Submitted to 5^th International Symposium on Education and Information Systems

The Lost Art of Discourse and the

Unrealized Promise in Distance Education

W. R. Klemm

Professor of Neuroscience

Texas A&M University

4458 TAMU

College Station, TX 77843-4458

E-mail: wklemm@cvm.tamu.edu

Suggested reviewers:

Bernard Scott, Bernard.scott@lews.uhi.ac.uk

Teun A. Van Dijk, www.discourse-in-society.org

Andreas Jucker, ahjucker@es.unizh.ch

The Lost Art of Discourse and the

Unrealized Promise in Distance Education

W. R. Klemm

Professor of Neuroscience

Texas A&M University

4458 TAMU

College Station, TX 77843-4458

E-mail: wklemm@cvm.tamu.edu

Abstract

We live in a soap-box world where reasoned discourse is being drowned out by shouts of bloggers, talk-show hosts, TV talking heads, letters to the editor, and sound-bite politics,. Our people are increasingly disinclined to read, listen, reflect, and learn from the insights of others. Although everybody has an equal right to their opinions, not all opinions are equally informed or intelligent. One task of education is to teach students how to develop opinions based on reasoned discourse, a task that is made more difficult by an anti-intellectual popular culture. Distance education affords a possible remedy because it has asynchronous collaboration tools that can, when properly used, facilitate proper discourse. Yet this promise goes largely unrealized, because teachers themselves seem not to appreciate how much we have lost of the art of reasoned discourse. Here, I hope to show how distance education technology can be deployed in systematic ways that help students to move beyond spouting of opinions to a spirit of inquiry, evidence gathering, analysis, creative synthesis, and conclusion-making based on written discourse with others.

Soapbox Culture

These days, it seems as if everybody has an opinion ― and they want to make sure you know about it. An abundance of soapbox venues makes it all too easy for anyone to spout their views. Consider the magnitude of blogging. Some 12 million adult Americans operate a blog site, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Of these, 82% of the bloggers say they expect to still be operating their blogs a year from now. Then there is the mind-boggling popularity of MySpace (over 60 million personal profiles), where youngsters seek out a platform to parade their experiences and views on seemingly every conceivable subject.

The associated trend is that many people are becoming loners. This trend was first captured in the famous book by Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone. He mustered impressive data to document that, as one reviewer put it, “the United States has lost much of the social glue that once allowed our society to cohere, that we are becoming a nation of strangers to one another.” In the world of public-school education, roughly 1/3 of adolescents drop out of school, an extreme indication of the preference to “go it alone.” Putnam points out that there is almost a straight-line correlation between a wholesome childhood and what he calls “social capital.” States (such as the Dakotas, Iowa, Nebraska, Vermont, Minnesota) where residents trust others, join organizations, volunteer, vote, and socialize, are the same states where young people are less likely to drop out of school. States where there is less social capital, particularly in many Southern states, youngsters are much more likely to be troubled. Without a background of social capital, children grow up with a dislike for working with others. the “bowling alone” syndrome is widespread, differing only in degree by geography, and may be increasingly exacerbated by electronic technology. When students are not using the Internet as a soapbox, they shut themselves off from the outside world with their iPods, videogames, and Internet surfing. Unfortunately, this isolation does not include much reading.

A marked decline in literary reading in the United States was discovered in a survey by the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA, 2004). In 1992, 72.6 million adults in the U. S. did not read a single book. By 2002, that figure had increased to 89.9 million, the NEA said. The three youngest groups surveyed showed the greatest decline in reading, a 55% greater decline than in the adult population, a statistic that does not bode well for the future of education. In the U.S. in 2002, there were the same number of readers as there were 10 years earlier, despite the fact that the population had risen by 40 million (Giola, 2004). Industry analyst, Jim Milliot laments, “Where Have All the Readers Gone? And Where Can We Find New Ones?"—that was the theme for the Association of American Publishers' 2006 annual meeting in New York. At the end of the day, the not surprising conclusion was that reading is losing out to electronic alternatives. This pernicious trend may not yet have caught on in all counties, but it is just a matter of time.

It is also not surprising that best-selling books are those dominated by religion, a genre dominated by self-preoccupation and by opinion, not fact. Book Industry Trends projects that publisher revenues will increase 18.3 percent over the next five years, but this growth will be driven by an over 50% increase in sales of books with religious themes (BISG Press Release, 2005).

An Educational Imperative

Given the growing social isolation and self-absorption, it seems imperative for educators to help students learn the value of learning and working with others. In the workplace, discourse provides the mechanism by which workers generate ideas, reach decisions, make plans for service or product development and marketing, and evaluate services and products.

People use discourse for many purposes, but a comprehensive list would include:

· Present information and ideas

· Inform others

· Motivate

· Engage others in shared thought

· Explain

· Persuade others

· Accomplish goals and tasks

Educational practice that does not develop these social and communication skills is a disservice to students. Teaching of these skills is optimized by learning environments that require written discourse.

Written discourse has special impact because writing engages author and readers with content more rigorously than does speaking. Written discourse is always available for inspection, reflection, and refinement. Value comes from cooperative conversation in the service of creative enterprise. Written discourse promotes “listening,” where the reader is invited to register information objectively, to flexibly reformulate one’s own understanding and positions, and to incorporate the ideas of others into insightful analysis. Requiring students to conduct discourse in writing increases the odds that they will organize facts and ideas more coherently and with logical rigor and that argumentation will be more persuasive. Both the reading and the writing increase focus and encourage students to stay on task.

Educators now have electronic tools that can promote social and communication skills, though these are most often employed (and misused) in distance education courses. I am referring to Internet software that supports asynchronous communication. Most distance educators assign high priority to community building, because of the isolation and relative lack of social support in distance education environments. Asynchronous communication tools can greatly enrich learning in traditional teaching environments.

The asynchronous nature that on-line technologies make possible provide a way to enrich the usual nature of learning discourse. In a regular classroom, even one where discussion is encouraged, student commentary is sequential and transient. Students speak one at a time and the ideas are not preserved. In asynchronous on-line environments, everybody can speak (write) at once, and all ideas are always available for inspection and reflection. My colleague, Jim Snell, and I have briefly reviewed the comparative advantages and disadvantages of the various asynchronous on-line technologies (e-mail, list serves, threaded-discussion boards, and what we called Shared Document Collaboration Conferencing (SDCC) (Klemm and Snell, 1994).

What’s Wrong with Discussion Boards?

Threaded-discussion boards are the de facto standard in on-line instruction, and are increasingly used as an adjunct to traditional teaching. But this mode of discourse is problematic on several grounds. Foremost is the encouragement of spouting opinion. Students post their opinion, but there is usually no requirement for data collection and organization, thoughtful reflection, persuasive argumentation, or integration of the data and thoughts of others in the class. Such a learning environment rarely requires students to gather and organize information and ideas into single coherent thought that fully reflects collaborate effort. In fact, discussion boards encourage students to do what they already tend to do too much of: spout off opinions.

Technical Issues

These systems do not usually use a full-featured word processor, requiring instead typing text messages into form fields. Students may not be able to create hyperlink interfaces with the Web, insert graphics/sound clips/video clips, run spreadsheets, interface with digital libraries, or perform other educationally valuable activities in the electronic environment.

Discussion boards afford only a clumsy way for students to respond to each other’s postings. Students cannot see more than one note at a time. They cannot directly edit or annotate each other’s messages. There may be no way to annotate any given note in context; one must create a new note and place it in the appropriate place in the topic outline. Students cannot even refer to each other’s content without cutting and pasting text from the e-mail being referenced.

Discussion boards organize information only by some arbitrary scheme, such as a topic outline. Specific places in the outline serve as fixed pigeonholes for each message. Each discussion board message has to be opened and then closed separately. With many systems, you cannot see what it is in one note while simultaneously viewing the note to which it refers. There is no way to create links outside of the hierarchical outline. Messages attach as notes associated with other notes, rather than as Web-like links to notes associated with specific character strings within a given document. There may also be severe constraints on the use of graphics and multi-media materials. The typical software collects and files messages but does not mediate the group construction of an academic deliverable, such as a group plan, project, report, or case study.

Poor Pedagogical Support

These limitations underlie a more serious deficiency in the way discussion boards are used for teaching. As typically used, the bulletin board environment encourages students to express mere opinions. This discourages learning. Opinions do not promote critical or creative thinking unless they are accompanied by data and rigorous analysis that capitalizes on the brain power of more than one person. Too often, bulletin board commentary is more monolog than dialog, and commonly it is undisciplined, uninformed, unproductive − and even unread.

Commonly, the purpose of on-line discussions is unclear and the expectations are vague. A few students can dominate the discussion. Comments are often weak, irrelevant or off task. No compelling need motivates students to read all the postings and therefore much of the discussion is wasted. I remember an educational technology conference presentation where the speaker showed the Contents page of his discussion board, boasting about all the student postings in his course. He failed to point out all the little yellow “new” tags, which indicated that he had not read the contents of those messages. Instructor intervention is needed in on-line discussions to help students stay on task and provide quality commentary. Instructor intervention (questioning, correcting, informing) can help students learn how to use language precisely, reduce misunderstanding of content, and stimulate a higher order of critical and creative thinking.

Hewitt (2001) has written a stinging critique of teaching with asynchronous bulletin boards. The very nature of such threaded-topic boards “provide few facilities for drawing together discourse in meaningful ways.” There is no convenient capacity to cut across the hierarchical structure of a class conference for stimulating what he calls “convergent” discourse, where the assorted notes are used to synthesize or summarize ideas. He reports some interesting data from three graduate-level courses that used threaded-topic discussion boards. Of the 830 posted notes that were analyzed, only 2% even attempted convergence. Paradoxically, all students said they would benefit from higher levels of synthesis and summarization. Yet, 81% admitted that they personally never made such attempts, and 75% said that the notion of synthesizing and summarizing across different note postings never occurred to them.

In my view, lack of convergent discourse is just one of the problems with bulletin boards. Some of the problem is created by instructors who accept spouting of opinion, rather than requiring students to DO something useful in asynchronous Internet communication systems. For example, teachers could use the Internet environment to help student learning teams apply what they are learning. Learning is enriched when a student group is required to make an informed decision, develop a plan, conduct a project, write a report, conduct a case study, construct a portfolio, or perform most of the other kinds of constructivist activities that rigorous student-student interaction can enable. Group-based project learning is especially valuable training, because in today’s world, teamwork is how most work gets done, whether in military operations, a law firm, industrial services, corporate product development, or in a scientific research lab.

Discussion boards do not facilitate the key pedagogical elements of building learning communities: collaborative learning activities that demand data collection, analysis, and convergent thinking that is performed in the service of a constructivist task that creates educational deliverables. We teachers like to say that we want our students to be creative and critical thinkers, but we opt out when given the opportunity to teach those skills. I have seen numerous discussion boards where the teacher does not structure conversation that requires back-and-forth dialog among students. Feedback from the teacher is often lacking. In many classes, most students do not even participate, acting as “lurkers” who may or may not even be reading the postings. A common teacher response to lurking is to require a specified number of postings, which of course can easily degenerate into a game where students just go through the motions of conversing. The problems of engaging students in on-line discussion prompted me to specify devices that teachers can use to get students more involved in on-line discussion (Klemm, 1998a).

E-mail and threaded-topic message boards fail to compensate for the lack of personal interactions that typically occurs in a traditional classroom and campus setting. In general, Internet courses still emphasize a “delivery” mode of teaching (instructivism reigns supreme), as opposed to a “participatory” mode . In a participatory mode, students interact with each other to develop understanding and construct a communal base of information and understanding. Usually, this means that there must be a tangible result, an academic deliverable of some sort that the learning teams produce. In short, such learning is constructivist and collaborative. Nothing fundamental is likely to change if a traditional, teacher-centered teacher moves a course to the Internet. Indeed, the inadequacies of teacher centeredness are magnified in an on-line environment.

Shared-document Computer Conferencing − A Better Alternative

Shared-document computer conferencing (SDCC) overcomes the limitations of bulletin boards. The basic advantage arises from encouraging student groups to integrate and synthesize multiple ideas and commentary. Synthesis and summary are the hallmarks of effective discourse. Learners are obliged not only to speak but to listen and enrich their knowledge and thinking. The academic deliverables that emerge are communal.

What is the role of technology in collaborative learning? In the “old” days, students had to e-mail their written materials to every member of the learning group, who in turn had to e-mail their responses to everyone (Fig. 1). This crude approach does not provide a convenient environment for creating or re-structuring material in the group’s assignment or for hyperlinking sets of shared documents or external digital resources. SDCC software enables a new and better way of sharing documents (Fig. 2).

SDCC systems liberate students from the limited discourse available with bulletin board notes. Maintaining a working memory of the intellectual content is facilitated, because everything can be seen in one self-contained document. At worst, one only has to scroll up and down to see the various facts and ideas contained therein, which is far more convenient that having the same content put in separate e-mail messages that have to be opened and closed one at a time, obliging the reader to remember what information is in each posting.

Most importantly, responses to points made by others in the group can be done in context, in the form of pop-up notes, for example, that still let you see the original text of what is being responded to and the context in which comments are embedded.

SDCC software provides shared workspaces for the insertion and iterative organization of information and insights, leading to evolving intellectual products that are continuously available for editing and annotation - in that same workspace - by all peers and instructors. The value of such software has been reviewed by Sherry et al. (2000) and many predecessors.

Failure of SDCC Software in the Marketplace

In the last dozen or so years, multiple varieties of SDCC software have been born only to endure a short and troubled life. Jim Snell and I created one of early forms of SDCC with a product called “FORUM,” an innovation that won us in 1993 the First Prize in an international contest for the “Best New Idea in Distance Education.” Our original software allowed students to create community documents, provided all the in-context linking capability of Web pages, and did several things that Web pages could not easily do in those days: 1) accommodate independent teams of learners, 2) create workspaces for private individuals or groups, 3) provide variable levels of shared access permissions to any given document, and 4) support pop-up in-context sticky notes (equivalent to writing in the margins). FORUM was limited in that it required client software installation that was cumbersome, and the documents were formatted in a non-standard word processor and not coded in html. These limitations were later overcome when we created Web-based version, Forum MATRIX (http://xshare.tamu.edu), now available free as open-source code. Our innovation was succeeded about four years later by a similar commercial product, “Groove,” developed by the IBM icon who created Lotus Notes, Ray Ozzie. This product apparently failed in the market place, despite having much more financial backing and a much more sophisticated marketing program. About the same time, other similar products came along, but they too have seen little success. Most of these have been designed for corporations and government, not education. A review of currently leading SDCC products has been published recently (PC Magazine, May 23, 2006, p. 23).

Next came Web-based “Wiki’s,” a large assortment of which are now available. Many of these are even hosted free. Wikis are generally used like blogs, but with an emphasis on participants annotating what is posted by others. Wiki’s often lack sophisticated management tools for user certification, access permissions (no access, read only, read and write), multiple independent workspaces, and seamless integration with a digital library.

Why did the SDCC concept fail to catch on? Many of the early systems were just too expensive for the education community. Examples of systems included Hummingbird (www.hummingbird.com/role/default/home.html), NextPage (www.nextpage.com/), E-room (www.documentum.com/eroom/), and WebEx (www.webex.com/). WebEx, for example, cost $6,000 to set up and $100 per user per month. And some of these systems require extensive support infrastructure. But cost is not the explanation for lack of acceptance, because free systems, like Wikis, are available.

One problem with systems that are maintained on other people’s servers is that, as an Editor of PC Magazine put it, “there’s no way to know who’s behind the glossy interface, which unnamed third parties are involved, or how well your data is (sic) protected” (Mendelson, 2006). Microsoft has now plunged into the SDCC market with its “Microsoft Office Live,” and Microsoft’s marketing muscle may well push SDCC over the top, Mendelson reminds us that Microsoft has a very poor credentials when in comes to computer security. The important thing is that coincident with Microsoft’s foray into SDCC is the recent introduction of other similar products. Google has introduced Google Docs and Spreadsheets (docs.google.com). There is also ThinkFree (thinkfree.com), Zoho (zoho.com), and gOffice (gooffice.com). These products are free (or almost free), and they operate on the principle of storing files and software applications on an Internet server hosted by the SDCC company. These products are pitched to the business community (Albro, 2007), where the culture of collaboration is well established.

In education, collaboration has a bad reputation among many teachers for a variety of reasons. Some teachers think of collaborative learning as a form of cheating, apparently without realizing that the teacher can still hold individuals accountable by suitable apportionment ratios for individual versus group grades. Many teachers have had bad experiences with group learning when they were students, brought on by teachers who were ignorant of group-learning theory and best practices. There is also the explanation that educators, particularly college professors, are slow to change their ways. But not all professors are luddites. Finally, my own experience is that even many students object to group learning, in part because of bad experiences in other poorly managed courses.

We originally thought that Forum MATRIX and other SDCC products were not catching on among educators because the products were not packaged in a way where teachers could see the value. In the decade and more that followed, a whole host of SDCC products appeared in a variety of packaging, at least one of which should have had mass appeal, we thought. There has always been the problem that it was hard to find such products from Internet search engines, because they are called by different names: enterprise solutions, Web conferencing, meetingware, project ware, or peer-to-peer netware. Moreover, the names don’t mean the same thing to everyone.

At one time we thought that maybe the SDCC products were too hard to use. But the same people who could write formulas for Excel would not use SDCC. Any new software paradigm takes a few years to catch on, but by the time SDCC had a chance to get accepted, we were all hurled into the simple, point-and-click world of the Internet. Students were not obliged to show much more initiative and creativity than browsing with point and clicking.

This brings us to what I now think is the heart of the problem. Students are not particularly attracted to do the hard work of research, logical analysis, synthesis of ideas and data, and creation of interactive discourse. Pointing and clicking is so much easier. When required by a teacher to do more than find stuff on the Internet, students would prefer to express opinions, rather than engage in a discourse that requires them to listen to what others have to say and integrate that with data and evidence to produce a creative synthesis. And what teacher wants to read and grade all this creative discourse? Professors, for example, barely have enough time to do their research and grade multiple-choice tests.

An added, and perhaps more fundamental problem, relates to what I said at the beginning about the growing individualism of our culture.

Redeeming Education Via SDCC Technology

Educational leadership should come from our universities. Too often, universities are the problem, not the solution. Except for Colleges of Education, university faculty and administrators show relatively little involvement in K-12 and show more commitment to research and varsity sports as they do to educational practice in their own institutions. In their book on the need for reform of universities, William Willimon and Thomas Naylor (1995) assert that university faculties and administrators are insufficiently concerned about the learning experiences of their students. Willimon and Naylor ask, “Is the real purpose of college life to entertain students for four years before they enter the workforce?” Rather than promoting “shared values and common aims,” our campuses seem to be dominated by “narcissism and hedonism.” Eileen Brown is quoted as saying that “American institutions of higher learning today, are among the more conservative forces in our society, continuing to educate in a hierarchical, individualistic, and passive manner out of tune with our society’s growing need to create learning communities in every area of business, government, and social services.”

So, my point is that universities not only have an obligated to enrich the sense of communal learning, they also now have, through SDCC technology, the means to facilitate such learning. Thankfully, my university now has a heightened awareness of the value of written discourse and is creating an array of “W courses” that require intensive writing experiences. And of course, our Forum MATRIX is available, not only in stand-alone form, but also as a tool in the university-wide WebCT. Collaborative writing is the best kind of writing for students because the emphasis not just on writing as such but on communication.

Making SDCC Acceptable as a Medium for Instruction

Teachers may need reminding that our intellectual culture deteriorates as we shift education away from dialog to monolog, from group-based reasoned analysis to the individual soapbox. Many teachers deceive themselves into thinking they have solved the problem by using “discussion boards” that are routinely available in typical course management operating systems, such as WebCT.

In a modern SDCC environment, students not only can view scrollable documents in their Web browser, but most importantly, they can check a document out for inserting text and graphics, editing, or for making links (to Web sites, other documents in the same SDCC, or to pop-up notes). Documents are saved in word processor or html format. In Forum MATRIX, the documents are not only archived on our own Web server, always available to all authorized participants, but they can be saved to a local PC.

Our open-source Forum MATRIX system (http://xshare.tamu.edu), for example, features an unusually simple and clean interface that runs inside a Web browser. A user (student) logs into a local server and is given a menu of work spaces (“conferences”) in which the user is registered. Clicking on the desired conference opens a menu of the folders therein, which are the topics that are in the “conference” (Fig. 3a, left panel). In this case, the topics are the workspaces of various students. Also shown is a link for accessing the digital library that houses the references and background material for the conference. When the link to a topic is clicked, the tree expands and the right-hand panel displays the documents that are filed therein. When one of these is selected, it can be checked out (or deleted). Clicking on a document title downloads it and opens it in the appropriate software application. Any type of document or sub-document can be put in the workspace (Fig. 3B), and can be worked on by any authorized group member as long as the member has the software application on their local PC.

LEAD Technologies Inc. V1.01

Figure 3a. Screen display of a SDCC workspace (NSF GK-12), with links to its digital library reference source (Instance Library) and a list of folders (“Topics”) accessible by all students registered in this workspace. One topic folder is opened to show in the right-panel the various documents filed in this space and when they were last worked on.

Fig. 3b. Expansion of “Metric Unit” in Fig. 3a to show links to its sub-documents and PowerPoint presentation.

Multiple items from different students can be put into the same document. Students and teacher can scroll quickly through documents, recognizing quickly which inserts and pop-ups have special importance because of the context in which they occur. Unlike postings on discussion boards, the inserts can be seen in context - without any opening and closing of files. Pop-up notes, also in-context, open and close quicker than e-mail because they are stored as an integral part of the document, which has already been opened in RAM.

The real power of SDCC systems is that documents can be fully shared. Student teams can work together on the same copy of a document, adding inserts, deleting, making strikeouts, and inserting links. Such work may be a case study, a literature report, plans or results of a project, or other kind of document deliverable. The group can select an “editor” to convert the marked up copy into a new version, which can be pasted in as a “new article.” They can likewise create successive versions as the project evolves.

My Uses of SDCC in University Teaching

Several kinds of activities have been field-tested with students for the 10 years that I used SDCC in my teaching at Texas A&M University. I summarize as follows:

Discussion Threads in Shared Documents

The idea of coalescing threaded discussions into common documents had been tested most often in my Biomedical Research course, taught entirely over the Internet. In this

course, students were asked to post an insight on assigned reading material, which they submitted in a shared document. Then they created in-context annotations of each other’s insights. This way, all of the commentary associated with a given document or topic was embedded in the document itself, and the context for each note was readily apparent. Participants in the conversation had the convenience of having everything in one scrollable place. Students in a learning team put their initials at the end of their text or used different font colors.

Note the example in Fig. 4 below, in which students were asked to post an insight on the Controlled Substance Act that regulates narcotics and certain other restricted drugs. Unlike the threaded-topic design, all the comments are gathered. When viewed on-line, comment notes popped up in context). Students identified each other by their initials or they chose different colored type in their word processor. The advantage of the interface is that a student can see everything in one place and does not have to go through all the mouse clicking needed to open and close a stack of discussion-board messages. A special feature is the ability to create in-context links, just as in Web pages. These links may be to Web sites, to other MATRIX documents, or (unlike Web pages) to pop-up notes. This design encourages students to get more engaged in group work because the mechanics of the process are so easy.

“The Controlled Substances Act of 1970”

I found this article, or piece of legislation, to be very long winded. However, it covers everything. Anything that could go wrong has a solution in this Act. The safety measures are more than adequate. I believe we definitely need legislation of this sort simply because the abuse of drugs in this country is out of control. TS

In working with controlled substances every day in the pharmacy I understand the rules and laws regarding them as far as how they are to be kept dispensed and delivered. When researchers use these substances they should follow the rules to the book in order not to incriminate themselves [W1] . Most importantly, a researcher should keep a log [W2] of the use of controlled substances in an experiment. SL

This shows the importance of the problems that can occur with the misuse [W3] of controlled substances. Such laws are necessary for the protection of the people. These laws are very important to the researcher,[W4] because a researcher often deals with controlled substances on a daily basis. BR

Researchers must often use controlled substances in their experiments. It is important for them to know and be able to trust their assistants [W5] who are dealing with the controlled substances. This article was interesting to me because I plan on going into pharmaceuticals. I got a lot if information about substances that only the pharmacist is allowed to handle. JL

This article is good to read to find out what type of things you can and can’t do with certain controlled substances in laboratories. Although most of it is written in legal jargon, it must be technically outlined “to the ‘t’”, [W6] so there isn’t to be any misinterpretation of what the CSA says in terms of dealing with these controlled substances. JA

It is vitally important that controlled substances be monitored very closely. If they fell into the wrong hands it could cost many unknowing humans and animals their lives. Although the guidelines for the use and distribution of controlled substances may seem to some to be too strict it is all done to protect the best interests of both distributors and consumers. TD

I feel that it is highly necessary to have such detailed laws regarding narcotic use especially in light of the abuse of painkillers [W7] such as Oxycontin. Even if a drug is regarded as legal by the medical community, there is still a need for strict regulations. EL

Figure 4. Section of a discussion by seven students that was contained in a single shared and scrollable document. In the non-print version, brackets serve as link anchors to pop-up in-context annotations from group members (in MS Word, the notes pop up automatically as the cursor moves over the text anchor).

All the discourse about a given topic appears in a single compact document. In Fig. 4, for example, the topic was addressed by seven students and each posting could have had pop-up notes from each of the other six students, making a total of 42 items. In a discussion board, all 42 items would have to be listed and opened one at a time. Now multiply this by the four or five questions I usually ask students about an assigned reading. It would take several screen displays just to list the topic titles for all those 144 items (and each would have to be independently opened and closed to see the contents). Can there be any doubt as to which approach is more convenient?

In this particular software certain limitations exist in the software. Students have to identify who they are (as with initials, or they could use different colored font). Also, there are no “new” tags to show if a comment has been posted after any given user has last read the document.

These disadvantages are off-set by the time saved from seeing the context for a comment. Unlike a typical discussion board, the reader has a better way to know whether a comment is of interest before viewing it. And the viewing and holding in working memory is easier, because the comment pops up and does not require opening and closing.

And, we have not mentioned the value for archiving. With shared-document mode, everything can be archived in one step. With most bulletin boards, each posting would have to be archived as a separate step.

Problem Solving

In my Biomedical Research course, I had student groups solve statistics problems and reaching a group consensus on bioethics problems. The work was made much easier because helped each other to understand the problems and the approaches to solution.

Insight Exercises

In my Introductory Neuroscience course, I required students to participate in “insight exercises” in which each student in a learning team asked a creative question about the reading assignment and then provided a rationale and strategy for answering it (Klemm, 1998b). I emphasized the need to develop skill in developing insightful ideas that can be expressed as testable hypotheses. At first I had to develop a rubric to show what qualified as an insight, because many students were uncertain what an insight was. Really good questions often did not have an answer, and in those cases, the task was to outline how to do experiments that could get to an answer. Each student in the group then made in-context critique comments in a shared document, building up a basis for the group to select the “Best Question and Answer” for the week which they then refined before submitting for a group for a group grade. Each group had a group Leader (who assured that things got done on time and that everybody was pulling their share of the load), a Best Q&A Editor (who coordinated the debate and wrote the revisions), and two or more Librarians, who did the library work to provide information. They developed a team spirit, actually wanting to compete with the other groups for the best grade. I found that a great advantage of this approach to group learning was the requirement of both an individual and a group product. Note also that as professor I only had to read one product per team rather than products from six individuals in each group. Moreover, the students produced better intellectual products than any one student alone could have done and, moreover, learned some valuable real-life lessons about working effectively as a group.

A process for teaching collaborative writing has just been published (Guth, 2006) in which each student writes a piece and then as a group they pick the most promising sample, peer edit it, and submit for a group grade.

Biographies

In the Biomedical Research course, I required each student to write a short biography on the discovery process used by a famous scientist (but not the ones that books have been written about). These biographies have pictures, and links to Web pages and even some of the publications of the scientists. The best part of this exercise was that everybody could see all the biographies. I could set permissions so that students could insert in-context questions and commentary on the biographies. Students not only learned more about the discovery process, but most of the time they realized why some students received a better grade than others.

Web Quests

I had students conduct searches of Web pages covering certain topics. They put the hyperlink to the pages, along with a summary of what can be found at that Web site, all into one community document. Each topic could be covered in a separate document, or related topics could be combined into the same document. Because everything was html-formatted, it was easy to build a hyperlinked Table of Contents.

Case Studies

In my Introductory Neuroscience course, I wanted students to become comfortable and reasonably competent in reading primary research literature. Toward this end, I assigned papers for the group to read and analyze in the Forum. However, I supplied specific guidance by showing them an analytical model to guide what they were to do in terms of understanding, assessing, and creating new ideas and perspectives (Fig. 5). Students usually approached this problem by assigning each team member to write certain responses, and then they interacted to correct any misunderstandings or add multiple insights (Klemm, 2002).

Fig. 5 Analytical model for student evaluation of research reports (Klemm, 2002).

In all of these teaching strategies, teacher feedback is easy and effective, because the teacher can “write in the margins” just as in the good old days of paper and pen. Extensive feedback can be supplied in-context as an insert (using a different font or color for emphasis), and short notes can be made in-context as pop-ups. By responding to a group rather than to each individual student, the teacher has less work and is more likely to be fully engaged in what the students are doing. When the same thing needs to be said to all groups, the teacher only inserts it once and then can refer other groups to that document.

Workspace Interface for Digital Libraries

I also worked with a team of computer scientists and veterinarians to create a digital library of exotic foreign animal diseases. Our Forum MATRIX was available as a group workspace for helping veterinarians and public health workers to diagnose outbreaks of foreign exotic diseases and develop response programs to contain the outbreak.

The library and Forum integrated smoothly, inasmuch as they were both Web-based systems. The library was designed to accept information about the conditions surrounding an outbreak and the symptoms and gross pathological signs seen in the first sick animals. Then users could search the library automatically to generate a list of tentative diagnoses. Students could use the information in the digital library in Forum as they conducted their analysis of any outbreak situation.

Shown below is the outline of a scenario by which public health officials, or students performing a case study, could use the SDCC system as an asynchronous workspace to use information in the digital library to diagnose the problem and develop a disease management plan.

1. Expert Summary. Each member of the group picks one or more of the tentative diagnoses. The student then posts a draft that explains which information about the disease’s symptoms, circumstances surrounding the sickness, symptoms, and gross pathological signs provides a justification for considering this particular diagnosis. Other students make in-context comments and questions.

2. Information Needed. All students in the group post and debate suggested calls for information that are not in the database that would clarify the diagnosis. Examples: What lab tests are needed? What tissues should be cultured or examined histopathologically? Students debate the postings with in-context comments and questions.

3. Ranking and Debate. Each student ranks each tentative diagnosis on a scale of 0 to 10 (10 being most likely). Each student presents an argument for their top choice, which others critique with in-context comments and questions.

4. Final Choice. As a group, a final differential diagnosis is made, along with the rationale and defense for that choice.

5. Management and Containment plan. The group develops a comprehensive plan for containing and managing the disease.

Exemplary case studies can be put into the library, so that groups in the future can reference it.

Possible Problems in SDCC

Versioning

When a document becomes extensively “marked up” with inserts, deletions, comments, etc., it is necessary for the group leader or editor to take all these suggested changes into account and create a new version, which in turn may go through iterative rounds of successive versions.

Each version should probably be archived for later reference. A teacher, for example, may want to see how the final deliverable was created and who was making the important contributions. In Forum MATRIX, this is easily done by leaving each old version on the Web server, where it shows up on the navigation tree. A new version can be created as a blank document, into which the editor writes the new version de novo or inserts the full document of the latest old version (which MATRIX allows you to save to a local hard drive).

Sabotage

Clearly, a malicious student in a group could sabotage the group documents. But why would a student want to do that, assuming that the grade is group-assigned, which would penalize the perpetrator? Moreover, such a problem will not occur if the teacher has created the proper team-learning spirit.

I have never had problems with sabotage. Serious college students seem to want to benefit from the ideas and input of fellow students. Where team-learning formalisms are involved, the built-in interdependence, bonding, and group grading makes sabotage even less likely. Also, with small learning groups, it should not be too hard to catch and punish any anti-social culprits who undermine the process.

Sabotage of the work of competing groups is a more likely possibility. I made certain that this never happened in two ways:

1. Students in a given group could not see, much less edit, the work of other groups until after submission deadline was reached.

2. After the deadline, security settings on all documents from all groups were changed to “read only.” This allowed everyone to learn from the work of others, without getting to capture that work for their own group.

I taught with SDCC for over 10 years. I never encountered a case of sabotage.

Conclusions

Message-based on-line discourse can overwhelm teachers with more e-mail than they or the students have time or inclination to read. The solution is to structure discussions in ways that shift the burden of communication from to teacher to the students. That is, require the discussion to be contained within learning teams and to be focused on accomplishing an assigned task. Thus, the bulk of the information and commentary does not require teacher involvement, and when it does, the teacher can communicate with the group as a whole rather than with separate mail to each learner.

The important teaching issue is that this kind of asynchronous discourse can be used to collect e-mail messages or it can be extended to support the creation of collaborative group products. To me, it makes more sense to use software that will allow a teacher to capitalize on the advantages afforded by collaborative learning formalisms.

The typical threaded-topic discussion board in on-line learning wastes an opportunity for more complete constructivist collaboration. This lost opportunity occurs for two main reasons: 1) teachers have not thought enough about how to enhance on-line learning; and 2) discussion-board software typically does not allow document sharing and in-context annotation, both of which are needed to optimize written discourse.

On-line discourse is optimized when the following conditions are met:

· The discourse has a clear objective that requires some kind of group-written deliverable.

· Students are required to go beyond the mere expression of opinion (for example: identify, compare and contrast, explain, argue, and decide).

· Students work in teams, using collaborative learning formalisms, to help each other to produce an academic deliverable.

References

________. 2005. New study predicts robust growth in the religious and Elhi market segments. Book Industry Study Group. http://www.bisg.org/news/press.php?pressid=27

_______2004. Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America. National Endowment for the Arts. Washington, D. C. Downloadable pdf available from http://www.nea.gov/pub/ReadingAtRisk.pdf

Albro, E. N. 2007. Your online office. PC World. January, p 20-22.

Giola. Dana. 2004 Reading at risk. National Endownment for the Arts. Washington, D.C.

Guth, Sarah. 2006. Discovering collaborative e-learning through an online writing course.

Innovate. 3 (2). http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php

Hewitt, James. 2001 Beyond threaded discourse (distance education). Internat. J. Educational Telecommunications. 22 Sept.

Klemm, W. R., and Snell, J. R. (1994). Teaching via networked PCs: What’s the best medium? Technological Horizons in Education. 22 (3): 95-98.

Klemm, W. R. 1998a. Eight ways to get students more engaged in online conferences. The Higher Education Journal, vol. 26 (1), pp. 62-64.

Klemm, W. R. 1998b. New ways to teach neuroscience: integrating two teaching styles with two instructional technologies. Medical Teacher, 20, 364-370.

Klemm, W. R. 2002. Analytical model for teaching students to analyze research reports in an asynchronous computer conference environment. J. College Science Teaching, vol.31 (5), pp. 298-302.

Mendelson, Edward. 2006. What’s your risk tolerance? PC Magazine. May 23, p. 53.

Milliot, Jim. 2006. Publishers hunt for readers. Publishers Weekly. March 20. http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6316989.html?industryid=23620&industry=Industry+Trends

Putnam, Robert D. 2000. Bowling Alone. Simon & Schuster. 541 pp.

Sherry, L., Billig, S. H., and Tavalin, F. 2000. Good online conversation: building on research to inform practice. J. Interactive Learning Res. 11 (1): 85-127.

Willimon, W. H., and Naylor, T. H. 1993. The Abondoned Generation. Rethinking Higher Education. Wm. B. Eerdmans Co., Grand Rapids, MI.