Is It Week 6 Already?

Computer-Supported Intentional Learning Environments by Scardamalia et al. (1989)

This article states that CSILE stands for "Computer-Supported Intentional Learning Environments" and is "an educational knowledge media system." (p.51) It further claims that "CSILE supports intentional learning by providing a means for a group of students to build a collective database (knowledge-base) of their thoughts in the form of pictures and written notes..." (p.52) which are then made known to everyone. It also states that "CSILE is being designed for eventual use at all grade levels an for all school curricula." (p. 52) That was back in 1989, It's been nearly 20 years since then, so where the heck is CSILE the software program today?

Since I've never seen or used this CSILE software, what I found more interesting in this article were the design principles for computer-supported intentional learning environments rather than how these principles were then incorporated into CSILE. What I found even more interesting was how Liberty's Kids - a software program designed by The Learning Company incorporated several of these design principles into their "history game."

For instance, according to the article's authors, well-designed educational software provides "process-relevant" feedback. (p.57) With Liberty's Kids, it is possible to get feedback from the program about the news articles that you prepare as an apprentice reporter. If you put together a well-constructed and interesting article, you can click on an icon that literally says "Feedback" and writing will appear under the various points of your constructed article informing you how good they are. Still more feedback is provided indirectly through the number of subscriptions that the newspaper sells due to your front page article.

Another feature that well-designed educational software shares it that it "encourages multiple passes through information." (p.60) Apparently, one aspect of learning that distinguishes experts from novices is that "naive students show a strong tendency not to go back over information. This is shown in their reluctance to revise compositions..." (p. 60) Their work is characterized by "single-pass" strategies. However, Scardamalia et al. note that "because computers make it easy to retain and recall information, educational software has the potential to help students develop multiple-pass strategies. Whether the software involves games, microworlds, subject matter learning , or tool use, ways should be sought to make it worthwhile for students to call back information they have dealt with previously and to reconsider it or to use it in a different context." (p.60)

I was excited to read that passage because again, it brought to mind Liberty's Kids and helped me to see just what an educational boon this software was when it was developed back in 2003. In the first part of the program/game, the user must interview various people about certain events in the struggle for American independence and decided whether to save their comments for later use in the newspaper article. Then the user returns to Ben Franklin's print shop to write up the who, what, when, where, and why of the event, relying on their repertoire of saved notes. They must amass the various quotes from Loyalists/Tories, Revolutionaries, ordinary citizens, famous characters, etc. and pull together a coherent article from all of these varying points of view.

Another feature of well-designed educational software according to Scardamalia et al. is that it "encourages maximum use and examination of existing knowledge." (p. 63) The authors believe that a "serious shortcoming of most educational soft ware is that the software itself has access to limited body of knowledge... and the students must work withing the confines of that limited knowledge base" (p.63) while real world tasks "tend to be wide open in the kinds of knowledge that may be drawn on in handling the task." In a more narrow and indirect sense, Liberty's Kids also fits this bill. Instead of relying on just one character's opinion of an event that happened (for instance, the Boston Tea Party), the user must ask multiple persons for their views to gain a well-rounded perspective. Of course, the user is not obliged to do so, but then their article will have a definite bias to it, resulting in less subscriptions being sold.

Yet another feature of well-designed educational software is that it "provides opportunities for reflectivity and individual learning styles." (p. 63) Scardamalia et al. go on to state that "the program must provide students time, opportunity, and peace in which to think about what they are doing and why" (p.60) in order to "support reflective thinking." (p. 60) Once more, I was happy to note that Liberty's Kids does just this, with the editing that the user must do to his/her article before it is published. Thinking about which statements to choose to use promotes this "reflective thinking" that Scardamalia et al. seem to favor.

The final feature of a well-designed educational program that Liberty's Kids evidences is that it "facilitates transfer of knowledge across contexts." On the one hand, the program may seem to only be about learning American Revolutionary War history. However, as Scardamalia et al. state, "educational software has an opportunity, not enjoyed by textbooks, to cut across curricular lines." I would argue that if not being multi-curricular, Liberty's Kids is at least bi-curricular in that it also teaches what being a good journalist/reporter is all about. You have to interview multiple sources to get the full story and then chose and pick wisely what you decide to print to give people the best overall picture of what really happened. (Of course, one could also reasonably point out that this is what good historians must also do, but then I believe there are great similarities between being a good reporter and being a good historian.)

Cognitive Tools for Understanding History: What More Do We Need? by O'Neill and Weiler (2006)

Again, I was pleased to see the Liberty's Kids faired so well in this article, in that it fit several of the principles that O'Neill and Weiler believe desirable as far as learning history is concerned.

For instance, they lament the fact that "most history instruction today revolves around the mastery of canonical accounts of the past; but without a grasp of the "metahistorical ideas" (Lee, 2004) that help explain where historical accounts come form and why they often differ, young adults are likely to develop the dismissive view of history..." (p. 183, emphasis mine) However, Liberty's Kids does help in its own limited way, to explain such things. Since the user must go around interviewing various characters (again, some famous such as George Washington, and others not so famous such as the wife of a Minuteman), then said user can see for him or herself just how varied the accounts of an historical event may be.

I was tickled to see that O'Neill and Weiler believe that "better history teachers attempt to give their students realistic experiences of historical research through projects or exercises in which student conduct interviews with elders..." (p. 183) since, of course, this concept of interviewing is at the heart of Liberty's Kids.

One design point that the authors favor in software is that "through some clever design work" (p. 184) software "can provide knowledgeable feedback on the content of students' notes..." (p. 184) The notes that they speak of refer to notes that through "an interface" (p. 184) that "demands attention to features salient to historians, such as the authors' positions, motives, and bases for knowledge." (p.184) In its limited way, Liberty's Kids does do this. By focusing on asking the various characters the "who, what, when, where, and why" of the events that were witnessed, the user is engaged with a game interface that is trying to mold him or her in to a historian by having them ask all the "salient" details that a historian would want to know. Furthermore, these notes that the user can chose to take during the interview are then amassed into a front-page article, which Moses (a game character who runs the press) will then comment upon through use of the "feedback" icon.

However, one thing that O'Neill and Weiler mentioned that at first gave me a little concern was their statement of Stage 2 of Shemilt's 1987 model of how students progress through four stages of understanding with regard to historical evidence and methodology. In Stage 2, "students think of historians as people who are somehow able to sniff out false of biased stories about the past, 'read off' the truth, and piece together the one true account. (In truth, there is no such thing.)" (p. 185) The reason why this idea first concerned me is because I wondered if Liberty's Kids might help to foster such reasoning? The user or player of the game is a defacto student of history. They must sort through the various bias encountered in the words of others. Playing the part of a reporter, the game encourages the user to indeed "sniff out" the truth. I would not wish for the student to get stuck in this stage 2 of Shemilt's model forever as a result of playing this game.

However, upon further reflection, I realized that perhaps getting "stuck" in stage two might not be a true concern after all. The point of Liberty's Kids is to point out that there are multiple views and accounts of history. Each one is accurate in and of itself, but may not present the complete picture of what really happened. Instead of passively reading a history book where an author has already done the sniffing for them, the students themselves must put themselves in the role of a historian and decide for themselves which facts to include and which statements to omit.

Furthermore, when composing the newspaper article, the user is required to submit two "why" statements as to why the event occurred. I believe that this reinforces the notion that there is more than one version of history - no one side has the complete truth. Since the student plays the part of the historian, he or she learns that what the historian does is to decided for him or herself what the best opinions are to use. In other words, the historian is only human and is fallible when choosing events to write about. Thus, I am at least hopeful that Liberty's Kids does not stick players into Stage 2 forever.

Rewiring the History and Social Studies Classroom: Needs, Frameworks, and Proposals by Bass and Rosenzweig

Although this was a different sort of article than the two above, I still did find some interest comparisons to Liberty's Kids in it. In the first part of their article, the authors ask: "Why Use Technology in Social Studies Education?" (p.2) The answer is because teachers want their students to be "more engaged with learning. (p.2) Certainly that is what appropriate educational software does... it engages students. I believe that students would find playing Liberty's Kids to be engaging. It plays like a game, but a fun educational one where they also learn history and how to make sense of differing historical accounts at the same time.

In the second part of their article, the authors ask "What Works?" (p. 3) The first part of this answer is "inquiry activities" (p. 4) They quote from the 1994 National Standards for United States History, which declared that "perhaps no aspect of historical thinking is as exciting to students or as productive of their growth a historical thinkers as 'doing history' by directly encountering 'historical documents, eyewitness accounts... and photos." (p. 4-5) Certainly, although it is just a game, Liberty's Kids allows students the opportunity to "do" history. They are in effect living it through playing the game. Moreover, in the game they directly encounter eyewitness accounts through the various people that they meet. Although there are no photographs to behold, there is the cartoon drawing of the various camps and battle sites and a few famous buildings to behold such as Philadelphia's Independence Hall.

The inquiry activities that the authors are referring to in this part of their paper, necessitates the "craft of introducing students to the inquiry process." (p.6) Liberty's Kids does this literally by making the player into a reporter.

Beyond what I have discussed above, I didn't really find anymore comparisons that I could draw between this article and Liberty's Kids but I did find it interesting that the authors address a point that I had in my conceptual framework for evaluating learning technology. For instance, they state that fiscal cost is a "key issue that new technology poses." (p.9) I also made the point that new technology is often expensive. Part of how we evaluate its worth should include whether it's potential to teach is worth the price it costs.

I also found it interesting that the authors argued that "one-shot workshops" (p.11) won't work in teaching teachers how to incorporate technology in their classrooms. Instead they need on-going support. This reminded me a little of Kleiman's article about "Myths and Realities about Technology in K-12 Schools." He mentioned the ACOT project (Apple Classroom of Tomorrow) which identified five stages of instructional evolution for using technology. The gist of these five stages was that technology support must be on-going for teachers in order for them to incorporate it with full confidence into their classrooms. Bass and Rosenzweig are making the same point. They even go a step further by saying that learning technologies should factor into the curricula of college education courses and become a part of teacher's certification.

When I began reading these articles for this week, I had no idea that I would end up comparing them so much to Liberty's Kids - which is the learning technology I plan to review for my midterm paper. I hope that our professor doesn't mind (hint, hint) if many of the points and sentences I bring up here in this blog end up in my paper as well. After all, I did put a lot of thought and effort and time into both reading the articles and writing them up for the blog.