WISE, a web-based science environment created by Berkley’s researchers Linn, Clark, and Slotta (2003), seeks to be a technology for educators to implement curriculum design patterns for student activities, but in my mind falls short in doing so. From today’s view, WISE is no more that an early attempt at a Learning Management System, even though the designers had lofty ambitions for WISE.
The WISE designers were seeking a solution to the challenge of fitting researched based instruction to the many standards and contexts that exist in teaching science, and framed thier technology design around three pedagogical considerations:
- Supporting knowledge integration
- Flexible adaptable curricula
- Professional development
The original curricula were designed by teams of consisting of experts of content, pedagogy and technology, tested and refined a number of times, and created a spectrum of projects from the standpoint of how presciptive they were.
The biggest drawback of WISE is that it is was not designed with a constructivist classroom in mind. The problems are too well defined, the projects are not authentic enough, and there are too many perscribed lessons in the projects, and there are too many defined steps in each lesson.
Gobert, Snyder & Houghton (2002) used WISE to teach plate tectonics to grade 6 students, but were more concerned with how collaboration affected the use of WISE’s model making affordance. Gobert et al. (2002) did demonstrate the WISE technology enhanced learning environment can does cause learning, but the amount of learning over other methods is suspect because there was no control group. As well, the WISE activity they reported on appeared to be bookends on a larger unit, and they did not specify how the rest of the unit was taught.
As an example project, Gobert et al.’s Whats on Your Plate failed to inspire me into wanting to use WISE, as the social affordance of sharing across time and space used can be accessed in other ways and other manners and the cognitive affordance is not aligned closely enough to constructivism and problem based learning. Perhaps WISE projects exist that are more closely aligned to problem based learning, but if so, I did not stumble on them.
Gobert, J., Snyder, J., & Houghton, C. (2002). The influence of students’ understanding of models on model-based reasoning. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), New Orleans, Louisiana.
Linn, M., Clark, D., & Slotta, J. (2003). Wise design for knowledge integration. Science Education, 87(4), 517-538.
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