This is in the spirit of Scardamalia and Bereiter's CSILE concept, an area of fascinating, current research. It need not necessarily be computer-based, though computers and technology greatly speed up the process and afford rapid communications among members of the learning community.

Critical components of collaborative learning are:

• Intentional learning (ownership of the goal and tasks)
• Team-building strategies
• Peer review and critiquing
• Conversation and negotiation (especially with multiple perspectives)
• Community building
• Epistemic forms and games
• Knowledge base development (authentic, relevant knowledge)
• Knowledge dissemination

While in the doctoral program, I have been involved with several teams to build a shared knowledge base, work on authentic tasks, overcome hurdles in design/development, negotiate problem areas and differences of opinion, build a final product, perform developmental research, and participate in a case-based competition. I worked collaboratively with Maggie Trigg to develop a workshop and a journal article describing practical applications of epistemic forms and games. I have participated in two AECT panels dealing with issues of adoption and diffusion of the Internet in educational institutions. I have also involved other doctoral students in co-authoring my papers and giving presentations at professional conferences, based on the Internet Task Force's ongoing support for our virtual community of learners and our developmental research on collaborative design. I also participated in AERA's VIRTCON III in 1996 and have been very active in all UCD class conferences on CEO.

After I left USF, I lead-authored an article on publishing online documents. Since then, I have published several documents, all of which are currently online. One of these is a synthesis paper on Issues in Distance Learning, one of the promising uses of CMC. With my team, I also designed and implemented the School of Education Home Page and documented the activities of the Internet Task Force. All of these activities have led to fruitful and interesting online conversations with other educators and researchers all over the world, via the Internet.

The development of electronic documentation is a rapidly growing area. According to Harnad, the peer-review process is not a function of the media (paper vs. online) in which a scholarly product is disseminated; it is a function of the type of refereeing that the product goes through before it is disseminated. An online document, properly reviewed, gains in relevance of information because of its timeliness. New forms of communication are emerging, such as E-mail discussions in doctoral seminars. Similarly, online discourse about a research project (known as "scholarly skywriting") such as AERA's VIRTCON III online conference allow the entire global community to review a document so that authors can make revisions before submitting their work to a journal. These online discourses lead to new research problems as users communicate with distant, unseen, peers.

With the current popularity of the World Wide Web, authors are faced with new problems because of the hypertext/hypermedia nature of the publication. New designs in computer-mediated communication - WWW or otherwise - must be based upon principles of message design, typography, and cognitively situating the user within the document.

Critical components of computer-mediated communication are:

• Message design, especially for hypertext and hypermedia
• Virtual classrooms and dynamic learning communities
• New designs for CMC
• CMC to support traditional classrooms
• Analysis and evaluation of CMC tools and environments
• Computer-supported cooperative work
• Electronic publishing
• "Scholarly skywriting" and the peer-review process for online documents
• Information access, retrieval, and dissemination

While at UCD, I have developed online tutorials to support the work of the Internet Task Force in scaffolding new users, as well as mentoring and coaching many new users online. I have built the Scholarly Publications section of the School of Education Home Page. I have participated in an AECT panel on electronic publishing. At RMC Research, I have evaluated two programs ( Creating Connections and BVIP) that have attempted to integrate both the CMC and the research features of e-mail and the Web into the classroom. I have also explored the field of performance support and electronic performance support systems as an alternative to training and traditional classroom instruction.

I have borrowed Pea's and Mezirow's transformative concepts because I feel that instuction is a two-way process, which involves learning and change by the teacher as well as the taught. In a transformative environment, there is a mix of teaching and learning activities. I combine "transformative" with "instructional" for two reasons:

1. even constructivists have an instructional agenda
2. the ID field has a well-understood literature base which I may draw upon.

One of the key problems associated with transformative instructional design is the non-traditional role of the teacher, especially in cases where students are participating in online collaborative activities, doing online research, and gaining expertise beyond classroom walls. Often, this comes as a threat to teachers, who must then transform their instructional strategies, modes of thinking, and begin to share roles with students as peer learners, rather than as teacher-and-taught. This greatly influences technology adoption and diffusion, as I have discovered in my research with three large-scale educational telecommunications projects.

Critical components of transformative instructional design are:

• Tools and resources for learning
• Adoption and diffusion of technology
• Learning processes
• Needs of adult learners
• Participatory design
• User-centered design
• Web-based instruction

I have written three papers on adoption and diffusion of technology. In particular, my paper for the 1998 AECT panel, The Development of an Integrated Technology Adoption and Diffusion Model, integrates the learning processes of teachers and students alike with the adoption-decision of new teacher-trainees. In the evaluation of the BVIP, I found that participatory design contributed greatly to the success of the peer trainer-of-trainers model used in the project. In my most recent proposal, I suggested that Caddo Parish, Louisiana, use a similar approach. My current research efforts with the TSS e-mail survey explore the connection between the affective and cognitive needs of our graduate students, faculty, and staff, and a set of potential and actual aids and supports that can be provided by the division and the Internet Task Force.

Back to Home Page