LSB History - Part 2
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.
LSB developers consisting of undergraduate and graduate students from the School of Education, the College of Information Studies and the Engineering School developed dialogue over the course of three years (1999 – 2002). During this development effort the university’s central IT group noted the development of the SOE’s homegrown CMS as well as several instances of WebCT and Blackboard in various colleges around campus and a decision was made to invest in an centrally administered enterprise deployment of Blackboard. One of the main motivators for the School of Education to continue to develop and operate its own Course Management System was its decentralized management and a strong belief that the enterprise product could not support the signature pedagogies of the school, which involved rich feedback from teachers in the field.