ABSTRACT

In a Learning-by-Design environment, students need support for a wide variety of activities such as design skills, research skills, collaboration, record-keeping, etc. SMILE is informed by our pilot work in the classrooms in which it was found that LBD classrooms were exhausting for teachers because they had to deal with a number of small groups, more or less at the same time. Support in the form of software to help students in the design, research and collaboration skills was thus considered a necessity. SMILE is an integrated learning environment and supports a range of design activities such as analysis of the problem, planning, generating learning issues, generating ideas for the design, setting criteria for evaluation, coming up with alternative solutions, modifying, revising and optimizing. It also supports collaboration and record keeping activities. It has a series of tools, each geared toward an important design activity and a set of prompts that help students understand the phase of design they are engaging in and the options to move forward. SMILE is guided by its knowledge of the design. As there are always many options for proceeding in design, prompting cannot be prescriptive; rather it need to be suggestive of what students might do next, thus helping them decide from several alternatives by further prompting. PABLO (Hmelo, Narayanan, Newstetter and Kolodner, 1995) has been integrated into SMILE has been used in our classrooms as a record keeping device where students could write about their plans, ideas, learning requirements, facts and constraints, etc. for the lung problem. We are at present working on the design of SMILE and a prototype called Web-SMILE that has been tested in classrooms.

INTRODUCTION

Based on our experiences in the classroom with PABLO, a synchronous collaboration tool, and WebCaMILE, an asynchronous collaboration tool, we designed a new learning environment, SMILE, integrating synchronous and asynchronous collaboration as well as scaffolding the design process and appropriate use of the tools.

PABLO (see Figure 1) is a learning environment that supports the note-taking activities that are central to PBL. Whereas in PBL students normally used whiteboards or paper to keep their records, PABLO provides an electronic workspace replacing and extending the whiteboard. PABLO serves several purposes. It provides shared space for record keeping, integrated access to support tools and workspaces, and a framework for attaching software-realized scaffolding.

Figure 1: PABLO's workspace based on the PBL methodology.

WebCaMILE (see Figure 2) is a network-based collaboration environment that provides a forum for sharing, discussing, and reflecting as well as integrating several information bases. Students using WebCaMILE post material to the network that they want others to see, carrying on threaded discussions on topics of their choosing. They might attach resources they find to their notes as well, showing others, for example, the spreadsheet they used to make computations they are writing about or the example they found on the web that supports their argument. WebCAMILE goes beyond simple newsgroups in helping students with expressing themselves as they participate in threaded discussions.

All in all, the students were able to use the tools, but they did not use them efficiently and not always as we expected. Furthermore, the teachers were sometimes lost and did not know what to do as well. A major reason for this, we believe, is that our emphasis on tools neglected to take into account students' need as they are using tools, i.e., we neglected the big picture in focusing support on individual activities within the big context. This bigger context includes successfully carrying out design activities and learning from them. We believe this must be our primary focus in the design of new learning environments, with tool support as just one part of the big picture.

Figure 2: A message hierarchy in WebCaMILE supporting asynchronous collaboration.

The findings from our studies in the classroom emphasized the fact that students did not really use the tools in a meaningful manner because they did not see the tools as supporting the learning that they were undertaking. They used the tools because they were given the tools and not because they needed to use them to support their learning. This brought home the fact that students need to be able to see tools as support for their learning. To achieve this end, we have now put the process of design at the forefront and are basing our current software design efforts on a process model of design grounded in a theoretical understanding of the design process and also in the data collected from our classrooms that helped us understand the activities that students engage in and need help with.

Design is a complex process consisting of many phases, both with respect to conceptualizing and building an artifact. The process is not linear, and students have to constantly refer back to earlier stages or activities. Because of the iterative nature of the design process, students need to constantly monitor their learning, i.e., they have to be proficient in metacognitive skills (Puntambekar, 1995). Explicit guidance about they should do next and suggestions that help them monitor their learning can be helpful. This can be done by scaffolding the design process, i.e., supporting students' learning with the help of prompts and suggestions until they have internalized the cognitive and metacognitive skills so as to take increasing control over their own learning. Based on this understanding, we have formulated a set of design principles that we are following in our redesign, called SMILE.

SMILE'S DESIGN PRINCIPLES

SMILE begins with PABLO's and WebCAMILE's design principles: to support students as naturally as possible in the important cognitive activities they are engaged in and to support collaboration by providing students with record-keeping tools and access to other tools, representations, and resources needed during collaboration. Among others, we have several design principles, first, that tools should be as integrated as possible. Both WebCaMILE and PABLO, as well as several other of the special-purpose tools we were also designing (e.g., for planning, for choosing between alternative solutions), can be viewed as note-management and note-presentation facilities. In each, students are guided by the layout of the screen to record and maintain notes appropriate to getting their task done. Based on the combination of this principle and this insight, we decided that we could seamlessly integrate tools by creating a common networked note-management core that allows different views of subsets of the same data. In this way, what were previously individual tools have become different structured interfaces to the same data. Data entered through one interface is accessible through another without retyping or pasting. This has allows us a shift in focus from a reductionist tool-oriented to a holistic process-oriented view of student support.

On of the most important design goals of SMILE was that scaffolding based on the process of design and learning activities guide the learner (Derry and Hawkes, 1993) through design and learning activities, helping students choose which views of their data might be most appropriate and helping them decide what to do next and why.

Tools as Representations

A tool in SMILE supports an activity by (1) presenting information from the note base in a way appropriate to the activity and (2) providing functionality suitable to manipulating the information. The intention is to support the cognitive, metacognitive, social, and action processes needed both to accomplish the end result and to learn from the experience.

In essence, each view of the note base provides a different representation for students to work from. Tools can now be seen as representations. The approach has practical advantages. The interface is much more consistent since each tool is just a different view of a subset of the note base. Integrating tools is much more feasible because the tools are not really different. Adding new tools (views) to the repertoire will be relatively easy to implement and to integrate in a usable way into the package. Users enjoy consistency and don't need to learn to use a collection of disparate interfaces; they will be able to transfer most of what they learned for one tool to the next.

Scaffolding the Design Process

A computer-based learning environment has only a chance of being useful in the class room if the technology and the class room are well integrated with each other. We believe that the learning process is the best place to interface the software and the class room. Our goal and the main task of SMILE is to support the students' learning and designing process by scaffolding the process. Thus, we view SMILE mainly as a process scaffolding tool that employs tools like PABLO and WebCaMILE to support scaffolding.

A process model of design and learning subgoals guides the scaffolding in SMILE. The process model is informed by the practices of PBL and research on design cognition (Bucciarelli, 1994; Schön, 1988), metacognition (Brown, 1981; Brown, Bransford, Ferrera, and Campione, 1983; Puntambekar, 1995), and learning from one's experiences (Kolodner, 1993). Subgoals generated by PBL include ANALYZE THE SITUATION (and its subgoals ASK QUESTIONS, IDENTIFY COMPONENTS OR SUBPROBLEMS), GENERATE LEARNING ISSUES, and CARRY OUT RESEARCH. Those generated by design research include UNDERSTAND THE SITUATION, GENERATE ALTERNATIVE SOLUTIONS, CHOOSE AN ALTERNATIVE, and so on. Those generated by the learning literature include IDENTIFY LESSONS LEARNED, PREDICT USEFULNESS, and so on. Our current challenge is to merge the subgoals generated by each contributing paradigm into a coherent set.

Each subgoal is annotated with its description, pre-conditions stating what needs to be true to begin to try to achieve it, post-conditions stating what can be expected to be true after achieving it, and the tool(s) that can be used to support its achievement. All of these are written both in language accessible to students and in an internal form that ties them together.

The model is used to guide the learner by suggesting things to accomplish (goals), things to do (actions), what tools to use, and how to use them. Scaffolding is provided upon student request. Given the hierarchies of subgoals and the information associated with each, students can easily ask a variety of questions:

"what ought I try to accomplish?" The post-conditions of the activities whose pre-condition apply in the current state can be used to suggest goals,

"how do I accomplish a stated goal?" The scaffolder can in this case suggest as goals the pre-conditions of the activities whose post-conditions match the students goals.

"what tools should I use for a stated subgoal?"

Scaffolding, as we are implementing it, can be viewed as a compromise between an adaptive student model and a more static scaffolder as can be found in a system like KIE (Bell and Davies, 1996). The normative model of cognition that it is based on (i.e., its subgoal hierarchy) is non-adaptive. Our intention is to synchronize the learner with the model. First, the model must be synchronized with students' activities and goals in order to be able to provide suggestions that are useful in the given context. Next, the scaffolder provides feedback and suggestions to the student in order to synchronize the student with the model. These two synchronization processes happen in parallel and support each other. The student is synchronized when he is requesting help, that is, although the process model is normative, the student is not required to follow it.

The student gives feedback to the scaffolder through the use of tools and through checklists that the system provides. This information will also be of use for the teacher to evaluate the student's performance.

Web-SMILE (see Figure 3) is the first prototype of SMILE and integrates synchronous and asynchronous collaboration. It is implemented using the World Wide Web and can be accessed from anywhere with a WWW browser at http://sectry.cc.gatech.edu/smile.html. In Web-SMILE, scaffolding is implemented in a much simpler way than we are planning for SMILE. Scaffolding is done using a simple diagram making explicit to the students the design process. Clicking on one of the activity boxes lead the student to a screen telling them more about a certain activity.

Figure 3: Web-SMILE integrating the PABLO and the WebCaMILE views.

WEB-SMILE IN THE CLASSROOM

We tested Web-SMILE in an after-school classroom using one Powerbook per person. The computers were all networked and connected to a local server so that they could. Several sessions over a couple of weeks were held.

The results were mixed. The students were able to use the interface with minimal training and they were able to navigate through the different workspaces without too many problems. However, it was unclear whether it was supporting their work or whether it was changing it into something else, e.g., a debate or a chat session. The kids appreciated the structure representation of the many notes they wrote and that they could go back at any time and study what they had decided earlier.

The fact that all the students were in the same room being just a few feet away from each other was a problem since communication just by talking to the neighbor was much easier and natural than slowly typing in a note and hope the person next to them would actually read them. What happened was a mixed communication protocol: First, they would post a message and then alert their neighbor that they should go and read them. This kind of communication could easily be supported in a fully distributed version using a chat window.

On the other, in-class tools like Web-SMILE may encourage students who wouldn't normally speak up to have their voices heard. That's a good reason for typing in notes, even if they're all in the same room or if they are pretty slow at it.

CONCLUSIONS

We are encouraged by our experiences, yet are still trying to find a way to provide better scaffolding which also improves the integration of learning environment with the classroom activities. Furthermore, the benefits of using a tool like (Web-)SMILE must be made more obvious to the kids because at the moment they seem to use it only because (a) the teacher told them to do so or (b), computers are fun to use.

REFERENCES

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