Learning from Student Projects

Design is a general concept that recognizes the importance of skilled behavior applied to the accomplishment of a meaningful goal. It provides a way to think about the process students go through in creating products and in creating personal understanding.

Use the following questions to guide your learning:

• What organizational, graphic, text, and interface design principles should students be are of as they develop hypermedia projects?
• What student and teacher activities are typical of the various stages in a cooperative group project?
• How can the design of hypermedia facilitate the design of knowledge?
• How does the teacher interact with students to make the creation of projects valuable learning experiences?

How we think about knowledge can strongly influence our behavior as teachers and learners. Two perspectives are possible:

• Knowledge as the accumulation of information. Information is factual knowledge. The perspective of knowledge as the accumulation of information is consistent with the metaphor of teaching as transmission. A more knowledgeable person passes information on to a less knowledgeable person.
• Knowledge as design. The perspective of knowledge as design focuses on knowledge that has a purpose (use). Knowledge of this type has been generated by a learner from information in order to accomplish something. Because this is a constructivist perspective, it is assumed that teaching involves helping the learner take advantage of information to build personal understanding.

The distinction between knowledge as information and knowledge as design cannot be explained entirely in terms of the information the learner encounters, but rather in what the learner does with this information. A design applies information to a purpose and generates knowledge. The learner constructs knowledge by using information. In contrast, a student may memorize information assuming this information will eventually prove useful.

Chapter 9 proposes that student construction of hypermedia products allows for the construction of knowledge by providing a purpose for processing information.

Extended consideration of personal understanding of knowledge

I. Principles of hypermedia design (pp. 317-326)

Hypermedia design is the purposeful process of developing a hypermedia product that is informative, interesting, and easy to use. Design combines element of science and art. While the artistic dimension will be challenging for many, certain concrete guidelines can be learned.

I.A Content organization

The author in any medium exercises a good degree of control over the sequence in which the user will experience information. Hypermedia offers the possibility of structuring multiple connections among units of information (nodes).

I.A.1 Organizational structures

I.A.1.a Sequential design

In a sequential design, each element of information links to the next element without allowing the user alternatives. The major advantage of a sequential design is simplicity.

I.A.1.b Hierarchical design

A hierarchical design organizes content as a system of categories and subcategories. The user moves through information organized in this fashion by making a series of choices. A branching design allows the user to find what they are looking for without examining all of the information available and provides a way to orient (or reorient) the learner by referring to main choice points.

I.A.1.c Web design

A web design is built on a more complex set of links among information nodes and allows the user the most autonomy in navigating the information provided.

I.B Graphic Design

Graphic design concerns the appearance and placement of the content. The purposes of careful graphic design are to make the content as informative, easy to understand, and interesting as possible.

Objects (images, text segments, buttons) should be placed and grouped in ways that facilitate the user’s interaction with the content and with the navigation system. One way to develop a design strategy is to make use of a grid - a pattern for placing objects.

Some basic guidelines:

• Buttons are usually placed along the edges of the screen.
• Buttons that serve related functions are typically grouped together. Buttons that appear on all screens are grouped separately from buttons that appear on a specific screen.
• The grid can be used to organize the placement of text as well as images and buttons.

I.C Text

Designers are encouraged to present text in chunks surrounded by space for greater legibility.

The number of fonts, font sizes, and font styles should be kept small. Deviations should be used sparingly for special emphasis.

I.D User interface and navigation

The user interface provides the mechanisms by which the user interacts with the information provided. The user should understand:

• what actions are possible and what the consequences of each action is likely to be
• where the user is within the body of information being examined

I.D.1 Menus and maps

A menu provides a list of the topics that are available.

A map identifies the components of information and the links among the components.

I.D.2 Buttons

When working with a multimedia product, users take action using buttons (web page links function as buttons). Buttons provide a useful way for both the author and user to exercise control. By programming the allowable actions as buttons, the author structures a specific set of alternative actions. By clicking a button, the user initiates an action.

II. Student cooperation: Fundamentals of design teams (pp. 326-328)

Cooperative learning refers to a classroom situation in which students work to help each other learn. The details of cooperative learning situations can be important; not every situation in which students attempt to learn together is effective. Research indicates that team rewards and individual accountability are especially important for success. Team rewards are some form of recognition for team success. Individual accountability means that team success is based on the contributions of each team member. The idea is to form positive interdependence among group members. There are a number of cooperative learning strategies and it is important to recognize that different methods are best suited to different learning goals.

Extended discussion of student cooperation

II.A Going beyond factual information

Task specialization methods require that individual students contribute to the accomplishment of a group task. Each student typically accepts responsibility for some aspect of the task, and the group’s performance depends to some extent on the contribution of every group member. Group investigation is a task specialization method that results in the generation of a group project. The group project could be the construction of a hypermedia product summarizing the study of a content-area theme.

III. Hypercomposition design model (pp. 328-338)

Lehrer’s hypercomposition design model provides a concrete way to integrate many of the themes from this book. The model itself was derived from a model of the writing process - the Flower and Hayes model. The model describes a number of interrelated actions that must be accomplished to generate a hypermedia product.

III.A Planning

The tasks involved in planning require the group to:

• develop major goals for the composition project
• propose topics and subtopics
• propose a presentation format
• establish team member responsibilities

III.B Transforming and translating

III.B.1 Collecting information

To collect information, students must identify relevant sources, locate the sources, and obtain relevant information from the sources. Students may also create information through original experiments or through some other method of collecting unique information.

III.B.2 Generating knowledge

Students need to organize, summarize and interpret the information they have collected. The final step in this stage is the generation of a product to present the conclusion resulting from these processes.

III.C Evaluating and revising

Evaluation is the process of searching for weaknesses in the product - the information provided and the method of presentation. The consequence of a product evaluation should be improvements in the product - the product revision.

III.D An alternative perspective

In the hypercomposition design model, Lehrer uses the writing process to propose a set of interrelated actions necessary to develop multimedia content. While educators may not be familiar with the Flower and Hayes model on which Lehrer's work is based, most have some experience with "writing projects" and perhaps with the idea of "writing to learn."

Nikos Theodosakis uses a different process, movie-making, as the basis for a different way of explaining the creation of a multimedia product. Both models emphasize a team approach and a series of interrelated stages resulting in a final product. In The Director In The Classroom, Theodosakis outlines the stages in the filmmaking process, the team he sees creating the final product, and proposed activities for each team member at each stage. Again, the fundamental proposal is that participants learn as they design a product.

IV. The teacher’s role in the design process (pp. 338-341)

Students seldom have the opportunity to create "works of mind" - original projects or investigations that are largely the responsibility of the learner.

IV.A Works of mind

Schools teach students about academic disciplines (e.g., history, biology), but seldom allow students to function as practitioners of these disciplines (e.g., historian, biologist).

IV.B Apprenticeship method

Teachers can assist students in creating works of mind by functioning in an apprenticeship role. In this relationship (discussed in some detail in Chapter 2), teachers do not focus on providing students with information. Instead, the role of the teacher shifts from dispensing knowledge, to demonstrating (modeling), coaching, and eventually taking a more passive role as an observer.

Works of mind allow students to develop the performance skills likely to appear among content area standards.

V. Student multimedia projects (pp. 342-358)

V.A Student web projects

The web offers an outlet for student multimedia projects.

Think of web pages as consisting of a combination of:

• multimedia elements - text, graphics, sound, movies
• hypertext markup language (HTML) - a special command language that informs the browser how to organize the multimedia elements for display
• links allowing access to other pages

V.B Basic features and skills

As the world wide web becomes capable of more complex presentations and greater interactivity, the technical skills necessary to create web pages has also increased. However, it is possible to identify a set of features that are reasonable for even younger learners to implement with the assistance of a web authoring tool. Our list of features and skills would include:

• Set background color. This can usually be accomplished through a dialog box controlling basic properties of the page.
• Add text to the page.
• Set the size of headings. Headings are usually designated by selecting a line of text and then selecting a heading size from a menu.
• Create lists. Again, lists (bolded or numbered) are created by selecting a number of lines of text and then selecting the type of list from a menu.
• Add graphics, sounds, and movies to the page. Multimedia elements can often be added in several ways. Some authoring tools allow the multimedia file to be dragged to a location on the web page. Others offer an "Insert" option from the menubar.
• Link a segment of text or a graphic to other web pages. Typically, the procedure is to select the text segment or the graphic and then enter the URL for the destination page within a dialog box.
• Create a table. Most authoring tools offer a menu option allowing the creation of a table with the number of rows and columns specified by the author. Once the table appears, it is typically possible to drag the lines dividing the rows and columns to generate a table with the designed characteristics.

V.C Alternate ways to construct web pages

Web pages can actually be created in a number of ways.

V.C.1 Word processing programs

Many tools you are already familiar with (e.g., word processing, presentation) have the capability of generating basic html pages. With many word processing programs, the program recognizes certain features in your document (bolded text, centered text, an inserted image) and attempts to duplicate these features in HTML. To determine if your word processor has this capability, you usually only have to investigate the options available when you select "Save As". It is good advice to always first save your document as a word processing file. If the HTML page needs to be modified, it is usually easier to make changes to the word processing document than the HTML document.

V.C.2 Web authoring software for students

There are several examples of web authoring software developed specifically for educational settings (e.g., eZediaQTI).

MediaBlender - a new tool for student multimedia projects

A sample eZedia QTI Project

V.C.3 General purpose web authoring software

Most classroom web authoring probably relies upon the same web authoring software used outside of educational settings. Some web authoring software is free (e.g., Netscape Composer).

Some thoughts on what task and tool for which learning goal

2/24/07