Week 13 Response

I found the Edelson, Gordin, and Pea article particularly interesting because (I think) it is the first article that we've read in which we've looked at a single learning technology as it has been adapted and changed through a couple of editions. It was interesting to read what the creators learned throughout their process. I was surprised and amused by their decision not to design any curriculum for the first version of their program, Climate Visualizer. They simply said, "we did not feel predesigned curricula were appropriate because we were hoping to foster an entirely student-driven form of inquiry-based learning in which student would generate and pursue their own research questions" (Edelson et al., 1999, p. 404). Of the many changes they made to their program throughout its four (or so) reincarnations, this seems to be the one they changed most significantly. Later (and this is the part that amused me) they developed a five-week curriculum comprised of structured activities, lessons, and even a culminating mock conference. And throughout all of this, the actual software seemed to play only a small part! That is a far cry from a "predesigned curricula" they initially felt would be "inappropriate." This leads me to two thoughts. First, that in creating this wonderful tool that students were supposed to dive into and explore, they were expecting students -- novices -- to behave like experts. The authors acknowledge the difficulties they had in creating an "authentic" tool for students to use that is similar to what experts would use while still making it accessible to students. But the very premise of this idea, the expectation that students should behave like experts, seems faulty to me. Students know they're students, not experts, and they aren't fooled by technologies that are only disguised as "real" tools that "real" scientists use. While I appreciate the authors' motives -- that by adapting these tools for student use, the developers are trying to increase student learning by providing an experience close to the ways in which professionals work -- I am still skeptical of their (or anyone's) ability to create a balance between accessibility and authenticity. I suppose I think that their end product was better because it gave students a taste of working with an expert-like tool, pushing them to new understandings, but took place within a well-designed and quite structured (and perhaps more traditional?) curriculum. The second thought I had related to this is that once again we see in this article the theme of imposing a really cool and advanced technology on classrooms with teachers who aren't comfortable with either the technology component of the program or the domain knowledge required to teach it . . . and then the learning technology fails to be used to its full potential. I would love to read something that describes teachers coming together with technology experts to design a tool that solves a real problem or fills a genuine void that teachers actually have in their classrooms. Now that would be authentic!

Week 11 Response

The Corbett readings this week really gave me a sense of what it means to pay attention to the social contexts of environments for which one designs or implements learning technologies. In many of our readings, the authors have made mention of the importance of doing so, but these readings for today go into explicit detail about what this really means. For instance, Corbett & Koedinger discuss the theories of human cognition on which cognitive tutors are based, and they describe the ways in which the application is designed to mimic human tutoring and instruction as best as they are able. Because of this, this technology seems unique among some of the other learning technologies we have considered. Though many of technologies that we have looked at are indeed based on theories about learning or instruction – which are both important, of course – this article seems to be the first of what we’ve read that really hones in on what it is that people and brains do well, and then designs a technology to behave in the same way. In other words, this seems to be the starting point for developing the cognitive tutor, rather than a mere consideration or adaptation along the way in designing. By using theories of human cognition as a starting point, the designers were able to look carefully at underlying assumptions about how students learn math (e.g., students learn decimal and fraction problems well in problem situations, but learn factors and multiples well in abstract problems [Corbett & Koedinger, 72]). This seems key to me not only in designing a learning technology, but for educators in selecting them for use in schools as well; it is crucial that we make choices about learning technologies based on facts and evidence, rather than what we assume to be true regarding how students learn best. While I was convinced throughout these chapters that the designers based both their design and assessment of the cognitive tutoring software and curriculum on understandings of how students think and learn and how human tutors behave, I was not as convinced in their assessment of increased student motivation in the classroom. Their conclusion that students who use the cognitive tutor not only demonstrate achievement gains (though it seems to remain to be seen if such gains are sustainable) but are also more engaged in general just seemed to be fluffy – an observation made in passing, rather than one bases on empirical data. This made me think it would be helpful to have in depth knowledge about what students enjoy and what motivates individuals (perhaps this is how economics might fit, but . . . ugh!) in order to design even better and more effective technologies.

Week 10 Response

While reading Larry Cuban's _Teachers and Machines_, I couldn't help but think of the circumstances that librarians and media specialists find themselves in today in relation to technology. Cuban discusses the ways that film, radio, "microcomputers," and in particular TV have entered the educational field, posing as panaceas, and threatening to become "surrogate teacher[s]" (Cuban 37). In discussing the tension between change and constancy in American classrooms, Cuban explains why technology simply can not and will not replace the teacher as the head of the classroom. Yet for librarians and media specialists, fear of being replaced by machines (or Internet and Web technologies) is a reality. For example, in the professional practices course I took last semester, we frequently took up the issue as to how to convince the public of the librarian's importance and role in an increasingly informationally-overloaded world. It seems to me that we were forever talking about and reassuring ourselves that librarians are even more important today given the ubiquity of informational technology and heavy reliance on the Web. But the question was - how to make the public and patrons see and appreciate this fact? And, I think for school librarians, replacement is more than a fear -- it is an actuality as school districts cut these positions. Since Cuban's central argument as to why machines can not replace teachers relates specifically to the nature and structure of schooling, it is not as though his book completely maps onto the difficulties that librarians wrestle with. Furthermore, it is only my assumption that media specialist positions are cut by tight school budgets because administrators don't value the work that media specialists do, or see their role in education as an irreplaceable one (I suppose there are other reasons). However, insofar as one of the school media specialist's roles is being a teacher, Cuban's work applies. Perhaps it would help school media specialists to identify the elements of the job that fall into the "constant" category as opposed to the "change" category (such as continuing to emphasize the importance of reading for pleasure and accessing books), and to capitalize on these things, while working to prove to administrators, fellow teachers, parents, and the broader community that seeking, finding, evaluating, and using information are not mechanical processes that children can engage in without the help of a teacher/media specialist.