DD Shift

I am hearing the song “I Never Thought I Could Feel This Way for a Boy” by the Scotland Yard Gospel Choir.

I recently read an article called “CoLeMo: A collaborative learning environment for UML modelling” that investigates an interactive UML teaching environment. I was interested in it because UML is a useful way of developing and representing designs for software. This is an important part of the software development lifecycle, and it could be a very nice tool for the progamme dossier for the IB Computer Science course. While I do not think CoLeMo will be the right tool for my classroom, I would like to reflect on a number of the underlying concepts that are introduced in the article.

The article discussed the the different types of collaborative tools that are out there for software development: tools for source code and entity relationship diagram development. As a part of their research, they developed a “distributed collaborative UML modelling environment, CoLeMo.” (Chin, et. al 233)

The goal of their environment (which I was not successful in finding for download anywhere) had the following goals:

1. develop an environment where students can participate in different locations,
2. develop a learning environment to facilitate collaborative UML modeling,
3. and develop an environment that supports student interactions. (235)

What seemed to be important to the researchers was that students use the environment to learn and practice UML modeling, while at the same time improving their collaborative skills. By improving collaborative skills, they specifically wanted to avoid:

The ‘‘free rider’’ effect arises when one team member just leaves it to the others to complete the team’s task and does not make any contributions. The ‘‘sucker effect’’ erupts when a more active or able member of the team discovers that she/he has been taken for a free ride by other team members. There can be a ‘‘status sensitivity’’ effect, where some team members take charge or have a great influence on the team’s work. These members usually have ample abilities and are very active. Finally, there is the ‘‘ganging up on the task’’ phenomenon. Here the team members collaborate, but only to get the task done as easily and quickly as possible.

To address these issues, they build in two different types of agents into their software: a domain agent and a facilitator agent. They defined these at the following:

1. Domain agent: something to give feedback to a student to show why something is wrong, and
2. Facilitator agent: something to give feedback to student about collaboration. (241)

The program that they developed was an interactive, client-server environment that allowed students to connect and work together to develop UML diagrams. The domain agent was a part of the program that gave feedback when a student would attempt to make an illegal diagram according to the grammar of class diagrams. The facilitator agent attempted to keep track of the amount of participation that a student made and gave encouraging feedback to either participate more or to let others participate.

In the end, the study was only completed with eight total students, and it was mentioned that further study would be needed to determine the effectiveness of this type of environment. But, in the limited feedback that the researchers got from this, it was generally positive.

What I found interesting about this study was the way that they chose to configure their environment and their domain agent. They set up the software so that it would allow students to make mistakes. It would then give the students feedback on why their attempted design would not work. This was preferable over having the software eliminate erroneous design elements from the toolbar. This is often how professional software is configured. This is to help a developer quickly access what he or she needs to get the job done. In terms of instructional software design, I thought that this is an excellent idea. There have been plenty of times when I could have used a piece of software that would give me a clear explanation of why something was wrong rather than simply removing that option all together from the toolbar. In evaluating (or designing) future pieces of software for my classroom, I will look for this feature.

From the collaboration perspective, I am skeptical about the quality of their facilitator agent. I think that it is difficult to program enough AI into a module to determine how effectively a person is participating in a collaborative effort. This, however, could be something that a human could do. Say, for example, you are working as a class on a wiki in Moodle, you could monitor the transactions that are going on at a specific time period that you have deemed “group work time” and then monitor the chats and the postings that different students are making. Then, you could use the chat features or a bulletin board in the same system to provide private or public feedback on collaboration strategies. You could even use Skype as a means of communication if you would prefer to communicate during the collaborative session via voice rather than typing.

I do not see how this would be useful in a setting in my classroom because my students generally have to come physically to class. And, theoretically, the collaborative sessions would be held at this time, so the online chat and/or VOIP would not be necessary. It could be helpful, though, to do these types of sessions intentionally during class so that students have a good model for doing this when they are attempting this type of work at home with their peers as a part of class projects or co-curricular activities. I do think that it is important that they have some sort of facilitation, at least in the beginning, so that they have some idea of how this could work successfully.

In terms of a collaborative, interactive, online learning environment, I think that I would be satisfied with a stripped down version of CoLeMo; one with a strong domain agent and one devoid of a programmatic facilitator agent. To my knowledge, there still is not one out there. If you know of one, please let me know.

Weiqin Chen, Roger Heggernes Pedersen, and Øystein Pettersen (2006). CoLeMo: A colaborative learning environment for UML modelling. Interactive Learning Environments, 14, 3, 233-249.

I am hearing the song “Rubber Ring” by the Smiths.

I read a conference proceeding article by Frederick Jenny about Instructional Technology in Computer Scienc e Education. In the article, Jenny gives an overview of the online tools that he has used in his own computer science classes.

The proceedings are from 2004, and the technology that is discussed is a bit “old”, but the concepts introduced can easily be used in the Web 2.0 arena. Jenny’s article focuses on using the Blackboard system. I will try to translate this into Moodle since this is the LMS that our school is using at the moment. I have picked out the most “relevant” ideas (from my perspective) to discuss in this review.

Students in his class have a personal “Inbox” where they turn in assignments. This is a directory where they can read, write and execute files. Jenny sets this up manually for each student. Students do not have access to other students’ directories in this scenario. I like this, and I really wish that Moodle would provide this sort of thing. You can set up individual assignments, journal entries, etc, but it doesn’t seem like you can set up a general area where students can store their own files for a course in Moodle.

This sort of centralized storage could easily be resolved by having the students start a blog for the course. But, the blog would not be part of the LMS, and it would not be part of the online grading system that is built into Moodle. It seems like this is a feature that needs more investigating for the Moodle developers. I am using a slightly older versionn(1.7x), though. Perhaps they have added this functionality in newer versions. I will have to investigate this.

Additionally, Jenny had his students work together on papers in a wiki-like way. They wrote papers using Frontpage and HTML and uploaded them for viewing and sharing. Naturally, this type of group essay development could be done via a wiki. Moodle does have a wiki feature built in, but I am not a fan of it. From what I have read, the next version of Moodle has a better wiki engine. I will check this out.

One thing that Jenny touches on that I think would be extremely important, especially for a programme dossier for IB Computer Science, is the storage of “before” and “after” work. Since it is easy to use digital means to create and store work, it is easy and extremely important to keep before and after examples of work that a student is doing. A blog or wiki could easily facilitate this. If students use their space to document the progression of their project, then that actually solves some issues for the teacher:

1. it removes any suggestion that the student has plagiarized work,
2. it demonstrates engagement on the part of the student (which counts towards one of the criteria),
3. and it shows how the stages progressed via time stamp which ensures that information gathering is followed by design, design is followed by program build and the build is followed by testing.

For the student, it helps with the following:

1. keeping everything in one place,
2. showing progression and growth over time which can be used as demonstration of scholarly work for university applications,
3. and giving the programme dossier an online, public presence which would make it seem more relevant to the outside world (especially if students got feedback from external sources).

The technology that Jenny presented has generally been superseded with time, but the simple before and after suggestion has sparked a slightly different way of thinking about how to use the tools for the students’ programme dossiers. From this I have two tasks:

1. First Choice: Evaluate whether or not the blog feature in Moodle (or assignment feature) has evolved to support an ongoing project throughout the course of a semester such that a student can track progress over time.
2. Second Choice: Evaluate whether or not there are blog providers out there that would support the same type of thing.

Jenny, Frederick (2004). Instructional Technology in Computer Science Education. Proceedings of the 2004 ASCUE Conference, June 6-10, (pp. 147-150). Surfside Beach: Association of Small Computer Users in Education.