<\/strong><\/p>\nA Model for Integrating Online Technology<\/span><\/strong>
\nDrew Murphy<\/p>\nThe Remediation of Classrooms<\/strong>
\nBusiness, communications, politics, media, are all experiencing significant change under the influence of online technology innovation. Yet, as we witness technology inducing staggering change in the world at large, classrooms are conspicuously absent in their participation in this phenomenon.\u00a0 Many people will point to inadequate funding, lack of technical support and professional development as significant obstacles (Tech Talk Survey, 2006) However, new technologies are eroding these barriers.\u00a0 Essentially, there is a deeper issue that is stalling education\u2019s participation in the technological shift. This deeper issue revolves around the remediation conflict currently occurring between the classroom space and the online space.\u00a0 Bolter refers to this remediation issue in terms of print text and digital text where \u201cThis debate turns on the question: which form is better at constituting the real, the authentic, or the natural\u201d (1995, p.43) This debate holds true for classrooms and computers as well. For print centric classrooms to participate more actively in the greater technological shift, teachers and technology need to reconcile at a deeper classroom cultural level, pay homage to one another and restructure together in incremental but important ways.<\/p>\n The Impact of Web 2.0 Online Services<\/strong>
\nWith the development of new online technologies, the improvement of hardware and software systems, and the access to high speed internet connections, new possibilities are available for classroom teachers.\u00a0 In the new millennium, the web has exploded with interactive content, social networking and user generated content functionality.\u00a0 Coined as Web 2.0 (O\u2019Reilly, 2005\u201d), these online applications and resources are creating new possibilities for classroom technology integration.\u00a0 Needing little or no training and often provided for free, barriers around cost and onsite support traditionally inhibiting technology integration are eroding.<\/p>\nFor teachers in particular, there are a multitude of services for creating interactive slideshows, photo galleries, timelines, flowcharts, sketchpads and more. However, a closer look reveals that most of the applications are aimed at a broad market of internet users and not classrooms specifically.\u00a0 Without specific classroom conscious remediations many of the applications don\u2019t adapt well to the time pressured practices of traditional classrooms.\u00a0 Wikis and blogs are somewhat of an exception.<\/p>\n
Wikis and blogs are getting serious attention as tools that offer classroom integration possibilities. These tools create opportunities for new online teaching methodologies which emphasize creative, resource rich, self-directed learning experiences for students. (Bruns, 2005). Yet these, powerful, flexible Web 2.0 tools still require significant technical understandings on the part of classroom teachers.\u00a0 These online spaces also create a whole new environment of engagement , access and control that represent significant shifts away from traditional classroom cultures (Bruns, 2005), where the teacher still leads the learning process, orchestrates classroom talk, designs and sets the activity schedule and measures learning progress.\u00a0 Thus Wikis and blogs, although pedagogically valuable, are broad and challenging tools that remain as peripheral, somewhat complicated innovations.<\/p>\n
For most teachers, web 2.0 tools are complementary resources offering novelty engagement or broad innovations requiring leaps of professional faith.\u00a0 It is the technology itself that is often the innovation.\u00a0 The ability to create the slideshow, the video, the flowchart in an online environment is an innovation in and of itself but it is not an innovation that directly impacts the inner workings of the classroom delivery model.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 They are innovations that represent radically new modes of teaching and genres of communication for teachers.\u00a0 Can they be beneficial for students? Yes.\u00a0 Do they represent innovations that can readily integrate into traditional classroom methods and practices, unlikely.<\/p>\n
The Nature of Classrooms Today<\/strong>
\nUnderstanding why technology integration in schools is happening slowly, against the backdrop of rapid social integration, involves understanding certain key aspects of classroom cultures.\u00a0 Classrooms are pre online technology environments.\u00a0 Technology, in general, is not new to these classrooms where the use of overheads, tv’s, vcr’s and projectors, has been common for years.\u00a0 However, these older technologies have become part of the methods and practices developed by teachers over many years and are deeply engrained in the culture of the classroom medium.\u00a0 At its core, the classroom model is a learning production model within a hierarchical leadership structure. The are exceptions and pockets of innovation but in general for most classrooms, the teacher leads the learning process, orchestrates classroom talk, designs and sets the activity schedule and measures learning progress.( Helena Austin, et al, 2002)\u00a0 Resources such as desks, textbooks,\u00a0 handouts,\u00a0 whiteboards, overheads, projectors, etc.., all contribute to the efficiency and productivity ethos of this curriculum delivery system.\u00a0 Classrooms are still primarily print based cultures that value and promote print based literacy.\u00a0\u00a0 And, it is a model where, over the years teachers have discovered and exercised numerous efficiencies and economies of scale to create effective learning environments.\u00a0 Persuading teachers to integrate new technology and the accompanying new methods and practices into this kind of deeply entrenched classroom culture requires a special type of innovation.<\/p>\n Looking for Incremental Innovation <\/strong>
\nLooking at the characteristics of effective innovations, we find research shows that incremental change to current practices is a common feature of effective innovation (Marquis, 1969).\u00a0 This makes sense for classrooms too.\u00a0 Relevant innovation for teachers means constructing web tools that make key incremental improvements to current classroom practices.\u00a0 Radical innovations, although offering possible pedagogical improvements, are typically much more difficult to integrate.\u00a0 Effective incremental innovation comes from understanding how teachers work in classrooms and how they currently engage with the online environment.<\/p>\nAs previously mentioned, classroom teachers typically lead the learning process, orchestrate classroom talk, design and set the activity schedule and measure learning progress.\u00a0 Within this general process, teachers use a variety of tools and resources including the internet.\u00a0 In particular, research indicates that the majority of teachers use the web most often to look for online content that might be used to support their curriculums. (Kenton, 2005, NSW Department of Ed., 2007).\u00a0 Numerous content aggregation sites aimed at teachers such as WatchKnow , 2Learn and Teachertube attest to the usage of the web as a major source of classroom content.\u00a0 Connected to this usage is the act of browsing for websites as a common teacher activity (Project Tomorrow, 2008) as evidenced by the popularity of bookmarking services such as Del.icio.us.\u00a0 All of this online activity makes perfect sense in the context of a classroom.\u00a0 Using web tools to find appropriate and engaging online content is itself an incremental innovation that both builds on and adds to the methods and practices teachers currently use in classrooms.\u00a0\u00a0 The question for educators is what are the next incremental innovations that might induce effective integration further.<\/p>\n
Discovering the Moment of Remediation Conflict<\/strong>
\nIf we build on the current online behaviors of teachers and link them back to their fundamental classroom methods and practices, we can start to piece together an incremental innovation model that is both realistic and transformative.\u00a0 Research shows that teachers inherently understand the value of technology to enhance teaching and learning. (Teacher Talk, 2006). Furthermore, the popularity of web browsing as an online teacher activity and the use of the web as a source of content demonstrates a fundamental connection the web has with traditional classroom practices.\u00a0 In other words, the web has content and classroom teachers will seek it out to use it.\u00a0 The question thus arises as to how do teachers integrate this web content into classrooms.<\/p>\nStudies show that teachers typically accompany visits to websites with paper handouts of instructions and questions.(Kenton, 2005 NSW Department of Ed., 2007)\u00a0 Other typical integration practices involved writing instructions on the board or giving oral instructions regarding the teacher\u2019s desired usage of web content.\u00a0 Herein, lies the point of conflict between classroom spaces and online spaces. Traditional print based mediums and teacher oratory are being used to cast off students into online content spaces. This bridging of print to screen is a radical transformation because the nature of the digital screen \u201cchanges methods of organization, structure, consultation, even the appearance of the written word.\u201d (Chartier,1995, p.15).\u00a0\u00a0 Having students switching between paper based information or board posted instructions as they interact with browser based content is a major obstacle to effective integration of online content into classrooms.\u00a0 The changing modalities of paper and screen interrupts the cognitive flow for the student as they mentally re-focus back and forth between the conflicting stimuli of what McCluhan called the hot precise and visually arresting nature of print text versus the cooler meaning making nature of online multimedia mediums (1964). The mixture of mediums creates subtle confusions of organization and meaning and changes the focus away from learning and more on mechanically understanding the instructions as students look back and forth to verify what they are reading.\u00a0 Kress describes the screen as an environment of \u201cspacially organized representation\u201d (2005, p14) where the placement of elements in relation to one another conveys significant meaning.\u00a0 Kress goes on to say that \u201cthe arrangements of visual representation, which we can also aptly call syntax, are also developments and elaborations from the logic of spatial display\u201d (2005, p14). In the case of the text handout, the lack of proximity of the teacher\u2019s text to the spacially organized syntax of the screen implies a grave syntactical error in the \u201cgrammar\u201d of the teacher\u2019s instructional process.<\/p>\n
In my own experience I have often observed other teacher\u2019s classes shifting between handouts, the board, a word processor and a website.\u00a0\u00a0 Needless to say these \u201ctrips to the lab\u201d are loud and disruptive affairs where the teacher\u2019s hopes for an engaging web experience are never truly manifested in the actual lesson event. And so the impetus to integrate technology into classrooms is mired in an ineffective remediation process between classrooms and computer screens, where at the moment of transaction when the teacher says \u201cRead your handouts and go to this website and do this….\u201d students fend for themselves in the new modality.<\/p>\n
A Tool Designed for Remediation<\/strong>
\nA possible incremental innovation is, however, possible in the form of a new web tool design.\u00a0 The tool should build on the teacher and the student\u2019s classroom relationship and tie their online content experience more closely together.\u00a0 Once someone is online, user\u2019s eyes and minds should remain online, starting with the teacher\u2019s initial experience of browsing for content.\u00a0\u00a0 Once a teacher finds a site they like, teachers should not have to create a handout as a student guide.\u00a0 Instead, the teacher calls up an online application that attaches a simple expandable side bar to the web page.\u00a0 The sidebar is a widget into which the teacher may give instructions, pose questions, post a discussion, or create a simple activity for that site. The sidebar also contains a form into which students submit their responses. All student responses are collected in a separate feedback window for the teacher to view, respond, moderate or assess.\u00a0 Now, when teachers send students to the site, the sidebar activity is waiting there for them in direct visual proximity to the site and thus the web experience stays in a single modality. The sidebar is integrated into the spacially organized representation of the screen and implies a syntactical cohesion with the other elements on the webpage. The sidebar also conveys a sense of authorship on the part of the teacher that accompanies the students into the space and mediates a constant relationship between the student and web content.\u00a0 The sidebar\u2019s direct proximity to the web content, creates a new online relationship between student, teacher, and computer and opens up new pedagogical possibilities.<\/p>\nThis simple idea incrementally builds on what teachers already do in traditional classrooms, namely design activities around content. Of course this is a simplistic model and teachers want to do more than just ask questions about content.\u00a0 But if the tool also allows for multiple questions, discussions and tasks in various combinations for any one or many websites, the pedagogical possibilities begin to rapidly expand. The mindsets of traditional teachers can now enter into the vast wealth of online content with incremental simplicity attaching simple questions to sites or, in time, building out into richer processes and sequences of enquiry and discussion.\u00a0 Once the handout is eliminated the full focus of teacher and student can be on exploring and exploiting web content. The proximity of the sidebar also puts the pedagogy of teachers into closer contact with online media. Questions and discussions become lenses through which teachers can shape critical responses to web content.\u00a0 Teachers are also composing directly in context to web content and constructing meaning making processes of inquiry and discussion born from their direct experience of the online in the moment. Finally, with the feedback window, the teacher stays in the online feedback loop, moderating and assessing the process and helping themselves migrate over from their classroom space into their digital web presence and discovering new efficiencies and economies of scale that come with digital database functionalities.<\/p>\n
Over time, as the teacher collects and creates more activities, teachers begin to harness web content in a codex like fashion categorizing activities in terms of durations and themes, archiving activities into sets and building out a personal canon of lesson content. The plethora of web content is thus repackaged and republished in the daily course of teacher planning.\u00a0 Ultimately this innovation allows for the incremental blending of classroom practices into their digital realm.<\/p>\n
This, of course, is one of many possible routes to incremental innovation that could be considered and it is by no means perfect or even proven.\u00a0 However, its persuasive design potential comes from understanding the remediation processes occurring between classrooms and computers in schools today.\u00a0 Through this process we can establish possible foundations on which other incremental design innovations might be built so effective integration can occur.<\/p>\n
References<\/strong>
\nAustin, Helena, et al. (2002).Schooling the Child: The Making of Students in Classrooms. New York: Routledge-Falmer.<\/p>\nBolter, J. D. (2000). Writing Space:\u00a0 Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation
\nof Print. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.<\/p>\n
Bruns, Axel, Humphreys,Sal (2005) Wikis in teaching and assessment: the M\/Cyclopedia project, Proceedings of the 2005 international symposium on Wikis, p.25-32, October 16-18, 2005, San Diego, California<\/p>\n
CDW-G, (2006), Teachers Talk Tech Survey. Retrieved November 19, 2009 from http:\/\/newsroom.cdwg.com\/features\/feature-06-26-06.html<\/p>\n
Chartier, R. (1995). Forms and meanings: Texts, performances, and audiences from codex to computer. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.<\/p>\n
Kenton, Jeffrey. (2005, December 22). Toward technology integration in the schools: why it isn’t happening The Free Library. Retrieved November 26, 2009 from http:\/\/www.thefreelibrary.com\/Toward technology integration in the schools: why it isn’t happening.-a0138483291<\/p>\n
Kress, G. (2005). Gains and losses: New forms of texts, knowledge, and learning. Computers and Composition, 22(1):5-22. London: Elsevier<\/p>\n
Marquis, Donald, G. (1969). The Anatomy of Successful Innovations . Innovation, November, 1969, Technology Communication Inc.\u00a0 retrieved November 20, 2009 from http:\/\/www.wepapers.com\/Papers\/71882\/Anatomy_of_Successful_Innovations<\/p>\n
McCluhan, Marshall. (1964). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man; 1st Ed. NY; McGraw Hill<\/p>\n
NSW Department of Education and Training (2007). How do NSW DET teachers discover, access, and use online learning resources in their practice? Strathfield,\u00a0 NSW: Centre for Learning Innovation.<\/p>\n
Project Tomorrow (2008). Speak Up 2007 for Students, Teachers, Parents & School Leaders Selected National Findings – April 8, 2008. Retrieved November 19, 2009 from http:\/\/www.tomorrow.org\/speakup\/speakup_reports.html<\/p>\n
O’Reilly, T. (2005). What Is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software.\u00a0 Retrieved November 19 from http:\/\/www.oreillynet.com\/pub\/a\/oreilly\/tim\/news\/2005\/09\/30\/what-is-web-20.html.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This paper examines the issue of effective integration of online tools and technology into classrooms.\u00a0 For me, there is a deeper issue other than funding and support that is stalling education\u2019s participation in the technological shift. This deeper issue revolves around the remediation conflict currently occurring between the classroom space and the online space. Developing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":84,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5099,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2433","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-major-project","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec540sept09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2433","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec540sept09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec540sept09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec540sept09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/84"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec540sept09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2433"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec540sept09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2433\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2447,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec540sept09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2433\/revisions\/2447"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec540sept09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2433"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec540sept09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2433"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec540sept09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2433"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}