CS92 So Far
Now the Hard Part
Focusing on "experience"
A Look at Three (Commercial) Programs
Children as Designers: A New Paradigm for Edusoft?
For Next Time
At the start of the course we read works that were meant both to indicate areas of relevant theory for, and experiments in, the successful design and use of educational technology generally, and to suggest important questions to carry forward into the software projects.
Works by Ullman, Dewey, Scheffler, Schank, Svinicki, Grabinger and Osman-Jouchoux, Copeland as well as selections from Software Goes to School were meant to stimulate questions about the meaning and significance of the terms "experience", "education" and "learning". Works like the ACOT study, Cuban's book, the articles in Druin, and of course your own work with your clients, have served as the "experimental" studies, and were meant to raise questions about the meaning of successful integration of technology in schools, the reason(s) why so many classroom technologies have failed to deliver the "revolutions" their advocates so clearly promised, and how relevant questions about educational technology depend on the scale of observation (e.g. the institution, the classroom, the student, the program, etc.).
Finally, we've completed the first phases of the projects themselves, revising project descriptions, observing classrooms and students, and presenting storyboards.
Now ....
The greatest challenge in CS92 has always been and remains to successfully integrate some answers to some of the questions we've raised in the design of educational software, given the constraints imposed by the clients, their students, their institutions (and your own abilities as well). Your projects will be evaluated based on: 1) your meeting the requirements of your client; 2) your attempts to meet this integrating challenge; and 3) your own happiness with the program.
For various reasons (social, political as well as scientific), questions about the meaning of "education" and "learning" in the context of educational software design are especially difficult right now. Questions about "experience" may be more accessible or manageable, if only because we can start with our own sense of expressions like "good experience", "bad experience", "educative experience" and "transformative experience". Are there features of any of these that can be generalized into design issues?
In light of this focus on experience, and as an addition to the taxonomies offered by Ward, van Dam, and others, we can add a categorization that distinguishes between programs based on a "drill for skills" task, those based on "explorations" and those meant to impart or make accessible a fixed body of information. We'll look at the following:
The big educational software news this week is that the dramatic consolidation of educational software companies that resulted in the purchase of The Learning Company by Mattel last May has been a flop, as Mattel announced they would sell The Learning Company as soon as possible. This calls attention the unfortunate history of educational software in the US, and forces an examination of the kinds of economic models that can and cannot be expected to result in good quality educational software for large numbers of American students.
In chapter 10 of Schank and Cleary, the authors call for government intervention to build curriculum in software for the nation's school system. They estimated cost of such a project at $1,000,000,000. Whether or not one thinks this a worthwhile idea, it is pretty clear that the private sector cannot be depended on to produce good quality educational software for schools and students on a national scale.
In the article by Kafai, from Druin's The Design of Children's Technology, we see a strain of research that suggests a different approach to software development, and one that suggests a model of technology production more flexible (and perhaps less expensive) than the traditional educational software company model. We'll spend most of the time today talking about the Kafai article, using Imeh's questions as a focus for the discussion.
Next week we'll be reading from In Search of the Virtual Class, by John Tiffin and Lalita Rajasingham. Please read chapters 1-3 for Tuesday and 5, 8 and 9 for Thursday.