Chee-Kit LOOI

Kent Ridge Digital Labs

Singapore

My involvement with KBEs

I lead the design and implementation of a Web-based MOO (WOO) called

SpaceALIVE! which various synchronous and asynchronous collaboration tools.

As designers, we envision them to be used by students in certain ways for

learning and collaboration. But what would be the actual experience of

students using such an environment? We initiated two SpaceALIVE! projects

with the objective of providing a testbed for the collaborative technology

as well as finding out how students would use such an environment for

collaboration and construction. ScienceALIVE! I is a project involving some

sixty over students from ten secondary schools. One of the project

objectives is to provide an integrated environment through IT for pupils

from different schools to co-operate and collaborate on an educational

project. ScienceALIVE! I allows us to sort out several operational problems

such as providing Internet access to the participating schools, and

technical problems with the SpaceALIVE! software. It also allows us to sort

out change management challenges such as initiating such an Internet

collaborative project to teachers and students who are new to such an

online experience.

ScienceALIVE! II zooms in more depth into the collaboration of a smaller

group of students. It involves two Singapore secondary schools and one Hong

Kong secondary school. In ScienceALIVE! II, students from different schools

form project teams to do research on a science topic and publish their

findings as a virtual science exhibit. Teachers from the various

participating schools and researchers from the National Institute of

Education, Nanyang Technological University, provide facilitation for the

teams to work together.

SpaceALIVE! was deployed in the TransportationALIVE! project which was

initiated with the objective of providing students in seven South-East

Asian countries with an Internet environment for collaboration and

construction. The project is organized by the Regional English Language

Centre of Singapore in conjunction with the Ministry of Education, and

involves one or two schools from each of seven South-East Asia Minister of

Education Organization (SEAMEO) countries of Thailand, Indonesia,

Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia, Vietnam and Singapore. The project runs from

November 1997 to February 1999 (see Figure 5 for the virtual project room

in TransportationALIVE!) The total number of student participants amounts

to a hundred.

My personal idea

I find some of the problems listed in the Purpose section of your workshop

description very close to heart, as these are the issues that confront us

when we tried to get students to collaborate and construct knowledge on our

SpaceALIVE! environment.

More recently, I have started to look at Shared MindTools as Visual Tools

for providing a focus for Collaboration and Learning. SMT are networked,

collaborative tools that help these groups of students or collaborators to

organize and communicate knowledge as they work together.  They integrate a

number of individual mindtools into a suite of tools. The mindtools are

designed for collaborative use instead of individual use. SMT also provides

facilities to help a training course coordinator or a teacher to monitor

the use of the mindtools in small groups.

We have all faced situations in which we had to think our way through

difficult conceptual problems. SMT allow a participant to externalize their

understanding or perspective of a concept, a problem or an issue. These

tools include concept maps that support brainstorming of ideas,

task-specific organizers like lists, trees, compare-and-contrast and

fishbone diagrams for organizing ideas; and process-oriented visual tools

that promote creative and critical thinking.

Mindtools were originally developed for individuals, when thinking was

considered solely as an individual act. Indeed most software on concept

maps and other visual tools for thinking cater only for the individual use.

SMT support the co-creation and co-use of mindtools by a group of people

working through the Internet.

When mindtools are created and edited in the SMT environment, the

collaborators can make desired modifications and refinements that are

easily integrated into the mindtools. All these are done in realtime,

allowing the collaborators to negotiate, discuss, and thrash out any

differences in views on the spot. The mindtools can be used for individual

sharing, group presentations, group self-assessment, and for providing a

focus for group discussions. Users can switch from one mindtool to another

with ease, and users such as teachers can retrieve previous versions of a

mindtool so as to trace the development process.

Biodata

Dr Looi Chee Kit is Senior Research Staff in the Learning Lab of Kent Ridge

Digital Labs. He is also an adjunct Associate Professor with the School of

Education, National Institute of Education.  Dr Looi obtained his PhD in

Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh in 1988. He has

been involved in research on educational technologies since 1983. Dr Looi

has authored more than 70 technical publications in international journals

and conferences. He has given invited talks at the 1997 Conference on

Artificial Intelligence and Education in Kobe, Japan, and at the Global

Chinese Conference on Computers in Education in Guangzhou, China in 1996

and in Hong Kong, China in 1997. He is currently President of the

Association of Advancement of Computing in Education, Asia-Pacific Chapter.

________________________________________________________________________

Chee-Kit LOOI

Kent Ridge Digital Labs

21 Heng Mui Keng Terrace

Singapore 119613

Tel: (65) 874 6696

Fax: (65) 774 4998