Volume 4, Number 2/3 1998
Contents
Abstracts
An Integrated Technology Adoption and Diffusion Model
Lorraine Sherry
RMC Research Corporation 1512 Larimer Street, Suite 540, Denver CO 80202, USAsherry@rmcdenver.com
During the evaluation of the Boulder Valley Internet Project, members of RMC Research Corporation in Denver, Colorado, developed a structural model of technology adoption and diffusion that comprised technological, individual, organizational, and teaching and learning factors. Although this static model was useful for identifying key explanatory factors and organizing them into a coherent framework, it did not describe the dynamics of the diffusion process, nor did it fit Rogers’ (1995) Diffusion of Innovations model. Revisiting the data, we developed a new model that integrated the adoption process with the learning process. As teachers learn about new technologies, specifically email and the World Wide Web via a trainer-of-trainers program, and as they begin to use these new resources in the classroom, they move through four stages of change—learning from their peers; experimenting and adopting; co-learning and co-exploring with their students; and finally, reflecting and either rejecting the adoption decision or reconfirming it and continuing the cycle to become the next round of peer trainers. The success of this process is supported by communicating a shared vision among all members of the educational system, including teachers, administrators, parents, the community, and the policy-making bodies.
Ron Oliver
Department of Library and Information Science Edith Cowan University, Bradford Street Mt. Lawley, 6050, Western Australiar.oliver@cowan.edu.au
Murray Lake
Faculty of Education Edith Cowan University, Bradford Street Mt. Lawley, 6050, Western AustraliaThis paper describes a project in Western Australia in which teacher-education students needing to learn practical skills of, and a theoretical understanding about, audiographics as an instructional technology, did so in a course where the technology itself was used as the delivery medium. This method of course delivery was characterised by a teaching program which involved such instructional attributes as knowledge construction, authentic contexts, student-centred learning, and collaboration. An evaluation of the course demonstrated high levels of student performance and satisfaction and positive learning outcomes.
The evaluation revealed that students were very positive about the alternative instructional format used with most seeing it as superior to conventional instruction. There was evidence that all the characteristic attributes had a positive impact on student learning and there were a number of learning outcomes that most likely could not have been achieved through conventional teaching. The instruction led to the development of the skills and knowledge needed to develop effective teaching programs with this technology. The components of the course which the students saw as most effective were those related directly to practical teaching with the technology.
Chih-Kai Chang and Gwo-Dong Chen
Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering National Central University Chung-Li, Taiwan 320chihkai@ms9.accmail.com.tw
chen@db.csie.ncu.edu.tw
This paper proposes a model for managing the learning flow and portfolios to scaffold learners and promote learning efficiency in a collaborative learning environment on the World Wide Web. The major obstacle to promoting learning performance is that existing systems cannot specify users’ interactions because the World Wide Web does not support learning flow and portfolios for constructing a collaborative learning environment. Consequently, new network technologies always attract instructors to adjust the system’s architecture to give better learning performance. Furthermore, designing a collaborative learning environment with existing network tools creates an additional burden for instructors and learners. For instance, an instructor may be asked to master the network tools to develop a collaborative learning environment and students may be required to pay attention so as to avoid disorientation in the environment. To thoroughly answer the problem, the learning flow and portfolio management of a collaborative learning environment should enable an instructor to scaffold and observe learners’ behavior effortlessly. This paper presents a framework and specifies the software for managing learning flow and portfolios on the Web. The design model can promote learning performance, avoid continuous adjustment to the system, and reduce the burden on users.
Yen-Jen Lee and Horng-Juing Lee
Media Server and Applications Group IXMICRO San Jose, CA 95125, USA{ylee,hjlee}@ixmicro.com
Wei-hsiu Ma and David H.C. Du
Distributed Multimedia Research Center Department of Computer Science, University of Minnesota Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA{wma,du}@cs.umn.edu
An effective network-based learning environment provides synchronous and asynchronous education to learners who are physically remote from or opt to telecommute to the base location of instruction. The environment provides content creation, user registration, course material storage, multiple delivery means, and end-user viewing tools. An intriguing aspect of the environment is how to model a lecture in terms of pre-, in-, and post-class information. We regard a lecture model collectively as an activity consisting of three elements: lecture materials, lecture presentation, and lecture interaction. These elements have their semantic meanings and relationships. The lecture model deserves a formal specification to describe its behavior and a structural representation in the hypermedia repository to organize the presentation information so that it can be truthfully reproduced in an asynchronous learning environment. We derive the synchronization specification for the media objects and define Strong-Weak Networked Hyperlink (SWNH) to represent the lecture structure and inter-/intramedia object reference in the distributed network environment. The specification and representation exhibit an object-oriented modular design, which is simple, but powerful enough, to aid on policy decisions such as prefetching, caching, and versioning control. The presentation of the lecture embodies both the event-driven and timeline-based presentation synchronization where the browsing and authoring tools developed earlier fit right into the learning environment, for example, FLexible Interactive Presentation Synchronization (FLIPS) and Hyper QuickTime (HQT) by the authors, or are immediately available through other providers, such as Web browsers.
Hiroaki Ogata and Yoneo Yano
Faculty of Engineering, Tokushima University 2-1, Minami Josanjima, Tokushima 770 Japan{ogata, yano}@is.tokushima-u.ac.jp
This paper describes knowledge awareness (KA), a new concept for inducing collaboration in an open-ended and collaborative learning environment. Sharlok (SHARing, Linking and lOoking for Knowledge) is also proposed as a testbed of KA, which has a knowledge building and collaborative learning environment connected via Internet. To enhance collaboration opportunities in this situation, KA provides information about the activities of the learners within the shared knowledge space. For instance, the messages are “someone is looking at the same knowledge that you are looking at” and “someone discussed the knowledge which you have inputted.” The spontaneous collaboration which is created by the messages facilitates the refinement and evolution of the learners’ knowledge. We have tested and verified the effectiveness of Sharlok and KA through their use.
Karen L. Murphy
Department of Educational Curriculum and Instruction Texas A&M University, 308 Harrington Tower, MS 4232 College Station, TX 77843-4232, USAkmurphy@tamu.edu
Renee’ Drabier
Technology Services University of Southern Colorado, 2200 Bonforte Boulevard Pueblo, CO 81001, USAdrabier@uscolo.edu
Mary Lu Epps
Department of Educational Curriculum and Instruction Texas A&M University, 308 Harrington Tower, MS 4232 College Station, TX 77843-4232, USAmle4920@unix.tamu.edu
Computer conferencing has become an increasingly important tool in university course delivery. This study addresses ways in which computer conferencing impacted interaction and collaboration patterns among students and with the instructor in a semester-long graduate course. Through a combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods, we (a) compared communication and interaction patterns in computer conferencing and face-to-face environments, (b) identified ways that computer conferencing encourages on-line discussion, (c) discovered methods of fostering collaborative learning, and (d) analyzed the instructor’s new and expanded role in a constructivist computer conferencing environment. Implications of the study are that computer conferencing offers unique ways of addressing needs of diverse learners through instructional design and design of the physical interface and that disorientation results from information overload.
Yu-mei Wang
College of Education, University of Guam UOG Station-COE Mangilao, Guam 96923ymwang@uog9.uog.edu
This case study involved designing an electronic-based environment to explore the effectiveness of electronic mail (email) as a writing tool for dialogue journaling. The setting for this study was in an intermediate-level reading and writing class in the American English Institute Program on the campus of a large public university. During a period of 9 weeks, six randomly assigned English as a second language (ESL) students in the class wrote dialogue journals to their instructor using email, while the rest of the students in the class wrote dialogue journals to the instructor using paper and pencil. The following issues were investigated: (a) What were the students’ attitudes toward dialogue journal writing via email? (b) What was the instructor’s perception regarding email dialogue journal writing? (c) What problems occurred in the process of using email as a tool for doing dialogue journal writing? and (d) In what ways were email journals different from paper journals? The findings of the study show that a variety of factors combined to exert an influence on the participants’ attitudes towards email. Limited knowledge about an email system prevented some students from taking a full advantage of email as a unique communication tool. Comparison of email journals and paper journals reveals that email created a different writing mode than that of paper and pencil.