Stimulating creativity in students
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When Alice Liddell, known to the world as the inspiration for Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland was a little girl, one mark of a good student was to bring a “clean slate” to school. The slate in question started as a piece of roofing tile, though by Alice’s time special school slates were manufactured for the sole purpose of having students write on them.
The beauty of the slate—a revolutionary piece of educational technology in its time—was that it could be erased and used over and over again. And so it was that good students (and Alice was surely one) were expected to come to school each day with their slates washed, ready for new information, and devoid of any memory of whatever information they might have contained the day before. A lot of “modern” educational software is like Alice’s slate. You run it, play with it, possibly learn something from it, and then forget it as quickly as it forgets you. Like the slate, the computer has no agenda, nothing in particular that it’s trying to teach, and no expectation that students will do anything in particular with it. Which is just as well, since whatever they do will leave no trace—neither student nor teacher will ever be able to refer back to what was done, much less infer what was learned through interaction with the computer. In our effort to make powerful, general-purpose tools have we lost sight of the fact that our students may misuse the tools, misinterpret their results, or simply become bored and drift off to the nearest interactive game? Take a grapher, for instance, that ubiquitous little tool that produces graphs from equations or data. An egregiously non-scientific sample (the first 10 of more than 2,000,000 Google hits for “grapher”) comes up with many examples of the type that would make great educational tools, but not one that actually sets up problems, helps students solve the problems, and remembers what they did so that next time they’ll get different problems, selected on the basis of prior knowledge or gaps in their understanding. Why is that? Why have we apparently regressed to Alice’s time in our use of information technology for education? In our effort to make powerful, general-purpose tools available to them, have we lost sight of the fact that our students may misuse the tools, misinterpret their results, or simply, in the absence of an explicit challenge, become bored and drift off to the nearest interactive game? Learning from games The comparison to games is instructive. Games have a purpose. Whether it is shooting as many bad guys as possible or figuring out how to work the teleporter, games have definite goals and subgoals, and they reward inquiry and problem-solving skills in immediate and tangible ways. They offer assistance where and when necessary, and most importantly they remem-ber who you are when you return; they put you right back in the action where you left off, without wasting your time on stuff you’ve already mastered or giving you challenges that are too advanced. So why don’t educational tools do the same thing? There are three obstacles, at least: (1) it isn’t easy to come up with problems that are challenging and fun and also teach something, (2) it isn’t easy, when someone is struggling to solve a problem, to figure out what is wrong and react appropriately, and (3) it isn’t easy to create and maintain the technological infrastructure that enables the system to keep track of each student’s progress. In tackling obstacle number one, the first step is to recognize that we are not designing software, we are creating an interactive curriculum. In the case of a grapher, for instance, this means that we don’t just worry about creating an interface that enables a user to make graphs easily, instead we must start with what the student is supposed to know already and what we would like her to get better at, and then create an activity that helps her learn. We have to start by realizing that the grapher is not the end product, it is the tool with which to create many different, targeted learning activities. Listening to students This example of a scripted assessment activity reports not only a student’s answers, but also how she obtained them. The second obstacle—figuring out when a student is having difficulties—flows from the first: a good activity should monitor a student’s actions and make reliable inferences. We can look to see whether successive attempts have been getting her any closer to the goal. We can check whether she is changing only one variable at a time in a systematic fashion, or trying everything at once. If we see counter- productive behaviors, we can offer context-sensitive help. We can watch for improvement as the activity progresses, and generate insightful reports for the teacher. The third obstacle—the lack of infrastructure—is obvious, but difficult. Supporting interactive learning and assessment activities requires the maintenance of a database that preserves privacy and confidentiality, yet is accessible by students and teachers alike. The answer to the problem lies in the technology itself, which has to become robust and user-friendly enough to be maintainable in a school environment. The Concord Consor-tium is actively working to make this happen. Through our association with the University of California at Berkeley’s TELS Center, we are helping to develop a powerful new software architecture that supports the persistence of students’ online activities so that they can access their portfolio, do their homework, or post questions for their study group from any platform at any time. Only when these functions are commonplace will the technology become an accepted and essential part of school life. Next steps What does it take to turn a general-purpose tool into an interactive learning experience for a student? In software terms the answer is straight-forward; you simply write scripts that embed the tool as a component. The scripts configure the tool (for instance, displaying a “target curve” for a graphing activity), and implement the activity (e.g., describing how to react when the student submits an answer). In practice, though, the script may not be able to communicate with the tool in the right way. Seemingly routine commands like “Don’t redraw the curve until the user has clicked on the button” may be impossible to implement if the grapher program hasn’t foreseen the need for them. Luckily, it is usually easy to change the program to accommodate such needs, if it is open source. We are helping to develop a powerful new software architecture that supports the persistence of students’ online activities so that they can access their portfolio, do their homework, or post questions for their study group from any platform at any time. An open source license generally permits one to alter a program, provided that one makes the revised version available under a similar open source license. And that is exactly what we have done on our Computer-Assisted Performance Assessment project, using an applet from the Physics Educational Technology group called Circuit Con-struc-tion Kit. The Circuit Construction Kit is a remarkably powerful, open-ended software tool that enables a student to build any circuit containing wires, bulbs, batteries, resistors, or switches, and to measure the voltage or current at any point in the circuit. However, the program does not pose a specific problem and consequently cannot judge how a student is doing. From our point of view, it’s a program that calls out for scripting. And that is what we have done. Our initial script (one of many we intend to build) is very simple: it puts a resistor on the screen and asks the student to measure its resistance. It tracks what the student is doing and waits for her to submit an answer. When she does, the program reports on and critiques not only her answer, but also the manner in which she obtained it. What circuit did she build, how and when did she use the meter, and how did she use the measurements to calculate the answer? Alice’s 18th century slate eventually evolved into a workbook that could guide her activities and keep a record of what she has done. The computer-toting students of the 21st century deserve no less. Source: The Digital Divide Network |
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