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| Fabien Girardin | My Projects |
pScenario is a pedagogical scenario tool for PostNuke inspired by the Moodle pedagogical platform.
Today exists an increasing interest for so-called "active" and "rich"
pedagogies that originate in various socio-constructivist schools of thought.
All of them feature authentic and rich contexts, rich student activities, a
certain amount of collaborative work and ample opportunities for informal collective
exchange. The efforts to make these "new pedagogies" effective require
the use of structured scenarios where the teacher has to fulfill a triple role
of facilitator, manager and "orchestrator". A pedagogical scenario
(also called a "story-board") is a sequence of phases within which
students have tasks to do and specific roles to play. However, unlike movie
scripts, there is room for improvisation and exploration and learners are encouraged
to take more responsibility for their own learning activities and processes.
At TECFA, we believe that there are new opportunities for rich and active pedagogical scenarios. Community, Content and Collaboration Management Systems (C3MS) like PostNuke present functionalities that teachers are keen to have, like news/comments, forums, simple CMSs, wikis and others. These tools offer support for the accumulation, organization and display of contents as well as many forms of user interaction. This allows to create rich pedagogical "workflow" scenarios. In addition, a well configured C3MS portal is a community engine that transforms a pure work tool into a collective and collaborative "place" that boosts class dynamics. In our opinion, a pedagogical portal should have a "clear focus" but "fuzzy edges" (Rieber 2001)
pScenario is a tool that allows teachers to define complete and rich scenarios for various pedagogical formats (face-to-face, at distance or mixed). We use the term "C3MS brick" for a component that takes care of a specific task, can be easily separated from others, can be configured and administered, can be combined and orchestrated with others and all this through the main portal environment. These building bricks for educational scenarios are described in detail in the "TECFA Seed Catalog" catalog available on our support site. A simple C3MS document brick usually offers insert - categorize - annotate - evaluate - sort - search functionality. Such features define the core of a "living documents" or "knowledge management" system and are essential to support student activities engaged in complex pedagogical scenarios. Intellectual support and exchange is provided via forums, annotations and articles. Besides these predominant and simple tools, more complex applications can be developped for PostNuke. E.g. besides pScenario, our team has developed an "ArgueGraph", a Computer-supported collaborative learning discussion tool, wTool, a pre-management tool, ePBL a pedagogical project management module and vQuiz, a simple quizzing module. Last, but not least, portals also should be designed in the spirit of true virtual environments that have drawn a lot of attention in the last decade. Tools like the a "who is connected box", a shoutbox or a little quotation box can do wonders.
It is up to teacher to clearly identify needed tools and to combine pScenario
with other PostNuke tools (e.g. Wiki, Links Manager, News Engine
or special educational tools into a teaching portal. pScenario also could be
used to administer a typical American graduate course that features
readings, short exercises and a term paper. The user community will decide about
the future of PESC and maybe even contribute to its evolution.
Administrator [screenshots]
User [screenshots]
Languages: English, French, and German.
Must have PostNuke 0.723x or higher
View the latest source code in tecfaseed CVS
1. Extract the pScenario archive and drop the content your PostNuke module
directory:
- Windows: Use Winzip (or any other extracting to) to extract pScenario.zip
- Unix: Type 'tar xvfs pScenario.tar.gz' at the prompt
2. From your PostNuke administration go to:
'modules'->'pscenario'->Initialize->Activate
3. Add the module inside a block (e.g. Main menu) by adding a new line that
should look like that:
Title:Pedagogical Scenario
URL:{pscenario}
Decsription:Pedagogical scenario tool
| fg - 02/2003 |