IPL-SI Analysis 2a
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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] Notes
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] Comments on Group Analyses
[edit] Team 1 Statement
[edit] Team 2 Statement
[edit] Team 3 Statement
[edit] Team 4 Statement
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