Education with New Technologies:
Rationale for the Design of an Online Learning Environment
February 1998
Prepared by Stone Wiske With assistance from Linda Booth Sweeney and Jim Moore
Researchers at the Harvard Graduate School of Education are developing an online environment to support teaching for understanding with new technologies. The primary goal of this site on the World Wide Web is to link innovative educators with one another, researchers, and other resources to support the improvement of teaching and learning, especially in schools. The Education with New Technologies (ENT) site is intended to facilitate the development and distribution of educational materials and to encourage their use by promoting reflective dialogue among a networked community of educators.
A prior working paper explained the purposes of this online environment and the issues its designers considered as they planned the website. This paper explains the choices we made as we attended to those issues during the design of the initial environment. The website was launched in mid-February, 1998, at http://learnweb.harvard.edu/ent/. Readers are encouraged to examine and critique its enactment of the ideas discussed here.
Overview
Our initial thinking about the design of the website was shaped by analysis of four interlacing issues: audience and access, the technical design of the website, the content of resources, and mediation of social interactions among participants who use the environment. During the past three months, as we developed the environment, we focused on the second two of these issues: technical design of the website, with attention to the overall metaphor and look-and-feel of the site, and the content of particular components of the website, including an interactive design tool, the forums for discussion, and the library of resources.
Besides developing these components of the site, we continue to reflect on the rationales guiding our design decisions. Two analytic frameworks are especially formative. The Teaching for Understanding (TfU) framework presents a concise and coherent approach to developing, enacting, and assessing curriculum. Because a central purpose of our website is to help educators use this framework to develop effective uses of new educational technologies, it is of paramount importance that the site itself exemplify the principles of this framework. A second guiding analytic framework is based on principles derived from a review of literature on knowledge management. The emerging field of knowledge management combines ideas from organizational theory, management strategy, and management information systems to draw implications for developing and sharing knowledge in social networks.
In this paper, we begin by explaining these two conceptual frameworks with emphasis on the principles that influenced the design of the online environment. Then we describe the environment itself, with attention to the features that exemplify these principles.
Teaching for Understanding
The Teaching for Understanding framework is a structure designed to help educators refine their practice to develop learnersí understanding. It developed through dialogue among educational researchers and developers and is intended to promote similar reflective dialogues toward improving educational practice. The framework is based on a conception of understanding as a performance or ability to apply knowledge in flexible, creative, practical ways. It consists of four elements, each elaborated with criteria to help educators exemplify these elements in their practice. In summary, the TfU framework recommends: (1) organizing curriculum around generative topics, (2) defining understanding goals that explicitly and publicly clarify what students should come to understand, (3) engaging students in performances of understanding that both develop and demonstrate progress toward the stated goals, and (4) examining students' performances through ongoing assessments based on public criteria clearly linked to goals.
Although the framework seems simple and commonsensical at first glance, teachers who use it thoughtfully often find that it transforms their practice in powerful ways. Their curriculum centers more squarely on priority goals, studentsí work advances these goals rather than preliminary or peripheral agendas, and shared responsibility for ongoing assessment develops studentsí commitment and confidence as learners. For these reasons we have chosen to use the TfU framework to guide teachers in making educationally powerful uses of new technologies.
Prior research has shown that teachers come to understand the Teaching for Understanding framework through experiencing educational activities that exemplify the framework. Such practical experience of learning for understanding animates what may otherwise seem like abstract concepts. Consequently, we are committed to designing the Education with New Technologies (ENT)environment to exemplify the principles of Teaching for Understanding. This approach is summarized here and illustrated more fully later in the descriptions of the website components.
1. Make Education with New Technologies a generative topic.
Generative topics address the heart of the subject (in this case improving
teaching and learning for understanding), engage the passionate interests
of learners, and are accessible through multiple entry points. We attempt
to present the ENT website as a comfortable place for school people, designed
to address the concerns that preoccupy them, which they may enter in multiple
ways according to their particular interests.
2. Establish clear understanding goals.
Understanding goals are explicit statements about what learners will come to understand. By articulating them clearly and publicly, all the members of a learning community consciously define both their overarching educational goals and a set of nested subgoals. Focusing on a chain of goals that lead to the target understandings, prevents siphoning off energy toward rehearsals of disconnected facts or skills. The ENT website publicizes its goals and, through various structures including the registration form, encourages participants to articulate and reflect on their own goals for learning in this site.
3. Engage learners in performances of understanding.
Learners develop understanding when they relate new ideas to prior knowledge and skills through observable activities that develop and demonstrate the target understandings. Such performances of understanding promote learning and provide the bases for assessing and improving learners' work. The ENT site includes interactive tools, forums, and resources that encourage users to think, reflect, and produce as they work in the site.
4. Conduct ongoing assessment of understanding.
Assessments of learners performances, based on criteria that are explicitly related to understanding goals, promote understanding. When assessments are conducted throughout the process of drafting and revising products or performances, they generate constructive suggestions for further learning. As learners apply explicit criteria in assessing their own or peers' performances, they develop a richer picture of possible demonstrations of understanding and deepen their own understanding. In several places, the ENT site provides users with criteria and prompts to help them assess their own performances and give constructive feedback to other participants.
Knowledge Management
In addition to the Teaching for Understanding framework, a set of principles derived from a field called knowledge management has influenced our thinking about the website and its facilitation. This field, which goes by various names, combines work in organizational theory, management strategy, and information management systems. It aims to link the capacity of information technologies with the creative capacities of human networks to promote learning and the generation of knowledge. For our purposes, we prefer a term like "knowledge ecology" which connotes the generation and sustainable flow of knowledge, rather than "knowledge management," which suggests the administration and filing of knowledge units. Linda Booth Sweeney reviewed work in this emerging field for theoretical, technical and design insights that might inform our efforts.
The Knowledge Management field shares with Teaching for Understanding both the goal of linking knowledge with action and the belief that understanding is developed through action. Among a far-flung group of people who share common goals, such as the audience we hope to address with our website, the Knowledge Management perspective focuses on strategies that encourage coordinated action. Through coordinated action, members can combine and share knowledge and expertise. In order to develop such coordination, however, participants need to foster a network of relationships based on trust and reciprocity. Some people use the phrase ìcommunity of practiceî to describe a group who are committed to collaborative generation of knowledge that they apply to the improvement of their practice. Structures and norms that encourage such communities of practice include: information is widely available to all members of the community, relationships are networked rather than hierarchical, innovation and collaboration are prized over efficiency and a formal division of labor, every member of the group shares responsibility for promoting learning.
In reviewing the implications of the Knowledge Management field for our work, we have focused especially on five principles:
Develop the communityís ability to adapt. Encourage participants to contribute to the resources and to help refine the mission and design of the community.
Link information to action. Encourage participants in the community to learn by doing and to apply what they learn in practice. Incorporate opportunities for active learning into the design of the website.
Provide opportunities for coordinated action. Provide tools, forums, and events that engage participants in collaboration.
Improve access to knowledge. Help participants locate the knowledge they want, store it in ways that make the knowledge easy to retrieve and relate to their work, and share knowledge with others who have similar interests.
Harvest knowledge in repositories or booths. As knowledge proliferates in libraries or forums, it must be sorted, stored, and culled or it rapidly becomes overwhelming.
ENT Website Design
The Teaching for Understanding framework and Knowledge Management principles influence both the overall conception of the ENT website and choices about the design of its components. Here we summarize the rationale underlying metaphor for the site and then describe design choices for components whose features explicitly reflect TfU and KM.
Village Metaphor
In keeping with the principles of the Teaching for Understanding framework and Knowledge Management theory, the website needed to invite active and thoughtful engagement from visitors, not simply passive looking. We first considered an interactive magazine format with regular departments designed for subscribers with particular interests. The expectation of regular issues would generate fresh anticipation among subscribers. Subscribers could tailor the magazine to their own specifications by highlighting certain features and minimizing or eliminating ones that did not interest them. As we discussed this conception further, we worried that the connotations of a magazine format might be too passive, however. It bore too much resemblance to the one-way transmission of knowledge from the generators to the recipients. We wanted a metaphor that encouraged participants to become actively involved in using the site and to consider themselves as key contributors.
The second metaphor we considered was a design studio, a place for collaborative construction of artful products. One advantage of this notion was that it conjured active participation in making innovative products. This underlying human activity offered a powerful complement to the virtual journey underlying the mountain-climbing metaphor around which our partners are developing their Active Learning Practices for Schools (ALPS) site. One difficulty was that the studio concept did not relate easily to mountain landscape of the ALPS site. Acknowledging the priority of a sense of community with ALPS participants for achieving our overlapping purposes, we opted to develop the site around a village metaphor.
The virtual village seemed likely to be a generative metaphor, enabling participants to draw upon customary modes of engagement in attempting a new and challenging endeavor. To offset the inevitably modern and potentially cold atmosphere of digital technologies, a village evokes old-fashioned and comforting images. We hope to attract the attention of teachers who may not yet be fluent with navigating the world wide web, so the familiar and cozy connotations of a village are appealing. A village seems likely to provide easy access to facilities and fellow villagers, and promises the opportunity to join a community. Our intention is to draw participants in the ENT site into relationships and dialogue predicated on reciprocal exchange. Finally, the visual image of village is easy to imagine as a map with paths connecting components in various ways. This visibility and flexibility seemed likely to help participants find their own way around the website. Our hopes for the village metaphor were realized when an early visitor to the site, a self-proclaimed Luddhite, said, "I feel at home here."
The site called "Education with New Technologies: A Networked Learning Community" contains buildings one might expect to fine in any typical village or town. The Welcome Center is a place to learn about the purpose of the site and the rationale for the village metaphor, and initiate a guided tour of the site components. The Meeting Hall is a place to meet other participants either in forums organized around particular topics or in a cafÈ where more informal discussions are held and members can browse the village newspaper. The Workshop is like a design studio with various interactive tools for making products such as curriculum plans and materials. The Library contains several kinds of resources, such as special reports, published texts, and links to related sites on the Web. All resources in the Library are cross-referenced according to topics and key words. The Gallery is a place for members of the community to display and view exemplary products and practices. Eventually it will contain both textual vignettes, short video segments, and perhaps oral interviews depicting and annotating examples of practice that exemplifies TfU principles and integrates new technologies. Finally, the Learning Center is a place to engage in sustained learning activities such as online workshops, institutes or structured tutorials.
Novel Components
Several components of the site expressly enact the principles of the Teaching for Understanding and Knowledge Management frameworks described above. Each of these features is intended to engage participants in understanding how to teach for understanding with new technologies by drawing them into interaction with the site itself and other participants.
The registration form invites visitors to describe their background and goals as a way of reflecting on their own learning agenda and of communicating those interests to other participants. By completing the registration form, participants identify the topics about which they wish to focus their learning and organize contact with other participants. With this information the site software automatically alerts the participants to resources, events, and other opportunities that may be particularly relevant.
To help participants assemble relevant tools, resources, and products, the site offers each registrant a backpack. This device enables participants to indicate forums, products, fellow community members, and resources that are particularly relevant and store these components of the site in a readily accessible form. The backpack is a structure that encourages participants to make their village experience relevant to their own goals and to relate the work they do while at the site to their own regular lives and knowledge organization systems. We are considering ways of including a notebook in the backpack that would allow participants to record information and make notes as they travel around the site and send those entries to their private email box.
We have created interactive tools that engage participants in performances of understanding, e.g., activities that develop and demonstrate their understanding of the TfU framework to improve education with new technologies. The initial example of this concept is the Collaborative Curriculum Design Tool found in the Workshop. With this tool, collaborative partners or teams work with a tool that provides prompts to support planning curriculum with the TfU framework. This tool provides sectors for describing generative topics, understanding goals, understanding performances, and ongoing assessments.
The Collaborative Curriculum Design Tool is also linked to a number of resources and supports that users may reveal or hide, according to their needs. For example, the tool is linking to online summaries of curriculum standards from local, state, and national groups that teachers may need or wish to consult as they design curriculum. In this way it can help teachers meet existing requirements, rather than feel like an additional demand. The tool provides means for members of a design team to draft and modify their product in private. Each sector of the tool is linked to criteria and questions that remind users of ways to address the elements of the TfU framework. These prompts are accessible in pop-up boxes that users may access or ignore, depending on their own preferences. The prompts help users conduct self- or peer-assessments of draft designs and generate suggestions for improvement. Members of a design team may post their curriculum design in a more public archive once they are ready to share their ideas and hear feedback from a wider audience. We believe the collection of public designs will provide visions of possibility that ENT participants may adapt for their own purposes and settings.
The resources included in the library are categorized according to a range of topics that interest teachers, administrators, and researchers. We have incorporated several kinds of materials in the library, including special reports prepared by the project staff or others, related websites, and print-based articles or books, each labeled according to keywords and annotated by the contributor. The keywords correlate with those provided on the registration form and the classification categories provided with the Collaborative Curriculum Design Tool. We are developing a resource tool that will allow participants to search the contents of the Library by these keywords to find resources of particular interest to them. The same tool will also permit participants to submit resources to the Library.
Forums located within the Meeting Hall provide a place to meet other participants in the ENT village and carry out more sustained conversations on topics of mutual interests. Initially, we have created a limited number of forums within which participants can share reactions to the site, and explore topics related to education with new technologies. If groups of participants identify topics they wish to analyze in an extended way, we can easily create new forums for them. In addition, a cafÈ forum invites more informal chatting, on the assumption that all communities are enhanced by places to relax and visit informally.
The design and structure of the forums emerged from an extended analysis of existing software to support electronic conferences. We developed criteria, based on our purposes and preliminary assessment of our target audience, and asked our Advisory Board to suggest appropriate software packages. Members of the project staff met with the Advisory Board to review and critique them with respect to their ease of use, adaptability to the web, and capacity to manage threaded discussions.
A key theme during this review concerned the merits of accessing discussion forums through email or through the ENT website. The advantage of email access is that users can participate in forum discussions without leaving the email program that is likely to be their primary telecommunication tool. This approach carries several disadvantages, however: email messages about ENT issues would be interspersed with mail on other topics and users might limit their engagement with the ENT site to reading forum messages in email. To engage participants more fully in using the resources of the site and to develop a community of practice among users of the ENT site, we decided to support forums embedded in the ENT online environment.
Most software packages that support web-based conferences proved difficult to understand, slow, or limited in terms of our functional criteria. None of the products fully met our needs. We chose to work with a web-based version of First Class, a conferencing software by Softarc. The current version of this product allows us to create and modify forums and a more fluent version is supposed to be released within the next several months. Participants in forums can respond to messages or initiate a new topic. Through a feature of their backpack, participants can arrange to receive notification from particular forums in their email. This "push" technology reminds users to visit the ENT site where they must go to participate in the forum conversation.
We recognize that online forums need mediation and facilitation, just like groups of learners who meet face to face. For the present, members of the staff will take responsibility for hosting each forum by visiting regularly, responding to questions, and helping other participants develop ways of supporting one another. As the number of participants grow, we hope to devise ways of moderating forums in ways that promote shared responsibility for fostering collaborative action. We also expect to create a means of harvesting key ideas or imformation from forum conversations and sharing it in an ENT village newsletter. It may be sent regularly to registered participants and distributed in the Welcome Hall and cafÈ forum.
Next Steps
The ENT website is very new. We have just announced its existence to a few people with whom we are currently working on Teaching for Understanding, the integration of new educational technologies, or both. During the next three months, we will proceed on several fronts.
Revise the existing site. We are still tinkering with the components that have already been launched, adapting the look and the language to convey our intentions more accurately and completely. As participants begin to use the website, they suggest corrections and modifications to improve the fluency and utility of the site. We will respond to these suggestions when they seem feasible and worthwhile.
Work with pilot participants. We are collaborating with several clusters of school practitioners in our areas on projects related to Teaching for Understanding and the integration of new technologies. These clusters include teachers and administrators at schools in Boston, Winchester, and Watertown, Massachusetts. Through intensive interactions with partners in these schools, we will examine the utility of tools like the Collaborative Curriculum Design Tool. These initial partners may also recommend new kinds of interactive tools that would aid their work.
Extend the site. Several proposed components of the site are yet to be designed. Walking tours of the village for people with different interests is one example. Examples of practice in the gallery is another example. We hope to create both text-based vignettes and perhaps Quicktime Video vignettes of classroom practice that exemplify Teaching for Understanding with new technologies.
Facilitate dialogue and exchange. As people visit the site and begin to use it, we expect that like-minded participants will wish to communicate with one another. The Forums may develop into a means for such dialogue. Initially, members of the staff will take responsibility for monitoring the forums, moderating them, and perhaps digesting the discussion into themes to be publicized in the ENT newsletter. Later we hope to engage other members of the community in serving as moderators.
Publicity and recruitment. As the site is tried and modified through consultation with our pilot partners, we will identify appropriate means of publicizing the site to others who may be interested. For example, we will announce the site on related electronic bulletin boards and newsgroups, at conferences, and in the authorís comment box of the order form for Teaching for Understanding: Linking Research with Practice at the online bookstore of Amazon.com.
Continued funding. During the next quarter, we will also need to explore options for sustaining funding for the development of the website. Ultimately we expect that the site may be maintained through fees charged for services including access to the resources, use of interactive tools, and participation in online workshops. External funds are needed, however, to develop the site structures and resources to the point that they are extensive and polished enough to support charging user fees and to attract a large enough group of participants.
Assessment. As the ENT site becomes more fully developed and we engage pilot participants in using the site, we will develop criteria and processes for assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the online environment. Issues to be considered include: the extent to which the site itself exemplifies the analytic frameworks described here, users' comments about the accessibility and value of the site, and the most effective ways of connecting use of the online environment with meetings, print materials, and other strategies for supporting teaching for understanding with new technologies.
This report was prepared at the Harvard Graduate School of Education with support from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.
"Designing a Networked Learning Environment: A Working Paper." Prepared by Stone Wiske, James Moore, Linda Booth Sweeney, David Grogan, Rhonda Struminger, and Andy Williams with assistance from Nathan Finch and Jon Chalmers. December 1997. Available in the Library of the Education with New Technologies website at http://learnweb.harvard.edu/ent/
Wiske, M.S. (Ed.) (1998). Teaching for Understanding: Linking Research with Practice. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Booth Sweeney, L. "Knowledge Management Through the Lens of the Teaching for Understanding Framework." Internal document.
Ibid.
The ALPS website may be found at http://learnweb.harvard.alps/ .
Seymour Sarason's phrase for images that stimulate innovation in The Culture of the School and the Problem of Change, 2nd ed. Boston : Allyn