Mashing Up Simulations and Knowledge Construction Technologies to Support Complex Instructional Designs

• In Event: When Systems Collide: Challenges and Opportunities in Learning Technology Mash-Ups

Abstract

The Technologies. Embedded Phenomena (EP) situate learners as investigators of simulated phenomena presumed to occupy the physical space of their classrooms (Moher, 2006; 2008). Each EP begins with a scenario—the suspicion of a fault line running through the room, the existence of an aquifer network beneath the floor, the presence of an active ecosystem of organisms within the walls of the classroom—revealed only by computer-based “portals” that show glimpses of the simulation at spatially discrete locations around the room. The science learning goals and inquiry methods may vary form one EP to the next, but central to the approach are that the simulations persist throughout the space of the room and across time, even over the weekend, allowing a sense of reality that promotes legitimate inquiry.

The Scalable Architecture for Interactive Learning (SAIL) is a flexible, open source technology framework for supporting complex pedagogical designs, including the grouping of students, their input and exchange across handheld computers, multi-touch tables, Smart boards, smart phones, probes and a variety of Flash and Web applications (Slotta, 2010). A user portal tracks individual contributions, while an intelligent agent framework operates on various XMPP channels to coordinate grouping decisions, access to materials, and logical operations. SAIL has been fine tuned into a set of libraries and applications called SAIL Smart Space (S3) in order to provide a flexible “smart classroom” framework that can support designs where students collaborate across contexts, dynamically generate knowledge, build on peers’ ideas, and investigate questions as a knowledge community (Slotta & Najafi, 2010).

The Vision. While long fans of each others’ work, our distinctive points of origin and disciplinary traditions kept us a bit blinded to our collaboration potential until a common friend said “you two really need to work together.” We found common ground around the problem of supporting the complex, multi-week pedagogical designs employed in the EP framework, which lacked technology supports for the enactment of those designs. Using SAIL and S3, we are developing tools to support learners and teachers in the construction of community knowledge and the development of science practices, and helping teachers to monitor and foster student participation in collaborative investigations, and have begun to deploy those in pilot classroom interventions. While we are not exactly at the beginning of our collaboration, we are still early enough in the game that our narrative will focus on the premise and promise of our mash-up: the interesting theoretical and technological alignments that made the ecological conditions favorable for real collaboration.

The Future. The most promising aspect of the collaboration is how the process of technical integration is leading to ideas about both new activity structures that could be made available in classrooms and new supports that could enrich learning experiences. Over the next few years, informed by strong partnerships with teachers, we will continue to develop and deploy these technologies in classrooms and work with the larger developer community toward the goal of creating more easily shared technologies to support classroom learning and teaching.

Authors

• James D. Slotta, University of Toronto

• Tom Moher, University of Illinois at Chicago