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Использование компьютерных технологий для создания проектов различной тематики при обучении иностранному языку: за и против
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Типология упражнений, направленных на обучение межкультурной коммуникации

(на материале научно-педагогической печати ФРГ)

Данная статья посвящена рассмотрению типологии упражнений, направленных на обучение межкультурной коммуникации. Приведены примерные задания, обеспечивающие приобретение данной компетенции на занятии по иностранному языку.

Межкультурная коммуникация как учебная цель осуществляется комплексно на занятии по иностранному языку. Вместе с тем существует перечень упражнений и заданий, обеспечивающих непосредственное обучение межкультурной коммуникации, ориентированных на приобретение соответствующих навыков и умений.

Принимая во внимание цели обучения, следует отметить, что данные упражнения направлены на приобретение коммуникативной компетенции в ситуациях межкультурного общения. Некоторые упражнения позволяют добиваться способности восприятия явлений иной культуры, проявления эмпатии и толерантности по отношению к ней. Причем обучаемый настраивается изначально на межкультурный подход и как следствие на смену перспективы восприятия.

Часть упражнений и заданий нацелена на достижение когнитивных целей обучения, т.е. на получение социокультурного и лингвокультурного знаний относительно изучаемого языка, а также для осознания знаний, касающихся собственной культуры.

Различают также упражнения и задания, преследующие практическую цель в изучении особенностей той или иной культуры. Адекватное поведение в рамках межкультурной ситуации обусловлено приобретением и расширением знания о культуре народа – носителя изучаемого языка на основе выявления особенностей исходной и иной культур путем сравнения их параметров.

Наиболее удачная попытка типологии упражнений для формирования межкультурной коммуникации у обучаемых на занятии по иностранному языку предпринята немецкими исследователями Хойсерманом и Пипо (1996) Согласно ей различаются:

упражнения, развивающие навыки восприятия;
упражнения, способствуюшие языковой рефлексии;
упражнения, предполагающие сравнение особенностей культур;
упражнения для развития коммуникативной компетенции в межкультурных ситуациях общения.

В отношении первой группы упражнений следует заметить, что многие распространенные задания для занятий по иностранному языку предполагают осознание обучаемым интерпретативного характера процесса восприятия, осмысление перспектив восприятия, исходя из особенностей родной и иной культур.

Примерные упражнения:

ассоциации к картинкам, детальное описание картинок и отрывков из фильмов, чтобы обучаемым дать прочувствовать процессы восприятия и понимания: Что воспринимаю я в первую очередь? Как интерпретирую я видеоряд? В какой степени мои интерпретации связаны с моей культурой?
формирование гипотез к ситуациям, к происходящему действию, изображенному на картинке, чтобы осознать процесс с точки зрения причинно-следственных связей и их обусловленность с культурной составляющей;
описание картинок с учетом трехшаговой методики «воспринять/описать, сформулировать гипотезы, выразить личное впечатление», которая позволяет избавиться от автоматизма в восприятии, когда наблюдающий чаще всего, не отдавая себе отчета, переходит от восприятия к оценке данной культуры;
дискуссии на основе обсуждения историй, рассказов, представляющих разные культуры, чтобы распознать границы собственного опыта и собственного знания.

Говоря о второй группе упражнений, способствующих языковой рефлексии посредством работы с понятиями, следует иметь в виду, что традиционные упражнения по развитию словарного запаса можно использовать для достижения межкультурной компетенции, при этом социокультурная обусловленность коннотативных значений слова становится явным и отрабатываются стратегии по распознанию различий и общего в лексике разных языков. Это создает предпосылки для развития языковой составляющей межкультурной компетенции.

Примерные упражнения:

исследование понятия (Brot), расширенного понятия (Essen und Trinken), чтобы понять коннотативные значения, их связи с другими словами, их разницу, граничащие понятия и т.д. Рекомендуется предварительное описание понятия на родном языке и последующая работа для поиска информации на иностранном языке в Интернете, имеющей отношение к данному понятию;
коллажи из картинок для представления функций и взаимообусловленности понятий не только в языковом плане, но и визуально;
из ассоциограмм к понятию определить слова с наибольшей частотностью, найти объяснение, провести параллели с культурой изучаемого языка;
понятия занести в шкалу или систему координат, чтобы наглядно и четко представлять себе их связи и иерархическую структуру.

Третья группа упражнений предполагает ознакомление с иной культурой и сравнение культур. Наряду с излюбленными вопросами «Как у Вас принято?», «Как у нас?» предлагаются упражнения и задания, дающие возможность, сопоставить «свое» и «чужое». Основой для сравнения культур является раскрытие и описание процессов мышления, коммуникации и поведения представителей обеих культур, обусловленных спецификой данной культуры.

Примерные упражнения:

литературный текст как путеводитель по культуре народа;
анализ культурных ценностей на основе рекламных роликов;
анализ пословиц и поговорок в языке родной и иной культур (есть ли аналогичные, или противоположные по смыслу);
сравнение культур на основе концепций пространства и времени, аспектов быта посредством миниопросов среди представителей данной культуры либо поиск информации в Интернете;
ситуации, в которых обучаемые должны сделать выбор из ряда возможных в пользу приемлемого для данной культуры поведения;
рассмотрение моделей поведения на примере фильмов или художественной литературы (например, сцены приветствия в мыльных операх).
сбор и обсуждение выражений, которые чаще всего могут вызвать недоразумение в межкультурном общении, например How are jou?

Четвертая группа упражнений предполагает, как уже было сказано выше, развитие коммуникативной компетенции в межкультурных ситуациях обучения.

Примерные упражнения:

упражнения из театральной педагогики и ролевые игры, которые в игровой форме позволяют осознать подтекст речевого действия. Они в первую очередь обращены к эмоциональной сфере обучаемых и облегчают полное вхождение в новую роль и связанную с этим смену перспективы. Кроме того, раскрываются и закрепляются невербальные средства коммуникации;
игры-симуляции, обеспечивающие погружение обучаемого в иноязычный контекст, напр., международные переговоры;
этнографические проекты, проводимые в среде культуры изучаемого языка, либо в местах, где собраны представители разных культур, напр., аэропорты, туристические центры (можно предложить носителям языка взять на себя функции информанта);
ведение дружеской переписки посредством разных средств связи (письма, электронная почта, факс и т.д.)

Список литературы

Bachman, S. / Gerold, S. / Wessling,G.(1996/\), „Aufgaben - und Übungstypologie zum interkulturellen Lernen mit Beispielen aus Sichtwechsel- neu“, in: Zielsprache Deutsch 27 (2), 77-91.
Häussermann, U. / Piepho, H..-E. (1996), Aufgaben – Handbuch Deutsch als Fremdsprache. Abriss einer Aufgaben- und Übungstypologie, München.
Richter, R. (1987), „Interkulturelles Lernen im DaF-Unterricht am Beispiel von „Sichtwechsel neu“, in: Deutsch als Fremdsprache 11 (1), 45-51.

раздел 4. Использование информационных технологий в иноязычном обучении в средней школе

Мальчикова А. Н.

Внедрение информационных технологий в процесс обучения иностранному языку.

Глобальный социальный процесс, информатизация общества, влечет за собой изменения не только в научно-технической составляющей жизни, но и интеллектуализации всех видов человеческой деятельности и создание качественно новой информационной среды социума, что обеспечивает развитие творческого потенциала индивида. Сбор, накопление, обработка, хранение, передача и использование информации является доминирующим видом деятельности в данном процессе, который осуществляется на основе средств микропроцессорной и вычислительной техники, на базе разнообразных средств информационного обмена.

Информатизация образования, как одно из направлений информатизации общества, представляет собой процесс обеспечения сферы образования методологией и практикой разработки и оптимального использования информационных технологий, ориентированных на реализацию психолого-педагогических целей обучения и воспитания.

Традиции, коренные проблемы образования, педагогическую практика затронуты информатизацией образования. В последние годы все активнее поднимается вопрос о внедрении в процесс обучения информационных технологий. Это подразумевает не только новые технические средства, но и новые формы и методы преподавания, новый подход к процессу обучения. Однако целью обучения иностранному языку остается как формирование коммуникативной компетенции учащихся, так и обучение практическому применению иностранного языка.

Как известно, задачами педагога является создание условий для практического овладения иностранным языком; выбор таких методов обучения, которые позволили бы учащимся проявить активность и творчество; активизация познавательной деятельности в процессе обучения иностранному языку. Обучение в сотрудничестве, проектная методика, использование ресурсов сети Интернет помогают реализовать личностно-ориентированный подход в обучении, обеспечивают индивидуализацию и дифференциацию обучения с учетом способностей учащихся, их уровнем сформированности языковых навыков и умений. Применение компьютеров при обучении иностранному языку, разнообразные обучающие и прикладные программы – электронные словари, редакторы текстов, энциклопедические, игровые и другие программы – могут успешно использоваться в целях обучения иностранному языку [1].

Основные существующие на данный момент в киберпространстве технологии, которые можно активно использовать в процессе обучения иностранному языку, переводя их в разряд средств обучения и воспитания, можно разделить на две группы:

средства синхронной коммуникации (synchronous communication tools)
средства асинхронной коммуникации (asynchronous communication tools).

Рассмотрим подробнее средства синхронной коммуникации – это интернет средства, позволяющие общаться в режиме реального времени (чат, видео чат и аудио чат). Примерами таких средств, предоставляющих возможность синхронного общения посредством чата и голосовой связи являются Skype и Yahoo Messenger: ссылка скрыта, ссылка скрыта

Yahoo messenger with voice и Skype дают возможность установить мгновенную голосовую связь с абонентом, находящимся в любой точке земного шара при наличии у него данных программ (либо позвонить на обычный стационарный телефон), или общаться посредством письменного чата. Существует также возможность подключения и использования вебкамеры.

Данные чат платформы, используемые в педагогических целях, открывают новые возможности в преподавании иностранного языка. Используя чат и голосовую связь, можно:

проводить уроки-проекты с учащимися из других стран;

обсуждать темы с гостем-представителем другой страны, являющимся компетентным в той или иной области научного знания;

предлагать кардинально новые, нестандартные задания. Например, для установки первого языкового контакта обучаемого и носителя языка, задав параметры искомого собеседника предложить: «Используя программу, найдите собеседника в такой-то (определяется в зависимости от изучаемого языка и целей преподавателя) стране. Узнайте его имя, интересы, т.п. Расскажите о себе… и т.д.»

функция архивации текста чата позволяет по окончании общения анализировать чатлог (Chatlog) с точки зрения грамматики, лексики, пунктуации, стилистики, речевых ошибок и т.п. и на этой основе выстраивать новые виды заданий.

Несмотря на то, что данные средства Интернет коммуникации появились сравнительно недавно, в мировой практике преподавания английского языка уже накоплен определенный опыт их использования в учебном процессе. Выделяют 5 видов педагогического чата:

чат на свободную тему (free topic chat); основная задача – это практика говорения, аудирования и письма на изучаемом языке;

чат, направленный на решение определенной учебной задачи (collaborative task-oriented chat);

чат-семинар или чат-презентация (academic seminar or presentation chat)

чат, направленный на отработку какого-то определенного материала или действия (practice chat); например, чат-интервью;

оценочный чат (evaluation chat), направленный на контроль и оценку степени усвоения того или иного материала.

Как показала практика иноязычного обучения, интеграция Skype и Yahoo Messenger в учебный процесс позволяет более эффективно решать целый ряд дидактических задач на уроке:

формировать и совершенствовать навыки чтения, непосредственно используя материалы сети разной степени сложности;
совершенствовать навыки аудирования на основе аутентичных звуковых текстов сети Интернет, а также текстов, подготовленных учителем;
совершенствовать умения письменной речи и навыки говорения;
пополнять словарный запас, как активный, так и пассивный, лексикой современного английского языка;
знакомить студентов с культуроведческими реалиями, включающими в себя речевой этикет, особенности речевого поведения различных народов в условиях общения, особенности культуры, традиций страны изучаемого языка;
формировать устойчивую мотивацию иноязычной деятельности учащихся на уроке на основе систематического использования аутентичных материалов и соблюдения принципа связи с жизнью.

Таким образом, интеграция новейших информационных технологий в учебный процесс предоставляет широкие возможности для вступления учащихся в живую коммуникацию с носителем языка в реальном времени и с отсрочкой во времени, активного вовлечения учащихся в языковую среду и преодоления языкового барьера, для творческой активности учащихся, совершенствования коммуникативной и межкультурной компетентностей, мотивации учащихся к изучению иностранного языка и культуры.

Литература:

1. Яценко Ю.С. Интеграция информационно-коммуникационных технологий в процесс обучения иностранным языкам. URL// ссылка скрыта /rspu/science/dissertation_councils/dissertations/avtoref/YatsenkoAvto.pdf

Абышева Н.Ю.

Использование компьютерных технологий для создания проектов различной тематики при обучении иностранному языку: за и против

Компьютер прочно вошел не только в жизнь взрослого человека, но и в школьную жизнь. Большинство преподавателей вместе с учащимися на своих уроках используют различные программы, создают презентации, проекты различной тематики, в том числе и на иностранном языке.

Конечно, чтобы выучить любой предмет, в том числе и иностранный язык, нужно обладать огромным количеством необходимой информации. Обычно такая информация содержится в печатных пособиях, но они не всегда бывают под рукой, а поиск необходимой информации занимает достаточно большого количества времени. В большинстве случаев необходимый материал для создания проекта на иностранном языке не систематизирован и не просто найти информацию для создания проекта.

В этом случае целесообразно использовать возможности компьютера, так как он имеет практически неограниченные возможности:

систематизация нужной учебной информации;
возможность оперативного управления процессом создания проекта;
возможность интенсивной коммуникации;
сохранения и сортировки нужной информации;
подключение к глобальной и локальной сетям и т.п.

При обучении с помощью компьютера соблюдаются и дидактические принципы обучения, без которых невозможно как обучение всем видам речевой деятельности на иностранном языке, так и создания проектов различной тематики: научности, сознательности, доступности (посильности), систематичности и последовательности, прочности усвоения, индивидуализации, наглядности.

Используя эти принципы обучения при создании проектных работ различной тематики на иностранном языке, реализуются следующие аспекты:

оптимизация процесса отбора необходимого учебного материала для нужного проекта;
улучшение способов презентации и организации необходимого учебного материала для создания проекта;
эффективность управления процессом усвоения знаний;
возможность сознательного отбора необходимой информации для создания проекта на иностранном языке;
доступность необходимой информации;
интерактивность взаимодействия компьютера и учащегося;
индивидуальность подхода при создании проектов различной тематики;
учет особенностей и уровня подготовки учащихся по предмету;
адаптивность учебных материалов;
реализация всех видов вербальной и невербальной наглядности.

Но не следует забывать и о качественной и количественной оценке последствий воздействия неоионизирующих электромагнитных излучений на здоровье человека. И в первую очередь это касается школьников. К сожалению, не существует определенных средств как индивидуальной, так и коллективной защиты. Последние исследования подтвердили, что у учащихся за 10 минут работы на компьютере оперативная память снижается в среднем на 20%. Как правило, чтобы создать проект на иностранном языке, приходиться работать на компьютере продолжительное время. Отмечены также и существенные нарушения при изменении активности между левым и правым полушариями: при красном свете у девочек – на 12%, у мальчиков – 15%, при зеленом – соответственно на 6 и 14%.

Установлено, что более 70% работающих с компьютером детей страдают так называемым «компьютерным синдромом». И его причина – необходимость пристально вглядываться в монитор на протяжении длительного времени. Результаты исследований, проведенных в различных странах мира, выявили четкую связь между компьютером и расстройствами зрения. Выяснилось, что учащиеся испытывают чрезвычайные нагрузки на зрительный аппарат, что требует использования специальных очков.

Подключение школ к Интернету и не всегда рациональное использование компьютера на уроках без учета возрастных особенностей учащихся , по мнению доктора философских наук, члена Совета Федерации А.Коробейникова, несет опасность дебилизации детей, это – вторжение в их естественный мир. Различная информация наносит вред психическому здоровью учащихся, вызывает появление фобий, маний, неврозов. Конечно, компьютерная грамотность необходима, но следует рационально использовать необходимый материал, предлагаемый на уроках для учащихся разных возрастных групп, при подготовке и презентации проектов. Только в этом случае исчезнут такие «школьные болезни» ( по Ф.Эрисману), как миопия, нарушения осанки и пр.

раздел 5. Использование информационных технологий в иноязычном обучении в ВУЗе

Murray Turoff

Managing a Large Distance Course Using Webboard

      The paper describes the experience of trying to use Webboard to manage 40-50 active students in a single course which has high pragmatic content and encourages a collaborative approach to education. It presents the methods used to organize the course and both the advantages this CMC (Computer Mediated Communication) system offers and the problems it creates. Finally some proposals are made for the functionality need in CMC systems to make it easier to manage large classes.

INTRODUCTION

The project from which the data and case study presented here is drawn was called “From Virtual Classroom to Virtual University: Institutionalizing Asynchronous Learning Networks (ALN) at NJIT.” Previously (1993-1996), we had produced and evaluated the ALN offering of all of the major courses for undergraduate degrees in Information Systems and Computer Science. Analyses of effectiveness based on these data were presented in a previous paper (Hiltz et. al., 1999). The most important goal of this most recently completed project was to “institutionalize” ALN at NJIT; that is, to provide an infrastructure and set of programs that would be able to continue to function once the six years of financial support and faculty leadership provided by the Sloan Foundation grants ended in December of 1999.

At NJIT we have been employing group communication software to deliver distance education and to augment face to face classes since the early eighties. Our approach has always been oriented to employing collaborative education methods and we have also conducted extensive evaluation studies both of a field trial and an experimental nature. Most of that evaluation effort has produced strong evidence that distance education employing collaborative approaches can produce educational results as good as face to face and in some cases can even produce better results than face to face.

A significant factor in accomplishing this result is the nature of the software that provides the group communication process. For a long time we were able to use EIES (Electronic Information Exchange System) that we build and evolved since 1974 at NJIT. EIES was officially retired the summer of 2000. We now have three separate commercial systems that NJIT faculty may choose from to deliver distance education and/or augment face to face classes. Another significant factor is the facilitation and leadership role of the instructor. Since the ability to carry out that role as part of a group oriented communication process is also tied into the functionality of the system being used we will be explain the exact procedure we used to deliver a course and the constraints placed on the delivery by the software used.

The prior paper on this project described faculty training and motivation, details of course delivery, etc. (Hiltz et.al., 2000). In the following sections, we will look at the characteristics of the ALN students, as they compare to students in on-campus sections of the same set of courses, and at some of the results derived from the post-course questionnaire.

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE STUDENTS

A course survey was administered to students enrolled in ALN sections of courses in the Sloan ALN project. The ALN sections used video tapes (or in a few cases, CD ROMS or web pages) to deliver the “lecture” type material in a course, and Virtual ClassroomÒ on EIES at NJIT (or, towards the end, the WebBoard or Virtual University conferencing systems) to support class discussions and collaborative assignments. “Mixed mode” sections combined ALN with face to face meetings. We also surveyed students in a limited number of “comparison” sections. These were the same courses, taught by the same instructor or set of instructors, taught in traditional on-campus “face-to-face” sections. Instructors in the target sections were requested to hand out the questionnaire at the final exam, if there was one; otherwise, the questionnaire was mailed. For many either there was no on campus final exam, or the instructor did not cooperate in handing out the questionnaire or urging its completion.

Characteristics of the students in ALN distance modes vs. other modes are described in a series of cross tabulation tables which appear in at the end of this paper in the Data Appendix. As in the previous project, it was found that ALN students were significantly more likely than students attending courses offered on campus to be U.S. citizens (69%) and have English as their native language (60%); belong to an ethnic group considered “white” (51%); be distance students (40%) rather than commuters (47%) or resident on campus (13%); be married (40%); have children (29%); work 30 or more hours a week (60%); have their tuition reimbursed (48%); be non-matriculated in a degree program (10%); be female (35%); and be 25 or over (61%).

The relatively low proportions of non-American and non-English language students in ALN courses may be surprising at first glance. However, this is probably an artifact of the different modal student status of foreign vs. U.S. students at NJIT. Almost all of the foreign students live on or near campus, and attend full time; their visa requires that they take at least 12 credits a semester. Many more of the American students are full time workers and part time students, living at some distance from the campus; the categories of students who are most attracted to the convenience of ALN.

The approach that I use to deliver distance courses is to always have a distance section offered together with a face to face section. I utilize the CMC system to put both sections together as one class. In fact, many of the project teams turn out to be a mix of distance students and face to face students.

STRUCTURING A LARGE ALN COURSES

I teach a number of senior and graduate elective courses that can only be offered once a year. It is difficult to exclude students who “need the course to graduate” when the normal course enrollment maximum of 30 is reached. As a result, I often have enrollments of 40 to 60 in a class that ideally would have a maximum of thirty students.

For a long time I was able to use the CMC system that we designed at NJIT (Virtual Classroom on EIES: Electronic Information Exchange System), which had a number of features that were useful for allowing an instructor to handle classes of this size when there was active participation by all the students. Since EIES was scheduled to be retired in August of 2000 after 25 years of usage, I began using a commercial system called WebBoard the past year.

The objective of this discussion is to explain how I can use such a system to manage a very large and active discussion group. There are at least six key aspects of successfully leading large ALN courses. Many of these are predicated on the observation that many upper division and graduate courses have a high degree of pragmatic content, which is particularly true of the courses I teach in Interface Design and Management of Information Systems. These six principles are:

1. Information organization and retrieval: One must carefully structure the activities in a course into different conferences or discussion forums, so that all of the information in one conference pertains to a small number of related topics, and no one conference gets so large that nobody can find anything in it.

2. Synchronization of the class as a whole: Set clear guidelines for what is to be done where and when, and strictly enforce them, to maintain the order that was laid out in the organization of the conferences.

3. Coordination, Collaboration, and Socializing among the members: Motivate, encourage, and facilitate truly active and collaborative interaction among the students. It is also to build up trust and openness in the expression of views. This requires an active and ideally daily presence by the instructor.

4. Sharing of knowledge: Given the usual mix of students with considerable working experience and those without, it is extremely important to have the experienced students try to understand the concepts of the course in terms of their real life experiences and to bring those understandings to the rest of the class. Students then take the pronouncements of the professor far more seriously.

5. Sharing of Learning and feedback: Given the nature of many abstract concepts, the instructor can better perceive if he or she is getting the message across when the students feed back those concepts in their own frames of reference. Also, those representations may be more relevant for understanding by other students than the ones the instructor was using to introduce the conference. This is a form of the Montessori effect.

6. Require participation:Grade students on the quality and timeliness of their contributions (not just for quantity, or going through the motions).
The foundation for being able to handle large ALN classes is certain features in the design of the group communications technology and the interface to the system. I will compare WebBoard features with the features used in the original EIES and point out the improvements needed in most current commercial systems (including WebBoard) to make the task easier and possibly allow extending the size to about a hundred students.

A. A Specific Example: In the spring of 2000 I offered my graduate course in the Management of Information Systems (CIS 679). This is an elective taken by graduate students in the Masters program in IS and in some other areas like Computer Science and Management. It is also required for the Ph.D. students in IS. About half the course focuses on the task of managing software development projects for applications in an organization.

The WebBoard approach is to set up a separate “board” (based upon the bulletin board metaphor) for the course. Within a board the instructor as a manager may set up any number of conferences. Each conference may be of a specific type having certain choices of functions, making its structure different from other conferences. In the old EIES system one could use multiple conferences, but one also could set up at any time in a conference an “activity” which had a unique structure; one of these was the question-answer activity which established a distinct sub-discussion which no one could join until they had given their individual answer. What was common for all these activities, and crucial, was that in EIES, one could get a list of all activities in a conference showing the status of each, including whether the given student had done that activity. While not as complete, one can get in WebBoard a list of all the conferences in the board showing how many items were entered and how many were new.

In WebBoard the manager of the board (i.e. the instructor) can reorder the list of the conferences so those that are no longer active can be put last and those that are new and important to participate in can be put at the head of the list. This provides a useful synchronization cue.

In my use of WebBoard I started the class with the following conferences:

Instructor’s Instructions
General Discussion
Introductions
Questions on Assignments
Questions on Book Chapters
Questions on Lectures
Questions on Readings (i.e. professional papers assigned)
Management Jokes (related to IS)
Cafe and Practice

Instructor’s Instructions used the feature that allows the manager to set up a conference which only designated people can write in. In this case it was the manager or the instructor, but one can have multiple managers or instructors. Clearly this conference is for anything the instructor wants to make sure will not get lost and the students know they need to have carefully read everything in this conference.

This included the links to the material I have on the web for the syllabus and other notes that are in the video tapes or CD versions of the lectures. It includes descriptions of all the assignments and, of course, an explanation of each conference in the initial list and the objectives of that conference. As we will see, the end of the course shows a much larger list of conferences that have been reordered a number of times.

Perhaps the most important instruction I give them is a need to be sure they put things in the right conference and in the right place in a conference. I inform them I will delete anything that is not in the right place and they will have to reenter it. As an instructor one has to be ruthless about this until the students begin to realize the importance of organization to understanding what is going on. The first few times I delete for a student I actually make a copy in a message and send the contents back to the student as well as deleting it. Rarely do they repeat the problem and most students do make use of the practice conference to understand the system.

The second instruction is to be sure to Reply to a root item rather than creating a new one. One of the problems of WebBoard is that you can only create in one frame a single discussion thread. The display of WebBoard has two frames: a list of conferences on the left and the text of what you are looking at on the right. In the left you can click open a conference to the list of root items and see which have developed a discussion thread. If you click on given root item (they call it a message rather than comment) then it displays in the right frame the contents of the root comment and all the replies to any level to that root item. The most common mistake beginning users make is to post their reply as a new root item and at that point all ability to see a given discussion thread in its entirety would disintegrate.

There are some so-called conference systems which only allow you to view one comment at a time, even as part of a discussion thread. Unless a user can see in a single scroll the whole discussion thread, it is impossible to follow a complex discussion (e.g. when you have to do operations to switch from comment to comment as opposed to just an unconscious scroll operation). If users cannot comprehend a complex discussion because of the interface functionality, then it goes without saying that they will NEVER create or have one. Many people using simpler systems probably don’t realize what is missing and this may be part of why they feel the ALN approach will never duplicate the face to face class.

However, WebBoard is far from ideal in that the original EIES allowed one to link together any sequence of items within a conference and thereby allowed one to merge a number of discussion threads as well as collect relevant items from other discussion threads that might be relevant to a different discussion thread. WebBoard could make a tremendous boost in its utility of dealing with complex material by merely allowing one to select multiple items from the left hand outline frame and allowing the opening of multiple threads to select ranges and individual items in this multiplicity. In the long run discussion structures have to allow non linear Hypertext types of topic organization (Turoff, et. al., 1999).

The Introductions conference is where everyone introduces themselves and at least informs the class of their experience in the field, their objective for taking the course and what specific topics they think at this point they are most interested in. After a root item which is the objectives, everyone replies to that root item so that the whole list of introductions can be viewed as one scroll. I put in a background item giving my interest in the topic and an explanation of why I am qualified to teach this topic. This first participatory conference is important in that it helps create a welcoming atmosphere and to establish “swift trust” (Jarvenpaa & Leidner, 1998), so I make every effort to respond to most introductions. The students also know there are assignments where they can work as teams so they realize their introduction is useful for team formation.

For a lot of conferences I point out we need to make every entry after my objective statement a reply to the root so we can get a scroll (and a printout or copy) of the entire conference for use as needed. So even new topics that would normally be conceived of as “root” items must be a reply to the objective comment as the only root item in the conference. This is a good example of how users often have to find a way to work around the mistakes of the designers of software. It is relevant to the course management problem in that it is often a mistake to assume users will do a certain thing in only one way when developing software requirements.

Separating out the questions into different types makes it easier for the students to find if a question has been addressed before asking it. It is much better than dealing with email for individual students. If I get an email I may copy the question into the conference rather than answer the email if I feel it might be asked by another student. WebBoard does have the desirable feature that you can enter comments anonymously so a student who feels their question might be stupid can still enter it. I actively point out they can enter comments anonymously and they should feel free to do so. Sometimes I will take the role of a student and argue with myself (anonymously) to get this started. Many subjects in Management have multiple viewpoints and it often revolves around very detailed considerations that do not appear until these contrasting viewpoints are explored.

I seed the joke conference with a number of items about management, including some Dilbert cartoons. They are told adding to this is not an assignment and not necessary but it can be done anytime they do run across something providing some useful but amusing insights.
The cafe and practice is for anything they want to talk about and general socializing that may have nothing directly to do with the content of the course. It is the online water cooler or coffee break place. It is important to help in getting to know one another and in developing working relationships.

The above set of conferences is stable for one week or until most of my students finally appear. I do put my face to face section of the course together with my online section and they become one course. Some face to face students do not know this is happening until they come to the first day of class and they need to the week to get oriented and up to speed. In the second week the following conferences are added:

Bad Management Examples
Useful Websites
Useful Attachments

The readings for the course include about seven professional papers which are available over the Web by password in PDF format. Also on the server for this course are some classic news articles about major IS management disasters (e.g. Business Week articles). However, if I have any additions to make during the course I use a separate conference for attachments contributed by the students or myself. I also provide about 50 useful websites I have found and invite students to find others and add them to the collection.

The first real assignment in week two is to either come up with an example of bad IS management from their work experience or find one written up in a new source. I ask them to try and hypothesize what was the real cause of this IS disaster in terms of management actions or policy. My objective is to respond to most of these with comments pointing out possible alternative explanations from the one they have expressed and to engage the whole class in a discussion about some of the more significant ones.

In week three, two more conferences are added. Some of the course materials deal with doing numerical (regression) projections on key factors in the IS field such as the cost and performance of hardware and software. I provide a number of good examples and then ask them to find an example of a data projection they can do into the future such as percentage of US population using the WEB. These and associated discussion go into a separate conference and there is no fixed due date on this assignment.

Extrapolation Examples
Nuggets & Turds

The nuggets and turds conference is set up about the same time and it is a voluntary assignment. Any where in the course (lectures, readings, book, etc) that students find something they think provides an outstanding insight or that they feel is just “bullshit,” they can put it in this conference, explaining why they have that view.

During the course I will have them do as teams 3-5 Harvard Case studies taken from the text book. They can do these as teams and they hand in a written copy. However, after the written report is due I start a general discussion on some critical aspect.   This resulted in four additional conferences in Spring 2000:

Internet Securities
VeriFone Discussion
Virtual Organizations
Canadian Airlines Discussion

Only two of these were formal case studies and the other two were focused on some questions for the Ph.D. students and not required for the other students.

In the old EIES system the case study assignments were done using a question and answer activity so that no one could see the discussion answer of another student until they had put in their answer, and then those that had answered could engage in free discussion. In WebBoard I use the approval conference feature, where no entry can be seen by anyone except the manager of the conference until the manager approves it. Therefore I set a due date when all the first answers have to be in and then approve everything and change the conference from approval to a regular one so free discussion can proceed. This is more clumsy than the original EIES version but still more useful than the ordinary conference structure for stimulating independent thought among all the class members.

I also use the approval conference feature for setting up the following conference about a month before the midterm:

Exam Question Assignment

Usually in the first week of this assignment, students are required to come up with an exam question that I could use on the midterm. I commit that I will include at least two student-generated questions on the 10-12 question midterm essay exam. At the end of the first week I approve all the questions so they may be viewed by everyone. I may have done some editing to improve them. Then everyone must find an unanswered question and answer it. Then the person who wrote the question must grade it. I will look on and step in when I feel the grading is wrong. So the whole class will have gone through some 40-60 questions and learned the answers to each before the midterm occurs. I still give the exam but it is almost an anti climax.

We only did two case studies in Spring 2000 because I had the opportunity to have the students evaluate two new pieces of software that were a new type of software and available on the web for a thirty day free trial. This was another team project using an approval conference for everyone to put in their report. This was the Evaluation Process Discussion conference.

While we started with a General Discussion conference, I later added the Development Process Discussion conference. This was part of the second half of the course, where we spend most of the time on the management of the development process, which also necessitated starting a separate specific discussion process. After this discussion I start at the end of the course a last discussion of some highlights of the course, called the Final Discussion conference. In the second half the course the original General Discussion only exists for things that don’t fit elsewhere.

The students also have to find a recent professional paper as “important” as the ones I assigned as readings and review it. First they propose what it is and once they do that no other student can review the same paper. Then when they do the review it becomes a reply to their original root comment for choosing the paper.

They also do a course project which can be done as a team and first they must propose it in terms of an abstract, table of contents and at least three to five very relevant professional papers they have found for the topic. At the end of the course they will actually upload the whole project as an attachment to their executive summary. This results in the following three conferences

Article Reviews
Project Proposals
Final Projects

At the end of the course the conference list was ordered as follows; the number in parentheses is the total number of comments in each conference.

Development Process Discussion (223)
Final Discussion (90)
Final Projects (73)
General Discussion (186)
Instructors Instructions (12)
Bad Management Examples (115)
Evaluation Process (39)
Questions on Book (16)
Questions on Readings (4)
Questions on Lectures (91)
Nuggets & Turds (199)
Extrapolation Example (48)
Internet Securities (9)
VeriFone Discussion (61)
Virtual Organizations (8)
Canadian Airlines Discussion (59)
Article Reviews (102)
Project Proposals (38)
Exam Question Assignment (134)
Useful Websites (50)
Useful Attachments (7)
Management Jokes (37)
Cafe & Practice (100)

  This class ended up with about 40 students completing and lost about 10 along the way from withdrawals. The total of the above was 1,701 comments, about 113 per week and about three per member per week. This was over 100 comments per week that a participant had to read. If they only signed on three times a week this was over 30 comments per sign on. In fact, I suspect most students signed on every day, only occasionally missing a day in the week.

Teams could have their own private conference established in the board and those are not included here. I would roughly guess I received about five to ten private messages a week from students in the course. About half of those I transferred to the conference under anonymity. The true private messages dealt with things like travel plans and advisement. After the supposed “end” of the course, comments kept being added to some of the conferences, which I consider one sign of successfully building a learning community.

Actually about 300 of the comments were mine and the distribution of comments among the students were more logarithmic: 219, 128, 108, 90, 61, 58, 50 39, 36 etc.

The modal participation was in the 25 to 30 range with like an average of two comments a week. While WebBoard does not supply statistics on the size of the comments most comments and particularly assigned discussion comments are fairly long (about a page) and clearly there is much thought that goes into the discussion entries. It is easy to see that students have a lot of concern for what the other students think about what they contribute.

B. Final Observations on Teaching This Course Online

Monitoring, grading and organizing all this material requires daily attention. Certain systems features could decrease the workload. Systems for learning need better statistics that would show things like last date online, how often a person started a root entry and how often he or she replied to other root entries. Perhaps the most serious shortcoming of WebBoard is that even though the board manager has the right to edit another’s entry, there is no information provided in the header that indicates an item has been edited and by whom. There is no alert to the group that an item they may have seen is now changed. In the old EIES system modified items were always delivered again as new. As the instructor I probably had to modify somewhere between 100 and 200 items but could not insure everyone would detect the change even though I usually made a comment in the item as to what changes I had made.

The use of fixed key words would also be a great improvement where the instructor can establish a list of key words that can be used as retrieval keys for individual items. Indicating comments were: questions, answers, opinions, arguments, etc would be very useful and also allow the instructor to better gage what is taking place on a collective bases. The old EIES system allowed free key words for any comment.

How does one obtain a high level of participation? Besides establishing and enforcing a structure that can accommodate it without causing information overload, one also needs to motivate it. Part of this is direct grading: 10% of the course grade was for “required” participation, and 10% was for voluntary participation. But in addition, the students soon realized that participating actively would improve their mastery and grades; for instance, participating in the exam and case study conferences would improve their grade on the examination. Secondly, an active style of “Socratic” dialogue was established and modeled, to encourage not only frequent participation, but also thoughtful, analytic participation. However, there are always a few students new to this type of course who do not see the importance of participation until they realize their grades are not turning out as they had hoped. All of a sudden, after the midterm, they go back and add their comments to all the discussions they previously ignored, even though you explain that this will not count. I now have a policy of turning certain discussions into a read only conference when I feel it the discussion period for that topic should have completed.

The final serious deficiency for the WebBoard software was the inability to download a transcript of everything or of the items generated in some date range so that the student might have a file on their personal computer they can review. They do have the feature for requesting that each new entry be sent individually as a message to the user, which of course completely destroys any ability to follow the organization of the material. Also at the end of the course a complete transcript is extremely useful for improving the material for the course. With the limitation of only being able to see a single discussion thread, an instructor or student wishing to do this at the end would have to perform at least three to four hundred separate operations of opening each discussion thread, or comment, in each conference, individually and then copy and paste it into to his word processing file on his or her PC.

While WebBoard and other conferences systems, (many of which are even less flexible than WebBoard), are suppose to be general purpose for business use as well as learning, these sorts of limitations show a complete lack of understanding of twenty five or more years of research in Computer Mediated Communications and the needs of groups to deal with complex problems, such as learning, as an effective group process (Hiltz & Turoff, 1993; Turoff & Hiltz, 1995, 1999).

To really be able to carry out the learning methodologies that one would like to apply depends on a great many functional features of thee asynchronous CMC system being utilized. Often the instructor, as user, has to resort to clumsy substitutes in functionality and use them in ways the designers never conceived they would be used. Hopefully there will be a future generation of software that better understands the needs of instructors and the benefits of being able to handle large active collaborative classes.

SUMMARY & CONCLUSION

Overall Student Satisfaction Ratings

Our prior project included only undergraduate courses in Computer Science and Information Systems. This project expanded ALN offerings at NJIT to include other disciplines (Management, Humanities and Social Sciences, and Computer Engineering) and graduate students enrolled in bridge, certificate, and master’s programs. Overall student ratings of their experiences are generally positive, and are very similar to results for the prior study. Thus, we have demonstrated replication and generalizability of the prior findings.

Teaching Large ALN sections

In order to conduct an online class in the range of 40-80 students using the current generation of software systems, the following conditions and practices should be present:

Utilize a large number of separate discussion spaces either as separate conferences or discernible topics within a single conference structure.
Utilize software that allows an instructor to edit and/or delete any contributions by a student so the correct placement of contributions can be enforced by the instructor.
Use software that allows the instructor to determine the status of each student with respect to their activity and when they were last on the system.
Use software where the students doing collaborative projects can have their own private conferences to be able to work on their projects as a group.
Use a mix of sections of a course that will give a distribution of students having relevant experience and those having little or no experience in the given content area of the course.
Provide the students with a guide to the structure you are going to use, and make clear the need to follow content guidelines on the placement of material.
Keep the class in synchronization so that everyone focuses on the same set of activities at the same time.
Encourage the “Montessori” technique, where students help others to minimize the overload on the instructor.
Use collaborative approaches for the class as a whole so that an atmosphere for sharing knowledge is encouraged.

The above recommendations are probably helpful for small classes, too. However, for large online sections, this attention to organization and collaboration are critical success factors.

There is a considerable amount of effort in handling classes which are in essence double the size of what should be a typical face to face or ALN class that handles a considerable amount of pragmatic content. While large lectures may be used for teaching skills they do not work well for teaching pragmatic content. For that the instructor must engage in a two way communication process that allows him or her to determine if the student has interpreted the material within their own frame of reference.

Software functionality—

Software to meet the needs of faculty dealing with large ALN classes could be greatly improved. In the long run it will be a lot easier to handle large classes when the software evolves to offer a number of very relevant functionalities. Certainly a key one is the ability to have discourse structures or conceptual maps as templates for the actual discussion (Turoff et. al. 1999). Besides their use as discussion guides, these discourse structures can be used to assign problems which can be solved by the class as a whole. For example, designing the organizational structure of a large software project could be a class assignment were the proposed alternatives fit in to a discourse structure and ultimately the class votes on disagreements to come up with a class wide solution. This would necessitate the incorporation of both voting and scaling tools for aiding the group to understand their subjective view points.

Once computer based communications are incorporated into the classroom environment, it is possible to tailor the group communication process both around the nature of the group and the nature of the application. What is critical for the learning process is that it must be the instructor that is able to do that tailoring. Putting such functionality in the hands of the user is still a major design challenge for the developers of this technology.

REFERENCES

Centra, John A. Determining Faculty Effectiveness. San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 1979.
Coppola, N., Hiltz, S.R. and Rotter, N. Becoming a virtual professor: Pedagogical changes and ALN. 5th International Conference on Asynchronous Learning Networks, U. of Maryland, October 1999.
Coppola, N., Hiltz, S.R. and Rotter, N. Becoming a Virtual Professor: Pedagogical Roles and ALN. Proceedings of the 34th Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences, IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, CA, (Maui, January 3-6, 2001); in press.
Harasin, L., Hiltz, S. R., Teles, L., Turoff, M., Learning Networks, MIT Press, 1996.
Hiltz, S.R., Benbunan-Fich, R., Coppola, N., Rotter, N., and Turoff, M. Measuring the Importance of Collaborative Learning for the Effectiveness of ALN: A Multi-Measure, Multi-Method Approach. JALN 4, 2 , 2000. , ссылка скрыта.
Hiltz, S. R., and Turoff, M. The Network Nation: Human Communication via Computer, rev. ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993 (Original Edition 1978, Addison Wesley).
Jarvenpaa, S.L., and Leidner, D.E. Communication and Trust in Global Virtual Teams. JCMC (3,4), June 1998. ссылка скрыта.
Jia Shen ,Starr Roxanne Hiltz ,Kung-E Cheng, Yooncheong Cho, and Michael Bieber, Collaborative Examinations for Asynchronous Learning Networks: Evaluation Results. Proceedings of the 34th Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences, IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, CA, (Maui, January 3-6, 2001); in press.
Turoff, M. and Hiltz, S. R. Software design and the future of the Virtual Classroom. J. of Information Technology for Teacher Education, 4, 2 (1995), 197- 215.
Turoff, M. and Hiltz, S. R. Computer-Based Delphi Processes, in M. Adler and E. Ziglio, Gazing into the Oracle: The Delphi method and its application to social policy and public health. London, Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 1995, pp. 56-88.
Turoff, M., Hiltz, S. R., Bieber, M., Rana, A., and Fjermestad, J. Collaborative Discourse Structures in Computer Mediated Group Communications. "Persistent Conversation: Discourse as Document" minitrack in the Digital Documents Track of the Thirty-Second Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-32; IEEE Computer Society, CD ROM), 1999.

Roxanne Hiltz

The Future of Technology-Enhanced Teaching and Learning Initiatives at NJIT

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