Indiana University: Program in Instructional Systems Technology

Spring 2001 

Doctoral Seminar on online communties: R695

Potential Projects:

Quest Atlantis

Quest Atlantis is an after-school program that immerses kids in educational tasks as part of an online Role Playing / Adventure game. Specifically, Questers go to after school centers, like the Boys and Girls Clubs, where they can work with others in various 3-D worlds. Each world is centered around a theme, such as Aquatic or Desert exploration. Within each world are various quests for Questers to accomplish. Quests are challenges that might be online or offline, and include things such as these:
  • Declare independence in the game Colonization. Write a history of your country.
  • Explore an aquatic environment in your own neighborhood. Determine the water quality of the environment. Report your results back to the community. Build a model of your area in ActiveWorlds.
  • Inventing a Quest for other people in a city. In this way, the core metaphor of the world is one of questing.

    • While much of the work on a particular challenge requires working at the computer, some of the more advanced challenges require that Questers also do work offline, such as collecting data on community issues (e.g., community bicycle trails, recycling, water quality) that are raised as part of the posed challenges, or creating public service materials for use in schools or the community.

    In addition to the Quest Atlantis Website which provides a common set of curricular challenges, an important focus of the overall concept is to develop and grow Quest Atlantis Centers.  Each Center will be designed so as to support the emergence of a collaborative community.  While housed in different locations (The Boys and Girls Clubs, The Children’s Museum, Educational Resource Centers at neighborhood malls, schools), the central environment of each center is the computer laboratory.  The computer laboratory provides the physical and social space in which the children and pre-service teachers come together to work on Quest Atlantis.  Within the context of each physical center, the project will involve using the Quest Atlantis online structures.  Centers will be designed so as to support the emergence of a face-to-face, collaborative community.  Each center’s laboratory, while having its own contextualized look, will have a set of common participant structures that provide the foundation for the overall experience.  When children join a particular land they become “citizens” of the Center through which they are registered, as well as the Quest Atlantis networked-community more generally.

    While Quest Atlantis users must come to centers to register to participate and to record completed challenges (for security reasons), the power of the local centers is the face-to-face community and the available mentors.  It is here that students will work with other peers and with mentors (pre-service teachers, local staff, and community volunteers).  While initially the pre-service teachers and other community volunteers will serve as Quest Atlantis Assistants, children who work their way through all the lands and reach Atlantis will also have the option of becoming an assistant and helping other children through the challenges.

    Students as Environmental Scientists

    The Students As Environmental Scientists (SAES) project at Indiana University (IU) will facilitate inquiry-based scientific research in middle school classrooms and dramatically improve students’ understanding of the nature of science and scientific inquiry. This goal will be achieved through an ongoing collaboration between the IU School of Education and the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis. The Children’s Museum has identified classrooms in Indiana, Kentucky, Illinois, Ohio, Wisconsin and Michigan that are currently using watershed activities/lessons in their classroom each year and have expressed interest in participating in this project.

    The project will support the development of an online community of students and teachers conducting classroom-based research on local and regional watersheds. Community members will share their experiences and engage in dialogue about their research in local watersheds. This project extends the traditional notion of the Web as a data-sharing tool, and will support sharing entire student research experiences on two levels; the community level and the classroom level.

    At the community level, there will be a series of artifacts and communications that are shared among all members of the community. At the classroom level, members will be able to investigate the experiences and findings of each participating class. It is our intention to structure this section so that someone visiting a classroom can develop a rich appreciation for both the process and the products of each research experience. The associated watershed curriculum will require students to use the experiences and findings of other classrooms and as the basis for their investigations. Students often have a very simplistic and mechanistic view of science.

    Members of this community will engage in authentic science research and begin to view science as a way of making sense of the world. They will have the opportunity to discover the tentative nature of scientific findings and that such findings are only “accepted” after intense scrutiny and discussion by members of the scientific community

    National Inquiry Learning Forum

    The N-ILF will extend our previous work to foster an online community of math and science educators to discuss, reflect, and evolve their inquiry-based teaching practices. This project involves the design and evaluation of the salient features of an electronic knowledge network to support a virtual community of in-service and pre-service mathematics and science teachers sharing, improving, and creating inquiry based pedagogical practices (register or take a tour at: http://ilf.crlt.indiana.edu/).  Founded in our previous research and consistent with our pedagogical commitment, we will be designing the N-ILF around a "visiting the classroom" metaphor, with the belief that teachers need to be full participants in and owners of their virtual space.  The hallmark of this environment is that teachers with a broad range of experience and expertise will come together in a virtual space to observe, discuss, and reflect upon pedagogical theory and practice anchored to actual teaching vignettes.

    Our focus will be to provide a means for teachers to improve their practice while situated in the real world of their current or future classroom.  We envision a community in which teachers can virtually visit each other's classrooms to observe and discuss approaches to teaching mathematics and science topics and to share artifacts. The N-ILF will become a resource to support continuous professional development.  We seek to support a sharing among community members at all stages of skill development — from master teachers to teachers in training.  Even in the case of the more experienced teachers sharing their practice, the goal is not to present a practice to emulate, but rather to provide a vehicle for discussing the practice and advancing the community as well as individual understanding.  Through observation, discussion, and reflection, each participant can find his or her own path to continuous professional growth and development.
     

    Other Suggestions

    In addition to the three projects listed above, you might have some ideas/opportunities to develop an innovative space that other class members would find of interest. If so, please talk with Kurt, Rebecca, or myself on the subject so we can see if it would be an appropriate project.
     
     

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