3. TECFA's Campus project: structure and collaboration
Overall Design
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Spacial metaphor
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Zones = courses
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buildings = main activities
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rooms = sub activities
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Featuring a growing amount of structured learning/teaching activities
3.1 Our growing activity collection
Features (each has some)
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Sharing
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Project monitoring
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Construction
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Discussion & argument
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Information classification
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Navigation tool construction
3.2 Zone Example: Educational software course
Main buildings (activities):
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Argue & Graph
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Mister QCM
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Design Studio
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Concept Factory
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A building for each activity
(teaching/learning)
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Each building:
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sets up various tasks with special tools
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contains the necessary information
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features collaboration
3.4 Information Space
Motivation:
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Better support for less structured scenarios ...
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Resource-based teaching implies support with documentation
Details:
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An RDF-type of database
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Various interfaces (queries, graphical networks, etc.)
..... No details (sorry)
3.5 XML Grammars for project support
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Grammars are central to understanding and doing
XML = grammar + content
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XML will add structure to web contents
(and much more ... censored in this talk)
Simple use of XML
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Write a grammar (schema, DTD)
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students use it to write something
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Give feedback, organize discussions for different phases
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Server-side programs can extract and combine information
Tools for simple XML authoring (1999)
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exist, but are either expensive or not totally usable
Example: Project Management
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Students do a feasibility study
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Feed back:
Teacher fills in slots with comments
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Students write the specification
Teacher adds comments
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.....
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.....
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.......
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Technical note for display:
best current solution is XSLT (translate to HTML)
Summary:
A lot of structured activities:
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Students do something
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using tools and resources
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Results are collected
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Debriefing, synthesis, feedback
mostly work flow tools
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Tasks are often pseudo tasks,
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phases are sometimes repetitive,
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most are collaborative or "collective",
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collaboration is structured,
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teacher can monitor, add, help, edit ...
A word of caution
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Some student projects/exercises will remain "open"
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We have to avoid the "video game effect"
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We must plan the mastering of the content, not of the tool
We have more ...
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some ideas are spreading (medical school, social sciences)
D.K.S.