication on the topic ignored by the paper, invalidating its claims?
- A consideration of the paper's logic: is it well argued and convincing?
- A consideration of the paper's style: is it clear, appropriate for the audience, well written, at a good level of abstraction?
- A consideration of the paper's contribution to the research field: is this an important addition to the literature or does it just repeat well-known information or add trivial results?
- In addition, you can give your opinions and disagreements with the paper or raise issues that the authors should address.
- For this course, it is important to discuss the contribution of the paper to the problem we are trying to address of supporting social networking.
[edit] Comments on Group Statements
This was my first project with educational collaboration software. Although we had two grants to conduct the research, we did not get much further than you will in this class -- designing a scenario and a rough prototype. We talked with some teachers and curriculum experts, but did not get to the point of systematic user testing. We certainly never were able to develop a working system that could be tried by classroom teachers. It is questionable whether the paper as written would be accepted in a journal today without some results of actual usage testing.
Nevertheless, looking back a dozen or more years, it is surprising how visionary the paper was. At the time, the World Wide Web and web browsers did not exist. Tools for bulletin boards and download sites were primitive, unstandardized and awkward. The idea of having sites made up of content that users contributed was not only uncommon, but was considered undesirable by our potential funding sources, like Apple and NSF. This idea is just starting to become acceptable with the talk about Web 2.0 and the success of Wikipedia, Flikr, etc. -- althought the Math Forum has been building its site through user content for most of the last 12-15 years.
In the interim, a few groups have made extensive efforts to implement pieces of what we proposed, like building online communities of teachers for exchanging ideas or developing standards and ontologies for "educational objects". None of these have had great success; these are hard things to do successfully.
The idea of automatically adapting curriculum to local conditions goes far beyond anything that has been tried as far as I know. The idea of combining browsing and searching has been an important approach in HCI -- Ben Shneiderman recently gave a talk on this at IST. It would be interesting to think about which of the design concepts in TCA have and have not been successfully developed in the past decade and why.
[edit] Team 1 Statement
- Seth Erickson and Elizabeth Veasey
- Seth_E 15:17, 12 April 2007 (EDT)
Summary and Analysis of Share Globally, Adapt Locally: Software Assistance to Locate and Tailor Curriculum to the Internet
The paper 'Share Globally, Adapt Locally: Software Assistance to Locate and Tailor Curriculum Posted to the Internet' (1995) discusses different theories of education, and how knowledge building and implementation often fall short with the current educational approaches/methodologies. To evolve the educational approach teachers need a tool to locate materials in order to build effective curriculums that use a construtivist philosophy towards individual student education. Stahl, Sumner, & Owen propose an innovative software tool called Teacher Curriculum Assistant (TCA) that "provides software support for teachers to make effective use of educational resources posted to the Internet." Using a plethora of resources that exist on the World Wide Web, teachers can construct their curriculums using a diverse learning ecology.
The paper definitely is appropriate for the concurrent subject matter in Info 608: Human-Computer Interaction. 'Human-Computer Relations' signifies cross-communcations between machine and human. In Info 608 we are learning how machine environments may facilitate social and intellectual collaboration. The paper discusses different educational methodologies, and how the 'constructivist' approach may be the best for the evolution of education. The TCA is a perfect model for this because it allows for the location, parsing, and evaluation of diverse subject matter for possible curriculums.
Stahl, Sumner & Owen use a variety of relevant literature in expounding their conceptual design for TCA. They incorporate into their paper myriad subjects ranging from cognitive design to programming languages. It seems that they did not ignore relevant literature, but rather, enriched their own research with it. From abstract to references, the paper was interesting, engaging and informative, even for those not well-versed in the area social networking or related field; the paper is still very readable. It was well organized and clear in its objectives, stating exactly what the objectives were, and how those objectives were going to be reached. Scenarios were effectively used to illustrate what TCA would be able to do if used. Overall the paper made a very good argument and was thoroughly convincing.
The paper certainly contributes to its research field in providing something new and viable to the area of social networking. From all indications, TCA if, implemented could be a very valuable resource. Teachers as well as students could greatly benefit from such a program.
The fact that TCA needs useful indexed resources made available to it, with comprehensive lessons plans and requiring coordination among interested parties, is a big obstacle but not an insurmountable one. With all the possible benefits this resource has to offer this obstacle may not be long standing. Although it would be interesting to know how the authors plan to initiate this corporation.
This paper is a great illustration of how social networking can be used to enhance and improve the way we work, for the benefit of all. Using such tools as TCA fosters the sharing of information, provides needed support and promotes discussion. These types of social networking tools have the potential for immeasurable impact on the user.
REFERENCES
Stahl, G., Sumner, T., & Owen, R. (1995). Share globally, adapt locally: Software to create and distribute student-centered curriculum. Computers and Education. Special issue on education and the Internet, 24 (3), 237-246.
[edit] Team 3 Statement
- Fernando and Dave
- Dave 20:23, 17 April 2007 (EDT)
The Internet has proven to be an increasingly popular medium for transferring of ideas and knowledge for teachers. In order to provide this knowledge in an efficient manner its loose structure must be adapted. Teachers must be able to find relevant curriculum, search for what they need, adapt it to their environment, organize it, and share their experience for other instructors. By addressing each of these with a frame work (the Teacher's Curriculum Assistant (TCA)) the authors are able to provide for the advancement of a new approach to learning. This new way often called constructivism builds an environment where students have the chance to individually reach in their own way or fashion. This greatly differs from the classical method of behaviorist teaching which supports the thought that one way of learning works for all students.
This course supports some of the author’s ideas on constructivism. It social structure allows students to build knowledge individually within groups and share that knowledge with the other group members. This allows them to build on the knowledge of their peers rather than just learning strictly information provided through a lecture.
The paper does not ignore major publications but does not reference these publications enough to add more credibility and make a stronger argument.
Overall the paper’s logic is sound and convincing, though some of the arguments seem to need more punch. Good examples are provided but there is no cited research on the benefits of constructivism. The question would be how would a researcher go about quantifying constructivism?
The paper is very clear in its message and is appropriate for the college level audience. The addition of example scenarios provided a clear view to the reader of how the TCA would function.
For the paper to add more than just trivial results it seems that we must receive some feedback on the benefits of TCA which is the main adaptation of the author's arguments. The authors give solid examples reinforcing their arguments but should also specifically reference other reasearch or documents to solidify their claims.
Overall, the paper presented a good argument with solid examples but it did lack external reinforcements and was slightly outdated.
The paper supports the idea of social networking but can have a better feedback mechanism to facilitate better building of knowledge and closer interaction between colleagues.
[edit] Team 5 Statement
- Members Kate, Lisa, Ben, Kevin, Olivia
- Date and Time of posting 144.118.94.19 20:32, 16 April 2007 (EDT)
1. A summary of the paper, stating the main point of the paper.
There is currently a disconnect between the behaviorist (traditional) and constructivist schools of thought, where the latter believes in teachers creatively structuring students' learning environments to provide opportunities for discovery. This type of learning environment can be achieved by specifically designed curricula. The TCA system assists teachers in developing curriculum for educational reform by delivering five major features: the ability to locate resources, the ability to search existing resources, the ability to adapt tools and resources to a custom curriculum, organization tools for resource management, and the sharing capability of curricula. The proposed system should provide an instructor multiple templates for potential lesson plans, which they can then modify for their specific learning environment. This will enable the instructor to provide in-depth lesson plans which would not be possible, due to time constraints, if they had to prepare the plan alone. Instructors can also add comments and options to the templates and in the system itself, thereby adding to the depth and richness of the options available for future instructors.
A software tool for Internet repositories that assist teachers with lesson planning that supports collaborate learning communities.
2. A consideration of the appropriateness of the subject matter for venue (i.e., this course) - applicable to this course because we are "guinea pigs"! - need some kind of control group (other HCI section) to measure which section understands the concepts of HCI better.
4. A consideration of the paper's logic: is it well argued and convincing?
- well argued...but underestimating the importance of having a solid foundation (sometimes needs to be achieved by pure memorization). Memorization first, then understanding later. Can't just jump into identifying multiple conceptual representations if don't understand just one representation.
5. A consideration of the paper's style: is it clear, appropriate for the audience, well written, at a good level of abstraction? - the paper is well writen if it's intended audience is a group of students in a class similar to this. However if the intended audience is actually intended to use the product then more detailed instruction would be beneficial.
6. A consideration of the paper's contribution to the research field: is this an important addition to the literature or does it just repeat well-known information or add trivial results?
- good example of the "regions of a circle" problem. examples are ideal for this type of argument where trying to prove that one method of learning is better than another. we are all familiar with traditional learning, so need examples to distinguish how the alternative approach would work, which the paper proviides. - Paper identifies "next steps" in implementing TCA....more information about deployment plan? how will teachers be trained to use this tool? - COnsidering the paper was written in 1995, it was probably a new idea for its time.
7. In addition, you can give your opinions and disagreements with the paper or raise issues that the authors should address.
Authors should obtain real-life examples of TCA implementations. metrics will be helpful to determine the effectiveness of TCA. Perhaps if metrics were collected for a community or subset of educational institutions, then the TCA curriculum could be implemented. The metrics of student performance should be measured to determined whether learning is facilitated with TCA. This would be a very long-term study. -The paper was put out by a research company as marketing for a software program.
8. For this course, it is important to discuss the contribution of the paper to the problem we are trying to address of
supporting social networking.
The paper serves as a guideline and exploratory analysis of TCA theory but doesn't provide concrete evidence supporting the thoery. The paper provides an example for what was possible with social networking for educators when the paper was writen. However since the web is constantly changing and evolving the current abilities of Web 2.0 dwarf the proposed benefits of TCA. The growth of wikis and blogging allows the same information to be decentralized and disbursed through the entire web with only a central search engine.
[edit] Team 6 Statement
- Members: Bertha, Brian, Eric, Rajeev
- Date and Time of posting: Bertha 22:26, 10 April 2007 (EDT)
The main points of the paper were based on a need for productivity software for locating various materials, resources and curriculum as well as sharing their experiences across the Internet. (Pg 1: ln 21 - 24).
From this need the research lead to the design and prototype of the Teacher's Curriculum Assistant (TCA) to provide the software support for teachers. (Pg 1:ln 25-27). This software assists the teachers in finding the necessary materials across the Internet. Teacher's have to locate ideas, search offerings by sites, adapt items, organize and share their experiences in this process. Unlike many other fields that have productivity software to achieve these results teachers did not have readily available access to such products.(Pg2: ln 23-27)
Various learning and methods for building knowledge were analysed as alternative directions than current learning methods. By creating such a diverse learning ecology this paper hopes to offer more choices of techniques and curicullum to match with different learning styles of students. (Pg 4: ln 20 - 23)
This subject matter is extremely appropriate for this venue, to assist in the design of a Virtual Math Lab as Human Computer Interface relies entirely on this type of design. In order to design anything you first must understand the question you are trying to answer, ie, What does a Virtual Math Lab front end look and feel like; and also the audience that the response is intended for, ie, teachers who have little time to prepare course material.
This paper addresses the need for a similar engine for school teachers to research and evaluate different curriculum. The social networking that is facilitated is the final outcome of their TCA engine to share their evaluations and modifications they made with the curriculum they chose.
In terms of the article's value and credibility, the document was published in 1995 when internet access was less available and speed of access was much slower. Many forums of discussion were on local access electronic bulletin board systems (BBS) that would be hosted by local institutions and/or organizations. They were also carried on through CD publications like WilsonDisc and MathWorld which was referenced in the article. (Pg 7: ln 1 - 3)
For mathematical needs, Wolfram Mathworld started in 1995 as one of the first wiki-type forums of discussion and information sharing. It's methods are much like those described for TCA in this article, providing various methods of finding information and leading to topics of probable interest. However, TCA in conjunction with a resource like Wolfram Mathworld would have allowed more teachers to access the information by functions like offline browsing and batch downloading of webpages. (Pg 8: 28 - 33)
The article's argument is strong. Information, however valuable, is not helpful and will not be propagated if it is not accessible. Also, there's a definite pattern to the work that teachers do in preparation for classes. Well prepared curriculum and experiences should be shared to help improve classroom experience for others. By combining the space for researching information and sharing curriculum and experiences, TCA would be able to help make teachers' time spend outside the classroom to be more effective.
The article was not always clear about who is the audience and what is its objective. It tried to explain concepts in learning, limitations of MathFinder, components to forums of discussion, and highlight TCA's strong points. The end of the article methodically reviewed ideas discussed in the article, but it did not tie in why it was important to discuss concepts in learning.
The idea of linking scattered resources and making the associations available to others to aid them in their learning and research is an important point in this article. It is something that users of the internet still need to learn to participate in developing. There is still far more information being added into this publically accessible space without much association with other valueable sources and sources of interest. Developing a network across all information shared in this forum can only be achieved when all participants assist in the process.
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