Selected notes from the Ed Media 2003 Conference in Hawaii. I presented a paper on InsituTraining.

Online Ed for Native Americans

Designing and Delivering Online Education for the Unique Academic Needs of Native American Populations
Joan Van Duzer, Humboldt State

Major questions and goals

• Focused on traditional learning and teaching before European contact, then moved into today's teaching methods
• Is online ed appropriate for Native Americans, or is this just another cultural assault?

Cultural factors

Native Americans are:

• reflective, rather than reactive
• collab not competition
• less likely to grad

Impact on Instructional Design

• high attrition risk
• include student-student and facilitator-student
• preliminary assisted online orientation (no-one took her up on this offer)
• encourage reflection and collab through discussion boards
  • focusing study questions, answers provided end of week
  • 50% of grade based on these
  • online discussions augmented with face to face, which connected people to names and allowed for non verbal cues
  • virtual pats on the back with personal emails from facilitator to students after posting

Student feedback

• appreciated flexibility, missed verbal cues, face to face
• appreciated opportunity for all to participate
• preferred shared power, instructor as devil's advocate rather than as authority

Questions and followup

• paper primordial campfire in cyberspace
• rubric: evaluation method
• paper Issues in cross-cultural assessment
• See course online
• http://blackboard.humboldt.edu
  • click login, then ''preview'
  • click courses
  • click American Indianm Education
• Click History of American Indian Education with preview on right

African AIDS awareness training with Emerging Technology

Emerging Technology for Emerging People: evaluation of an AIDS-awareness training system
Ruth de Villers, U. South Africa

Edutouch

• Headphones, feedback in own language
• touch-based: no mouse or keyboard
• focused on miners and

Instructional Model

The Six C's

1. Cognitive learning
   • Process rather than products
   • Edutouch reiterates and moves from general to particular (what is starch, protein, minerals; what food are they in?)
   • minimal short-term memory load
   • cultural metaphors: scabs as protective walls, cells as soldiers
2. Constructivism
   • Active immersive learning
   • picture power, animations, own-language aural
   • real world info, presenters
3. Components
   • not didactic, choose your own order
   • true or false tests very popular: provided interaction
   • little point by point teaching
4. Collab learning
   • many used them in groups: placed in work areas, rec areas, food areas, etc.
   • natural peer training: the guy who knows how to use it shows them
5. Customization
   • Touch screen selection of vernacular language
   • matching user's-visual patterns
   • users interact at time and location of choice
   • choose their own modules and sequences
6. Creatvity
   • colors, etc.

Questions and Followup

• Navigation systen or linear?
• How not intimidated by quizzes?
• matching user's-visual patterns
• Why do you think collab use of equipment came about

Supporting indigenous collab through MM CDrom

Kevin Roach, Educator and Designer, Fond du Lac Ojibwe School
Mary Hermes, Assistant Professor of Education, University of Minnesota Duluth

Cultural Considerations

• game-like
• traditional laerning styles of story-telling, participation and exploration
• encourages exploration
• no tests, no win or lose
• allows students to contribute images, songs, etc.

Navigation

• Home-area, trail metaphor
• recurring characters: Sami and his sister

Questions and followups

• Navigation: any labelling system? How do they know what brings them where? Or is it pure exploration?
  • Answer: for studetns it is purely eploratory, but teachers provided with a site-map
• Find CD-Rom around December

Encounter Theory and online learning

John Hedberg, National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, jhedberg@nie.edu.sg
Rod Sims, QANTM, Brisbane, Australia, rsims@qantm.edu.au

Propositions

• environments self-modified by learners
• collab between pedagogy and designers
• taks must engage learners

Three I's

1. Information structure and its representation
   • visual, text based, etc
2. Interaction possibilities
   • simple interaction with info (2 buttons max)
3. Interface structures and how elements are visually presented

Design Process

• Old school: Build Test Revise Analyse
• New School
  • Rapid protyping
  • Concurrent design: implement as you go
  • Just in time support

Encounter Theory

• Introductory encounters
• Controlling encounters
• Strategic encounters - allow new directions
• Sympathetic encounters

Metaphors

• Museums
• Theatre
• Microsoft style applications

Questions and Followup

• Stage Struck software: learners as actor

Reaching Students of many langs and cultures

Rika Yoshii

Computer Science Department, California State University, San Marcos, USA, ryoshii@csusm.edu

• Delete innapropriate material for specific cultures
• script-editors with different langs in multiple windows

Fusa Katada

School of Science & Engineering, Waseda University, Japan, katada@waseda.jp
Three D's

• Diversity
  • own lang teaching helps acheive diversity
• Disparity - EAGLE
  • teaching in difft languages in difft: access is limited to non-english speakers
• Divide
  • Social Divide
    • Santa Barabara: 94% of those taught in their own language fail when they move to English courses: bilingual as a barrier! to success in an English world
  • Cultural divide
    • own lang a link to the past but a key to success
  • Linguistic Divide
    • learning and thinking most effectively facilitated in one's own language

Faeqa Alsadeqi

Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies, University of Bahrain, Bahrain, foo96@batelco.com.bh
Globalisation

• IT people in Arab lans use internet for research, but non-IT do not
• this is not due to lack of computer literacy: they use internet for social communication but not for research
• Internet has not replaced older forms of research in Arab nations

Felicia Zhang

Chinese and Applied Linguistics, University of Canberra, feliciaz@comedu.canberra.edu.au Should students learn in their own language and why?

• Cultural identity is important
• Teaching only in english might systematically disempower students
• Translators need to know subject and culture!
• Learning styles
  • we should not blindly accept a learning style just because of cultural comfort
  • must be flexible, and fuzzy enough to deal outside of cultural learning methods
  • Instructor as contributor
  • need to make way to no-tech and low-tech

Five Issues

1. Should the students learn in their own language and why
   • Learning through a new language teaches new concepts
   • Early education in own lang for concepts: english or international language for college and on
2. How will we create materials in various languages?
   • pedagogically we should use our own languages, but english as a tool for passing the info on
   • production of the materials in difft languages is the responsibility of each language-group
3. How to translate materials from English to other langs?
4. Should students learn in the styles normally accepted by their own cultures?
   • impossible
   • cannot be rigid, must be flexible
   • language is inseparable from culture, so they must be taught in own culture
5. How will we deliver materials to remote areas of the world?
   • Internet eventually

Questions and Followup

• EAGLE?
• International designers
• Fuzzy teaching styles

Visualization tools for student use in learning programming

Paul Juell, paul.juell@ndsu.nodak.edu
Manohar Sreekantaradhya, manohar.sreekantaradhya@ndsu.nodak.edu
Department of Computer Science, North Dakota State University, Fargo, North Dakota 58105

• Variety of viewpoints is essential
• works as both in-class teacher tool, and as self-run student tool
• http://trc.ucdavis.edu/trc/active/definiti.html
• real-time control by students
• each perspective should have its own visualization
• organized conceptually, not as code (i.e. not pop array but pushing something to the top of a list of items)
• hide things they are not interested in

Visual Metaphors must be matched with concept and code

• control panel + display area
• VCR like controls: play, step forward, step back, and stop
• play to watch the visualisation as the code runs, or step through (CR: like Director's watcher?)

Active learning

• students set pace, revisit
• selectable aspects for visualisation: i.e: algorithm vs variable focii

Interactive Learning Structures Environment: An Alternative Pedagogy

Shahin Vassigh, Co-Director for Center for Virtual Architecture, Department of Architecture, University at Buffalo, The state University of New York, United States, Vassigh@ap.buffalo.edu

Alternative Pedagogy

Multiple modes

• exact in-class replication
• multiple views, can study in different contexts
• self-run, students move from intro to advanced at own pace (CR: layers of simplicity)

Instructor's role

• not long lectures, but small production-based studio sessions with small groups

"The generic lecture approach to learning, which necessitates that all students earn at the same rate, could be replaced by individualized learning patterns that are more compatible with teaching in this design studio format. Students can access the subject under investigation in the form exactly as it is delivered in class, have the ability to repeat information, and use multiple views and magnifications to investigate the subject more thoroughly. By selecting a different path within the software, it is also possible to avoid repetition and study the same subject in a completely different context. This structured self-exploratory system allows the students to explore concepts from introductory and advanced principles at their own pace. Long hours of lecturing can be reduced and supplanted with self-directed learning, freeing up the instructor's time to interact individually with small groups and to participate more actively in the design studio."

Designing Representational Tools for Collaborative Learning

Dan Suthers, U of Hawaii-Manoa

• Belevedere is available at sourceforge!: http://belvedere.sourceforge.net/

Diagrams

• had to remind students to put their discussions in the diagram: they preferred face-to-face
• thus, diagrams became stimulus rather than mode of communication

Discourse Maps

• visually map communications between students
• allow for sorting (subject, relevance, judgements, etc)

How do representational affordances quide learning?

Representational Tools

• primitives (shapes)
• external reps make us evaluate our ideas in difft ways
• shared Representations prompt negotiations

Salience (Larkin and Simon, 1987)

• how easy is it to extract the info from the representation later?

Prompting (Collins and Ferguson, 1993)

• what further cognitive activity does the representation encourage?
• matrices prompt data-talk
• shapes prompt discourse on relations

Low Bandwidth 3D MOO Software

Internet-based 3D Graphical MOO Software that Supports Distributed Learning for both Sides of the Digital Divide
Dr. James G. Jones ,Dept. of Technology and Cognition ,University of North Texas ,Denton, Texas USA ,greg@tapr.org

• 3D-engine is low banbdwidth
• OpenGL
• 3d can create more immersive interactions than email and other text-based 2way communication tools
• not discussing pedagogical implications, but effectiveness over low-bandwidth

Resources and Followup

• Created Realities Group
• Stanford Interactive Workspaces Project
• OpenGL
• Everquest

Diverse Ethnic and Cultural Landscapes

Zones of Discomfort for Learning Environments: Taking the University to Diverse Ethnic and Cultural Landscapes
Judith Kirkpatrick, University of Hawai'i - Kapi'olani College, USA
Kristine Blair, Bowling Green State University, USA
Susan Inouye, University of Hawai'i - Kapi'olani College, USA
Ulla Hasager, University of Hawai'i at Manoa, USA

Soundbites

• "Pacific students learn by watching, and will often be scolded if they ask questions"
• "I thought that teaching mouse skills, navigation, web building, etc. was most important, but I soon discovered that the most important facet was a feeling of inclusion in the community made available by the web"
• "university setting in the midst of the Palolo houseing project"

Pacific Voices: Trad Knowledge and Village Wisdom

Pacific Voices: Empowerment through Traditional Knowledge and Village Wisdom
Malia Nobrega, malianob@aol.com
Martha Guinan, guinan@hawaii.edu: I met her: good contact
Lilian S Segal, segal@hawaii.edu: ed tech at UH

Overall Themes

• Low-end, so easy and quick to make
• teaches students about cultures while learning to use tech equipment

Video Poster

• Students teach via a poster explained on video: (eg: Palau on environment)

Storybook Weaver: story creator software

• Yap: sign language + imovie

Howto Videos

• Stone crab gets all of his arms ripped off while still alive: "its a cultural thing"

Video Letter

Saipan: child explaining where and what Saipan is

• exported as quicktime cdrom and as video
• video letter sent to another country, and then that country responds with their own video letter

Guam

• children throwing trash out
• song playing about beautiful Guam island
• "Are you maing our island ugly?"
• graffiti: why don't you draw something pretty to make our island beautiful