The Living Schoolbook

 The following is a segment of a larger story that I wrote to attempt to summarize the history of the Living SchoolBook, a research group in the School of Education at Syracuse University.  In this entry I begin to talk a bit about our involvement in the Sakai network and our contribution to that group.  If you haven't read any of the previous articles about the history of the LSB, you may want to look at the previous entries related to this topic.

 The following is a segment of a larger story that I wrote to attempt to summarize the history of the Living SchoolBook, a research group in the School of Education at Syracuse University.  In this entry I begin to talk a bit about our involvement in the Sakai network and our contribution to that group.  If you haven't read any of the previous articles about the history of the LSB, you may want to look at the previous entries related to this topic.

Portfolios in the School of Education

Paper Scrapbooks

For the past several years students in the School of Education have gathered together at the end of each semester to share paper based portfolios which consisted of pictures of their teaching and examples of student work into a scrapbook.  The students would be organized into small groups where they would share their experiences with other students and a faculty member or host teacher.  The purpose of these portfolios were to share and raise awareness of what the other students were doing as well to get some informal feedback from the faculty and teachers.

Technology Culture

The LSB has employed a series of systems administrators and developers with a strong knowledge of and belief in open source technologies.  A strong sense of advocacy for open source technology in education developed slowly over this time.  The LSB believes that the “free” nature of these communities is congruent with the education community.  For better or worse, proprietary systems have been viewed by the technical staff as inflexible and therefore often inappropriate as a tool for innovation in teaching and learning.  The belief was that open source teaching and learning projects could be tailored to meet the specific college’s pedagogy and assessment style.  Between 2000 and 2003 several transparent and honest discussions between enthusiastic software developers and teachers yielded many products that were used to transform and educate teachers in surrounding districts.  Most of these success stories involved open source software projects as key components.

LSB technology projects - a "constructivist" approach

Previous PT3 funding, received by the college in 1999, funded the exploration of constructivist learning pedagogy in the teacher preparation program.  For this grant, the LSB developed a homegrown Course Management System known as “Dialogue” (http://dp.syr.edu, /dialogue) that had a heavy emphasis on a “conversation” (discussion) tool deployed in learning communities (classes).  The tool allowed community administrators to monitor/moderate community-wide, small group and one-to one conversations and to leave comments and assign arbitrary “grades” to student postings.  The reporting features Dialogue allowed administrators to track back through each students graded posts to evaluate how a student’s learning was developing.  Students could also see the posts that admins had tagged as significant and how they were evaluated on those postings.

The Living SchoolBook

Funding Source

Role in the School of Education

It was late at night at the Atlanta Sakai conference and I was thinking a little more about making pithy statements about the practice of teaching.  At the tech demo table for Goal Aware tools I was asked whether I thought that faculty would be resistant to using Goal Aware tools to markup their assignments with the learning outcomes that they are supposed to be addressing and then thoughtfully rate students' performance towards learning outcomes.  I am not qualified to answer (I am not a teacher) but that won't stop me from thinking a little about it...I'll even think out loud.  It helps ground me in the rationale for the Goal Aware tools idea.

The movement toward standardization of learning outcomes in general is met with resistance.  Whenever an outside agency steps in to regulate or inspect or make change in an existing system, those vested in that system are going to resist.  The accrediting body for the School of Education doesn't force the schools that it inspects to adopt their standards, however.  NCATE requires that the school articulate their own expectations of students.  While not at all a trivial task, this makes the pill easier to swallow (doesn't it?).  Even though the consensus building effort is extremely laborious (or so I have heard), I know that during the process faculty know that this is probably good medicine.When that consensus building process finishes its first iteration, I think you can hear the sigh of relief in surrounding hills and towns.  There is real sense of accomplishment.  

They don't say, "Hooray! Now we can get to work measuring student progress toward our outcomes; finding ways to improve our classes; adjusting our programs and our curriculum.  After that maybe we can set new goals and outcomes for round two!"

Nope, you won't get a sigh of relief about that.  This is endless work.  Iterative and continuous work that conscientious teachers and administrators have to struggle with.  The time and energy to generate good assessment data that can be relied upon to draw conclusions about the program and the classes will take away from the time spent doing other things such as research, planning new lessons and talking to students.  To the less insightful it may seem counterproductive.  Plenty of arguements can (and have) been made against it.

When we presented our original Goal Aware ideas at the Baltimore Sakai Conference, I spoke with Deborah Everhart in the halls after our presentation.  She told me that Blackboard was working on requirements for a similar system.  I had followed up with Deb on the phone after the conference.  She had someone in their product development group call me at Syracuse.  I described our ideas to her and we really weren't sure how to proceed.  At that time, I felt that the intellectual property issues around the idea was an impediment to collaboration.

While our Goal Aware installation of Sakai in the School of Education is our center for innovation in pedagogy and technology to support that, our enterprise courseware installation is Blackboard.  It would be great if "Goal Awareness" could be baked into that installation.  It would be even better if Blackboard could facilitate that.

We had a small, but highly productive, Outcomes Based Assessment BOF meeting today at the Sakai conference. In attendance was: Janice Smith (rSmart), Wende Morgaine (Portland State), Noah Bottimer (Saginaw Valley State University), Melissa Peet (UMich) and Jim Pease, Joe Shedd and myself (Syarcuse University).

We began the discussion with the diagram I posted yesterday to frame up the discussion. What we turned to really quickly was what new Goal Aware tools are needed. In other words, what new ways do students need to be engaged in the learning process that leverage the ability of student work to be tagged and evaluated based on learning outcomes?

I am not a teacher.  I am a Systems Analyst/Project Manager for a technical research group in the School of Education.  Admittedly, I am new to Project Management and am receiving formal education through Syracuse University's School of Information Studies which was recently voted as not too shabby.  I can't help but let ideas from my job and continuing education bleed into the domain that I am trying to support: that of educating students.

Professors in the classes I have taken seem rather biased toward the waterfall model of the software development lifecycle.  This methodology involves a series of phases that pretty much fall one after the other.  Plan, analysis, design, implement and maintain.  A Project Manager's job is to oversee the process.  A lot of this involves ensuring that monitoring and measurement practices are in place so that the project manager is able to identify areas where the project is starting to fall behind schedule.  In this view of project management, the schedule is king.  Time is money and slipping schedules are high stakes problems.  The PM's job is to get the project back on schedule...on time, under budget and high quality.  If you fail at that, you fail as a PM.