|
Theory: an
Introduction
In 1995, "What's
on the Web?," was written with the goal of scanning the Web for what
might be useful to teachers and students. The "might be useful" was
not individual stellar Web sites, but a broader contextual framework to
cyberspace: if not exactly defining the universe, I hoped to at least mark out
that some things are galaxies, a few constellations, and many are stars
radiating their own special light. Books entitled such things as "Explore
the Unleashed World Wide Web in 7 Days for Dummies/Educators" list tens of
thousands of "Killer Web sites," implicitly suggesting that once you
get a handle on these you'll have "done" the Web. But this is akin to
getting access to the Library of Congress and being handed a piece of paper
listing someone's Top Ten Favorite Books. Oh yes, and the library's collection
doubles in size every three months. So, it's not the titles that are needed,
it's the structure, the organization, the forest for the trees.
Zen in the Art of
Teaching with the Web
It's
a lot like what you're already doing.
It's
unlike anything you've ever done before.
Say
what? After exploring the Web from a teacher's perspective, the above paired
truths sang out their accuracy. Getting a take on the stuff of the Web proved
comforting in that basically the Internet offers lots of information and some
learning experiences. Doesn't this sound like the familiar terra firma of
the classroom teacher? You might ask then, "What's so big about
cyberspace?" "Big" has a lot to do with it. Teachers are
frequently bound by the magazines they subscribe to, the television shows they
videotape, the books available in their library, the perspectives filtered
through textbooks, etc. With the Web you get the world.
Explore
the Zen of Teaching with the Web
Our
attempt to classify the content and function of Web sites that would be useful
to teachers defined seven main categories. If you'd like to find out more about
each, turn to the earlier
article, otherwise click, surf, and cogitate your way through the table
below until the Zen truth is revealed to you. In case you need the
"Teacher's Edition" to this table, skip
ahead to the "correct answer."
The Benefits of the Web
If you came here for the right answer, all I can say is: Gotcha!
Like religion, politics, and favorite foods, the Internet is large enough to
accommodate most everyone's taste, bias, and natural inclination. It seems to
have something for everybody. This is not to say it has everything for
everybody. It is not an encyclopedia (although encyclopedia are available
there). It is not abundant in its resources for non-reading elementary students
(although there are plenty of images). It is not the storehouse for archived
historical documents (yet). Conversely, it's spotty in its range and attitude
toward posting the work of contemporary artists (let's be advocates for a
sensible Fair Use policy for education). But the Web (just out of toddlerhood in
human years) continues to grow exponentially, becoming more robust and
sophisticated in what seem like six month increments. So if something you want
or need is lacking, either put it up yourself, or wait a few months and check
again. Now that I've made a case for there being no one right answer to what
makes the Web so great compared to traditional information sources or learning
experiences, it's too tempting not to at least offer some fairly obvious
advantages afforded learners through the Web.
Basically, the Web-based content and experiences look a lot
like what traditionally grows in classrooms. But in other ways the fruit borne
of these trees tastes unlike anything educators have chanced to sample before.
In other words, educators will recognize old friends like references, resources
and lessons, but the breadth, depth, immediacy, passion, and interactivity
available in the Web-based brethren open up an entirely new way to educate.
Browsing the Internet garden brings forth specimens that
blossom with potential:
So the suggestion is, as you search for Web sites, don't
look for the online equivalent of your textbook or handouts (though they may
exist), look for the sparks that create insights, the contrasts that excite
problem solving, the bells and whistles that motivate, the passion that
inspires. Needless to say, if you are new to the Web, it's necessary for you to surf,
stumble, search, and lurch your way to finding your own understanding of the
Web. It would be a shame to inflict the Internet on students as just one more
structured, assigned, have-to dictated by the teacher. Along these lines, the
next section makes a case for shifting the teacher's sphere of influence in the
orbit of the classroom.
An Embarrassment of
Riches (that could be worthless)
Question: If the basic categories of the learning universe
are the same, but they gain the potentials of immediacy, relevance,
interactivity, authenticity, etc. through Internet access, how does the
teacher's relative position in the learning alignment change?
In other words, when the teacher is the source of the
information, the learning path tends to be teacher-to-learner, sometimes
skipping the critical process of learning along the way. When the source of
information, interaction, opinion, imagery, etc. is other than the teacher -
i.e., the Internet and its netizens - what is the teacher now supposed to do?
Every few years a term pops up that no one's heard of, but that within six
months has become a regular and even tired part of the teaching vernacular.
Remember the first time you heard "paradigm shift?" Within months, the
metaphor of "thinking out of the box" had gone from little considered,
if not unknown, to a standard assumption about what (more) teachers should do.
Last fall, I heard a term three times in two days in three
different cities. Disintermediation. Like paradigm shift, disintermediation
comes to education from the business world (author's uncontroled soapbox jab:
When will the learning community get its gods right?). An example is the easiest
way to understand both the concept and implications of disintermediation.
Suppose you have two bookstores, one is at the mall and the other is online.
Let's say the online version sells books for less (even with shipping costs
factored in), has a far greater selection, and is available 24 hours a day
without leaving your home. The question arises, "What value does the actual
mall-based bookstore offer that the Web-based version does not? This is not a
rhetorical question. And answers will vary. Sometimes people don't know what
they are looking for and they want to browse the aisles, read some pages, maybe
ask a clerk for help or suggestions. Maybe there are lattés and over-stuffed
chairs. Maybe there's the chance to make acquaintance with other (single?)
booklovers? Regardless, the mall-based bookstores have to contend with the new
competitor who has taken out (dis) a middle man (intermediary) between the book
and the buyer.
The point for educators is clear: if more information and
expertise might be available to learners via the Internet (Web sites, E-mail
correspondence, listservs, etc.), what value do teachers add to students'
education? Again, this is not a rhetorical question. And answers can vary along
with teachers' strengths, personalities, philosophies, etc. But the question
remains.
Many years before the Web, educational theories and models
began to champion a learner-centered focus in which students take greater
responsibility for what goes on in their own minds. Cognitive psychology has
been persuasive in arguing that the expert learner's rich fabric of meaning (AKA
schema) doesn't come from acquiring a single strand of knowledge, but from
weaving together relationships among topics into a complex and synthetic whole.
Similarly, constructivism suggests that truly comprehensive understanding of a
complex topic comes from learners stitching together the facts, relationships,
perspectives, variations, and non-examples from an array of contextually rich
(not "text usually limited") inputs. In fact, my personal experience
was one of on-going frustration as I tried to implement cog psych and
constructivist strategies with the limited resources available pre-Web. Now with
the depth and breadth of the Internet becoming more and more accessible to more
learners, the marriage of technology with learning seems assured after their
lengthy, off-again on-again, courtship.
So rather than view
disintermediation as a threat, the power of the Internet has liberated teachers
to move from the industrial Age of assembly line learning to an Information /
Communication Age where they can no longer sphincter the firehose flow of
information shooting through our society. So we get to take on the roles that
have been suggested by the learner-centered strategies: facilitator,
guide-on-the-side, mentor, coach, etc. After all, we've taken the educational
psychology courses and thought about the learning theories, so let's add the
human, inspiring, adaptive value that we can bring to make this embarrassment of
riches that is the Internet truly valuable to learners.
Practice: A Role for the
Webbed Educator
So if we teachers are not the source of information, what
other value do we add to support students? There seem to be three main areas:
creating a learning environment, shaping Web-based activities, and hands-on
facilitation while students are in the learning process. The remainder of this
article will focus on the second aspect, the only one that is exclusively
related to integrating the Web into classroom learning. The other two aspects
(creating a learning community and in-process facilitation) are well-treated in
the literature on student-centered instruction.
Remember the premise that the Internet is an embarrassment
of riches that's next to worthless without an educator. If this statement seems
filled with too much boosterism, perhaps pointing to a few non-examples of how
technology is ab-used will make the case. Perhaps you too have seen technology
used as a "Lesson Plan in a Can:" rolling a two hour Hollywood movie
with little or no tie-in to learning activities, letting students play computer
games divorced from other classroom studies, surfing the Net, or online
chatting. It's a little surprising that teachers who wouldn't dream of
sending students to the library without a learning task and who would never
sanction class time for students to pass notes, do see surfing and chatting as
somehow inherently educational just because they involve the Internet. This is a
natural response to a new technology. People need to gather to see the latest
thing, aren't sure what it's for, and tend to use it in traditional ways. Enough
people (and many students from home!) have spent this time and are now ready to
see what this new technology will actually do to increase student learning.
What follows is one fairly comprehensive strategy for
integrating the incredible power of the Internet with student learning. The
strategy offers an easy entry place for newcomers to the Internet as well as
more sophisticated activities for advanced users. There are two main phases to
the strategy are:
- Harvesting the
Web's abundance
- Shaping
activities related to learning goals
The
chart below outlines the decisions that would guide users toward a particular
format of Web-based learning.
 
Start Where You're At:
New or Savvy?
The best suggestion in picking a
topic is to start where you're at. If you have an area that's your specialty,
something that thrills you to teach, that you know inside and out, up and down
begin there. Or maybe there's a topic you've been wanting to learn more about;
there's nothing like a hungry learner. (If you're stuck, explore The Idea Machine to click through 50 prompts for picking a
topic.)
Topic
Hotlist
The natural place to begin integrating the Web for learning
is collecting sites that you find most useful / interesting / peculiar on your
topic. Doing this will save your learners hours of aimless surfing. In the bad
old Pre-Web days, people collected Internet locations on index cards, in
databases, or on crumpled scraps of paper. With today's Web browsers, this
Internet harvesting can be done through bookmarking your favorite sites with a
simple pull down on the menu. This is fine for the machine you're using, but
it's a bit of a hassle to get those bookmarks transferred to all the computers
in a lab. It's a much more efficient process to create a Webpage that collects
the locations in a Topic Hotlist. This solves the computer-specific nature of
bookmarks and also makes your collection available to everyone in your school,
district and the world (nothing like maximizing your effort!).
When you create a Topic Hotlist, your learners will be
spared hours of fruitless searching. What they will have is analogous to when
your diligent school librarian gathers key works from the stacks on a topic your
classes are studying and rolls them into your room for students to explore. The
resources likely differ in quality, currency, and quirkiness, but the learning
strategy is similar: give the students a breadth of materials on the topic they
are studying. What's missing is the exact learning you'd like the students to
achieve. Those tasks and instructions are probably on the handout they're
working on, not the Webpage they're using to gain insights, experiences, and
information. This is why a Topic Hotlist is an easy strategy to employ; you
simply add the Web resources to an activity or unit you already have prepared.
Sometimes you might choose to
have learners search their own sites on the Internet. Good examples of this are
when students do independent study projects like I-Searches or you have groups
studying different aspects of a larger topic (an example would be an
interdisciplinary study with student teams each taking a decades in 20th Century
American history). In these cases it makes sense to have students search - and
shouldn't they be able to post what they have found on the Web via their own
hotlist? The deciding factor here is probably how many computers you have
available to students in school or in their homes or local libraries and
available time. Access speed can also cramp this activity if your connection is
dial-up, clogged or molasses.
Example Topic Hotlist
- China
on the Net
Multimedia
Scrapbook
Many teachers who are fairly new to the Net have been
technology-users for years. Their students create newsletters, desktop slide
presentations, HyperStudio stacks, etc. Creating Multimedia Scrapbooks will be
no-brainers for these teachers who now get access to the Web. Essentially a
hotlist, the Scrapbook focuses on providing links to a variety of media and
content types (photographs, maps, stories, facts, quotations, sound clips,
videos, virtual reality tours, etc.). Learners use the Scrapbook links to
explore aspects of the topic that they feel are important. They then download or
copy and paste these scraps into a variety of formats: newsletter, desktop slide
presentation, collage, bulletin board, HyperStudio stack, or Web page. The
students' creations will now be richer and more sophisticated because of
resources that had never been available in their classrooms before. This is also
a good time to educate students on copyright and fair use policies as well as
making contact with more expert learners via e-mail. Finally, By allowing
students to pursue their own interests amid an abundance of choices, the
Multimedia Scrapbook offers a more open, student-centered approach that
encourages construction of meaning. Even though neither Topic Hotlists nor
Multimedia Scrapbooks target achieving specific learning, the cluey teacher will
use these strategies to promote the constructivist learning that can happen when
students synthesize a large and contextually rich selection of data and
experiences.
Example Multimedia Scrapbook
- Exploring China
Promote Learning
Let's say that you want to create a totally Web-based
activity. You might as well. After all, you'll create handouts, do research,
locate resources, and design the activities, so why not put this on the Web,
too? Then your students can access it from any connected computer and other
teachers at your grade level across the world could have access to your learning
experience. The main difference between the first two formats and the following
three is that Treasure Hunts,
Subject Samplers, and WebQuests
target specific learning, rather than merely sending students to Web sites
hoping they will find something useful there and create cognitive sparks. Isn't
it better to provide compelling experiences that foster the attitudes, knowledge
and skills that are the goals you're all working toward? Take a tour through the
descriptions and examples below to see which format most captures your learning
goals.
Treasure
Hunt
When it's time to develop some solid knowledge on a
subject, teachers and students can create Treasure Hunts. The basic strategy
here is to find Web pages that hold information (text, graphic, sound, video,
etc.) that you feel is essential to understanding the given topic. Maybe you
gather 10 - 15 links (and remember, these are the exact pages you want the
students to go to for information, not the top page of a huge Web site). After
you've gathered these links, you pose one key question for each Web site you've
linked to.
A smartly designed Treasure Hunt can go far beyond finding
unrelated nuggets of knowledge. By choosing questions that define the scope or
parameters of the topic, when the students discover the answers they are tapping
into a deeper vein of thought, one that now stakes out the dimensions or schema
of the domain being studied. Finally, by including a culminating "Big
Question," students can synthesize what they have learned and shape it into
a broader understanding of the big picture.
Example Treasure Hunt
- Black
History Past to Present
Subject Sampler
Part of what makes the Internet so great is the quirky,
passionate, real stuff that many people and organizations post there. You'll
find things on the Web that you'd never find on TV, the newspapers, or
magazines. Subject Samplers tap into this vibrant vein in order to connect
students to the chosen topic. Specifically, Samplers work like those chocolate
samplers: you open the box, look things over, think you see something you'd
like, then poke your finger into it. If you like it, you eat it. If you don't,
you leave it pre-poked for someone else's taste.
Specifically, in a Subject Sampler learners are presented
with a smaller number (maybe half a dozen) of intriguing Web sites organized
around a main topic. What makes this a particularly effective way to engage
student buy-in is that first off, you've chosen Web sites themselves that offer
something interesting to do, read, or see. Second, students are asked to respond
to the Web-based activities from a personal perspective. Rather than uncover
hard knowledge (as they do in a Treasure Hunt), students are asked about their
perspectives on topics, comparisons to experiences they have had, personal
interpretations of artworks or data, etc. Thus, more important than the right
answer is that students are invited to join the community of learners
surrounding the topic, for students to see that their views are valued in this
context. Use a Subject Sampler when you want students to feel connected to the
topic and to feel that the subject matter really matters.
Example Subject Sampler
- My
China
WebQuest
When it's time to go beyond learning facts and to get into
grayer matter in a topic, your students are ready to try a WebQuest. Basically,
a WebQuest is an inquiry activity that presents student groups with a
challenging task, provides access to an abundance of usually online resources
and scaffolds the learning process to prompt higher order thinking. The products
of WebQuests are usually then put out to the world for some real feedback.
It's best to choose a topic in which aspects are under
dispute or that at least offer a couple different perspectives. Current events,
controversial social and environmental topics work well. Also anything that
requires evaluation or scientific hypothesizing will evoke a variety of
interpretations. The reason the Web is so critical is because it offers the
breadth of perspectives and viewpoints that are usually needed to construct
meaning on complex topics. Students benefit from being linked to a wide variety
of Web resources so that they can explore and make sense of the issues involved
in the challenge.
Logistically, all students begin by learning some common
background knowledge, then divide into groups. In the groups each student or
pair of students have a particular role, task, or perspective to master. They
effectively become experts on one aspect of a topic. When the roles come
together, students must synthesize their learning by completing a summarizing
act such as e-mailing congressional representatives or presenting their
interpretation to real world experts on the topic.
You might want to use an WebQuest as a first activity to
quickly immerse students in real learning, then go back and fill in the broader
picture with a Treasure Hunt or Subject Sampler.
Example WebQuests - Tuskegee
Tragedy, The Big Wide World,
Little Rock 9,
Integration 0?
Where Do You Go From Here?
Suggestions for
Choosing Activity Formats
If you're
new to the Web or think students merely need additional resources, gather links
into a Hotlist or Scrapbook.
If you're ready to take the next step of incorporating learning activities into
a Webpage, then choose one of the three formats based upon what might be missing
in your present curriculum. For example, if learners need to gain more knowledge
about the subject, inform them with a Treasure
Hunt. If they come out of a current unit apathetic, hook them with a Subject
Sampler. If they learn enough knowledge and like the topic, but don't engage
in higher-level thinking, challenge them with a WebQuest.
Now
you may be saying, "Okay, I'm interested in making one of these Web pages,
but I don't know HTML, haven't got a clue about how to post pages on the
Internet, and mostly, I have no time to learn either." So the next question
arises:
So
do I give up?
Fear not, feisty teachers, your life just got easier thanks
to Filamentality
("combining filaments of the Web with learners' mentalities").
Filamentality is an interactive Web site that we created because learning HTML,
designing a Web-based activity, and posting pages on the Net are three pretty
big hurdles for people with students to see, papers to grade, lessons to write,
and cookies to bake (the true glue that keeps a class happy). Thanks to
masterful Perl programming by Jodi
Reed (see her Getting Started
with CGI Webpage) and the willingness of Pacific
Bell to post user Web pages on its server, you can be guided through
choosing a topic, gathering quality Internet sites, creating one or all five of
the activity formats described above, and automatically posting your pages on
the Web. Want to learn more? Test drive Filamentality
on the Web or in a workshop near you.
Parting is Such Sweet
Sorrow
Three years (and many HTML tags) later, our sponsorship
from Pacific Bell Education First continues after the conclusion of the
Fellowships. We hope that you find at least some aspect of our applications
useful in working the Web for education. When we heard people ask "What's
on the Web?" we wrote that article and presented at conferences
throughout California. When teachers and librarians were saying, "Where's
the good stuff on the Net?" we created the Blue
Web'n library of great educational sites. Filamentality
ties most of it together. It looks like we left you hanging with just one more
question: who'll bake those cookies?
Written
August 1997, last revised June 2001
http://www.ozline.com/learning/theory.html
|
 
launched
june 1, 1998, last updated december, 2001
copyright © 1995-2001 ozline.com
& tom march
all rights reserved
|
|
