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