Overview
Pedagogical story-boarding with a C3MS follows a simple principle. The teacher creates a pedagogical scenario (activity) by defining different phases of the work process. Each phase contains at least an elementary activity which in turn should be supported by a tool (portal or web 2.0 brick). Larger projects can contain several smaller scenarios.
See the Catalog of simple scenarios for some suggestions.
The scenario building bricks are elementary activities, e.g. something like "search on the Internet", "insert a link",
"make a comment", "coedit a text", "vote for something", "enter an item to a glossary". See the Catalog of elementary activities for a list of these.
Supporting software
Any computer-supported activity-based pedagogy needs tools that are different from traditional learning management systems. There are many choices, e.g. to implement scenarios in the spirit of IMS Learning Design one could use a system like LAMS. However, the C3MS approach is a bit a different: There is less emphasizing of story-boarding and activities happen in more open project-oriented atmosphere. Basically, students engage in writing activities in various forms of collaboration (single, group collaborative, class collective) and we need a system that supports this.
The following figure points out the differences between a system needed for simple transmissive e-learning ("learning I" in Baumgartner and Kaltz) and software needed for a project-oriented design ("learning III").
Main-stream e-learning requires that teaching materials are well prepared in advance (by either a teacher or a content expert) and that it is used "as is". Learners usually are supposed to digest this material (repetitively if needed) in a
rather isolated way. The same contents are used over many classes, unless something needs to fixed. Activity-based pedagogies assign a more diverse role ICT and to the document. Learners generally select the documents they need by themselves from a larger choice (which includes the whole Internet). More importantly, they actively participate in the production of documents, some of which can be reused later on. They also should be allowed to annotate documents, i.e. enrich them by their own experience. In more general terms, activity-based teaching needs a computer mainly as a facilitating structure, a thinking, working & communication tool and not as a content transmission device. Accordingly, most student and teacher activities should be supported by computational tools and lead to new "contents". Within this perspective we can see that activities and roles are defined in a collaborative expressive digital media framework
Learning management systems vs. Living document and collaboration systems
A living document and collaboration system can be as simple as a wiki, but a integrated set of several tools may turn out to offer some advantages, i.e. we claim that different kinds of writing and collaboration activities may be better scaffolded by different tools. Environments that integrate various useful tools are portals or webtops, and also some software developed in educational technology research labs. In this context we stick to popular open source or web 2.0 open access software since it is software that is both teacher-enabling (they have control) and "street proven".
Such environments should provide at least the following functionalities:
•• Access to rich information sources (not just stream-lined e-learning blocks) by various means, e.g. browsing, searching by categories or popularity, searching by keywords.
•• Affordable interaction with various types of information contents (including annotation).
• Rich interactions between actors, that are facilitated by awareness mechanisms (who did what, what is new, etc.)
•• Simple integration of these activities through a "place".
Of course these environments can not provide all the tools than can be imagined (e.g. data analysis), but it should be planned that at least the products of activities should be posted on-line, in order to discuss, annotate and reuse them.
Story-boarding with a C3MS
Pedagogical story-boarding with a C3MS follows a simple principle. The teacher creates a pedagogical scenario (activity) by defining different phases of the work process. Each phase contains at least an elementary activity which in turn should be supported by a tool (portal brick). Larger projects can contain several smaller scenarios. The scenario building bricks, i.e. elementary activities are something like "search on the Internet", "insert a link", "make a comment", "coedit a text", "vote for something", "enter an item to a glossary".
Designing courses with the C3MS model
Integration of scenarios and activities
In large project-oriented design, various scenarios need to be integrated. Since neither C3MS nor webtops provide integrated workflow capabilities, the teacher must select one or two special announcement tools in order to "drive" a scenario or a larger project. The easiest solution for scenario management (i.e. setting tasks, describing resources and providing feedback) is to use a News engine, Forums or a Wiki.
Of course, once could imaging that richer integration modules could be programmed. In the SEED project, we actually did develop a few prototype tools.
ePBL is a "Project-Based e-Learning" module and it provides the following functions: (1) Scaffold students during their projects by "forcing" them to fill in their project specification (through an XML grammar); (2) help students write their final article and (3) help teachers monitor easily several projects in parallel and give them feedback on time. We will describe an example course using ePBL later .
pScenario was a prototype tool inspired by Moodle and that allows teachers to assemble scenarios for various pedagogical formats (face-to-face, at distance or mixed) and to associate student activities with other tools. 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 tool) 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. Finally, the CRAFT laboratory at EPFL developed a project management tool that allows a teacher to run larger project-based courses.
See
Since the project ran out in 2004 and we lack resources, these modules haven't been further developed. It's the common story of edutech projects. Therefore, we suggest to teachers to use the News Engine or a blog to drive scenarios. An other alternative is to look at recent (2007) developments like CeLS and LAMS that are activity-based pedagogical workflow engines. IMS Learning Design engines, once implemented also are of interest to teachers who whish to work with a formalized environment that supports workflows.
The TECFA SEED Catalog
Since both C3MS portalware and modern webtops have a modular and an extensible architecture, they can be adapted/combined/ configured to many specific usage scenarios. Our hope was to create some sort of educational modules economy with the PostNuke platform. The next figure shows the model of such a "scenarios and portal modules" economy. It did not happen in education, i.e. not many new specifically educational modules came to existence. However, since we only came up with the idea in 2001, it is too early to call the idea a failure. Innovation usually takes longer and other initiatives like the educational user community for Drupal may have more success. On the other hand, creative educational repurposing of all sorts of Internet technology (including portals and web 2.0 tools) did and does happen. Creative teachers use any software that helps them teaching, and Daniel K. Schneider often has the impression that tools not made for education are popular than the ones made for education and for various reasons we will not develop here.
By "modules economy" we mean that a teacher installs some portalware (not too difficult) or a sharable webtops (easy) and that he expands this environment by adding modules in order to support various teaching scenarios.
Below is figure dated 2003.
Portal configuration and modules economy
Now compare this diagram with Michele Martin [3]'s diagram of her personal learning environment.
Michele Martin's PLE
What she did for herself could inspire a teacher:
•• He could have his private environment (webtop page) or individual tools
•• An environment share with a class (webtop page) or individual tools
•• Have students create their individual, group or class environments that are shared with the teacher
•• Encourage students to create their own private space.
The whole thing then would be a networked C3MS from his teaching perspective, but with the additional benefit that learners may have their own personal environments and that they could customize their productions as learning e-portfolios. “With the increase of teachers using blogs and wikis, and students networking and utilizing online tools, the demand for easier and more efficient ways of learning is on the rise.” Brian Benzinger [4], retrieved 19:15, 1 June 2007 (MEST)).
I made a little mockup with pageflakes to demonstrate the principle.