Although trained as a computer scientist, Prof. Ulrich Hoppe brings a strong perspective - and knowledge - from collaborative learning. The focus of his talk was that learning processes must be integrated, both technologically and pedagogically.
"I do not believe that this should lead to computers controlling learning, it should lead to computers enriching the learning processes, making certain things smoother, more flexible, maybe also changing the expressiveness that we have, give us different means of intellectual expression that would be used in these learning environments" (This echoed the point of Richard Noss' keynote speech at the Symposium.)
Reflecting on the field of computer-supported collaborative learning, he said, "If you look at CSCL research you can see certain patterns of research. For instance there is, in a number of projects, support for synchronoous cooperation in small groups using shared workspace technologies." This includes community support through online forums and so on. But this is often disconnected from the classroom - and the real world. "Why do we consider all these things as separate, almost exclusive modalities?" he asked. "When you look at research, you see research in all of these categories. But what we see in real life embraces this all. So i think there is a clear need to support a kind of educational workflow that goes across these modalities."
Prof. Hoppe also referenced Susanne Lajoie's talk, specifically her mention of 'learning trajectories.' "These trajectories," Prof. Hoppe said, "are over time and place." They stretch across across large group, small group, and individual situations. This notion of a fluid movement between these group levels, he said, arose in a discussion with Pierre Dillenbourg (who also mentioned it in his talk). For Prof. Hoppe, the issue is how to share between a classroom environment and the larger community - even within the same school. "There is a real deficit currently," he said, "in schools and school practice with providing good intranet infrastructures and local repository infrastructures." There are global infrastructures, he said, but classes need local support. At university level, this is not a problem; it is in the primary and secondary schools.
The NIMIS project (Networked Interactive Media In Schools) from 1999 was described as "the first real example of a computer-integrated classroom." In fact there were no computers in the classroom itself, but they were hidden in an adjacent one. In the classroom there was an interactive whiteboard and tablets embedded in tables, which students could use collabratively. They were early learners, from four to eight years old. The system had a logging system, and a way of visualising students' progress to the teachers.
Prof. Hoppe and his colleagues found some interesting results. For example, the whiteboard had no function for drawing straight lines, and one day they observed a teacher using a ruler on the whiteboard to draw a straight line. This combination of analog and digital technologies has fascinated Prof. Hoppe to this day. "We should see many more of these things in the future," he said, and in fact, more recently he observed similar behaviour when visiting Prof. Tak Wai Chan of National Central University in Taiwan (who participated in two panel discussions at the Symposium).
The COLDEX project (also discussed by Niels Pinkwart) continued the vision of integration between different groups by supporting learning communities in science and technology. These were not virtual communities, Prof. Hoppe explained, but grown from the bottom up by "local face-to-face islands." The theme was space science and included autonomous robots, lunar cartography, self-contained biospheres, and seismology. The tools for exploring these areas included the 'Coolmodes' environment which integrated a number of programming languages and types of representation, mobile devices for capture and initial analysis of data, and remote control of a large telescope.
A learning object repository was developed by Felisa Verdejo's team at UNED in Spain. This had a web interface, as well as an interface embedded directly in the tools used by learners. So a learner could, for example, search for documents similar to the one currently being worked on, and the document itself was not merely text but a model. This also facilitated searching for peers, since the system knew the authors of similar documents. Prof. Hoppe compared this to the type of social navigation presented by David Benyon. The tools themselves were shared, and this type of communication through an artifact has been described for synchronous contexts in CSCL, but not for asynchronous ones.
Finally, Prof. Hoppe talked about the Kaleidoscope MoSIL and Cossicle activities - the former a one-year project which spawned the latter longer-term research team; both deal with scripting interactions between learners. This, he said, is learning design by example, in which the products of learning emerge from what students do, not from existing learning objects. This was also discussed in the Inquiry Learning SIG workshop.
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