A Maiden Voyage of SNS in Distance Learning

December 16, 2001

James Laffey Assistant Professor in the School of Information Science & Learning Technologies at the University of Missouri and Director of the Center for Technology Innovations in Education laffeyj@missouri.edu

In the mid-1980’s when I first went to work at Apple Computer, Inc., I designed, produced and programmed the first interactive videodisc to work with HyperCard. It was used to teach support staff for Apple dealers how to configure SCSI systems. Not too much glamour in the subject matter, but oh so much fun being there at the start of HyperCard. In the year 2001 I can claim to be the first person to teach an entirely online course using Shadow netWorkspace. Perhaps by the end of 2002 more people will know about SNS than can remember HyperCard or videodiscs.

In the summer of 2001 I taught a course about using SNS using SNS. The students were mainly teachers who were both learning about the application and the idea of using networked learning systems. We used SNS1 for that class. In the fall of 2001 I taught a course on interface design using SNS1 to start the class and switching to SNS2 about a third of the way through the class. The interface design course was taught to graduate students in our learning technologies program. Using SNS in its’ preview or beta status had a number of challenges, but also brought substantial rewards. I have learned much from the experience (hopefully so have the students), and I will use this article to describe three issues.

The first issue is that the students, of course, had no experience with SNS. But even worse, many had experience with Blackboard or WebCT. This meant that not only did they have to learn something new, but they had to unlearn something to get there. One of the key points of difficulty was that in their previous use of systems the teacher role was the focus point and the course was the universe. In SNS the student workspace is the focal point and the learning community, of which the course is only a part, is the universe. Only as the course advanced and the students started to see themselves interacting with other students in workgroups, did they start to see that the relationship with the instructor and his guidance was only part of their learning experience. They could then start to see how the course was only part of the community and indeed they could envision taking work from a course they were taking into a course that they were teaching. In retrospect, I think it might be best to have users start working in SNS as a personal workspace and then enter into classes as the need or opportunity arises.

The second issue concerns the learning activities of the students. I relied heavily upon a webquest-type of strategy. The webquest (1) introduces the students to an issue (and since I’m the professor gives my eloquent spin on it), (2) provides a number of links to resources to explore on the web, and (3) challenges the student to make sense of something or apply their new knowledge to solving a problem. I would build my webquests using shadowdoc, ask the students to represent their solutions using a shadowdoc, and place the documents in a workgroup with a small set of student colleagues. The student colleagues would then critique and provide commentary in the student’s document. This last step takes advantage of the feature that any member of a workgroup can edit any document in that workgroup. Because of the online document editor and the collaborative features of workgroups it was relatively easy to have the student representations of their own knowledge be a major teaching tool of the course. The ease of representation and sharing meant that I could require every student to represent and share their work. Much of our use of the discussion board was about what they had learned from each others work. While shadowdocs are still quite limited in their formatting features and have no spell checker, I found the simplicity of writing and editing online to be quite nice rather than using my word processor, uploading a file, seeing a mistake and having to repeat the process.

My third issue relates to the challenge of communicating with online students. SNS2 has a discussion board, chat, email, and express messages. But these tools were not available in SNS1 and chat took awhile for us to get working effectively. When we were working in SNS1 I used the homework notifier and shadowdocs (for organization and content) as the main tools. As the new communication tools came online they provided great facility for interaction, but they also create challenges for communication. Which tool for what information? I know of one extremely able student who rarely participated on the discussion boards because they seemed cluttered and noisy to him compared with direct communication in the intra-shadowdoc method. I’m sure I have much to learn about harnessing the power of these tools for teaching, but one of the first lessons in my next courses will be about the proper role of each medium, and building some consensus about how we will use the tools during the course.

My experiences teaching with Blackboard as well as talking with other instructors about distance learning courses is that there is a heavy dependence on reading materials and the discussion board or chat tool. SNS provides a good environment for getting the students work to be central to the course. Tools like shadowdoc and workgroups make it easy for a student to produce, share, receive feedback, and reflect upon his or her work. As these tools advance and additional tools for representation and sharing are developed, SNS will be a place for active learning in authentic and social contexts.

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