Back to Grant ProposalOpen Letter to Sakai
Developers' Community
Published February 10, 2010
Dear Sakai developers community,
We are working on a grant proposal and we need your help in assessing
programming work for this project (also, if we get the grant we might need your
help in finding people who can work on this project). Over
the past 14 years (since 1996, first using Microsoft FrontPage), we have been
working to build and improve upon a
web-based environment which
supports dialogic pedagogy and
its emergent pedagogical ecology in
our classes at the University of Delaware School of Education. This class web
environment has been designed to
support a learning ecology of dialogue. In our pedagogical judgment, we
have found that web platforms designed and
commonly used for education seem to
build monologic educational ecologies, in which class
web discussions focus on replies to
singular topics (like in a FAQ forum), and the pedagogical design emphasizes
instructor control and surveillance of students’ assignments and discussions. In
contrast, we have designed a class web environment that supports a different
educational ecology focusing on the participants’
messy exploration of ideas generated
by the community of learners (this “messiness” embedded in our web design is
deliberate as we do not wish to unilaterally organize or control the responsive
discourse which emerges in the discussion). In
this classroom community of learners, all participants, including the
instructor, have equal rights for defining and negotiating the theme of communal
discourse.
However, we feel that our current web platform
has great technological limitations.
Most importantly, it is built upon our clumsy integration of Microsoft
SharePoint v.1, JavaScript, MSSQL
Server 2000, and MS Access technology
which cannot be easily shared with other instructors outside
of our university. Furthermore, the complexity of our system has rendered it
difficult to support for anyone other than someone well-trained in MSSQL Server
and MS Access database systems, and takes valuable instructor time to maintain
before and throughout the semester.
We are currently working on a grant proposal to develop (among
other things) our dialogic class web environment on the Sakai platform
and would like to ask the Sakai developer community questions regarding the
feasibility of our project, as well as the overall costs and time associated
with the project (e.g., costs for hiring developers, what types of work would be
needed for developers to do, and so forth). Our university, the University of
Delaware, has established Sakai as the platform for its course web environments.
We would like to create a class web
environment that supports dialogic pedagogy on the Sakai platform.
Conceptually, we see a class web
environment supporting dialogic pedagogy as
much more than a “dialogic tool” to
be added to an existing pedagogical framework and structure. It is, we feel, a
radical departure from
existing educational technology and
pedagogy. Although we recognize that
pedagogy and technology provide mutual affordances for each other, we consider
educational philosophy as the guiding principle for the pedagogical and
technological designs for a class web environment.
We do not want to sound arrogant, but in
our view, the design of many existing class web environments is consciously or
unconsciously guided by a conventional monologic educational philosophy based on
“covering curriculum” unilaterally preset by the instructor in advance.
Consequently, in the current
conceptual language used about Sakai, each module is described as a pedagogy-free,
self-contained tool. In contrast our approach is ecological rather than
instrumental. For example, in a party, we wouldn't speak of a room, or a patio
as “a tool” as
much as we would consider it a space. Similarly, we look upon the Class Web
Environment as a learning space with its own ecology instead of a tool.
To better visualize what we have in mind, we have developed a web site with
information about our grant proposal here, https://ematusov.soe.udel.edu/diaped_CWE.
We would also encourage anyone to inform
us about any current grant opportunities and
provide your feedback on any technological challenges we face, criticisms of our
approach, and pedagogical design improvements, and any new exciting
possibilities.
We have created a Demo site of our
class web environment supporting our dialogic pedagogy which
allows interested developers and instructors to visualize this web environment, https://www.web-ed.udel.edu/EDUC259.demo
(when you get to the Demo Website, you are put in the student's role,
which is just the tip of the iceberg of what we have designed for the course).
On this site, please notice these key features:
1) Webtalk: A threaded, asynchronous discussion forum which deliberately has more in common with old NNTP-based newsgroups than currently popular topic-centered FAQ-like designs of many “Web 2.0” discussion forums, wikis and blogs. This design, in our experience, promotes dialogue through the development of a rich threaded network of ideas, in which messages generating RESPONSES are immediately recognizable, and responses to messages can change focus, sometimes 3 or more times in a thread.
2) Progress
Report: A system designed for students to become
responsible for their own progress within the class. Currently providing only
daily updates to students, students can monitor their progress by seeing how
much they OWE the class in terms of work, or how much they have in CREDIT. The
report monitors the students’ meeting of minimum web participation requirements
and any COMPENSATION which they owe or have performed for the class. Students
are expected to do a minimum amount of Webtalk postings and weekly
“mini-projects” in a given period of time (in the demo class, per week). All
compensations are due within 3 weeks to keep students engaged.
3) Miniprojects:
An assignment system which encourages everyone in the class – both instructors
and students – to respond to each other’s posted work. All assignments are
publicly accessible.
4)
E-library:
Unfortunately, due to copyright and privacy concerns we cannot show you the
upper level of our class web environment. The “e-library” has educational
resources that instructors share and collaborate on: databases of miniprojects,
lesson plans, interesting links, videos, readings, surveys, course evaluations,
and so on.
We look forward to your feedback and suggestions
Sincerely,
Eugene Matusov, School of Education, University of Delaware
Mark Smith, School of Education, University of Delaware
Ana Marjanovic-Shane, Chestnut Hill College
Katherine von Duyke, School of Education, University of Delaware
Relevant publications:
Matusov, E., Hayes, R., & Pluta, M. J. (2005). Using a discussion web to develop
an academic community of learners. Educational Technology & Society, 8(2),
16-39. Available at
https://ematusov.soe.udel.edu/vita/Articles/Matusov, Hayes, Pluto, Using webs for
developing community of learners, THEN, 2005.pdf