Notes for Week #4: Diagnosing and Prognosing Educational Software

"Mere activity does not constitute experience. It is dispersive, centrifugal, dissipating. Experience as trying involves change, but change is meaningless transition unless it is consciously connected with the return wave of consequences which flow from it. When an activity is continued into the undergoing of consequences, when the change made by action is reflected back into a change made in us, the mere flux is loaded with significance. We learn something." (John Dewey, from Democracy and Education (MacMillan, 1916)

"Articulacy here has a moral point, not just in correcting what may be wrong views but also in making the force of an ideal that people are already living by more palpable, more vivid for them; and by making it more vivid, empowering them to live up to it in a fuller and more integral fashion." (Charles Taylor, from The Ethics of Authenticity (Harvard, 1992))

Where we are and where we're going

So far:
• Reading Ullman and Weizenbaum, we began to consider both the pathos and ethos of programming, and thus our involvement in the creation of programs for educational purposes.

• Reading Cuban and Scheffler, we began to consider the historical and professional context for creating and implementing technology for the classroom, and began to analyze the purpose and institutional role of technology in the classroom.

• Spending a week learning authoring programs in the CS/MML environment while meeting the teachers in their own environment raised issues about how to "fit" our creations to classrooms and educational purposes of various sorts.

Now:
• We'll continue with readings that help us build a framework for evaluating our own work in the areas of understanding classrooms, understanding HCI issues, and understanding cognitive and social issues concerning schooling and education.

• We'll develop the projects through the revision of the project descriptions, the composition of a project page for documentation (etc.), and an articulation of the project using the "storyboard".

• We'll build the software, documenting decisions and revisions, and implement it, test it, reflect on it and implement it again.

Questions about software evaluation

1. Should we compare (educational) software to the "book" or to a specific genre of the book (e.g. the textbook)?
2. Educational Software 101 (092 < 101 ?!?): How far have we come? (Ward and Sewall (1986))
3. Educational Software Today: What are the promises and perils of grounding software design in the experience of the student? (Lu, Voss and Kleinsmith (1997))

Next week

• Revised project descriptions due on Tuesday.
• Read Sandholtz, et al (1997), chapters 1-3, and Gardner (1991), chapters 6-7, for Tuesday. Read at least two other chapters in Sandholtz and Cuban (1993) for Thursday.
• Bil Johnson, from the Education Department at Brown will be joining us on Tuesday and Luther Spoehr, also from the Education Department at Brown, will join us on Thursday
• Use the list for questions and articulations as you continue to develop your projects (descriptions, pages, and storyboards).
• Storyboards due on the 5th of March.