Crossing Boundaries Final

Dimensions

Boundaries exist across a vast number of dimensions. Each of these represents an axis along which there is a boundary condition that defines different groups of people. Dimension may affect ability of communities to collaborate or to use technology effectively.

Technology skills

People approach software products across the full dimension of expertise. Technology savvy students and faculty have profoundly different expectations from technology products. Indeed different communities of scientist have very different skills and expectations. For example, math/cs use only silicon graphics.

Technology support and resources

Communities of science educators vary in the amount of institutional support and financing available for technological solutions to collaboration.

Adopter class

Early and late adopters have different expectations from technology products. They differ in risk taking propensity, need for scaffolding, and possibly communication style.

Age

Young and not-so-young may have different expectations from technology products. Expectations may depend on their historical technology experience, good or bad.

Disabled

People with disabilities may need special affordances to use traditional technology products. Designing for accessibility is critical for this audience.

Power

This is a locus of control boundary. Some faculty are more willing to cede control over problem spaces to the student. Some students are more or less willing to make decisions within technological problem spaces.

Cultural Style

Some communities (some people) may require visual, auditory, graphical or other representation for collaborations to work.

Discipline

Scientific disciplines differ in the ways they analyze data, ask questions and validate answers. Use of technology, platforms, models and visualization media differ significantly. Disciplines differ in communication styles and in ideology about collaboration. For example, emphasis on single authorship vs acceptance of multiauthorship may lead to different technology schema.

Race

Access issues are critical. underrepresented minorities and institutions that serve them predominantly often (but not always) fall on the downside of the digital divide. Students and faculty often have less experience with technology and more fear that technology will displace the mentoring aspects that make MSIs very special places to nurture the development of students.

Gender

Although inroads are being made, women often have less experience with many forms of technology. Younger women, of the video and gaming generation are often more comfortable with use of technology. Nonetheless, differing communication styles, reticence to speak out and to ask for assistance may still require attention to their special needs in every community of science.

Institutional type

Characteristics of institutions set their expectations for their facullty and students. Cultural differences between insitution, belief systems and arraogance often are barriers to working togehter across institutional walls. Building collaboratories that use technology must take into account the need for building trust and collaborative communication. Economic differences also impact what technology can and should be adopted to serve all.

Research tradition

Comparative vs experiemtal research traditions differ in their needs for technology and the types of technology they value. Basic vs applied research tradition, for example, may differ substantively in their need for security devices, signed lab notebooks and authentication.

Community values

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Stories

Duck is an environment for students to explore practice questions. The developer began with the explicit goal of breaking down the false dichotomy among right and wrong answers. Although many faculty begin with the expectation that they should be able to mark items as "right" or "wrong", the challenge of writing unique feedback for each item provides an opportunity for them to be reflective about the nature of the task at hand. This has been effective in transforming the kinds of questions some faculty write, as they realize the questions they're asking are not very interesting.

The PNL collaboratory wanted people at different locations to be able to analyze data collaboratively. Initially, they created data analysis applications that could be operated collaboratively and gave a variety of controls to a teacher, who could allow different users to join in and participate in the analysis. During trials, they found that, although many faculty had demanded a system that could provide control, in fact such systems were too cumbersome. They transitioned to using VNC, which allows people to use the same applications they usually use and which don't control who can do what. Instead, normal social controls appear to be sufficient to enforce polite behavior regarding who is operating the mouse at any given time.

Students using the OWL electronic homework environment described a variety of strategies they used to subvert the "mastery" component, that required students to retake quizzes until they could demonstrate competence at a particular level. One strategy entailed having students in a group collaboratively develop a spreadsheet with the formulas necessary to solve each of the problem types. Students could then simply fill in the values from the quiz and get all of the correct answers to the problems.

Project LearnLink began at Emory to build a community of learners among science students. Based on FirstClass, a collaboarative conferencing system, LearnLink was transmitted from department to department (and even college to college) by students. Because the software permitted students to control their own conferences, to add icons and to set up chats, they were its biggest advocates. Different voices entered the virtual classrrooms. people who never spoke in class often contributed long, thoughtful essays. Science (and soon everything else) exploded, 24-7.

PKAL Project Kaleidoscope is a national alliance of faculty focusing on what works in improving undergraduate science education. From its focus on developing faculty leadership for the 21st Centtury to its focus on building and laboratory design, PKAL has led the discussion of undergraduate science reform. By listening to faculty voices and courting institutional leadership, by insisting on take home action plans, PKAL has created a viable, supported network for reform. Most participants are from liberal arts colleges. Including research 1 instituions offers many boundary challenges.

CUR The Council for Undergraduate Research is an alliance of many liberal arts institutions (primarily), with a common focus of building infrastructure and support for undergraduate research and making it part of the central mission of undergraduate education. Including R1s has presented some real challenges.

BioQUEST The BioQUEST curriculum consortium is a collaboratory of science educators and technology folks. The mission is to reinvent undergraduate biology education through a problem posing, problem solving, and peer persuasion philosophical approach to teaching and learning, using open problem spaces to challenge and entice learners.

Bringing BioQUEST and other open ended simulations to biology departments has required more persistence. In smaller honors classes where the profs were more open to relinquishing control the introductions were easier. The primarily research community were less willling to spend the time to adopt and adapt. They needed scaffolding, examples, and resources as well as assistance to implement exercises. The rewards and incentives of their community made it difficult to interest them in the time investment. Honors students were good vectors for the ideas and introduced a demand into other classes. The development and use of PBL and Cases began to permit entry points for that community. Over time we began to capitalize on the desire of research faculty to attract research students to their labs. By identifying needs ( needs assessment) and then bringing in BioQUEST workshops and other visiting scholars, we began to build interest in the tools. Adapting research tools (Biology WorkBench) was one entry point.

A Biology Workbench lab at UMass Amherst went through multiple generations before TAs and faculty supported it. Initially, each group of students used protein explorer to view a variety of macromolecules, performed a BLAST search on a unique protein, an alignment, a box shade, and colored in amino acids in a PDB file to visualize structure with colors representing identity and concensus, and then present their findings. TAs complained that it was too complicated and required "too much clicking". The activity was redesigned so that students used protein explorer and performed a BLAST search and alignment, but then pasted the alignment into a tool that colored in the amino acids automatically, and then present their findings. TAs complained this was still too complicated. In the final revision, students use protein explorer to compare several different lysozymes, visit consurf to view conservation of sequence with a unique protein, and present findings. Now the TAs and lab coordinator love it.

A development process which has proven particularly successful is for the developer to work one-on-one with an interested faculty member on an idea (either from the faculty member or the developer). Input from potentially interested faculty to ensure that the range of capabilities supported will have broad support and the project is developed to support scalability. The project is developed and tested in a single course, then scaled up and provided as part of the available resources for all faculty in subsequent semesters.

Teaching with Technology Faculty Workshops

Many forms of workshops exist from the 3 hour one technology or one simulation focus to the 9 day marathon BioQUEST immersion. What I have found works is more like a class for faculty 2-3 hours a week for a semester, that is built around each participant working on a new course or new course material. The kicker is helping each other and bringing together folks from different disciplines and schools.

CancerQUEST CancerQUEST began as a project of one faculty member who was besieged with questions about the biology of normal cells and cancer cells by members of his wife’s cancer survivors support group. By engaging undergraduate students in his classes in developing content, animations and materials, he built a website that is a tool for many levels of cancer education. Its many audiences have contributed to the “user-friendly” nature of the site and have extended its uses.

PBL, ICBL and other variants

In these communities the focus is around a pedagogy. Some successfully use technology, some depends on face-face contact and insist of small groups. The continuum of approaches and applications from k-12 to medical schools makes this an interesting set of communities to investigate, asking how they bridged substantive differences and where technology has helped.

PRISM This project unites graduate students in the sciences with high school and middle school teachers to design course materials using technology built around real world authentic problems and cases. although in its infancy it is teaching us many things about borders and bridges across boundaries.

Virtual Sherlock Virtual Sherlock is an interactive tutorial that will allow you to investigate and learn science, develop your analytical skills and improve your problem solving abilities.

Your Goal: To be trained as a forensic chemist. You will need to master the underlying science in enough depth to solve the crime but also to serve as an expert witness. Do I need to remind you that these courtroom sessions can be very intense? In order to accomplish your goals, you will need to learn some new material and revisit some old material. Consult the Goals document regularly for detailed information on what you will need to master. Learning this material is your responsibility.

The Chem

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Other Useful Resources:

Learn Link
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Online Web-Based Learning
Web hosting
Project Kaleidoscope
Virtual Sherlock
Scholarships
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Dissertation Help
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Parameters

There are a variety of parameters in technology design that influence social practices.

Cost: Expensive vs free

Economic issues can be a profound barrier to adoption of technologies.

Tasks: authentic vs contrived

The nature of the task is often critical for inspiring student engagement.

Timelines: linear vs non-linear

Environments can provide more or less scripting (or scaffolding), which can guide novice users along a path through an exercise.

Controls: open vs closed

Technology products can be designed with open or closed approaches to the controls: Minimally, who can set parameters for the environment and gain access to the records.

This can also include the underlying source code. If the code is closed and can't be modified when needed, this can greatly limit the potential applicability of the resource.

Evaluations: student vs faculty

The performance of users in an environment are often evaluated. Who evaluates the performance and the products created can make a big difference.

Incentives: rewards and punishments

Users participate in technology environments for a variety of reasons, many of them extrinsic. The reward structure associated with a technology environment will influence how it is used.

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Lessons

Technology design decisions can result in systems that reify or break down boundaries. Systems that reify boundaries are often invisible to users, like the statement by Marshall McLuhan "I don't know who discovered water, but it wasn't a fish." Factors that contribute to the maintainence of the established order are pervasive and difficulty to identify. Systems that break down boundaries are often contentious and require constant attention because parties invested in the status quo will often be looking for mechanisms to subvert them.

Anonymity and accountability

Issues of Control

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Principles

Creating and building collaborative communities requires real attention to social conventions and cultures of the communities. Benefits of joining the community must exceed costs and effort requires and all community members must win or the collaboration will fade away. For example it is a wonder that anyone joins the kind of science community that stresses competition and emphasizes hierarchies of value of institutional type or disciplinary area.

Established communities whether they be communities of research practice, disciplines, institutional types or student groups have rules written and unwritten, implicit and explicit that guide their practice. The community often has goals and ends. Its members have roles and responsibilites within the community and values that affect and impact the practice of the commmunity. Bringing new members to a community or bridging communities requires identifying and making explicit the rules of practice for each and establishing new rules that allow communication and win-win benefit.

Students are often the optimal vectors of institutional and technological change. When allowed to control the shape of the problem space and the criteria for evaluating the worth of solutions, students develop ownership and work harder to learn and convey and communicate across boundaries.

Authentic problems and problem spaces grab the interest of the student learner and keep the interest of the faculty or facilitator. Sometimes research questions, although authentic in a way are too constrained by disciplinary lenses, methodology and reductionism to fully engage a full suite of learners. Messy, open-ended real world problems, where the learner can grasp threads of their own interest and expertise to contibute to potential solutions may work better.

CrossingBoundaries