TCC Presentations

2001 Paper Presentations

THE CHANGING ROLE OF (INTERNET) TECHNOLOGY IN TEACHING AND LEARNING

Donna Gaudet
Director, Training and Professional Development, Academic Systems, USA, <dgaudet@academic.com>

Introduction

We are in a time of unparalleled development and change. The creation of new technologies occurs at a rate that surpasses the ability of mere mortals to keep pace and adapt. We are overloaded with information, tools, gadgets, and software programs with more appearing on a daily basis. Nowhere is this change more noticeable than with computers and the Internet. To give you an idea of how fast things are growing and changing:

Computers’ processing power leapt 7,000-fold in three decades; electronic tasks that took a week in the early 1970s now can be compiled in a minute.
A single computer chip now has enough memory to store about 1,600 books.
Sending the 32-volume Encyclopedia Britannica from New York to San Francisco over the Internet would have taken 97 minutes in 1970. Today you could send eight full sets in one second.
The number of U.S. households with computers at the start of 1999 was 53%. No households had computers in 1970, less than 1 percent in 1980, and 22 percent in 1990.
It took 38 years for commercial radio to reach an audience of 50 million, 13 years for television. It took the Internet only five years to have that many users. (Sokolosky, 2001)

Along with all this technological growth and change come wonderful opportunities and possibilities, especially in the field of education. As faculty and administrators, it is our responsibility to understand these possibilities and their potential so we may give our students the best learning environments. How do we do this? How do we choose among all the technology options available to us? What impact will these technologies have on teaching and learning? What approaches to teaching and learning with these technologies will be most effective or least effective and under what circumstances? How will we use the technologies to improve what we are already doing? These are just some of the questions that come to mind. The goal of this paper is to raise these issues, provide you with a framework for thinking about the changing role of Internet technology in teaching and learning, and offer some suggestions for adopting new Internet technologies into your courses and programs.

Use of Internet Technology — Phase 1
1994 - 1996

Adoption of Internet technologies for instructional use has followed a pattern initially described by Everett Rogers and adapted to educational technology by William Geoghegan. Initial users of these technologies were part of what Rogers (1983) calls the "Innovators." These were the faculty who, in the mid-90s, learned how to program using HTML coding. They were the "techies" and "experimentalists" as referred to by Geoghegan (1994) and were often more interested in the technology itself than in any broader issues that the technology might address for the science of teaching and learning.

Most courses and instructional resources developed by this group during this time had the following characteristics:

Text-based and tabular information — lots of reading was required to access the information, and it was presented in paragraph and tabular form with little or no interactivity.
Linear organization of material — material was presented very much in the order that a lecture would be presented.
Lack of internal linking — lots of scrolling was required to move through the text.
Limited external linking — most documents were self-contained and did not contain many links to external sites.
Textbook dependent — information often referred students to the dominant text via page or chapter numbers.
Separation of content and tools — any communication tools that were used were separate from the course/resource environment.
Lack of consistent navigation — faculty created their own templates that certainly were different between faculty members and often even between courses developed by a single faculty member.
Highly customized— each course was developed from scratch by the faculty member and, because of the high level of technical skill required to generate such courses, was not easily shared from faculty member to faculty member.

With few exceptions, development occurred in isolated pockets involving individual faculty members with little or no formal support from their institutions. The limited tools as well as the high level of technical skills required for the task prevented the majority of faculty members from experimenting with Internet technologies. Indeed, the data from Kenneth Green’s Campus Computing Survey (1996) show that in 1995, just 24% of all campuses had formal plans to use the WWW for instruction and only 12% had formal plans to use it for distance learning.

Use of Internet Technology — Phase 2
1996-2000

The next phase of technology adoption involves a group referred to by Rogers (1983) as the "Early Adopters". Geoghegan (1994) describes them as visionaries who "blend an interest in technology with a concern for significant professional problems and tasks." The Early Adopters watched the Innovators experiment with the Internet technology for a year or two, and were intrigued as to how it might provide solutions to an important issue in education: the need for anytime, anywhere learning. They helped the Innovators develop approaches to web design that were more consistent and contained a higher integration of course content and tools such as e-mail. Web authoring tools such as Dreamweaver and FrontPage addressed some of the HTML coding issues allowing web authors to focus more on content and design.

The more consistent web design and integration of tools that began with the Innovators was a step in the right direction for the next segment of adopters, the Early Majority and the Late Majority which make up 68% of the adopter population. Both of these adopter groups take a "wait and see" attitude about new technology and innovation, with the Late Majority adopters often slightly less confident about their technical skills and slightly more likely to resist change than the Early Majority (Geoghegan, 1994). These groups begin using technology only when compelled by either overwhelming evidence in support of it or pressure from their institutions. Early Majority and Late Majority adopters want to see results and proven technology before they make any changes to what they do and how they do it. They don’t want to spend a lot of time figuring out the technology but prefer to devote themselves to instructional issues.

With the release of platform technology in 1997, the Early and Late Majority adopters really began to get involved. Commercially developed platform tools were convenient, affordable, and, compared to hard-coding HTML, easy to use. Within a few years names like WebCT, Blackboard, Top Class, and E-college were well established providers of these tools, allowing Internet technologies to take a firm hold in the Majority adoption groups. Faculty could now focus on issues surrounding the use of these technologies rather than the technologies themselves.

Most courses and instructional resources developed during this time had the following characteristics:

Text-based and graphical information — less reading was required to access the information in these courses than in First Generation courses. Instructors used platform content areas to help break up lengthy pages of text and also included more graphics. Course content itself was still fairly passive and did not engage the students interactively.
Material organized through the structure of the platform — faculty began to give more thought about the organization of information using platform content areas to help them.
Lack of internal linking — information placed into platform content areas was often self contained and did not contain links to other material in the course itself
External linking — external linking was cool and easy to do. Most faculty made great use of this aspect of Web design. Some even went too far placing hundreds of external links into their courses.
Textbook dependent — the majority of courses were still textbook dependent although the platform technologies allowed instructor to create and refer to more of their own resources.
Integration of content and tools — communication tools, assessment tools, and student tools were all integrated into the platform environment.
Consistent navigation — within a given platform, navigation was consistent.
Less customized courses— because of the consistent navigation features and backend database structure that powered platform technology, faculty were able to more easily share (i.e. export and import) their courses so that other faculty could use them, adapt them, and modify them as well.

Platform technologies addressed the greatest need of instructors and institutions at the time: quick and easy tools to get information on the Web using a consistent format with a low-level of technology skills required. These tools allowed faculty to take their presentations, ideas, and classroom techniques and transfer them to the web environment. In addition, commercial platforms provided a vehicle to widely disseminate the use of Internet technologies and enabled institutions around the country, and even around the world, to establish an online presence.

Use of Internet Technology — Phase 3
2000-????

With the initial hurdle to web presence (i.e. lack of HTML programming skills) taken care of by platform technologies, faculty have begun to analyze their use of Internet technologies in the instructional process. Both faculty and students are less satisfied with course content that is highly text-based, and faculty are beginning to develop content using Flash, Shockwave, Quick Time, and Real Player technologies. Unfortunately, most faculty do not have the skills needed to use such technology or the time to learn those skills, and most institutions do not have the instructional and technology support staff to work with all the faculty who want to develop content using such technologies. However, the open architecture of the Internet is ideal for the sharing of content created by faculty who do have highly developed technical skills. The MERLOT project is a prime example of this. In addition, publishing companies and other vendors such as Academic Systems are creating high quality, web-delivered content that addresses the interactive needs of students and faculty.

Using the above technologies, faculty are beginning to create courses that have the following characteristics:

Highly interactive content — course content may include graphics, media, and other options with lots of opportunity for students to interact and receive feedback.
Organization path chosen by the student — paths through the material are chosen by students depending on their skills and need.
High level of internal linking — courses are designed as true webs of information with lots of internal references and links.
External linking — links in course content are organized effectively so students can easily decide which ones are appropriate to visit and which ones are not. Programs are used to maintain links so that broken links are repaired or removed.
Non-textbook dependent — courses are non-textbook dependent although textbooks are often used as resources. Much of the content exists in the online environment.
Course content as a sharable resource — course content that is highly interactive takes a lot of time and money to develop. Faculty can search out the web itself or vendor sources for content. They do not have to reinvent the wheel.

Here are some examples of courses/sites/programs that use Phase 3 Internet Technologies:

IN-VSEE is a consortium of university and industry scientists and engineers, community college and high school science faculty, and museum educators. They began a common vision of creating an interactive World Wide Web (WWW) site to develop a new educational thrust based on remote operation of advanced microscopes and nano-fabrication tools coupled to powerful surface characterization methods. IN-VSEE is a unique initiative that enables a science or engineering class ("operator") to select and investigate materials over the WWW. Using a "fishbowl" format, other classes ("observers") are able to observe the operator class conducting an experiment. Operator classes remote-control the Scanning Probe Microscopy (SPM) from their classroom with the SPM images broadcast over WWW in real-time. The observers actively participate by communicating with the operator class via WWW-Chat or video conferencing. IN-VSEE has a chain reaction effect by creating dialogue and being shared over WWW with other classrooms. This same approach serves as a model for the national use of other instruments beside the SPM. [Online: http://invsee.asu.edu/invsee/invsee.htm]
The Ohio State University’s College of Medicine uses Internet2 video for distance education. (Internet2 is a national and international collection of interconnecting high-performance networks. The networks allow sites attached to them to interact in ways not possible using the Internet). Medical students can watch sharp and clear images of surgery being performed in a distant city, perhaps including rare procedures they otherwise might never see. (Dessoff, 2001).
Virtual FlyLab is an educational application for learning the principles of genetic inheritance. The user designs matings between female and male fruit flies carrying on or more genetic mutations and examines the patterns of inheritance among the offspring.[Online: http://vcourseware5.calstatela.edu/]
MERLOT [Online: http://www.merlot.org/Home.po]
academic.com's Math and Writing libraries provide high quality interactive content modules that faculty can use to supplement a wide variety of courses. Students may also access academic.com on their own, 24 hours a day, every day.

[Online demo: http://flex.academic.com. Use Click2XL CD for necessary plug-ins]

Describing the use of Internet technologies in terms of three phases does not mean to imply that use of one phase is automatically better for student learning than another. In fact, as indicated by William Geoghegan (1994), "[Internet] technology in the service of ineffective teaching will do nothing to improve the quality of instruction; it will simply perpetuate and even amplify poor teaching. Likewise, good teaching can often be enhanced by even simple technology, wisely and sensitively applied. In either event, the process begins with teaching; technology comes second" (p. 13). Rather, the phases are intended to describe a path of possibilities. Some faculty will choose to apply technologies from Phase 1, some may choose Phase 2, and some may be developing or applying technologies from Phase 3. Whichever technologies you choose, be sure to ask and research important questions along the way:

What impact does this technology have on the achievement of my students?
What specific use of this technology proves most effective and in what situation?
Is this technology more or less effective than some other technology?

It is only through research and understanding the effect of technology on the learning of our students that we can effectively plan for the continued use of technology in the future.

Resources

Dessoff, A. (February, 2001). The sexy technology: Internet2. Matrix. p. 20-24.

Geoghegan, W. (1994). Whatever happened to instructional technology? Paper presented at the 22nd Annual Conference of the International Business Schools Computing Association. Baltimore, Maryland.

[Online: http://w3.scale.uiuc.edu/scale/links/library/geoghegan/wpi.html]

Green, K.C.(1996). The 1995 National Survey of Information Technology in Higher Education. [Online: http://www.campuscomputing.net/].

Rogers, E.M. (1983). Diffusion of innovations, Third edition. New York: Free Press.

Sokolosky, V. (March, 2001). Do you computer? Southwest Airlines Spirit. p. 44-46.

TCC Online Conferences
Kapi`olani Community College
University of Hawai`i
Honolulu, HI




Welcome About 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007	2001 Paper Presentations THE CHANGING ROLE OF (INTERNET) TECHNOLOGY IN TEACHING AND LEARNING Donna Gaudet Director, Training and Professional Development, Academic Systems, USA, <dgaudet@academic.com> Introduction We are in a time of unparalleled development and change. The creation of new technologies occurs at a rate that surpasses the ability of mere mortals to keep pace and adapt. We are overloaded with information, tools, gadgets, and software programs with more appearing on a daily basis. Nowhere is this change more noticeable than with computers and the Internet. To give you an idea of how fast things are growing and changing: Computers’ processing power leapt 7,000-fold in three decades; electronic tasks that took a week in the early 1970s now can be compiled in a minute. A single computer chip now has enough memory to store about 1,600 books. Sending the 32-volume Encyclopedia Britannica from New York to San Francisco over the Internet would have taken 97 minutes in 1970. Today you could send eight full sets in one second. The number of U.S. households with computers at the start of 1999 was 53%. No households had computers in 1970, less than 1 percent in 1980, and 22 percent in 1990. It took 38 years for commercial radio to reach an audience of 50 million, 13 years for television. It took the Internet only five years to have that many users. (Sokolosky, 2001) Along with all this technological growth and change come wonderful opportunities and possibilities, especially in the field of education. As faculty and administrators, it is our responsibility to understand these possibilities and their potential so we may give our students the best learning environments. How do we do this? How do we choose among all the technology options available to us? What impact will these technologies have on teaching and learning? What approaches to teaching and learning with these technologies will be most effective or least effective and under what circumstances? How will we use the technologies to improve what we are already doing? These are just some of the questions that come to mind. The goal of this paper is to raise these issues, provide you with a framework for thinking about the changing role of Internet technology in teaching and learning, and offer some suggestions for adopting new Internet technologies into your courses and programs. Use of Internet Technology — Phase 1 1994 - 1996 Adoption of Internet technologies for instructional use has followed a pattern initially described by Everett Rogers and adapted to educational technology by William Geoghegan. Initial users of these technologies were part of what Rogers (1983) calls the "Innovators." These were the faculty who, in the mid-90s, learned how to program using HTML coding. They were the "techies" and "experimentalists" as referred to by Geoghegan (1994) and were often more interested in the technology itself than in any broader issues that the technology might address for the science of teaching and learning. Most courses and instructional resources developed by this group during this time had the following characteristics: Text-based and tabular information — lots of reading was required to access the information, and it was presented in paragraph and tabular form with little or no interactivity. Linear organization of material — material was presented very much in the order that a lecture would be presented. Lack of internal linking — lots of scrolling was required to move through the text. Limited external linking — most documents were self-contained and did not contain many links to external sites. Textbook dependent — information often referred students to the dominant text via page or chapter numbers. Separation of content and tools — any communication tools that were used were separate from the course/resource environment. Lack of consistent navigation — faculty created their own templates that certainly were different between faculty members and often even between courses developed by a single faculty member. Highly customized— each course was developed from scratch by the faculty member and, because of the high level of technical skill required to generate such courses, was not easily shared from faculty member to faculty member. With few exceptions, development occurred in isolated pockets involving individual faculty members with little or no formal support from their institutions. The limited tools as well as the high level of technical skills required for the task prevented the majority of faculty members from experimenting with Internet technologies. Indeed, the data from Kenneth Green’s Campus Computing Survey (1996) show that in 1995, just 24% of all campuses had formal plans to use the WWW for instruction and only 12% had formal plans to use it for distance learning. Use of Internet Technology — Phase 2 1996-2000 The next phase of technology adoption involves a group referred to by Rogers (1983) as the "Early Adopters". Geoghegan (1994) describes them as visionaries who "blend an interest in technology with a concern for significant professional problems and tasks." The Early Adopters watched the Innovators experiment with the Internet technology for a year or two, and were intrigued as to how it might provide solutions to an important issue in education: the need for anytime, anywhere learning. They helped the Innovators develop approaches to web design that were more consistent and contained a higher integration of course content and tools such as e-mail. Web authoring tools such as Dreamweaver and FrontPage addressed some of the HTML coding issues allowing web authors to focus more on content and design. The more consistent web design and integration of tools that began with the Innovators was a step in the right direction for the next segment of adopters, the Early Majority and the Late Majority which make up 68% of the adopter population. Both of these adopter groups take a "wait and see" attitude about new technology and innovation, with the Late Majority adopters often slightly less confident about their technical skills and slightly more likely to resist change than the Early Majority (Geoghegan, 1994). These groups begin using technology only when compelled by either overwhelming evidence in support of it or pressure from their institutions. Early Majority and Late Majority adopters want to see results and proven technology before they make any changes to what they do and how they do it. They don’t want to spend a lot of time figuring out the technology but prefer to devote themselves to instructional issues. With the release of platform technology in 1997, the Early and Late Majority adopters really began to get involved. Commercially developed platform tools were convenient, affordable, and, compared to hard-coding HTML, easy to use. Within a few years names like WebCT, Blackboard, Top Class, and E-college were well established providers of these tools, allowing Internet technologies to take a firm hold in the Majority adoption groups. Faculty could now focus on issues surrounding the use of these technologies rather than the technologies themselves. Most courses and instructional resources developed during this time had the following characteristics: Text-based and graphical information — less reading was required to access the information in these courses than in First Generation courses. Instructors used platform content areas to help break up lengthy pages of text and also included more graphics. Course content itself was still fairly passive and did not engage the students interactively. Material organized through the structure of the platform — faculty began to give more thought about the organization of information using platform content areas to help them. Lack of internal linking — information placed into platform content areas was often self contained and did not contain links to other material in the course itself External linking — external linking was cool and easy to do. Most faculty made great use of this aspect of Web design. Some even went too far placing hundreds of external links into their courses. Textbook dependent — the majority of courses were still textbook dependent although the platform technologies allowed instructor to create and refer to more of their own resources. Integration of content and tools — communication tools, assessment tools, and student tools were all integrated into the platform environment. Consistent navigation — within a given platform, navigation was consistent. Less customized courses— because of the consistent navigation features and backend database structure that powered platform technology, faculty were able to more easily share (i.e. export and import) their courses so that other faculty could use them, adapt them, and modify them as well. Platform technologies addressed the greatest need of instructors and institutions at the time: quick and easy tools to get information on the Web using a consistent format with a low-level of technology skills required. These tools allowed faculty to take their presentations, ideas, and classroom techniques and transfer them to the web environment. In addition, commercial platforms provided a vehicle to widely disseminate the use of Internet technologies and enabled institutions around the country, and even around the world, to establish an online presence. Use of Internet Technology — Phase 3 2000-???? With the initial hurdle to web presence (i.e. lack of HTML programming skills) taken care of by platform technologies, faculty have begun to analyze their use of Internet technologies in the instructional process. Both faculty and students are less satisfied with course content that is highly text-based, and faculty are beginning to develop content using Flash, Shockwave, Quick Time, and Real Player technologies. Unfortunately, most faculty do not have the skills needed to use such technology or the time to learn those skills, and most institutions do not have the instructional and technology support staff to work with all the faculty who want to develop content using such technologies. However, the open architecture of the Internet is ideal for the sharing of content created by faculty who do have highly developed technical skills. The MERLOT project is a prime example of this. In addition, publishing companies and other vendors such as Academic Systems are creating high quality, web-delivered content that addresses the interactive needs of students and faculty. Using the above technologies, faculty are beginning to create courses that have the following characteristics: Highly interactive content — course content may include graphics, media, and other options with lots of opportunity for students to interact and receive feedback. Organization path chosen by the student — paths through the material are chosen by students depending on their skills and need. High level of internal linking — courses are designed as true webs of information with lots of internal references and links. External linking — links in course content are organized effectively so students can easily decide which ones are appropriate to visit and which ones are not. Programs are used to maintain links so that broken links are repaired or removed. Non-textbook dependent — courses are non-textbook dependent although textbooks are often used as resources. Much of the content exists in the online environment. Course content as a sharable resource — course content that is highly interactive takes a lot of time and money to develop. Faculty can search out the web itself or vendor sources for content. They do not have to reinvent the wheel. Here are some examples of courses/sites/programs that use Phase 3 Internet Technologies: IN-VSEE is a consortium of university and industry scientists and engineers, community college and high school science faculty, and museum educators. They began a common vision of creating an interactive World Wide Web (WWW) site to develop a new educational thrust based on remote operation of advanced microscopes and nano-fabrication tools coupled to powerful surface characterization methods. IN-VSEE is a unique initiative that enables a science or engineering class ("operator") to select and investigate materials over the WWW. Using a "fishbowl" format, other classes ("observers") are able to observe the operator class conducting an experiment. Operator classes remote-control the Scanning Probe Microscopy (SPM) from their classroom with the SPM images broadcast over WWW in real-time. The observers actively participate by communicating with the operator class via WWW-Chat or video conferencing. IN-VSEE has a chain reaction effect by creating dialogue and being shared over WWW with other classrooms. This same approach serves as a model for the national use of other instruments beside the SPM. [Online: http://invsee.asu.edu/invsee/invsee.htm] The Ohio State University’s College of Medicine uses Internet2 video for distance education. (Internet2 is a national and international collection of interconnecting high-performance networks. The networks allow sites attached to them to interact in ways not possible using the Internet). Medical students can watch sharp and clear images of surgery being performed in a distant city, perhaps including rare procedures they otherwise might never see. (Dessoff, 2001). Virtual FlyLab is an educational application for learning the principles of genetic inheritance. The user designs matings between female and male fruit flies carrying on or more genetic mutations and examines the patterns of inheritance among the offspring.[Online: http://vcourseware5.calstatela.edu/] MERLOT [Online: http://www.merlot.org/Home.po] academic.com's Math and Writing libraries provide high quality interactive content modules that faculty can use to supplement a wide variety of courses. Students may also access academic.com on their own, 24 hours a day, every day. [Online demo: http://flex.academic.com. Use Click2XL CD for necessary plug-ins] Describing the use of Internet technologies in terms of three phases does not mean to imply that use of one phase is automatically better for student learning than another. In fact, as indicated by William Geoghegan (1994), "[Internet] technology in the service of ineffective teaching will do nothing to improve the quality of instruction; it will simply perpetuate and even amplify poor teaching. Likewise, good teaching can often be enhanced by even simple technology, wisely and sensitively applied. In either event, the process begins with teaching; technology comes second" (p. 13). Rather, the phases are intended to describe a path of possibilities. Some faculty will choose to apply technologies from Phase 1, some may choose Phase 2, and some may be developing or applying technologies from Phase 3. Whichever technologies you choose, be sure to ask and research important questions along the way: What impact does this technology have on the achievement of my students? What specific use of this technology proves most effective and in what situation? Is this technology more or less effective than some other technology? It is only through research and understanding the effect of technology on the learning of our students that we can effectively plan for the continued use of technology in the future. Resources Dessoff, A. (February, 2001). The sexy technology: Internet2. Matrix. p. 20-24. Geoghegan, W. (1994). Whatever happened to instructional technology? Paper presented at the 22nd Annual Conference of the International Business Schools Computing Association. Baltimore, Maryland. [Online: http://w3.scale.uiuc.edu/scale/links/library/geoghegan/wpi.html] Green, K.C.(1996). The 1995 National Survey of Information Technology in Higher Education. [Online: http://www.campuscomputing.net/]. Rogers, E.M. (1983). Diffusion of innovations, Third edition. New York: Free Press. Sokolosky, V. (March, 2001). Do you computer? Southwest Airlines Spirit. p. 44-46. TCC Online Conferences Kapi`olani Community College University of Hawai`i Honolulu, HI