Mimi Recker

Integrating Technology and Problem-based Learning: A Mixed Methods Study of Two Teacher Professional Development Designs

Andrew Walker et al. — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 15:11:00 PST

This article describes two consecutive enactments of technology-oriented teacher professional development designs, aimed at helping teachers find high-quality online learning resources and use them in designing effective problem-based learning (PBL) activities for their students. To align with current professional development prescriptions, in the first enactment, teachers learned PBL design skills concurrently with technology skills. Following aspects of design-based research, the professional development theory, participant feedback, and results from the first enactment informed the design of the second. In this second enactment, technology skills were separated and presented prior to learning about PBL. Results from a mixed-methods study of impact indicated that both professional development enactments were associated with large increases in teacher knowledge, experience, and confidence with regards to technology use and integration. Variations in the level of PBL usage by teachers in their activities, and the degree to which they discuss PBL and technology integration are presented alongside limitations, practical significance, scholarly significance, and planned future work.

Where in the World? Demographic Patterns in Access Data

Mimi Recker et al. — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 15:10:57 PST

Standard webmetrics tools record the IP address of users’ computers, thereby providing fodder for analyses of their geographical location, and for understanding the impact of e-learning and teaching. Here we describe how two web-based educational systems were engineered to collect geo-referenced data. This is followed by a description of joining these data with demographic and educational datasets for the United States, and mapping different datasets using geographic information system (GIS) techniques to visually display their relationships. Results from statistical analyses of these relationships that highlight areas of significance are given.

Peer Production of Online Learning Resources: A Social Network Analysis

Beijie Xu et al. — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 15:10:55 PST

This work describes methods for collecting user activity data in a peer production educational system, the Instructional Architect (IA), and then takes a social network perspective in analyzing these data. In particular, rather than focusing on content produced, it focuses on the relationship between users (teachers), and how they can be analyzed to identify important users and like-minded user groups. Our analyses and results provide an example for how to select the most important factors in analyzing the dynamics of an online peer production community using social network analysis metrics, such as in-degree, out-degree, betweenness, clique, and community.

Hitting the trifecta: A professional development model for creating, using and disseminating open education resources.

Sarah Giersch et al. — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 15:10:52 PST

This session presents a teacher professional development model developed by the Digital Libraries go to School project. Presenters will discuss the curriculum, which utilizes the Instructional Architect and the National Science Digital Library. Presenters will share preliminary data, lessons learned, and discuss future work including evaluation and scaling.

Modeling Teacher Ratings of Online Resources: A Human-Machine Approach to Quality

Mimi Recker et al. — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 15:10:51 PST

In education, the scalable deployment of media-rich online resources supports peer production in ways that promise to radically transform teaching and learning (CRA, 2005; Pea et al., 2008). Online educational repositories such as the Digital Library for Earth Systems Education (DLESE.org) and the National Science Digital Library (NSDL.org) collect and curate online learning resources created for a wide range of educational audiences and subject areas (McArthur & Zia, 2008). Through a simple, web-based authoring tool, called the Instructional Architect (IA.usu.edu) teachers locate and share educational resources and activities in an IA project. These IA projects can then be viewed, copied, and adapted by other IA users, in ways that support innovative teacher peer production. A vexing problem for such initiatives remains the elusive notion of quality. In peer production environments, how does one identify quality online content? Moreover, how does one do so in sustainable, cost-effective, and scalable ways? Previous work (Bethard, et al, 2009) presented an innovative approach for using machine learning models to automatically assess the quality and pedagogic utility of educational digital library resources. They demonstrated the feasibility and accuracy of automatic quality assessments for a single STEM domain and audience-level: high school Earth science. This work reports recent efforts to extend these models to support a broader range of STEM topics and grade levels, specifically applied to IA projects and compared model outputs to quality assessments made by K-12 teachers. Since the nature of the resources being compared in the IA (peer) versus DLESE (expert) are different, results of this study provide insights on the generalizability of this machine learning approach and its potential for facilitating teacher peer production.

Connecting People with Online Resources: The Instructional Architect (PBL)

Mimi Recker et al. — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 15:10:49 PST

The National Science Foundation (nsf.gov) has funded a large initiative to catalog collections of high-quality online resources into the National Science Digital Library (nsdl.org). The mission of the NSDL is to help improve education for all teachers and students.

The purpose of this module is to help you find high-quality online resources, learn strategies for incorporating them into a free software tool called the Instructional Architect, and use these projects in an instructional situation.

In this module, you will learn to access online resources and to use tools to help solve instructional or learning problems or issues that you currently face in your classroom. You will also learn about reviewing IA projects to help you in choosing projects you can reuse and in designing your own.

Integrating Technology and Problem-Based Learning: A Comparison of Two Teacher Professional Development Approaches

Andrew Walker et al. — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 15:10:47 PST

Connecting People with Online Resources: The Instructional Architect (Technology)

Mimi Recker et al. — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 15:10:45 PST

Educational Data Mining Approaches for Digital Libraries

Mimi Recker et al. — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 15:10:43 PST

This collaborative research project between the Exploratorium and Utah State's Department of Instructional Technology and Learning Sciences investigates online evaluation approaches and the application of educational data mining to educational digital libraries and services. Much work over the past decades has focused on developing algorithms and methods for discovering patterns in large datasets, known as Knowledge Discovery from Data (KDD). Webmetrics, the application of KDD to web usage mining, is growing rapidly in areas such as e-commerce. Educational Data Mining (EDM) is just beginning to emerge as a tool to analyze the massive, longitudinal user data that are captured in online learning environments and educational digital libraries. This project uses EDM to examine data from the Exploratorium's Learning Resources Collection and the Instructional Architect at Utah State University. The results are combined with more traditional evaluation data (e.g., surveys, interviews) as part of a comprehensive strategy to understand science teachers' behaviors, motivations, and learning experiences with digital library resources. The project informs improvements in the design of the user experience, as well as tailored teacher professional development, contributing to a growing body of research on teacher learning by using cyber-enabled approaches. This poster shares the results from the first year's work.

Problem-Based Design: A Technology-Oriented Teacher Professional Development Model.

Andrew Walker et al. — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 15:10:41 PST

Results from the First World-Wide Web Survey

James Pitkow et al. — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 14:24:26 PDT

The explosion of World-Wide Web (WWW) across the Internet is staggering, both in terms of number of users and the amount of activity. However, to date, no reliable characterization exists of WWW users. In this paper, we report results from a survey that was posted on the Web for a month, in January of 1994. There were several goals motivating our survey. First, we wished to demonstrate a proof of concept for WWW technologies as a useful survey medium. Second, we wanted to bet a-test the design and content of surveys dealing with the Web. Third, as mentioned, we hoped to begin to describe the ra nge of Web users. In one month, we had over 4,700 respondents to our survey. Their responses helped us to begin to characterize WWW users, their reasons for using the WWW, and their opinions of WWW tools and technologies.

Supporting ‘Word-of-Mouth’ Social Networks through Collaborative Information Filtering

Mimi Recker et al. — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 14:24:25 PDT

Altered Vista is an instructional system that supports a form of ‘contextual’ collaborative learning. Its design incorporates an information filtering technique, called collaborative information filtering, which, through computational and statistical means, leverages the work of individuals to benefit a group of users. Altered Vista is designed to provide, upon request, personalized recommendations of Web sites. It can also provide recommendations of like-minded people, thus setting the stage for future collaboration and communication. An empirical study involving in-service and pre-service teachers was conducted using Altered Vista and presents results from an empirical study. The study examined the feasibility and utility of automating the well-known social feature of propagating word-of-mouth opinions within educational settings. It also examined the impact of Altered Vista’s ability to recommend a social network of potentially unknown people.

A Concept-First Approach for an Introductory Computer Science Course

Linda P. DuHadway et al. — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 14:24:25 PDT

Several weaknesses have been identified to the programming-first approach often used in introductory computer science courses. Despite these weaknesses, programming continues to be the central focus in CS1 for many institutions. This paper proposes a concept-first approach that can be integrated into existing programming-first curriculum.The approach is based on three principles: a) drawing from the students' everyday experiences to introduce new ideas and skills; b) allowing students time to acquire a foundation in these concepts before introducing a high-level programming language; and c) separating fundamental concepts from language syntax. A feasibility study for integrating this new approach in a CS1 class at USU is described.

Collaboratively Filtering Learning Objects

Mimi M. Recker et al. — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 14:24:25 PDT

This chapter describes and discusses the application of collaborative filtering techniques to the design of metadata structures for learning objects, and its implications for instruction. This approach enables context-sensitive discovery and recommendation of learning objects. The discussion is based upon research in developing and evaluating a collaborative filtering system, which enables users to share ratings, opinions, and recommendations about resources on the Web. An additional benefit of this approach is that it also allows a user to locate other users that share similar interests for further communication and collaboration.

Instructional Architect Teacher Professional Development Handouts

Mimi Recker et al. — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 14:24:24 PDT

Three handouts for the teacher professional development workshops on the Instructional Architect (IA). Starting spring 2009 the face-to-face workshop was changed to be three different days of learning about how to use the IA, inquiry based and problem based learning, evaluation of IA projects with a rubric, and creating IA projects.

Collaborative Information Filtering: A Review and an Educational Application

Andrew E. Walker et al. — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 14:24:24 PDT

This paper reviews the literature surrounding an information filtering technique, collaborative information filtering, which supports the discovery of resources in a way that is sensitive to the context of users. Moreover, via statistical clustering techniques, the system supports automated, personalized filtering and recommendation of relevant resources and like-minded users for particular user communities. The paper also describes an educational implementation of this approach, called Altered Vista, and presents results from a 3-month trial use of the system, aimed at evaluating the educational effectiveness and usefulness of the approach.

New Zealand Higher Education in the Age of the Global Virtual University

Cathy Gunn et al. — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 14:24:23 PDT

Universities around the world are frequently criticized for being tradition bound and slow to respond to changing conditions in the markets they serve. A review of the New Zealand higher education sector over the past 10 years suggests this criticism is not well founded and, while there are notable differences across national contexts, this finding may generalize to other developed countries as well. The period in question has seen rapid technological advancement impacting on most areas of professional life. In New Zealand, this development has been accompanied by significant political change, a shrinking in the real funding base for universities, and changing patterns of demand for higher education courses. In response to these pressures and supported by the growing ubiquity and power of new media and communication technologies (especially the Internet), institutions are increasingly required to offer flexible access to students who may be dispersed in both time and place, and in full- or part-time employment. This trend is widespread and increases competition in an already market driven sector.

A Non-Authoritative Educational Metadata Ontology for Filtering and Recommending Learning Objects

Mimi M. Recker et al. — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 14:24:23 PDT

Digital libraries populated with learning objects are becoming popular tools in the creation of instructional technologies. Many current efforts to create standard metadata structures that facilitate the discovery and instructional use of learning objects recommend a single, authoritative metadata record per version of the learning object. However, as we argue in this paper, a single metadata record — particularly one with fields that emphasize knowledge management and technology, while evading instructional issues — provides information insufficient to support instructional utilization decisions. To put learning objects to instructional use, users must examine the individual objects, forfeiting the supposed benefits of the metadata system. As a solution, we propose a system that includes multi-record, non-authoritative metadata focussed on the surrounding instructional context of learning objects.

Educational Digital Libraries on the Verge: Introduction to the special issue

Lillian Cassell et al. — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 14:24:22 PDT

Emerging distributed socio-technical infrastructures, as embodied by digital libraries, are transforming (and even disrupting) traditional work practices. As a result, research about the design, development, implementation, and impact of digital libraries are of interest across a wide variety of fields. In this regard, education is no exception. Indeed, it could be argued that the study of educational digital libraries is at a particularly critical juncture, as they hold tremendous potential for democratizing access to learning. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) estimated that in 2007, over 150 million people would pursue higher education. As the Internet becomes accessible to more people through mobile devices that exploit a range of connectivity technologies, digital libraries have the potential to help reduce significant barriers to education by offering broad access to abundant, high-quality (and often free) online resources for learning and teaching.

Discovery and Use of Online Learning Resources: Case Study Findings

Mimi M. Recker et al. — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 14:24:22 PDT

Much recent research and funding have focused on building Internet-based repositories that contain collections of high-quality learning resources, often called ‘learning objects.’ Yet little is known about how non-specialist users, in particular teachers, find, access, and use digital learning resources. To address this gap, this article describes a case study of mathematics and science teachers’ practices and desires surrounding the discovery, selection, and use of digital library resources for instructional purposes. Findings suggest that the teacher participants used a broad range of search strategies in order to find resources that they deemed were age-appropriate, current, and accurate. They intended to include these resources with little modifications into planned instructional activities. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of the findings for improving the design of educational digital library systems, including tools supporting resource reuse.