Studying Educational Technology II

Introduction: A note on Storyboards

Next Wednesday, we'll begin the storyboard presentations by the project teams. Although the concept of storyboarding is today used primarily in the visual arts (e.g. film and video), we ask both more and less of traditional storyboards in CS92. Less, because we certainly don't expect a great deal of polish or for you to have made final decisions about composition. More, because we want the storyboards to give us not only a sense of the media and the story but also of the rationale and techniques you're thinking about to make the software a success.

If you look at Saori's notes on storyboarding you'll see that she mostly cited examples of how different teams had handled them in the past. That's a reasonable way to plan your own storyboard, but an alternate approach is to plan your storyboard around essential questions that you might ask of other projects/programs. For example, your storyboards might address/answer the following questions:

• What is the goal of the program?
• How will the program begin and end, and what will be the sequence of interactions and the general flow of the program?
• Is there a metaphor that will dominate and/or help organize the users experience with the program?
• What use will be made of text, images and sound and why?
• What cognitive and/or literary techniques are you employing to motivate and facilitate learning?
• Who will use the program and do you imagine them using the program once, several times, or many times over many years?
• Is your program especially informed by any of the authors we've read (or authors we've not read), and, in general, on what are you basing your decisions about program design?
• What are your criteria for evaluating the finished program?

Continuing with Teaching with Technology: Creating Student-Centered Classrooms, by Sandholtz, Ringstaff and Dwyer

We'll continue our discussion of the ACOT study, led by Xander's and An's comments and questions. Along the way we will perhaps have a chance to discuss the following questions:

• Where does each team think their sponsoring teacher is on the evolutionary path set out by the authors between "entry" and "innovation"?
• As am empirical study of the use of computers in school, what are the strongest and weakest points of the ACOT study?

For next time: Read the 1999 paper by Becker and Ravitz and evaluate its quality as a study of the use of computers in education.