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Designing Collaborative WWW Learning Environments - the HENRE project

Paul E. Lambert and Richard A.Walker

Faculty of Education
University of Sydney

lambertp@mackie.edfac.usyd.edu.au
walkerr@mackie.edfac.usyd.edu.au

Abstract
The WWW provides a unique resource for education and through its hypertextual connectivity supports constructivist models of education. The HENRE project aims to further develop the educational efficacy of WWW environments by designing from a social constructivist perspective. This sees the WWW not just as an information resource but as an arena for collaborative and cooperative learning, a shared for exploration and creation. Through the extensive use of cgi scripts, HENRE provides students with a learning environment which builds upon the types of interactions and communications that have evolved as part of cyber culture on the internet with educational activities that encourage collaboration, cooperation, and metacognition.The paper will first explain the design model for HENRE and its development from a constructivist approach to a social-constructivist or systems approach.The implementation of design principles will be discussed in terms of the possibilities and limitations of an extended WWW environment. Finally early findings from data collected on the operation of HENRE will be discussed in relation to the design model
Keywords
Constructivist Model, HENRE, Teaching and Learning.

Introduction

The World Wide Web has opened up the internet for educators, students, and the general public in what is nothing short of a minor information revolution. The technical infrastructure that grew through the decades of the PC boom and the gradual evolution of the internet has allowed the World Wide Web to flourish.

The World Wide Web is a perfect product for the post modern era. Its very form hilights questions of ownership of information, sources of knowledge, authorship, authority and authenticity that pervade post-modern theoretical discource. In education, it lies comfortably in the theoretical discussion of the relationship between hypertextual information structures and schema type models of cognition [Jonassen90], that to some extent pervade constructivist models of learning.

In some instances however, the models of education that hypermedia systems such as the World Wide Web support are being questioned, criticised and sometimes replaced with alternative models. Social views of learning (which have been developed and explored under the various labels of social constructivist, socio-cultural, socio-historical, or social constructionist) foregound social and cultural factors as of primary importance in learning. With these new models comes the awareness that the World Wide Web, in its current evolutionary phase, does not readily support models of learning that are less focussed on the individual construction of knowledge than on the social and cultural processes of learning.

The World Wide Web and the Individual Construction of Knowledge

The learner as explorer is an image of the educational process that is illustrative of constructivist models of learning and teaching. Whether the idea of an objective reality is subscribed to (as in realist constructivism), or not (radical constructivism), constructivists believe that learning is an active and individual process of interpretation and construction through experience.

Central to this view is the notion that a person's current experiences (and therefore learning) are greatly (and necessarily) interpreted thorough their prior knowledge and resulting expectations. Consequently, not only is the learning of any two people in the same environment likely to be quite different, but they are likely to construct their learning experiences in individual ways.

The primacy of prior knowledge in constructivist models of learning coupled with the view that learners construct their own personally meaningful associations between these prior knowledge structures and new knowledge is easily represented in a nodes and links model of cognition [Prawat89]. Such a model can also be used to describe hypertext information structures [Nielsen90].

Hypertext (hypermedia) has been viewed by many educators as a computer-based information structures that supports a constructivist paradigm [Jonnasen92]. Learners can explore a vast assemblage of information, choosing their own meaningful paths, making conscious associations between prior knowledge and hyperlink choices [SFJC91] - in short, creating a semantic web which will mirror their own developing cognitive structures [Jones89].

The ability of the World Wide Web to support this model of learning has no doubt provided one rationale for the development of countless web-based learning sites. Once these are created, it is assumed that students will browse/explore through these information rich hypertext data bases, constructing their own individual learning experiences. Research shows that this potential is not always realised, and a number of significant problems have emerged with using such non-linear information structures as learning environments.

Disorientation [Laurillard93], lack of a sense of size, limits and position [Andrews et al 95], and locating relevant information sources are some of the most well documented problems a user faces when using hypermedia systems such as the World Wide Web. When a user is also a learner with specific learning needs and goals, these problems can seriously erode the learning experience.

These well recognised problems with hypermedia environments are however, the object of much current developmental research. Enhanced browser design, navigation tools, environment mapping, and search tools are all helping to address such problems with educational hypermedia. New generation networked hypermedia systems such as Hyper-G provide alternative architectures for structuring hypermedia in more adaptable ways.

The World Wide Web and the Social Construction of Knowledge

From a social view of learning, this interaction is necessary to provide a situation where learners' can discuss, model, support and work cooperatively. Such social environments facilitate the development of zones of proximal development [Vygotsky76]. The development of a ZPD is seen as important from a social view of education as it is where new learning can occur through a learner's collaboration with a more knowledgable person.

Social environments that support collaborative learning are not readily represented in the World Wide Web which is basically a networked information structuring and retrieval environment. Consequently, the WWW does not at first appear to provide a suitable development base for learning environments concerned with the social construction of knowledge. However the WWW is a 'tool' of the internet, and while it does not readily support social interaction, this is not true of the internet in general.

Electronic mail, newsgroups, listserve groups, moos and muds are all aspects of the internet that support the creation of (virtual) communities. Numerous books, articles have been published on life and love in online communities (eg: Rheingold92), particularly those created through common interest news and mailing groups, and muds and moos. These texts help to show how culture and community can grow within electronic network environments.

These more social aspects of the internet have also been very effectively used for focussed educational purposes. Academic listserve groups provide a critical forums where ideas are explored and opinions can be expressed. The Globewide Network University (among others) have had promising results with using moos for the teaching of distance education courses. Schools and universities have used email to create temporary electronic communities with other remote learners, or domain experts [RL90], [BBN91], [BC94].

The HENRE project, currently being piloted in the Faculty of Education at the University of Sydney, is designed to integrate the functionality of internet technologies that support social interaction with access to the vast hypermedia database of the World Wide Web. Through this integration, we hope to create a World Wide Web environment that facilitates the development of learning communities and which supports social models of learning.

Initial Design of the HENRE Environment

In order to guard against the functional irrelevancy that threatens when new technologies are used to perform existing tasks [Lambert95], the design of HENRE was based upon systems model of technology usage. The systems model focuses attention on proposed activities and where they occur as part of the evolved activity systems of a particular technology. Applied to the project aims of building an educational environment on the internet, we developed an initial three stage design plan for HENRE.
  1. Define the target activities, learning goals and objectives of proposed environment
  2. Identify where such activities, learning goals, and objectives occur within the authentic [1] practices of the activity systems in which the proposed environment will be developed
  3. Use these relevant authentic practices as a basis for design
These stages will be further elaborated below:

Define the target activities, learning goals and objectives of proposed environment

The first stage of the design of HENRE was to identify the specific educational activities that could be supported by a Web-based collaborative learning environment. We decided that such an environment should provide students with the opportunities to:

In addition the environment should both scaffold learners and model practices.

Identify where such activities, learning goals, and objectives occur within the authentic practices of the activity systems in which the proposed environment will be developed

As we expected, many of the activities proposed for our educational environment occurred on the internet as authentic practices and these became the basis of our design model. Below, the proposed activities are listed under the internet technology which supports these activities.

Internet email

listserve/bitnet/news groups

WWW/Gopher/ftp

Two proposed activities were not overly apparent in any of the internet activity systems we looked at:

Use these relevant authentic practices as a basis for design

As can be seen from the above, most of our pedagogical objectives could be located as authentic activities occurring in the various activity systems defined by the different internet technologies. However these in themselves do not form an integrated environment such as we envisaged, but are a clumsy assemblage of linked, but differing technologies. We felt we could integrate these technologies into a modified World Wide Web environment by developing purpose built extentions with cgi scripts. In addition, building our environment as a World Wide Web 'document' would also allow us to maintain an operationally constant interface.

How HENRE Works

HENRE has been designed to facilitate the types of learning situations that are in accord with social views of education. Consequently, much importance has been placed upon facilitating cooperative and collaborative activities where students work in groups united through common learning goals. At the most fundamental level, students work in small groups pursuing their own research interests as they are related to the course. Within these groups, students physically or virtually work together to produce a research report that will be included as published material within HENRE (and therefore accessible by the WWW community). Students collect research materials from the database of course texts, the World Wide Web, or newsgroups and listserve groups. Student groups may also consult domain experts, course teaching staff, and listserve communities by using email.

At a higher cooperative level, all groups participating in the environment are encouraged to work together, sharing resources and providing help and feedback. This is a necessary part of the activities of the environment, as group reports are to be publish as a linked, hypertext community document. Groups must therefore be aware of other groups' research, and work out where their report links with other reports produced by the community. To help students with the tracking of related research, HENRE includes a research topic matrix which graphically shows those groups working on similar or related topics.

To further encourage community wide interaction and cooperation a discussion forum provides a communal space for the exchange of ideas, questions, and information about resources. The sharing of resources is encouraged through the provision of a 'shared archive' where groups can place resources of relevance to the whole community.

Structure of HENRE

The primary cooperative unit in HENRE exists at the research group level. Each group (2 - 4 members) involved in pursuing a common research task, base their online activities from their own collaborative workspace. The workspace (figure 1) provides the group with a place to archive resources, send email messages to other cooperative groups, share resources of value to the whole online community, and access a research topic matrix which provides easy reference to concurrent and related research activities within the whole online community. They may also access discussion forums, and a variety of HENRE resources (keyword searchable texts, online library catalogues and reference CD roms, ejournals, discussion groups, email links to domain experts, email links to staff, access to the WWW).

All workgroups are linked to each other by email links, the discussion forum, the shared resources bin, and the community activities archive, and the research topics matrix (figure 2).

The environment is designed to foster cooperation between the groups, and finally, collaboration on a community wide WWW publication. This is partly achieved through the final goal of producing a linked assemblage of all the groups work which will be the community publication. In order for this to be effective, it is important that groups are aware of the topics being researched by other groups, and how their work could fit into an overall publication.

Central to this aim are the research question matrices. One matrix, constructed relative to the whole community, shows the relationships between all the research topics and the participating groups (figure 3), while another, accessible from within the group workspaces is relative to that group only. The groups are represented in the matrix as mail links to that group.

Figure 3 Section from community question matrix

The discussion forum (figure 4) is based on a listserve model and is the community discussion area. Comments posted in the forum can be read and answered by anyone in the community. It is the place where notices about useful WWW sites, resources that have been placed in the shared archive, and problems, help, suggestions, grievances, jokes etc can be posted.

Figure 4 Section from forum

HENRE uses a wide range of internet resources that may be of benefit to the learner. These include telnet connections to Australian and overseas online library catalogues, links to ejournals, subscription to relevant listserve discussion groups, structured links to key WWW sites, email links to staff and domain experts, links to internet search tools, and a keyword searchable archive of online texts (scanned course texts and internet resources).

Current Pilot

HENRE is currently being used by students in the Faculty of Education at the University of Sydney. The students are studying an advanced course in educational psychology which deals with aspects of cooperative and collaborative learning and the use of new technologies in learning and teaching. Data on its operation is being gathered online, through activity journals, and periodic questionnaires.

HENRE is presently being served from a power Macintosh 6100 using WebStar 1.1 software and connected to the local network by ethernet. The environment uses around 70 cgi scripts which have been written as applescripts. NetScape 1.1 provides correct formatting of the environment.

Conclusions and Future Developments

It is to early to have any quality feedback on how HENRE will support the learning of the pilot student group. Data gathered from these trials should cast light on the strengths and weaknesses of this environment in particular, but also on the use of the web as a site for collaborative learning in general.

The HENRE project is well placed to make use of developments in WWW technology as they occur. We are hopeful that the near future will see a closer integration of browsing and authoring in WWW tools, and this is certain to enhance educational projects such as HENRE which encourage active participation in World Wide Web activities.

Footnotes

[1]
'Authentic' is used cautiously here to refer to activities that have co-evolved with technological medium.

References

[BBN91]
Bolt, Beranek, and Newman Inc. (1991). Community of Explorers: Building a new kind of computer network for school science. Boston, MA: BBN.
[BC94]
Brown, A. L., & Campione J. C. (1994). Guided discovery in a community of learners. In K. McGilly (Ed.), Classroom Lessons: Integrating cognitive theory and classroom practice. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
[Jones89]
Jones, T. (1989). Incidental learning during information retrieval: A hypertext experiment. Computer Assisted Learning. 2nd. International Conference, ICCAL '89. Berlin: Springer-Verlag
[Jonnassen90]
Jonnassen D.H, & Grabinger, S.R. (1990). Problems and issues in designing hypertext/hypermedia for learning. In D. Jonnassen and H, Mandl (Eds.) Designing Hypermedia for Learning (1st ed. Vol. F 67, pp 3-26). Berlin: Springer-Verlag.
[Jonnassen92]
Jonnassen D.H. (1992). Hypertext as cognitive tools. In P.A.M. Kommers, D. Jonnassen, and J. Mayes (Eds.), Cognitive Tools for Learning (1st Ed. pp.147-148). Berlin:Springer-Verlag
[Lambert95]
Lambert, P.E. (1995). Distance education and the internet: A systems approach. In H. Maurer (Ed.). Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia, 1995: Proceedings of Ed-Media '95. Charlottesville, VA: Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education.
[Laurillard93]
Laurillard, D (Ed.), (1993) Rethinking University Teaching (2nd Ed.). London Routledge.
[Neilsen90]
Neilsen, J. (1990). Hypertext and Hypermedia. San Diego, CA: Academic Press
[Prawat89]
Prawat, R.S. (1989). Promoting access to knowledge, strategy, and disposition in students: A research synthesis. Review of Educational Research. Vol 59 No.1 pp 1-41
[RL89]
Reil, M.M, & Levin, J.A. (1990). Building electronic communities: Success and failure in computer networking. Instructional Science, 19, 145-169
[SFJC89]
Spiro, R.J, Feltovich, P.J, Jacobsen, M.J, & Coulson, R.L. (1991). Cognitive flexibility, constructivism and hypertext: random access instruction for advanced knowledge acquisition in ill structured domains. Educational Technology, May, 24-33.
[Vygotsky89]
Vygotsky, L. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher mental processes. M. Cole, V. John-Steiner, S. Scribner, & E. Sauberman (Eds). Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
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