Evaluating Educational Software I: Questions to Ponder for Discussion on 3-4-99

Copeland's objective in The Educational Significance of Electronic Media was to demonstrate the educational significance of electronic media. Do you think that he accomplished this? Is Copeland's "quadrant" model effective in visualizing the significance of electronic media? Is its one-dimentional 4-quadrant quality restrictive or limiting?

Copeland admits that in 1987 many holes were evident in research on the educational opportunities provided by electronic media. What new perspectives have been incorporated by the TERC site and Quinones and Kirshtein into the evaluations of technology?

Do you think that the multiple pages of in-depth questions on the TERC site are important to ask in evaluating software? It seems that much of what the TERC site evaluates (i.e. developing students' ideas through interaction, engaging students in negotiating meaning, constructing understanding, etc. and correlating content with relevant standards of education)is also valuable for a teacher to consider and implement in the general classroom. To what extent should software be relied on in educating youth? Say within10 years software upon software, covering all the major disciplines, fits most of the criteria in educational software evaluations and alleviates problems that educators have tried to balance for years. What would be the role of the teacher with respect to the software?

Schwartz, The Right Size Byte, seems in favor of implementing new content and new approaches into the educational curriculum. He says "it is important to rethink continually the content of what we teach and to revise that content to reflect the realities of the world around us." But new content and new medium is intimidating to teachers who have been taught by traditional methods. Copeland also says that "what there is to learn is not static, but rather is a live and growing body of knowledge to which (students) can, and indeed are obliged to, contribute. It seems that everything within intellectual thought in this world has reached a point where in order to discover anything new, one needs to start from the extremely complex, or get there really fast. Hundreds of years of thoughts in philosophy, science, literature, etc, have been built upon and restructured by more thoughts and thoughts and thoughts. With all these thoughts thunk and recorded, humans have by now created a conceptual and informational overload. So today where should we start from? Should we assume that the earth is round and assume that "I think therefore I am" and thus have more time for other explorations or internalize first the roots of what we would like to explore? Let's see, where the heck am I going with this? In creating his Geometric superSupposer software, Schwartz had to decide what was more important: to make students construct geometric figures such as bisectors from lines and arcs tediously or to provide bisectors so that students can more playfully form other geometric constructions. Schwartz chose the latter, explaining that if students can see the true nature of a subject from the beginning, they will more likely to put effort into understanding its foundations. What do you think of this? Do you think that the visually interactive qualities of computers enable most learners to grasp concepts more easily?

Schwartz asks designers to challenge his views for a productive debate. I will bring in a big newsprint pad and marker. If we have time and people are in favor, we can challenge and/or encorporate the 2 readings and software evaluations to form our own visual diagram/form that portrays "ideal" educational software.

OK, I guess that's it. See you in class,

Naomi