New educational software devised by IBM Research is helping to create a community-based approach to learning that promises to revolutionize education.
In Brief:
By linking the security and database features of Lotus Notes® to the Web-browsing ability of Netscape Navigator(TM), IBM Research has created an educational software tool called "Wired-for-Learning." It permits students, teachers, parents and outside mentors to participate in a community-based approach to education. The system is being implemented for the first time in a North Carolina elementary school.
It looks like a typical bulletin board: yellow-lined note paper attached by pushpins, the corners curling up slightly, along with homework assignments written out in neat hand. Yet the pushpins are virtual; the paper is virtual; the bulletin board is virtual. Everything on the screen is virtual, but the learning is real.
This fall, some 1,000
elementary students at the newly christened
Governor's Village school in North Carolina's Charlotte-Mecklenburg School District will log on to an ambitious online experiment in educational reform that experts nationwide will watch closely. A team in the Learning Technologies group at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research
Center has provided a key element in this new electronic form of education. Called "Wired-for-Learning," the application is part of the company's Reinventing Education initiative. It aspires to nothing less than changing the who, what, where, when and how of learning.
The Wired-for-Learning software extends the secure collaboration of Lotus Notes to the World Wide Web by way of a Netscape browser. Such collaboration enables community-based learning, allowing parents to confer with teachers about student work, students to discuss and develop assignments with other students, and teachers to trawl the Web for educational materials. "The system is designed for four user types," says Cynthia Vincent, designer of the bulletin board interface. "Teachers, parents, students and mentors. Parents can log on at home or at work and see what their children are working on, confer asynchronously with their teachers or discuss their assignments."
"Wired-for-Learning isn't a freewheeling e-mail or discussion system. It centers on student work by attaching the communications to student assignments," adds Watson's Peter Fairweather, the group senior manager, education solutions ,and former education professor, schoolteacher and courseware developer. "The work - student assignments and projects - underlies all the communications. For example, assignment discussions are visually tied to the individual or group tasks, infusing them with an almost physical purpose. Participants show less inclination to drift off the subject in that context."
In a larger sense, the technology promotes
serious educational reform. One goal is to transform the role of the teacher from a "sage on a stage," as Fairweather puts it, to more of an educational coach, shifting more of the responsibility for learning to the student. Another is to involve the family, particularly parents, in education. A third is to expand the educational process beyond the classroom to homes, libraries, community centers or anywhere reachable by the Internet. Moreover, Wired-for-Learning's database of teaching mentors enables teachers to find and engage extra help when and where it's needed.
"The teacher shouldn't be responsible for everything that happens," says Fairweather. "Not only would that be inefficient, but it suffocates opportunities for essential student skill development. Students should learn to direct their own learning by locating and evaluating references,
organizing material for others or critiquing others' ideas, for example."
Each user of Wired-for-Learning has a password, a set of individually tailored Web pages, and access to a wide range of Web resources. Students not only receive assignments online, but see the exact educational criteria - mandated standards of school board, education agency or professional education organization - that they are
expected to meet. They can survey the Web for educational resources or dip into a "topics list" that Wired-for-Learning has helped the teacher organize and locate. And, in what might be called an educational adaptation of Internet news groups, students can participate in assigned discussions replete with audio, video, annotations and hyperlinks to other Web sites. Unlike news groups, however, these discussions are private and include a wide range of response modes.
Restructuring education
Governor's Village is an ambitious attempt to restructure education, literally from the ground up. IBM pledged to support the project in September 1994 through its philanthropic Reinventing Education initiative, which also gave grants to schools in Broward County, Florida; Chicago, Cincinnati, Dallas, Philadelphia, San Jose, San Francisco; and the states of Vermont and West Virginia. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg School District is building four schools - two elementary, one middle and one high school - for 5,200 students, on 200 acres it had previously purchased near Research Park, on the northern fringe of Charlotte.
The open architecture of the campus echoes the innovative way that children will advance through the school: by achievement against a set of standards. These standards will apply to all the students, about a third of whom come from the immediate neighborhood, a third of whom are minority students from the inner city, and a third of whom are students in the workplace magnet program, whose parents, with the agreement of their employers, promise to volunteer one hour of their time to the school for each student enrolled.
The Wired-for-Learning component is specifically designed to encourage group assignments and on-line student discussion. Typical of this type of collaborative assignment, Vincent explains, might be asking fifth graders to design a new park for their use in the community. Disciplines involved in this type of assignment range across geometry, planning, communication, art and design, budgeting, policy formation and political science, to name a few. The standards component of the system helps guide the evaluation of student performance over this mixed and expanding curriculum set.
A primary goal of Reinventing Education - and the focus of the National Education Summit in March co-hosted by IBM - has been to promote the use of instructional standards both to define expectations for learners and to measure their accomplishments. Wired-for-Learning enables teachers to productively exploit what would
otherwise be unwieldy and tedious collections of verbiage to create guides that help locate teaching resources on the Web. The standards act as a guide for a search engine to help teachers find materials they can use to make assignments. The standards themselves, along with the resources that they find, become part of students' assignments and form a context for subsequent evaluation by teachers and review by parents.
"One of the things both educational psychology and common sense tell us," says Fairweather, "is that if students know what specifics are required of them, their performance improves. Typically, the standards rest in a set of books on the shelf, unused. Wired-for-Learning ties them into the actual mechanics of assigning and evaluating work and, because teachers, students and parents must use them, students should do better."
Environment for discussion
"These technologies breed new kinds of assignments," Fairweather says. "For example, a 'discussion feature' allows students to work together on an assignment no matter where they are or when they choose to study. More important, in those discussions, they have to present their thinking to others' scrutiny, respond to criticism, evaluate the work of others or divide up the work - skills not often applied to traditional assignments."
The discussion feature, created by researcher Sherman Alpert, keeps a running tally of students' remarks. "There'll be a list, a thread of a discussion about a particular assignment," Alpert says. "Users - that is, teachers, students, parents or mentors - can enter discussion documents, and they can also reply to others."
In addition to writing text, students can annotate their remarks with special effects. Click on an icon of a cassette recorder, and the student can enter an audio segment; click on an icon of a television set, and the system allows the insertion of a video segment. The entire discussion is saved in the Notes database, where teachers, parents and mentors can review it. They can also use special markup tools to highlight, write comments or
attach notes directly on students' discussion
documents. The collaborative assignment approach distributes evaluation across students as well as teachers so that, in effect, peer evaluation becomes one of the assignment tasks.
Technological underpinnings
Wired-for-Learning's sprightly interface hides its virtuoso engineering. Project leader Richard Lam and his colleague Lei Kuang have built the links between the Netscape format, which users see and use, and the back-end Lotus Notes system, which provides secure access to students' work. A parent who wants to retrieve a particular assignment,
for example, could click on a link on a Web page. That would send the request through a middleware layer of protocol handlers and OLE objects that route the query and integrate sources of
information, allowing Netscape to talk to Notes and vice versa.
OLE is a technology used to create and reuse software components that are independent of the programming languages involved. "When you click on that link," Lam explains, "the Netscape browser invokes our protocol handler, which is itself an OLE object. The protocol handler will talk through other OLE objects to Lotus Notes. That pulls the information about the student's assignment out of the Notes database, and passes it back up to the protocol handler. The protocol handler then formats the data as a new hypertext markup language (HTML) document, writes it to the disk and then tells Netscape to load it. So all you see as a user is a link that you click on, and then a new Web page comes up. But under the covers, there's all this interaction between these various software components to tie together Netscape and Notes using OLE."
Making it work
The utility of Wired-for-Learning depends on a certain level of accessibility to equipment. In order to increase access and participation,
particularly by those living in the inner city, the grant includes computers for libraries and
community centers in those neighborhoods.
The extension of the school day and its export into homes must also be watched carefully. Teachers already have a long day that starts before the students arrive and ends not when they go home, but after all the projects have been evaluated,
parents called, conferences completed, plans
written out, tests graded and materials ordered.
If students become more productive, busy
teachers likely will have even more work, so the technology must increase their productivity, too.
Nevertheless, Wired-for-Learning continues to grow. It is now being integrated with another
education application, IBM K-12's SchoolVista(TM) instructional management system. Aspects of
the software are also being applied to other
Reinventing Education projects, including one for the San Francisco School District, where
it will be used as the basis for guiding those making decisions about services for students with
special needs.
As an experiment, however, Wired-for-Learning's greatest value has been as an illustration of how technology can help bring about the
reinvention of education by highlighting what happens when parents get involved in their
children's schoolwork, when students and
teachers work together in teams, when standards are really used, and when students can extend their reach globally for the resources they need to learn.
Stephen S. Hall is a freelance science writer based in Brooklyn, New York. His latest book is entitled Mapping the Next Milennium.
More Information:
Online Help for Assessing Portfolios
A Knowledge Niche in the Net
Online Help for Assessing Portfolios
Don't be fooled by the small-town charm and rustic splendor of Vermont's New England landscape. When it comes to public school education, the state has been a daring innovator. The Green Mountain state is among the national leaders in the movement toward "per-
formance-based assessment." This method of measuring students' performance moves away from the sole use of standardized multiple-choice tests, toward a more ambitious system of rating "portfolios" - bodies of students' work in writing, math, science, the arts and other disciplines - which IBM Research is now helping the state to implement.
Once a year, teachers from all over Vermont convene to read, compare and assess portfolios submitted by every fourth and eighth grader in the state. It is critically important that a teacher in Brattleboro rates students' work the same as a teacher in St. Albans.
To achieve such consistency, the
Research Division is developing software to help train all teachers who assess portfolios. "If you really want to use this to supplement multiple-choice tests," says Vicki L. Hanson, a scientist at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center who heads the Vermont Project, "you have to show that two teachers will score a piece of work basically the same way."
To promote statewide uniformity in student assessment, IBM is creating an online system that incorporates both
Vermont's educational standards and a database of examples, or "benchmarks." The database shows representative scores for each category of students' portfolios (a 2 in Organization on a
writing sample, for example, or a 4 in Purpose). While assessing an individual student's work, a teacher can click on a rubric icon to see the assessment criteria or click on a benchmark to compare it with a standardized rating.
Some of the money from the Reinventing Education grant will buy hardware for schools in less-affluent districts, so that every school in the state will have at least one computer that can use this software. The plan is to have a pilot system up and running in two schools later this fall. Full rollout is anticipated for the beginning of the school year in 1997.
A Knowledge Niche in the Net
Several years ago, a scientist spending a month at a weather station in Antarctica received a query from the United States about rocks. The question came not from headquarters, but from an elementary school student who wanted to know about the geology of Antarctica for a school science fair project. Replying by way of a satellite uplink to the Internet, the scientist wrote back: "I don't know much about rocks, but here's what I see."
The technology that allows elementary school students in Minnesota to ask questions of working scientists in Antarctica forms the heart of NetVista(TM). This technology, developed by IBM Research, gives K-12 schoolchildren access to the four corners of the world - and to the scientists exploring everywhere in between - through the Internet. After two years in the field, the product was officially announced in June. Currently in use at about 200 schools, it has roughly 12,000 student users in the U.S.
NetVista was developed by the Niche Networking group at the Thomas J.
Watson Research Center. "We laugh about our name," says project member Wendy Kellogg, "but there's a real serious intent to it, as well. The project is primarily a good piece of usability engin-eering that happens to be in the Internet arena. It's customized to fit in the K-12 environment, which has very different priorities and concerns from your run-of-the-mill Internet access."
The advantages of Internet access are obvious. For example, says Kellogg, many schools have created their own home pages. The pages not only showcase exemplary work by students, they also create more of an identity for the school itself. In addition, students wired for Internet access can participate in nationwide scientific projects, such as one recent
effort to collect rainwater and measure its pH level. An atmospheric scientist later analyzed the results and explained to the students how the results contributed to the understanding of acid rain.
Beneath the simplified, child-friendly interface, the NetVista team had to create several features to accommodate the
special needs of Internet use in the school setting. The software, for example, permits more or less conservatism in terms of blocking access to certain Internet sites; the decision is up to each school.
The system also takes into account the fact that many schools do not have unlimited phone lines. So a single server - using a single dedicated or dial-up phone line - can accommodate many students. Finally, because schools typically do not have a lot of technical expertise, IBM Research designed the system to perform housekeeping functions and basically administer itself automatically.
Another project that reveals the power of the Internet is called Virtual Vacations. To gain access to the database, Kellogg explains, "students had to write about what it would be like to take a vacation where they live." Once they entered their description, they could "visit" other vacation spots in the U.S. "The teachers loved that," Kellogg says. "It was an opportunity to get the students to reflect on what makes where they live special, and to try to express that in writing - and then have the fun of exploring other possible places."
"It's as easy to use for somebody in grade three as in high school," says Fred Jennings, an IBM marketing representative based in Toronto, who has found an especially warm reception for NetVista in Canada. The system is already in place in about 500 Canadian schools, where some 25,000 students are using it to study everything from the migration patterns of Beluga whales to ancient Celtic civilization. "It was designed for the educational marketplace," says Jennings, "and that's what schools really like."
