EduMu

Help Seeking desging: Interactive Environments

At the very beginning, the authors point out some facts:
1. about the evidences:
“…Recent studies report evidence that although effective help-seeking behavior in ILEs is related to better learning outcomes, learners are not using help facilities effectively…”
2. about the goals: from which the 3rd one I will like to focus on … since, in my opinion, is the practical one. Theoretical perspectives and literature can always be reviewed and one will find more and more different/better one; but exactly identifying the reasons for the lack of effective help use, is definitively the link to the practice.

According to the help-seeking process (Nelson-LeGall, 1981):
a) Become aware of the need of help
b) Decide to seek help
c) Identify potential helpers
d) Use strategies to elicit help
e) Evaluate help-seeking episode

The use of it implies: self-regulated learning skills. Personally, I think that Prompts, prior knowledge and personal/psychological facts are not enough to approach the lack of help-seeking effectiveness in ILEs. Even though there are clear differences between H-S in a normal learning environment and ILEs as the authors well described, I consider that the design of both environments is crucial for their effectiveness.

So, I will skip all the “learners’ related factors”, “epistemology” and such things, and would like to focus in the ILEs design, as some approaches determine: combination between the learners and the technology, and therefore the role of an additional help system (Bransford, Brown & Cocking,2000).

Even the system may not know enough about the nature of student’s difficulties to volunteer appropriate help (Anderson, 1993), which is also a big issue to deal with in my perspective, the design of ILEs has to be as rich as possible so things like that could be not avoid but coped or supplied by other tools/ways.

As literature in this paper and in general show, there are plenty of “learning” theories and many different personal/student characteristics and thoughts about cognitive processes and even exactly about “help-seeking behavior” … as the authors propose in future research lines, …more studies are needed to establish under what circumstances a causal connection exists between the provision of (on-demand) help and better learning outcomes… and I put “on-demand” in parenthesis because I would like to take this phrase in general to support my next “hypothesis”.

I definitively agree that “on-demand” help is a good start to deal with the lack of help effectiveness, nevertheless, much more is required. I think that the “systems for providing help” should not be position in the student, it sounds contradictory but it is not; the students are going to be the ones beneficed, but the system will function or will be done based in the better match according to the curriculum, education level and general students characteristics, even also in a “directive” way, so that it still works even if the student is not able to recognize the need of help, or even if the curriculum requires other features from the ILEs.

Moreover, I agree that it would be really nice (thinking in middle-term future findings) that the “help systems” could be even able to DETECT when help behavior is not being well used in ILEs, kind of the “intelligent learning environments” mentioned in the text.

Shortly, regarding the point from Dutke & Reimer (2000) …different types of help may cause different types of help-seeking activities and result in different learning outcomes… I totally agree with that, but still think that in the way that ILEs are more specific-related to all those “differences”, the learning outcome and the help-seeking behavior will be more beneficed.

In the text, the authors specify some “factors” of particular interest (p.35) that, beside others, would be interesting to take into consideration. Briefly they are:
• Context sensitivity
• Cognitive load
• Whether the learner controls the level of help…
• Whether the learner should be able to freely access help or whether should be some kind of cost associated help.
• The value of domain-specific representations.
• The psychological quality of text and multimedia information in help systems.
In general, I also think those factors could be better studied in order to improve the ILEs design and usefulness.

Finally, I would like to review the point coming right after: 5.Design –and learner- related factors interact in their effect on help-seeking and learning. I totally support the idea that “one size fits all” is not the way to do it while designing ILEs. As I have written above, the best would be to match those learners characteristics + learning types + environment + level of education + domain-specific curriculum = “ILEs utopia”.

As closing, I would like to leave open some questions that I also liked very much, expressed as “future research” guidelines by the authors in this paper (which I can not answer my self by now, but I am totally interested in going further with the topic in this direction):
1. How is a given help system used in different context (e.g. laboratory, classroom, home, etc.)?
2. To what extent do specific help-seeking activities in ILEs generalize across increasingly inclusive context (classroom, school, districts, etc.)?
And adding some other thoughts by my own…
3. Could it be a META-ILEs design? (Referring to meta-cognitive skills)
4. If so, how could we use those ILEs? To learn about them? With them? Used/mean as support systems? …

Social networks – building learning communities:

Scardamalia (1996) in his chapter: `Computer Support for Knowledge-Building Communities´ offers a suggestion for how to escape the pattern of reinventing the familiar with educational technology. His/their goal is to create communication systems where the relations between … are immediately related and are natural extensions of school-based activities…
Focusing in ideas for `knowledge-building´ discourse & technology.

The ideas represented in CSILE come from 3 lines of research which are: 1) International learning, 2) the process of expertise and 3) Restructuring schools as knowledge-building communities; taking more into consideration the last point.

They provided and took into consideration several issues about Schools, knowledge-building issues, what makes a community work, etc… in which I won’t go through again, but which I still think are nice references to think about while working on this topic, since those are a meaningful part of the basis.

So I will skip directly to the main point in this chapter (in my opinion): How technology can help reframe classroom discourse to support knowledge-building? … Let’s see the proposal:

 A community data base at the Center of Classroom discourse: mean to be created by the students, which is an interesting element here that serves as an objectification of a group advanced knowledge, but with additional facilities since the students can comment and organize notes into more complex structures. This variation I really think it make sense and makes use of the technology in a way that cannot be done without it; I mean, without the platform, in a normal basis school environment, it would be very difficult to make text from the students available for everybody and even have the possibility to reorganize them into more complex structures that could be also seen from everybody so they can continue commenting and working on them. As the author afterwards points out: “CSILE is designed to frame student’s ideas in ways extensible to the broader knowledge-building community…”

 Focus on problems and deep understanding: from this part I would just mention the fact that CSILE approach is to have students write statements of what they need to understand in order to make conceptual advances… which is something that could be also done without technology, but I still wanted to mention because it a “plus” for this proposal, since the `rules´ for using the technology are also a crucial factor to make the implementation success.

 Decentralized, Open knowledge Building, with a Focus on Collective Knowledge: I really liked that CSILE is designed to support that a) the information flow freely among participants and that 2) knowledge is distributed across students. Also the “asynchronous” discussion that allows any participant to take turns any time. The cultural issue is also an enrichment element for this platform: CSILE offer opportunity for culturally different students to appropriate ideas in their own ways and for their own uses… something that in the present time is necessary.

Skipping some other characteristics of CSILE such as reflection, etc… I will go direct to other one that I found also very interesting and in which technology also plays an important role: “Diverse arrangements for supporting Small-group interchanges” … it means that there is place for a small-group discussion and additionally records are provided in order to bring those discussions into broader audience (Scardamalia, Bereiter, & Lamon,1994). This facility is an example about how to foster knowledge using the technology with learning/knowledge-building basis.

Just as a final though, I will take itself some authors lines with that I strongly agree:
“We don’t want to suggest that the technology by itself can bring about the transformation of a school into a knowledge-building community. We have already evidence that teacher strategies can make a major difference in the extent to which students engage in collaborative knowledge-building community, meeting the specifications set our previously” …
But still CSILE is a very nice proposal to work with those ideas and also make use of technology; this is in my opinion a very good example that we can be able to create something that “really” makes the difference in the schools, taking into consideration the traditional way and trying to mix it the best with the technology boundaries.