Notes for Week #5: The Significance of the Classroom

Our guests this week are Bil Johnson, Lecturer & Clinical Professor of Social Studies/History, and Luther Spoehr, Lecturer, both in the Department of Education at Brown.

Developing a vocabulary for the evaluation of educational software:
Three programs for learning history

Discovery American History on CD-ROM (Prentice Hall, 1997)
Port of Entry (National Digital Library Project, 1997)
The Oregon Trail (MECC, 1993)

Consider five questions:

• What sorts of experiences are the authors trying to encourage?
• To what extent are multiple paths/narratives/styles made possible?
• How does the software relate to the "three assignments" mentioned by Gardner (p. 131)?
• What effects do the entertainment/amusement goals have on the presentation of the content?
• What would be a valid assessment of the effect/effectiveness of this program?

Other questions we should be asking of educational software?

Teaching with Technology, by Judith Sandholtz, Cathy Ringstaff and David Dwyer (1997).

• Bil Johnson on classroom and school culture.

• Kim Mowery on chapters 1-3 of Sandholtz, et al.

• Gardner's "non-cognitive responsibilities," the "three assignments" and the aims of education considered yet again.

• What insights from the book seem particularly relevant to your projects?

• Where would you place your teacher among the Entry, Adoption, Adaptation, Appropriation and Invention stages?

"Computers Meet Classroom: Classroom Wins," by Larry Cuban (1993)

• What is the (rhetorical) effect of referring to the teaching assumptions on p. 198 as "cultural beliefs"? How do the different scenarios discussed in the article imply different interpretations of these beliefs?

• If you had to summarize the argument in this article in a few sentences, what would you say?

• Are there important differences between elementary and secondary schools that directly affect the prognosis for the effective use of computers in classrooms? If so, what institutional reforms would be required to overcome these differences (if overcoming them is desirable)?

• As we leave discussions of classroom life for readings in and discussions of interface design, what do you want to keep in mind from Cuban, Scheffler and/or Sandholtz, et al., when you begin making your programs?

For Next Week:

• We'll begin our discussions of interface issues with articles by Grabinger and Osman-Jouchaux (1996) and Nicol (1990), drawn from the computer science and Human-Computer Interaction literature.
• Thursday we add cognitive science to the mix, with articles by Spoehr and Spoehr (1994) and the introduction to McGilly (1994).
• Storyboard presentations for each of the projects are due next Thursday.