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Knowledge Building in TAPPED IN and ChemSensePatricia Schank, Judi Fusco, Elaine B. Coleman, &
Christine Korbak We are involved in two NSF-funded projects in which KBEs play an
critical role: TAPPED IN, a community of
about 6000 educators (Schlager, Fusco, & Schank, 1998; Schlager & Schank,
1997), and ChemSense, a new research and
development project aimed at improving high school chemistry learning (Coleman,
Schank, Kozma, & Coppola, 1999). At the KBE workshop, we will share the
knowledge-building issues and findings that have emerged in our work, criteria
we've used to evaluate and design KBE tools, and our current needs. We are
particularly interested in potential collaborations with other developers to
assemble an extensible architecture for KBEs (using XML, Java, the web, etc.). TAPPED INTAPPED IN is an online community that supports teachers' professional growth through both formal professional development programs and informal collaborative activities with their colleagues year-round. Educators can attend activities hosted by education organizations, conduct their own activities, or expand their circle of colleagues by participating in community-wide activities. The underlying technology is a platform-independent, Web-based virtual environment designed to support the changing needs of education professionals and teacher professional development organizations. Activities occur in virtual rooms that provide a basic yet powerful set of synchronous and asynchronous communication mechanisms and support tools (e.g., virtual whiteboards, notes, tape recorders, shared Web viewers, threaded discussion boards).Unlike many environments that are typically thought of as KBEs, TAPPED IN is primarily a synchronous space. We think that the addition of synchronous components to asynchronous KBEs can help overcome some of their limitations. Successful workgroups naturally progress through cycles of tightly and loosely coupled collaborative activities that occur over extended periods of time (Kuutti, 1991; Sproull & Kiesler, 1991). Asynchronous-only KBE's cannot support or capture the real-time interaction that groups occasionaly require. Thus, we aim for an environment that seamlessly supports a natural flow of communication, from real-time to time-shifted, in a single persistent space that integrates their work documents and captures their progress. We have needs for tools to aid this seamless integration and better support importing, managing, and later accessing information. For example, members have asked if they can "grab" a note from a threaded discussion board and import it into the TAPPEDIN MOO (e.g., as a note in their pocket) for later reference or to show others during a synchronous discussion. Unfortunately, no simple, standard mechanism for such data transfer exists. Further, mechanisms for finding such a note later are limited to simple text search on the title of the note, or visually scanning through lists of items in virtual containers (rooms, file cabinets, your pockets, etc.). We are developing and using quantitative and qualitative instruments including surveys, activity logs, interviews, and discourse analysis tools to assess the TAPPED IN model. Working with our research partners at NISE, we developed a new method of doing discourse analysis to understand knowledge building in collaborative groups (see Derry, Gance, Gance & Schlager, in press; Fusco & Schlager, in preparation). Transcript analyses show that even with a group that uses the technology minimally over a period of several months, the structure of their meetings shifts from a focus on the TAPPED IN technology and group norms to a predominantly task-focus, similar to dialogue captured in face-to-face meetings. ChemSenseThe ChemSense project aims to help students investigate complex chemical systems by making the underlying chemistry more visible to students, and making students' underlying thinking more visible and open to inspection. One of the key tools in ChemSense will be the "portfolio" KBE. The goal of this tool is to support content creation, epistemological thinking, and collaborative knowledge construction to help students think about their understanding and identify gaps and advances in knowledge. The portfolio will emphasize annotation and linking of multiple representations in chemistry, and allow viewing the knowledge base from various perspectives.We have evaluated several KBE-like tools to determine if they address our requirements or if we can extract design criteria from them. These environments include SpeakEasy, Convince Me, Belvedere, Knowledge Forum (a derivative of CSILE, Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1996), typical threaded discusson tools like Hypernews, more synchronous environments like TAPPED IN, and commercial knowledge management software like Intraspect. Several members of our team either helped develop or have extensively used each of these products. For our purposes, we see particular value in Knowledge Forum, but we are interested in creating a hybrid environment that combines aspects of many of these tools--including, not surprisingly, a synchronous component. We are also designing an interface to the database that we think better supports navigation, focus, and display of large information spaces (e.g., Robertson, Card, & Mackinlay, 1993; cf. the Hyperbolic Browser; The Brain), since discussion spaces can grow rapidly over extended periods. As of October 1, we have converged on a set of semantic relationships and thinking types (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1996) that we believe should be visually represented in the ChemSense KBE. We are currently designing the interface and architecture of our custom environment. To help inform our design process, we expect to use one of the existing KBE tools (likely Knowledge Forum) with some high-school chemistry students this fall. We are familiar with applications of many of these KBEs in other settings, but feel that much can be learned by trying one with our particular teachers and students. We will also gather informal feedback on mockups of the interface we are designing, and can share our preliminary findings, if relevant, during the workshop. ReferencesColeman, E.B., Schank, P., Kozma, R., Coppola, B. (1999). Promoting representational competence to facilitate understanding and epistemological thinking in chemistry. REPP Project First Year Report (NSF #REC-9814653), Menlo Park, CA: SRI International.Derry, S. J., Gance, S. Gance. L. L., & Schlager, M. S. (in press). Toward Assessment of Knowledge Building Practices in Technology-Mediated Work Group Interactions. To appear in S. Lajoie (Ed.) Computer as Cognitive Tools II. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Kuutti, K. (1991). Activity theory and its applications to information systems research and development. In H. E. Nissen (Ed.), Proceedings of the IFIP TC8/WG 8.2 Working Conference on the Information Systems Research Arena of the 90's: Challenges, perceptions, and alternate approaches (pp. 529-549). New York: Elsevier. Robertson, G., Card, S., Mackinlay, J. (1993). Information visualizaation using 3D interactive animation. Communications of the ACM, 36(4), 57-71. Scardamalia, M., & Bereiter, C. (1996). Computer support for knowledge-building communities. In T. Koschmann (Ed.), CSCL: Theory and practice of an emerging paradigm. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Schlager, M., Fusco, J., & Schank, P. (1998). Cornerstones for an on-line community of education professionals. IEEE Technology and Society, Special Issue on Computers in the Classroom: The Internet in K-12, 17 (4), 15-21, 40. Schlager, M., & Schank, P. (1997). TAPPED IN: A new on-line community concept for the next generation of Internet technology. In R. Hall, N. Miyake & N. Enyedy (Eds.), Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Computer Support for Collaborative Learning, pp. 231-240. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Sproull, L., & Kiesler, S. (1991). Connections: New ways of working in the networked organization. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. |
