Sasha Barab & Thomas Duffy

Indiana University

We are currently leading an NSF-funded project to design and research an on-line environment to support a community of science and mathematics teachers. At the KBE workshop, we will share our experience with building the on-line learning community, focusing on how we have embedded learning principles into the community’s virtual space. We are interested in on-line participant structures that others have developed and research methodologies for examining participation/learning.

We also bring to the workshop our expertise in conceptualizing theoretically grounded principles from which to guide instructional design (Barab, 1999; Barab et al., 1999; Barab & Duffy, in press; Duffy & Cunningham, 1996; Duffy & Jonassen, 1992; Duffy, Lowyck, & Jonassen, 1993) in designing learning environments based on these principles (Barab, Hay, & Duffy, 1998; Barab et al., in press; Barab, Squire, & Dueber, in press; Chaney & Duffy, in press; Duffy, Dueber, Hawley, 1998), and in evaluating participation/learning within these environments (Barab, Fajen, Kulikowich, & Young, 1996; Barab, Bowdish, & Lawless, 1997; Barab, Hay, & Yamagata-Lynch, 1999; Chaney & Duffy, 1999).

Additionally, we are the director and associate director of the newly established Center for Research on Learning and Technology (CRLT) located in the School of Education at Indiana University, Bloomington. Through participation in CRLT activities we have found ourselves engaging in continual discussions around the country on the design and evaluation of KBEs. Below, we briefly overview the CRLT, the Internet Learning Forum (ILF), and our respective background related to the session.

We are currently engaged in design research around the National Science Foundation (NSF-KDI-9980081) funded project called the "Internet Learning Forum" (ILF). Being in the first year of a three year project, the issues being addressed by the KDE workshop have particular relevance to us. The ILF project involves the design and research of an electronic knowledge network to support a virtual, dynamic community of in-service and pre-service mathematics and science teachers sharing, improving, and creating inquiry based pedagogical practices. Founded in our previous research and consistent with our pedagogical commitment, we are designing the ILF around the "visiting one another’s classroom" metaphor and with the belief that users need to become full participants in and owners of "their" virtual space.

The ILF design centers around the vision of a community in which teachers can virtually visit each other's classrooms, through video streaming, to observe and discuss approaches to teaching mathematics and science topics and to share artifacts. The ILF is meant to support a distributed group of teachers in making the tacit knowledge involved in their teaching explicit so that it can be shared with others and, in turn, to aid teachers in using that explicit knowledge as a tacit part of their practice.

It is our belief that knowledge building comes from sharing and reflecting on practice with others. In the ILF, teachers will submit videos of actual classroom practice along with commentary and reflection on the video element. These videos, accessible over the web via video streaming technology, will act as anchors for discussion threads by community members. The research goal of this project is to understand the social and technological factors underlying the effective use of electronic technologies to foster, sustain, and scale a virtual community. Several research issues drive this project:

1. How can networking and electronic technologies be used to represent and facilitate the sharing and evolution of teaching practices?
2. What are the taken-as-shared meanings that emerge in the ILF communities and how do those meanings evolve and diffuse into classroom practices?
3. How do the ILF members structure themselves into communities and how do we promote boundary crossing?

Center for Research on Learning and Technology (CRLT)

The CRLT has as its mission to promote and support a community of scholars dedicated to research on the design, use, and implementation of technology to improve learning. Three primary themes underlie the work at the Center:

Working as the directors of this new center, we find ourselves in continued collaboration with colleagues at Indiana University and around the country discussing research on technology and learning in general and how to develop and assess learning in KBE in particular. We look forward to sharing what we are learning with the workshop participants and with sharing what we learn at the workshop with CRLT participants.

Sasha Barab

Sasha Barab is currently working as an assistant professor of Instructional Systems Technology and Cognitive Science at Indiana University, Bloomington. His research has focused on establishing rich learning environments, frequently with the aid of technology, that are both engaging and complex, assisting students in constructing collaboratively the "whats" in a manner that provides insights into the "whys." Much of this work builds on current literature regarding situated cognition and focuses on the use of multimedia as one practical means of building collaborative spaces that connect classroom learning/participation to its functional and social context. In addition to this design focus, his research focuses on developing research methods for capturing cognition in situ within the context of intentional learning environments. In capturing cognition in situ, he found that it has become necessary to develop an account of the broader context through which knowing/doing has meaning. It is this latter realization that led Barab to his additional research focus on communities of practice, and his interest in technology has led him to his current research effort regarding on-line communities of practice and the development of knowledge-building communities.

Thomas Duffy

Thomas Duffy’s interests have centered on the design and use of information. The information could be computer-based, text, or graphic; the use could be for learning or to do a job. Since coming to Indiana University in 1988, his work has been in the design of collaborative learning environments. Some of this work has been theoretical, looking at constructivism as a framework for understanding learning. A second area of work has been problem based learning (PBL). One area of my current research is on strategies for promoting and supporting collaborative inquiry in the post-secondary classroom and in the distributed education environment. Much of this work has examined the tool design and pedagogy for asynchronous conferencing. A second area of current work has focused on the use of computer based simulations of work place environments for use in middle and high school. Again, the focus of our work has been on the problem solving process and the teacher’s role in helping to provide a problem solving framework, coach problem solving/critical thinking skills, and promote collaborative reflection on the process. Most recently, Duffy has developed and researched ACT, the Asynchronous Collaboration Tool, a pedagogically based tool for supporting web-based collaborative learning.

Barab, S. A. (1999). Ecologizing instruction through integrated Units. Middle School Journal, 30, 21-28.

Barab, S. A., Bowdish, B. E., & Lawless, K. A. (1997). Hypermedia navigation: Profiles of hypermedia users. Educational Technology Research and Development, 45(3), 23-42.

Barab, S. A., Cherkes-Julkowski, M., Swenson, R., Garrett. S., & Shaw, R. E. (1999). Principles of self-organization: Ecologizing the learner-facilitator system. The Journal of The Learning Sciences, 8(3 & 4), 349-390.

Barab, S. A., & Duffy, T. (in press). From Practice Fields to Communities of Practice. To appear in D. Jonassen (Ed.), Theoretical Foundations of Learning Environments. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Barab, S. A., Fajen, B. R., Kulikowich, J. M., & Young, M. F. (1996). Assessing hypermedia navigation through Pathfinder: Prospects and limitations. Journal of Educational Computing Research, 15(3), 185-205.

Barab, S. A., Hay, K., & Duffy, T. (1998). Grounded Constructions and How Technology Can Help. Technology Trends,43(2), 15-23.

Barab, S. A., Hay, K. E., Yamagata-Lynch, L. C. (1999, May). Constructing networks of activity: An in-situ research methodology. Presented at the 1999 Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Montreal, CA.

Barab, S. A., Squire, K., & Dueber, B. (in press). Supporting authenticity through participatory learning. To appear in Educational Technology Research and Development.

Chaney-Cullen, T. & Duffy, T. (1998) Strategic Teaching Frameworks: Multimedia to support teacher change. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 8, 1-40.

Duffy, T. M., & Cunningham, D. J. (1996). Constructivism: Implications for the design and delivery of instruction. In D. Jonassen (Ed.), Handbook of Research for Educational Communications and Technology (pp. 170-198). New York: Simon & Schuster Macmillan.

Duffy, T. M., & Jonassen, D. H. (1992). Constructivism: New implications for instructional technology. In T. Duffy & D. Jonassen (Eds.), Constructivism and the technology of instruction (pp. 1-16). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Duffy, T. M., Lowyck, J., & Jonassen, D. H. (Eds.). (1992). Designing environments for constructivist learning. Heidelberg: Springer.