AUC Academic Conference 'From Virtual to Reality' The University of Queensland 1996

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Paper Title:

USING COGNITIVE TOOLS IN INTERACTIVE MULTIMEDIA

Presenter:

Barry Harper, University of Wollongong

Authors:

Barry Harper, Associate Professor, John Hedberg, Associate Professor
Robert Wright Project Manager and Robert Corderoy, Instructional Designer
University of Wollongong,

(contact details)

Keywords: Cognition, Multimedia

Faculty area: Education

INTRODUCTION

Introduction of information and telecommunication technology, and specifically computers, into the educative process has been heralded as a panacea for the woes of education. There has been considerable hype about the advantages of the use of technology in education and bodies responsible for the management of education have not been immune to claiming the political mileage that "supplying" technology to schools brings. The technology does offer teachers the opportunity to individualise instruction, place children in open ended student centred investigations, and to shift from their traditional instructor role to mentor and co-learner but the panacea, like past revolutions in education, will go the way of previous technologies unless changes to our schools and the tools provided with computers occur. These changes need to be part of a shift in teachers becoming more disposed to view learning as an active, creative, and socially interactive process and to view knowledge as something children must construct and less like something that can be transferred. Additionally software tools need to be available that supports the learner in construction of this knowledge.

In order to understand how to achieve these goals, the development of an extensive research base of empirical evidence to support the changes that we instigate in learning environments needs to be developed (Bork, 1995)

One of the most extensive longitudinal studies on the effect of the introduction of information technology in classrooms has been carried out under the Apple Classroom of Tomorrow (ACOT) program ( Dwyer, 1995). The ten year research and development collaborative program focused on how teaching and learning change when teachers and students have routine access to technologies. One of the key elements of this program was a belief that technology should be used as a tool for learning and a medium for thinking, collaborating, and communicating. The research showed teaching in ACOT classrooms compared with traditional classrooms involved more project work, more extensive projects, more motivation for the writing process, more group work and cooperative learning, more interdisciplinary activities, more opportunity for students to make choices and a different philosophy of teaching. It also involved less structure, less teacher presentation and the elimination of worksheets.

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In support of these findings, Schofield & Verban (1988) have found that

"The introduction of computers into the classroom changes the teachers' role ..... leading to decreases in teacher-directed activities and a shift from didactic approaches to a constructivist approach"

The role of software in this process has also been examined and Norman (1993) has proposed that the software used in such environments should support the change in teachers views.

"The trick to teaching is to entice and motivate the students' excitement and interest in the topic, and then to give them the proper tools to reflect, to explore, compare, and contrast, to form the proper conceptual structures"

Don Norman's view of software for classrooms has formed the basis of the design goals for Media Fusion,(Bellamy, et al, 1995) The designers of Media Fushion use video to motivate users and then provide data and data analysis tools to allow them the opportunity for deeper reflection on the issues presented in the video.

The overall outcomes of the ACOT program have been summarised by David Dwyer (1995)

.... technology plays a catalytic role in opening the minds of teachers to new ideas about children, learning, and their own role in the education process.

Dwyer also claims that without this form of reflection and subsequent changes in professional practice, the promise of technology will never be realised. This premise supports the criticisms of Bork (1995) and Schank and Cleary (1995) of our current modes of education.

THE POTENTIAL OF INTERACTIVE MULTIMEDIA

Current interactive multimedia technologies have the potential to represent ideas in almost any mediated form, and provided we can generate a comprehensible metaphor for organising our functional options and the underlying knowledge structures, the student can roam through the resources, creating their own meanings and understandings of the phenomena they encounter, ie creating their own form of the learning environment rather than one generated by their teacher or by the package designer. When raising the idea Florin (1990, p30) saw information landscapes, as virtual towns, or intellectual amusement parks. The analogy is quite intriguing and helps us to visualise many abstract concepts within a single metaphor.

This form of representation of information supports students' learning processes advocated by researchers like Schank and Cleary (1995) who have argued strongly for the use of such technology to support students in following their own interests or questions. This rich context has the potential to allow the novice to work with authentic problems and practice.

However, within this context, designers of multimedia learning environments have tended to be narrow in their view of how users will interact with the rich array of multimedia resources once a challenge, in the form of a problem to solve, has been posed. Once the material has been presented to user(s) and they have interacted in the ways envisaged by the instructional designer (and often in new ways not considered by the designer) the user is left to ponder and present their conclusions using more routine presentation technologies, such as pen and paper. Increasingly, users have access to the same multimedia technology but have lacked access to the rich digital media resources embedded in the learning environment. Additionally cognitive tools to support the user have been shown by Jonnasen and others to enhance the learning process and to support the users' investigations. If students are to truly create their own meanings and understandings of the phenomena they encounter, designers need to not only incorporate user tools which will enable them to present their findings using the full array of resources contained in the packages, but also support their investigations with powerful cognitive tools.

The lack of intriguing learning environments embedded in much of the commercial interactive multimedia products currently available cannot be entirely attributed to the lack of understanding of the results of cognitive science research by developers. The challenge for researchers is to not only conceptualise new types of learning environments, but also demonstrate that process so that developers of educational software produce products that support learning in the most effective ways.

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INTERACTIVE MULTIMEDIA AND COGNITIVE TOOLS

Interactive technologies began to be introduced early in the twentieth century to "engage" students in the learning process (Cuban, 1986). As new theoretical views of learning have developed, it has been recognised that learners act as active constructors of knowledge (Duffy and Jonassen, 1992). Within this constructivist framework, which is concerned with the process of how we construct meaning and knowledge in the world as well as with the results of the constructive process, cognitive tools can help us as learners organise, restructure and represent what we know. Jonassen and Reeves (1996) have summarised the foundations of cognitive tools research to this point :

There is some evidence now that cognitive scientists are attempting to narrow the gap between the learning environments portrayed in many commercial interactive multimedia packages and the sorts of learning environments that will truly enhance learning. Schank and Cleary (1995) have described a set of innovative interactive multimedia packages based on their conceptualisation of realistic learning situations and what they describe as learning architectures. These packages illustrate the general lessons of cognitive science research through the design models adopted.

The innovative use of cognitive tools in interactive multimedia learning environments has also been reported by Lajoie and Greer (1995). The package Bio-World (Lajoie, 1993) is an interactive learning environment designed to support the acquisition of scientific reasoning skills in high school students and integrates a variety of cognitive tools to assist in scaffolding scientific reasoning activity. Users of this package are engaged in explicitly justifying hypotheses with evidence; organising, categorising, and rating evidence; and constructing a final summary argument on the topic of bacterial and viral infections. One of the proposed developments for this package incorporates an authoring mode for students to generate new scenarios for their peers to investigate. This enhancement will support the powerful augmentation framework design of the package.

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EXPLORING THE NARDOO AND STUDENT DRIVEN INVESTIGATIONS

With an understanding of the shortcomings of much of the commercially generated learning packages, we sought to combine cognitive scientists ideas of effective student centred learning and problem based learning from information landscapes to form the basis for effective design. Within this context we also sought to incorporate a range of cognitive tools which would support the learner in the active construction of knowledge.

The detail of this design process and the theoretical position has been reported in Hedberg et. al. (1994). The resulting package, Exploring the Nardoo, provides an information landscape of resources based on ecology. The information landscape uses a geographic metaphor which contains a Water Research Centre and a navigable river environment.

It incorporates problems that challenge students to become active participants in the learning process and simulators that allow the user to ask questions and investigate possible answers to those questions. By providing a metaphor relating to the real world, students are encouraged to apply scientific concepts and techniques in new and relevant situations in this ecology-based application. In so doing, the learner is likely to become more interested in developing questions, ideas and hypotheses about the learning experiences encountered. Exploring the Nardoo provides the student with a flexible set of tools made available through a personal digital assistant (PDA), Figure 1, to assist in the investigation process.

The process of using source material within the package in support of an investigation has been facilitated by allowing the user to:

The package also provides to users the ability to record thoughts and impressions 'on-the-fly' whilst examining media stories. This provides the potential for students to reorganise or revise their thoughts to better 'make sense' of what they see and hear. Students are able to document their emerging ideas in support of an investigation or problem solving exercise whilst viewing different media. This provides support in the formulation of new schemata in the process of accommodating the new information.

Figure 1: The Personal Digital Assistant Notebook

The multimedia collection, editing and presentation facilities offered within Exploring the Nardoo are extensive and present a great potential for students to become manipulators of multiple media. New avenues are opened for expression for those who choose to use the facilities within the package. We are aware however, as Schroeder and Kenny (1994) point out "learner's not accustomed to this technique and multimedia facilities will require instruction in its use" before they become proficient with the technique but once accustomed to it the student has a powerful process at their disposal to gather, organise and illustrate their ideas. Support for teachers and students in the use of these features has been be modelled using walk-through movies made available through the help system and also detailed in support notes available in reference books within the package.

SPECIALISED SUPPORT TOOLS FOR EXPLORATION

Exploring the Nardoo contains two specialised tools aimed at providing support at a deeper level for the exploration process, namely, a simulator (containing three interactive simulations) and a presentation guide which, together with support for note taking methods and suggestions on filing of materials, contains a series of genre templates. The three simulations available in Exploring the Nardoo are an algal bloom simulation, a whole catchment level water demand management simulation and a personal, home based water use simulation. Each of these simulations is a powerful exploratory tool, which provides support for the solution to one of the embedded problems by mimicking a 'real world process' which forms an integral part of one of the problems encountered in the Nardoo River Catchment.

Figure 2 A personal water use simulator

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They greatly enrich the 'quality' of the problem solving process for students by providing the student with unhindered access to act and become immersed in a 'real' situated process, manipulating the various causal parameters and testing hypotheses without a 'real' consequence or risk and in a time frame which is convenient to them. (Figure 2). They promote the adoption by the student of the active learner mode and in so doing support the active construction of knowledge by the student during the process of solving a problem.

A necessary skill in problem solving is the ability to collect and manipulate and analyse many different forms of data and then present them in a meaningful and useful way to any of the many different discourse communities. The genre template tool, in the presentation guide, provides a suitable mechanism for the support and development of this skill. The student support for the collection of this data in the form of note taking and the resulting solutions to problems includes modelling of the various styles of discourse used in different communities.

The use of the notebook metaphor can be carried through to the creation of multimedia presentations. The notebook can be used as an organiser for drafting the presentation and should make the transition to a finished multimedia product seamless. Templates such as the genre templates within a notebook can be used as advanced organisers for the learner, especially those with little prior knowledge. The templates also provide a framework for gathering information and stimulating recall of prior knowledge.

By making such templates available and encouraging their use, we are assisting students through a modelled form of outlining. Identifying concepts within their notes that bear some relationship to part of a template structure requires high order thinking skills which

"a) causes focusing on important points, b) helps students gain familiarity with text structure, c) aids retention, d) generates useful alternative texts to supplement materials read, and e) causes active participation in learning " (Bianco and McCormick, 1989 in Schroeder & Kenny, 1994, p966)

The value of this modelling process is not faculty, learning style, level of school, or type of writing dependent.

CONCLUSION

The development of innovative interactive multimedia packages that support student driven exploration and investigation has not been a priority for the multimedia industry. Design models and examples of such products are now being presented by researchers to not only support the research endeavour in this field, but also to support more commercial design of educational products. Exploring the Nardoo is an example of a product which provides a range of cognitive tools in an information landscape to support student investigation. Simulations and support tools which allow multimedia reporting are embedded in the package and are supported by several metacognitive tools for the writing process. These tools not only include details about genre but also scaffolding templates to support the learners. The extent to which problem solving and student centred learning goals are achieved will be investigated and reported upon when the product is released to schools.

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REFERENCES

Bellamy, R.,Grant, W., Cooper, E.,Borovoy, R., and Adams,S, (1995) Media Fusion: A Tool that Supports Learning through Experience, Reflection, and Collaboration, ACOT research publications #19, Research Findings - Media Fusion

Bork, A,(1995) Guest Editorial: Why Has the Computer Failed in Schools and Universities?, Journal of Science Education Research, 4(2), pp 97-102

Corderoy, R.M., Harper, B.M., & Hedberg, J. G., (1993) Simulating Algal Bloom in a Lake: An interactive multimedia implementation. Australian Journal Of Educational Technology. 9(2). Summer: pp.115-129.

Dwyer, David (1995), Learning for the 21st Century: Lessons from Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow, Proceedings of the International Conference on Computers in Education, Ed. Jonnassen,D., and McCalla, G, Singapore; December 5-8. pp1-11

Florin, F. (1990). Information Landscapes. In S. Ambron, & K. Hooper, (Eds). Learning with Interactive Multimedia. Redmond: Microsoft. pp 28-49.

Hedberg, J.G., Harper, B., Brown, C. & Corderoy, R. (1994) Exploring User Interfaces to Improve Learning Outcomes, International Federation for Information Processing Working Group 3.2 Computers at University Level: Interactive Multimedia in University Education: Designing for Change in Teaching and Learning, University of Melbourne, 6th-8th July, pp15-29

Jonassen, D. H., & Reeves, T. C. (1996). Learning with Technology: Using Computers as cognitive tools. In D. H. Jonassen, (Ed.), Handbook of Research on Educational Communications and Technology (pp. 693-719). New York: Macmillan.

Lajoie, Suzanne P., and Greer, Jim E. (1995), Establishing an argumentation environment to foster scientific reasoning with Bio-World, Proceedings of the International Conference on Computers in Education,Ed. Jonnassen, D., and McCalla, G, Singapore; December 5-8. pp89-96

Lajoie, S.P., (1993), Computer environments as cognitive tools for enhancing learning. In S.P. Lajoie and S. Derry (Eds.) , Computeres as Cognitive Tools, pp.261-288., Hillsdale, NJ.,Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Norman, D. (1993) Things That Make Us Smart. Addison-Wesley: Reading, MA.

Schank, Roger C., and Cleary, Chip (1995), Engines for Education, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, New Jersey

Schroeder, E.& Kenny, R., (1994). The Integration of Learning Strategies in Interactive Multimedia Instruction, Paper presented at the AECT National Convention and INCITE'94 International Exposition, Nashville, TN, February 961-979.

Schofield, J. & Verban, D. (1988). Computer Usage in Teaching Mathematics: Issues Which Need Answers. In D. Grouws and T. Cooney (eds.) The Teaching of Mathematics: A Research Agenda (Vol. 1). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Contact Details

Associate Professor Barry Harper,
Faculty of Education,
University of Wollongong,
Wollongong,
Australia, 2500

ph +61 42 213465,
fx +61 42 213892

email: b.harper@uow.edu.au,

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