Reflections on the Portfolio:
My Process of Learning and Growth

 

Lorraine Sherry

 

September 1997



Introduction

In 1994, when I entered the doctoral program, I really had no idea what I wanted out of a doctoral program except the chance to do some creative writing about telecommunications and how it influences the learning process. Nor did I have any idea about just what constitutes a philosophy of learning, other than what I had learned about schema development in cognitive psychology. Because of health problems, I really had no intention of ever going back to work. However, I consider myself a lifelong learner, and a believer in continuous improvement, so I started the program and watched as patterns began to emerge through my work, patterns that are reflected in my portfolio. Looking back over the past three years, some things have changed, and some have not.

My topic foci - collaborative learning, computer-mediated communication, and transformative instructional design - all under the aegis of computer-supported-collaborative-learning (CSCL) have not changed. However, with health problems slowly and steadily coming under control, I am definitely in the workforce, and I daily deal with complex problems of educational practice at RMC Research and on the Internet Task Force here at the School of Education.

Interestingly, The MITRE Corporation (where I was once employed) and Sun Microsystems (which may hold promise in the future) are beginning to realize just what implications CSCL has for both learning and training. Ed Nuhfer at UCD is also very interested in developing faculty and staff expertise in technology and telecommunications. CINS is interested in my work with the Internet Task Force and the School of Education Home Page. I am keeping my options open concerning future professional advancement.

At RMC Research, over the past 2 1/2 years, I have progressed from being an intern on contract, to a research assistant, to a permanent part-time research associate. I have also received honoraria for outstanding professional publications. Our CEO, Everett Barnes, is very interested in the Teachers' Internet Use Guide, and has personally promised me all the support I need to develop products involving Web-based instruction. RMC's emphasis is exactly the emphasis of the doctoral program: to become a practitioner/leader/researcher in educational settings, and to apply my knowledge to develop practical solutions to difficult problems of instructional practice. I will not say this has been an easy path, but now, with top-level support and the technology I need to do my job, I am finally becoming able to do just that. I am enclosing some letters documenting this progress.

Academically, I consider myself a legitimate peripheral participant in a global community of learners and educational researchers. My colleagues are not limited to my peers and professors at UCD, but span the globe. People are reading my on-line publications and discussing them on-line with me. I have managed to gather a cohort of five educational leaders for a proposed AERA symposium next year on Diffusion of Technology in Educational Institutions: Theory into Practice. I have also been selected for Who's Who Among Students in American Universities and Colleges, 1997. I am enclosing a representative sample of messages from other educational professionals regarding my work.

I am also enclosing a timeline with my own reflections and self-assessment of my learning and work over the past three years.

Domain 1 - Core Knowledge



Portfolio Products:

Research Management Product
Tutoring Roundtables
The Dynamics of Collaborative Design
Epistemic Forms and Epistemic Games/A Model Computer
Six Research Critiques
Reactions to Corsaro

My current thinking has been highly influenced by a few key educational researchers and instructional technology gurus, especially Ann Brown; the advocates of a mediated environment (Roy Pea, Charles Crook, and Brock Allen); Allan Collins; Feltovich and his cohorts; the connectionists (William Clancey and his associates); and the situated cognitionists - in particular, Jean Lave. I've gradually shifted from the traditional computer metaphor of learning and the cognitive viewpoint of schemata-as-stored-structures to a more connectionist viewpoint. However, I still believe that epistemic forms are a very good way to represent knowledge in a structured manner.

I don't intend to present a "knowledge dump" here; rather, I'll mention several key articles that I consider to be extremely important toward constructing my own philosophy of learning. My ability to create and manage a professional knowledge base to represent my knowledge of my topic foci is adequately reflected in my Research Management Product. Many of the ideas of these influential writers can be found in my other portfolio products.

Let's start with Ann Brown. I'd read Brown and Palincsar's (1989) piece on Guided, Cooperative Learning and individual knowledge acquisition before I entered the program, and was fascinated by the way she dealt with the influence of a group problem-solving setting on individual learning, the processes of co-elaboration and co-construction of knowledge within the learning group, the way confrontation and conflict could be used as a catalyst for restructuring and change, and the social support provided by the group through encouragement, rewards and recognition for good work, and camaraderie. I had practiced various strategies for encouraging collaborative learning in my volunteer tutoring at the Tutoring Roundtables at Polk Community College and found that they worked.

What made Tutoring Roundtables click? In The Advancement of Learning, Brown (1994) outlined some general principles for fostering a community of learners, which she and Joseph Campione (1997) put into practice in Fostering a Community of Learners (FCL). Basically, academic learning is active, strategic, self-conscious, self-motivated, purposeful, and stresses the development of metacognition. An effective learning environment capitalizes on multiple zones of proximal development, with the understanding that learners develop at different rates. Differences are legitimized - especially different, valid ways of approaching the same problem. Encouraging an active exchange of dialogue among learners results in a community of learners.

In my experience I saw that the same groups of students would sit at the same tables and work together on rewriting English papers, trying to solve algebra problems, or attempting to visualize solids of revolution in calculus. Where words didn't work, I used epistemic forms - a sort of bricolage of motorboats and sailboats with vectors attached to them, sets of nested parabolas with different foci, and the like. Working together, talking, drawing pictures, relating textbook problems to real-life problems - these students did, in fact, form semi-permanent learning circles, which paid off in terms of better grades for each member of their group.

In the three years I've been in the doctoral program, I've learned that one cannot become too fixated on a single model of doing things or thinking about things - be it qualitative/quantitative research, cognition/connectionism, or constructivism/information transmission. As in quantum mechanics, it depends on your particular situation, and the particular problem you're trying to model and solve. Here's where Roy Pea greatly influenced my thinking.

One of the most important paper I've read is Pea's recently revised version (1996) of Seeing What We Build Together: Distributed Multimedia Learning Environments for Transformative Communications. Pea takes a dialectical approach to learning, balancing ritual communication (sharing common knowledge and values through participation and socialization with other learning community members) with information transmission (imparting information to the learner by some form of instruction), and showing that these are not mutually exclusive. When learners participate in inquiries at a field's frontiers of knowledge with mature communities of practitioners, the communication process transcends both modes and gives rise to a process whereby both sender and receiver are transformed. This is the basis of what I call "transformative instructional design" - a dynamic mix of constructivism and traditional instruction, appropriate to the situation in which the learners find themselves.

Pea's 1993 paper, Learning Scientific Concepts Through Material and Social Activities, sets the stage for the 1994 paper by showing that the "student as tabula rasa" (IP) perspective, constructivism (not viewing positively the student's existing intuitions), and Vygotskian alternative (the individual internalizes what first takes place externally in social learning situations) are all lacking, in his estimation. Creation and interpretation are reciprocal processes of human conversational action. Two-way transformative communications involve meaning negotiation (via public resources for interpretation) and appropriation (by involvement in culturally organized activities in which the tool of learning plays a role). The tool itself can be transformed as it comes to be used by someone new. This combination of the schools of western thought and Soviet thought, again, forms a dialectic which makes a lot of sense. It is this underlying process that leads to the group dynamics that Karen Myers and I observed and presented in our collaborative design paper - which is why I have included it here under Core Knowledge.

This was my first action research project. I presented our research results at the 1996 STC Conference in Seattle and had the paper published in the STC Proceedings. I also revised and expanded the paper as The Dynamics of Collaborative Design, co-authored with Karen Myers. The manuscript has just been sent to IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication. It epitomizes what William Clancey (1993) means when he considers computer system design as a group activity involving different communities of practice. Our communities linked UCD students with corporate trainers, and UNIX experts with novice HTML authors.

Our team collectively built a distributed knowledge base and mentored one another via e-mail, in a way that was independent of time and space. This was an excellent model of what Charles Crook in Computers and the Collaborative Experience of Learning (Crook, 1994a) calls "longitudinal continuity" - a dynamically constructed, common base of shared knowledge, understandings, and beliefs within our electronically-linked learning community. This process fostered interactions that Crook in Computer networking and collaborative learning within a departmentally focused undergraduate course (Crook, 1994b) describes as "resourced in relation to computers" - going beyond Tyler's earlier conception of computer as tutor, tutee, or tool. Information was stored in a mediated environment, not just in people's heads, so it was accessible to all. As Allen and Otto (1994) put it in Media as Lived Environments, "the cultural extension of human cognitive evolution appears linked to an emerging capacity to externalize information storage/processing by creating and manipulating cognitive artifacts" (p. 4), thereby distributing the work of representational processing between the users themselves and the cognitive artifacts that represent shared knowledge. Allen's idea of increasing thermodynamic efficiency (and hence, survival of a species) by storing representations in the environment rather than in neurons or DNA is a most persuasive argument for computer-mediated communication, learning, and design.

Crook and Allen both made a lot of sense to me: why not use computer-mediated communication and mediated environments to move from the usual instructional design process into the creation of a dynamic, asynchronous, open-ended learning environment that could support a community of learners that was dispersed in time and space? Moreover, did we have to use "instructional design" at all? In the Teachers' Internet Use Guide, I did begin with the idea of a traditional tutorial, but capitalizing on Pea's idea of the information transmission/knowledge sharing dialectic, I went beyond that form to "teach teachers how to catch fish for themselves", by creating a piece that stimulated reflection as well as planning and design. This is what I mean when I refer to "transformative instructional design".

I used an approach outlined by Koschmann, Myers, Feltovich, and Barrows (1994), namely, to explicitly state the learning objectives and instructional requirements; to study current educational practice regarding these goals (via on-line searches for exemplary curriculum integration sites on the Web), developing a specification based on the requirements and limitations of a hypertext-based tutorial on the Web, and producing an implementation that allows for a great amount of local adaptation and customization. This job aid presents the type of just-in-time, just -in-place information that electronic performance support systems are designed to facilitate, and it is my way of putting into practice some of the ideas that I talked about in Supporting Human Performance Across Disciplines: A Converging of Roles and Tools. (See Domain 2).

I tend to think in hypertext. The Teachers' Internet Use Guide is hypertexted; so is my portfolio. Feltovich, Spiro, Coulson, and Feltovich (1997) are masters of hypertext environments and problem-based learning. More important to me, however, is their conceptual framework - Cognitive Flexibility Theory. As my Tutoring Roundtable students realized, complex problems do not lend themselves to simple answers. There are multiple representations, multiple interpretative theories, multiple analogies, and multiple methods - all of which can be brought to bear on a complex problem. And how do we begin to represent a solution to the problem? By using an epistemic form (Collins & Ferguson, 1993; Morrison & Collins, 1995).

I use epistemic forms - they work beautifully for algebra students who are struggling with problems involving mixtures, cars-and-bicycles, etc. I've written an article for Educational Technology Magazine, co-authored with Maggie Trigg, that takes Morrison and Collins' ideas and puts them into practice in Epistemic Forms and Epistemic Games. Basically, epistemic forms are target structures that guide inquiry. We can visualize them as generative frameworks with slots, and with constraints for filling those slots. Thus, they are more or less like a schema - a model that represents knowledge organization. They are a terrific way to assist a visual learner. Moreover, since scientists are constantly on the lookout for symmetrical forms that organize nature (e.g. the periodic table, triangular and hexagonal structures to organize elementary particles), the use of epistemic forms has always been quite popular in the hard sciences. It is also very appropriate in computer science, which is why I wrote A Model Computer Simulation as an Epistemic Game for the ACM SIGCSE Bulletin, a magazine for computer science educators.

Pattern recognition goes hand in hand with connectionism - and is intimately tied in with perception, informal reasoning, and situated actions. Interestingly, connectionism does not assume the existence of stored structures such as schemata; but it does depend upon shared representations, shared meaning, and constant restructuring and reorganizing of prior knowledge in the light of new perceptions and actions. Connectionism treats learning as the outcome of the performance of tasks, each time in a slightly different setting, with different conditions and constraints, which, in turn, will slightly restructure the neural network and alter the next performance. The key idea, according to Clancey (1993) is that knowledge is a capacity to interact - talking with people, manipulating materials, imagining and planning in daily activities. The process of generating a representation involves "coordinating perception with action; this coordination takes place in a dialectic between the social and neural processes" (Roschelle & Clancey, 1992: 451).

Thus, learning for the individual means enculturation of that individual into a community of practice, using a common set of language, tools, and nonverbal communication to develop shared understandings and to begin to participate in that community of practice by applying one's knowledge to solve complex problems. This move from the neural to the social processes brings us to one of the key writers on situated cognition: Jean Lave and her concept of legitimate peripheral participation. To Lave, "agent, activity, and the world mutually constitute each other" (Lave & Wenger, 1996: 33). Learning can only be attained in specific circumstances. The meaning of those specific circumstances is constructed by renegotiating and restructuring the meaning of past and present actions. This brings us back full circle to Brown and Palincsar's notion of guided, cooperative learning, which is the original cornerstone of my conception of collaborative learning.

As a postscript, to further flesh out my core knowledge domain with regard to research methods per se, I'm including the six research critiques that were required in the courses I took, plus my reflections to Corsaro's Friendship and Peer Culture in the Early Years, all of which were considered outstanding.

References


Allen, B.S., & Otto, R.G. (1994). Media as lived environments: The ecological psychology of educational technology. Unpublished manuscript: San Diego State University.

Brown, A. (1994). The advancement of learning. Educational Researcher, 23(8), 4-12.

Brown, A.L., & Campione, J.C. (In press). Psychological theory and the design of innovative learning environments: On procedures, principles, and systems. In L. Schauble & R. Glaser (Eds.), Contributions of Instructional Innovation to Understanding Learning. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Brown, A., and Palincsar, A.S. (1989). Guided, cooperative learning and individual knowledge acquisition. In L.B. Resnick (Ed.), Knowing, learning, and instruction: Essays in honor of Robert Glaser, pp. 393-451. Hillsdale, N.J: Erlbaum.

Clancey, W.J. (1993). Guidon-Manage revisited: A socio-technical systems approach. Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education, 4(1), 5-34.

Collins, A., & Ferguson, W. (1993). Epistemic forms and epistemic games: Structures and strategies to guide inquiry. Educational Psychologist, 28(1), 25-42.

Crook, C. (1994a). Computers and the Collaborative Experience of Learning. London: Routledge.

Crook, C. (1994b). Computer networking and collaborative learning within a departmentally focused undergraduate course. In H.C. Foot, C.J. Howe, A. Anderson, A.K. Tolmie, and D.A. Warden (Eds.), Group and Interactive Learning. Southampton, UK: Computational Mechanics Publications.

Feltovich, P.J., Spiro, R.J., Coulson, R.L., & Feltovich, J. (1996). Collaboration within and among minds: Mastering complexity, individually and in groups. In T. Koschmann (Ed.), CSCL: Theory and Practice of an Emerging Paradigm, pp. 25-44. 1996: Erlbaum.

Lave, J., & Wenger. E. (1996). Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Morrison, D., & Collins, A. (1995, September-October). Epistemic fluency and Constructivist learning environments. Educational Technology Journal, 39-45.

Pea, R.D. (1994). Seeing what we build together: Distributed multimedia learning environments for transformative communications. In T. Koschmann (Ed.), CSCL: Theory and Practice of an Emerging Paradigm, pp. 171-186. 1996: Erlbaum.

Pea, R.D. (1993). Learning scientific concepts through material and social activities: Conversational analysis meets conceptual change. Educational Psychologist, 28 (3), 265-277.

Roschelle, J., & Clancey, W.J. (1992). Learning as social and neural. Educational Psychologist, 27(4), 435-453.

Domain 2 - Interpretation and Synthesis


Relevant Portfolio Products:

Issues in Distance Learning
An Assessment of Training Needs in the Use of Distance Education for Instruction
Supporting Human Performance Across Disciplines: A Converging of Roles and Tools
An Integrated Technology Adoption and Diffusion Model

To me, this means theory into practice -> Praxis. Whenever I embark on a research project, I start with a review of relevant literature, and I try to glean the most important ideas from current books and articles that will inform my research process. After I had completed my 1994 needs assessment for distance learning, which I performed as an intern with Pacific Mountain Network (PMN), I wrote and published the review of relevant literature in a separate article, Issues in Distance Learning, in the International Journal of Educational Telecommunications (IJET), a refereed journal sponsored by AACE. In 1996 the article was one of sixteen articles nominated for the Elizabeth Powell Award from all refereed journals on educational technology over the past year; won me my first honorarium for scholarly publication from RMC Research; and was subsequently reprinted in Educational Technology Review. I also wrote a journal article on the needs assessment itself, (An Assessment of Training Needs in the Use of Distance Education for Instruction), with Richard Morse as editor and co-author. That, too, was published by IJET.

As my area of expertise shifted from distance learning to more local applications of computer-mediated communication, I began to notice how new users were encountering great difficulties with the mechanics of HTML authoring, uploading and downloading files, dealing with graphics files and attachments, and the like - things which were second nature to me as a former computer programmer. Since several members of the Internet Task Force were recent graduates now employed as corporate trainers, and since they were knowledgeable in the development of electronic performance support systems (EPSSs), I selected that as my focus for the second doctoral laboratory in the spring of 1995. It also gave me a chance to develop some job aids and tutorials of my own, and to find out first-hand whether they were or were not useful for new users.

In researching the literature on performance support systems - electronic and otherwise - I began to realize just how eclectic that literature base was, and how it revealed the similarities, the differences, and the emerging trends in human performance technology, EPSSs, technical communication, and instructional design. The outcome of this literature review was a synthesis paper, Supporting Human Performance Across Disciplines: A Converging of Roles and Tools, which went through several revisions (which is why I made Brent Wilson a co-author!). It was finally published in Performance Improvement Quarterly, a refereed journal sponsored by ISPI. This publication won me my second honorarium for scholarly publication from RMC Research. The on-line version also made its way to the EPSS InfoSite, where it would up as a *Recommended Article*.

Using a process similar to what I had done for PMN, I decided to take the literature review for my most recent research project - the evaluation of the Boulder Valley Internet Project (BVIP) - and write it up as a separate piece titled An Integrated Technology Adoption and Diffusion Model, which I have recently submitted to IJET for publication. Two themes emerged from the BVIP evaluation: (1) the great disparity between the traditional Rogers model of Diffusion of Innovations and the actual adoption of a rapidly evolving innovation (educational telecommunications) by a decentralized organization; and (2) the fact that adoption theory was intimately tied in with learning theory. Whereas my AERA presentation in 1997 focused on the first theme, my proposed AERA symposium in 1998 will focus on the second.

Teacher-trainees go through a learning/adoption trajectory, starting out by learning about a new innovation, going through the adoption-decision process, becoming co-learners and co-explorers of the innovation with their students, and finally, becoming reflective practitioners who must decide whether to continue in a spiral to become change agents and mentors of their peers, or whether to reject the innovation. They can drop out at any part of the cycle. Different people are on different parts of the cycle at different times.

The article has been reviewed by Ellen Stevens, and I have revised it accordingly. Dan Surry of the University of Southern Mississippi has given it another reading and a positive feedback message via e-mail. It has just been accepted by the International Journal of Educational Telecommunications.

Domain 3 - Disciplined Inquiry


Relevant Portfolio Products:

Far View Distance Learning Project: Needs Assessment
Findings and Recommendations
Interview Data
Target Audience
Telephone Interview Instrument
Creating Connections: Rural Teachers and the Internet
EJVC article
Interim Report (RMC Research Corporation)
Presentation at 7th National Conference on College Teaching and Learning
Final Report (RMC Research Corporation document, separately bound)
Boulder Valley Internet Project
Initiative II Research Proposal
BVIP: Teachers Mentoring Teachers (AERA Presentation)
BVIP: Lessons Learned (AECT presentation)
Evaluation of the BVIP: A Case Study (JILR manuscript)
Final Report (RMC Research Corporation Document, separately bound)

By virtue of performing needs assessments for both Polk Community College and PMN, and because of my expertise in educational telecommunications, I was hired by RMC Research Corporation as a research assistant. What was originally an internship has now turned into a permanent, part-time position, which will be converted to full time employment as soon as I received my degree. The two major RMC projects I've worked on were the evaluations of the Annenberg Creating Connections Project and the Boulder Valley Internet Project (BVIP). Both are separately bound and are official RMC Research Corporation Final Reports. Both use a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, primarily surveys and in-depth interviews.

About halfway through the Annenberg Project evaluation, my supervisor (Dianna Lawyer-Brook) and I realized that we had gained some good insights into a training program that was based on a strong grassroots movement within Boulder Valley and that also demonstrated the success of a training program whose products and documentation were disseminated widely and shared nationally. The homophily between external change agents (ordinary classroom teachers who had just received Internet training themselves) and new trainees throughout the United States had a positive impact upon the outcomes of the training program. Moreover, by using electronic communication channels effectively and by making sure that information was made available to all parties concerned, the project attained a good degree of success and national notoriety.

Based on the interim report (September 1995), I wrote a journal article titled Creating Connections: Rural Teachers and the Internet. It was subsequently published in the winter edition of the Electronic Journal on Virtual Culture (EJVC), a refereed on-line journal. One of the referees said "it's clearly written, and its perspective is that of the project leaders. Although it's written as a report, it's informative and fairly objective, with details that could serve as starting points and percentage figures that could be used as baseline data for other such efforts". We also co-presented the paper at the Seventh National Conference on College Teaching and Learning, an ACM-sponsored conference in Jacksonville, Florida, March 1996.

At about the same time as we were finishing the Annenberg Project evaluation, it was time to carry out Phase II of the Boulder Valley Internet Project evaluation. The project's goals included development and delivery of comprehensive district-wide teacher training for using the Internet and the establishment of a foundation for curriculum applications and development. We had started with quantitative methods - an analysis of 142 responses to a district-wide e-mail survey (a 33% return rate) and an initial examination of the BVIP system logs. The preliminary data indicated that respondents had a very high comfort level with e-mail use and a high comfort level with other Internet resources, so their training had effectively prepared them to use the system. Typical connects involved checking e-mail, reading large numbers of messages from LISTSERVs, doing gopher searches, exploring, accessing databases such as NASA, telnetting to CARL for library research, and finding resources and integrating them into the core curriculum. We also started with some in-depth interviews of eight teachers who were effectively using the Internet in the classroom. For our next step, we intended to carry out a case study to cross-check the self-reported data that was gathered in the survey and the interviews.

The original research proposal was rather scanty except for the data collection matrix. I used this as an opportunity to write a detailed Research Proposal Portfolio Item for Alan Davis' REM7500 seminar, which was then accepted by RMC Research and became the foundation document for our future efforts. I wrote two different survey instruments (one for teachers, one for non-teaching staff) and the focus group questions for students who participated in the embedded case study. I also wrote the questions for the focus group and assessment work group, and customized interview guides for selected teachers, principals, technology resource people, and project leaders.

The study was greatly under-funded for the amount of work involved ($38,000 for two people over two years), and the final report was handed to the project leader two months after the initial projected due date. However, she was pleased with it and offered to edit any journal articles that we planned to write once the project was over. I wrote a 38-page summary of the project, Evaluation of the Boulder Valley Internet Project: A Two-year Case Study, which I presented at the annual meeting of the AERA, March 1997, and the AECT In-CITE'97 Conference, February 1997. I also submitted a short article based on the AECT presentation to T.H.E. Journal for publication. I have just submitted a manuscript based on the final report to the Journal of Interactive Learning Research, a new refereed journal, for publication.

Domain 4 - Professional Engagement


Relevant Portfolio Products:

Foundations of Teaching with Technology: Colorado School of Mines
Opening Panel Presentation (separately bound)
Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (separately bound)
Evaluation Forms
Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning: UCD School of Business
Workshop in Case-Based Instruction on the Internet
Evaluation Forms
Workshop in Case-Based Instruction on the Internet: RMC Research
Evaluation Forms
Web-Based Instruction (Technology in Education - TIE '97)
Teachers' Internet Use Guide: Hands-on Workshop
Evaluation Forms
Transformative Communication as a Stimulus to Web Innovations (in B. Khan, Ed., Web-Based Instruction)
Teachers' Internet Use Guide [On-line]: National Conference of Texas.
The Treasure Zone (Ed's Oasis chose the Guide as Site of the Week)

At my first annual review, my committee recognized that I was strong in research and professional publishing but weak in professional presentation, teaching, and training, especially since my practical background was in scientific research and technical writing, not teaching or training. Thus, over the next two years, I made a special effort to close this gap. Presentations at professional conferences were fairly easy for me, once I had mastered PowerPoint; professional seminars and workshops were another challenge altogether!

I was given the opportunity to conduct several one- and two-hour workshops at UCD: one in HTML authoring for Judy Duffield's ITE students, one in Netscape and the World Wide Web for School of Education faculty (with Brent Wilson and Janell Sueltz), and one in uploading home pages to the CINS servers for Scott Grabinger's IT seminar. Here, I was dealing with familiar audiences, within a culture that I was part of. That's why I've included these under UCD Community Participation, rather than in Domain 4.

The next stage was to conduct workshops - on my own - for professional groups outside the UCD School of Education. I remembered from my experiences at the University of South Florida, when giving professional workshops at state-wide conferences, that it was essential to be very prepared with structured tutorials, especially when dealing with Murphy's Law as it applies to the Internet with its concomitant busy signals, carrier drops, and "No DNS Entry" error messages.

I was given my first opportunity to conduct a seminar for a professional group on a subject directly related to my topic foci by Ed Nuhfer in July 1996, when Ed Nuhfer asked me to present a three-hour workshop at Colorado School of Mines (CSM) on Web-based instructional strategies and to participate in the opening panel of the conference with three other professors. I titled the workshop Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning. Surprisingly, my workshop was the most popular one of the conference; it was so overbooked that I had to repeat it a second time. I was paid at professional rates, and was expected to produce a professional performance. Here was my very first opportunity to exercise leadership in a professional sense - to act like a professor, serve on a panel like a professor, and to train professors in something where I was an expert and they were the learners. I wasn't sure whether I could handle it or not, but I gave it my best shot.

I developed a detailed set of activities: a presentation giving an overview of Web-based instruction, a presentation on case-based instruction followed by a hands-on exploration of the University of Virginia's Virtual ID Case Competition. After the break, we continued with a presentation and discussion about the collaborative aspect of authentic tasks, emphasizing on-line publishing and the construction of a shared knowledge base via mediated communications, and finally hands-on exploration of individual home pages, project-based pages, and whole-class annotated bibliographies.

The first workshop was plagued by technical problems. To add to the difficulties, it took nearly fifteen minutes for all participants to find the computer lab. Thus, first-day evaluations were mixed. Second day evaluations were somewhat better, with comments like "nicely organized, good opportunities to try things, good reference hand outs" and "long section on WHY use case studies - we got the point fairly quickly". It was definitely a learning experience!

Based on the CSM workshop, I was asked by Ed Nuhfer to present a shortened version (1 1/2 hours) of the same workshop to the UCD School of Business faculty and staff, as part of their staff development program. The audience was also interested in on-line case studies and mediated dialogue. I was able to re-use much of the same materials that I had used at CSM. I supplemented these with a synopsis of Patrick Jenlink and Alison Carr's paper on conversation as a medium for change in education and Jamie McKenzie's modules for a staff development course designed to emphasize student investigations as a profitable means of exploring information available over the Internet. Activities were to skim the article on conversation, skim the staff development course (both on-line), then a presentation on case-based instruction, and a group exercise for participants to solve the case as teams, followed by a closure discussion. Based on my experience with the CSM workshops, I had learned to de-emphasize "canned" presentations and play up hands-on exploration. That worked - evaluations were much better this time. Based on my good experience at the UCD School of Business, Shelley Billig, our site director, requested that I repeat the workshop for RMC staff.

At about the same time as I was preparing for the CSM conference, I was invited to contribute a chapter to Badrul Khan's forthcoming book on Web-Based Instruction, which was subsequently published by Educational Technology Publications. I enlisted Brent Wilson's help as co-author, wrote the chapter called Transformative Communication as a Stimulus to Web Innovations, had Brent revise and edit it, and submitted it to Dr. Khan. He really liked the chapter and asked me to review the opening chapter of his book, as well as give feedback to one of his students who was currently reviewing our own chapter. All of this led to some fruitful, interactive conversation - "Scholarly Skywriting" - much like what I described in a short article on on-line publishing that I had published in the STC Intercom magazine.

After the book was in press, I was invited to give a presentation at the 1998 Technology In Education (TIE) Conference in Snowmass. I had been to TIE in 1996 with Brent Wilson, giving a presentation on Web-based lessons and resources, and I knew the audience would be friendly. However, TIE participants are K-12 teachers, in contrast to the professors who attended the CSM and UCD School of Business workshops, so I had to change the format of my presentation. At the same time, I was working on the Teachers' Internet Use Guide at RMC Research, under a STAR Center grant. That seemed like the ideal match: present the use guide as an example of Web-based Instruction, specifically oriented to a K-12 audience. It was a big hit! I downplayed the "canned" presentation and let teachers work at their own speed, using a structured worksheet along with a host of ancillary materials, while I walked around the computer lab and spoke to each group of participants. I also made much more use of audience interaction and discussion, and got good reviews as a result - along with some excellent feedback which I have used to improve the product. Once I improved the product, now with the help of my team (I finally got them into the CSCL mode!), I submitted it to the National Conference of Texas in Austin, and it was just accepted.

Domain 5 - Professional Leadership and Commitment


Relevant Portfolio Products:

 The Boulder Valley Internet Project - Lessons Learned (T.H.E. Journal)
Diffusion of Technology in Educational Institutions: Theory Into Practice (Proposed AERA '98 Symposium)
Magazine Articles (Public Information Writing)
 Supporting a Networked Community of Learners (Tech Trends)
Raising the Prestige of On-line Journal Articles
(STC Intercom Magazine and AECT presentation)
The Teachers' Internet Use Guide: Aligning Internet Lessons with Texas Standards (Tech Trends)
Newsletter Articles (STAR Center, TSS Newsletter)
Tutoring Roundtables (Texas STAR Center)
Short articles for the TSS Newsletter
Web-Based Instruction: Barriers and Facilitators (Texas STAR Center)
Funding Proposals
Caddo Parish Technology Initiative (RMC Research Corporation, separately bound) and Focus Group Results (separately bound)
The WEB Project: Evaluation proposal (RMC Research Corporation, separately bound)
Funding Proposal for follow-on data gathering for the Annenberg Project
Funding Proposal for a videoconference with Finland
The Rocky Mountain Lesson Exchange (submitted to US West Foundation)
The Navajo Learning Network (submitted to OERI, Field-Initiated Grant)

My research on the Boulder Valley Internet Project left many unanswered questions. We had run out of money to do any follow-up telephone interviews on nonrespondents. What actually happened with the project was very different from what Rogers would have predicted - client/change agent empathy strengthened the training program but greatly inhibited upward percolation of this grassroots effort to the people who had the power to make policy and allocate resources. Plus, the Boulder Valley School District was highly decentralized - a far cry from Rogers' model of the centralized adopting organization. I wrote up my reflections in a public information article to appear in T.H.E. Journal: The Boulder Valley Internet Project - Lessons Learned.

While I was at AERA this March presenting the results of the evaluation, I discussed what I had learned with several other prominent researchers - Elliot Soloway, Patrick Jenlink, Ann Shore, Dan Surry, and several others. Elliot said that corporate models (including Rogers) don't transfer well to educational institutions; we need a newer, better model to describe diffusion of educational innovations in a K-12 setting characterized by site-based management. Ann Shore had been tackling the problem of technology implementation plans, and Patrick Jenlink was interested in a systems approach to sustainability of large-scale innovations. I attended a presentation on sustainability, and was surprised to find out that my experiences were much like those of participants and directors of CoVis, Schools For Thought, and Foundations of Science. Were there common themes that could be discussed? Were there other viewpoints that weren't being discussed?

Like the "great leap forward" at CSM, here was my chance to exercise leadership and see if I could assemble a panel on my own to address the key issue at next year's AERA annual meeting: Diffusion of Technology in Educational Institutions: Theory Into Practice. I sent out an e-mail message to some of the professors I had spoken to at AERA, indicating that I was just a lowly doctoral student, but I was interested in hearing what they had to say, and would they be willing to participate in a symposium on these issues next year? Again, I was surprised to find out just how much support they were willing to give me - I got positive responses from Dan Surry, Patrick Jenlink, Betty Collis, and Kent Gustafson, and some nice words of encouragement from Dan and Kent. They said that they were once doctoral students and were in the same boat then as I was now, and they would be happy to do anything they could to make this symposium proposal a success. I also invited Joseph Hawkins to present a paper, because I was quite impressed with the evaluation of a similar project to the BVIP that he had worked on in Maryland. He, too, agreed to present a paper. Today, I sent out the symposium proposal to AERA - five papers, one discussant who is the ex-president of AECT - five authors, all from different states and countries - a good mix of theory and practice. Though the proposal wasn't accepted, it got high reviews, and it was a good learning experience. Plus, I'll still be presenting the paper at AECT '98.

Meanwhile, I was beginning to understand the value of public information writing in addition to publishing in refereed journals. I felt really good about publishing Supporting a Networked Community of Learners (in Tech Trends, with all participating members as equal authors - truly a collaborative learning venture! That magazine article reported on an intervention that the Internet Task Force had implemented in the School of Education - the design, development, and implementation of the School of Education Home Page.

Last winter, I published an article in the STC Intercom magazine titled Raising the Prestige of On-line Journal Articles, which I presented at AECT this past February in Brent Wilson's panel on on-line publishing. I've also written a lead article for the next TSS newsletter describing the events at the TIE Conference this summer. Recently, I submitted an article on The Teachers' Internet Use Guide: Aligning Internet Lessons with Texas Standards to Tech Trends.

Part of my current work at RMC Research involves serving on the STAR Center Technology Team, supporting their Web site, writing annotated bibliographies, developing products, and writing short articles. I have developed the Teachers' Internet Use Guide as a product for them. Our team is also expected to write a newsletter article a month on the general subject of "teaching and learning". The STAR Center reviews the newsletter articles and then publishes them in their local house organs - and if they think they have a more global audience, submits them to various magazines dealing with educational leadership and systemic reform. I have submitted an article on Tutoring Roundtables to them, a copy of The Teachers' Internet Use Guide: Aligning Internet Lessons with Texas Standards, and also an article on Web-Based Instruction: Barriers and Incentives with David Hoffman as co-author. I also submitted the Teachers' Internet Use Guide article to Tech Trends, and the Web-Based Instruction article to Electronic Learning.

I also feel it's important to keep my colleagues at UCD informed about what is going on within the division and the university as a whole, so I wrote a couple of very short articles for the April 1997 TSS newsletterone recruiting research projects for the second annual OSCAR competition, and one about the re-analysis of the 1995 TSS survey data that I did in the advanced statistics class. I'm also including some older TSS newsletter articles, including the writeup on TIE '95. I've written a similar article for TIE '97, which Brent Wilson submitted to the TSS newsletter for me.

Another phase of RMC Research's work is writing grant proposals - that is our livelihood. My first exposure to proposal writing was with Brent Wilson in 1994 when we wrote the Rocky Mountain Lesson Exchange proposal for US West. Since then Iwritten a couple of short proposals myselfone for funding for a videoconference with Finland, and one to Libby Black to gather additional data that would address the gaps in the Annenberg study. Of these, the only one to be funded was the Finland proposal. However, the videoconference never took place because of the unavailability of the Auraria Media Center at the time that the videoconference would have occurred.

With the phasing out of the big projects, staff members at RMC are invited to submit proposals for OERI funds, Technology Challenge Grants, and the like, provided they can find schools or districts to partner with them. This spring I participated in writing two proposals. The first proposal - The WEB Project: Evaluation Proposal - was initiated by Shelley Billig (our site director) and Joseph Martinez. I was asked to critically review the proposal and then to do the data analysis if it was funded. We received funding of $40,000/year for three years, to serve as external evaluators for The WEB Project's Web site. I am currently carrying out the analysis on the baseline data that we have collected this May.

I was lead writer for the second proposal, Caddo Parish, Louisiana: Technology Initiative Support Proposal, working with David Hoffman, Joseph Martinez, and Shelley Billig. We are currently finishing the second draft of the final report for our first contract with Caddo Parish. If they are pleased with it, perhaps they will fund my latest proposal - we are asking for $105,000 over two years. Based on my expertise with telecommunications and professional development, I've been told that I'll be included in any future efforts that involve Web site development, Web-based instruction, or technology training.

Next Steps



I've always tried to stay on the cutting edge of corporate research, and I see some pretty bright horizons for CSCL in the future. Trouble is, you can't have CSCL without a workable infrastructure in place and a population which has pretty much adopted it - hence my current areas of study at both work and in the School of Education are presently slanted in the direction of organizational change and technology adoption/diffusion. But my end target is to work in the area of CSCL, whenever and wherever there's a population that's willing to ride that wave with me.

To chart progress toward my target, and to self-assess my own skills and knowledge, I've developed a self-reflection grid called my "Portfolio Timeline" that I'd like to add to the portfolio. I've followed RMC Research's guidelines for authentic assessment of student portfolios, reporting my progress in each of the ten portfolio product areas over time, from emergent, through beginning, through developing, and finally, to independent. This is included in my paper-based portfolio; I do not intend to put it on-line.

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Lorraine Sherry
File moved November 16, 1997