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Project Leaders: Dale Musser and James Laffey, Center for Technology Innovations in Education
The ISJS is a network-based software system for supporting new forms of
teaching and learning that emphasize field experiences, inquiry and
reflection. The ISJS has many capabilities, but a good starting point is
to think of it as an electronic tool for keeping and sharing a reflective
journal containing multimedia entries and for real-time and asynchronous
communication and collaboration. The ISJS system utilizes a web-based
client, a server for processing journal system transactions, and a
database system that supports the storage of media objects and index
information. In the Fall 1997 semester, the ISJS will support 600 students
and faculty and is expected to grow to over 1200 users in the next three
years.
Although ISJS can be utilized in a range of learning communities, it has been implemented in the MU College of Education (COE) to support the students who are enrolled in the Undergraduate Teacher Education Program. These students use the tool to chronicle their learning experiences, which extend from the classroom at the University to field experiences (observations, aiding, and student teaching) at partner K-12 schools. The journal editor allows students to create multimedia documents that contain text, images, sounds, URL's, and when network speeds support it, video. These documents illustrate student experiences, capture their thoughts and observations regarding these experiences, and document questions and concerns that the student may have. Once a journal entry has been created, it is submitted via the client to the server for storage within the journal system database. Other members of the journaling community can access the journal entries and respond to them through an append mechanism. Appends, like journal entries, are multimedia documents. ISJS allows the community of students, teachers, and mentors to share experiences and receive expert advice. In the past, students, while engaged in field experiences, were isolated from each other and from their teachers and mentors. ISJS removes that isolation and creates the ability for the members of the community to communicate and collaborate with each other.
In addition to the ability to journal, ISJS provides access to the web, custom information bases, real-time chat, newsgroups, e-mail, and multimedia profiles for each of the journal authors. The journal author profile provides information about an author, access to their web page, and a context for chatting with or e-mailing the author. With a high bandwidth connection the real-time chat function could be developed to support multiple media types such as images, audio, and video.
The user experience is extremely important in the design and operation of ISJS. The system needs to support storage and retrieval of multimedia documents in a timely fashion. A student is encouraged to create media rich journal entries to capture and articulate their experiences. But, network speeds can discourage them from doing so because of data transfer rates. What sets the ISJS software apart from other Internet applications is its support for two-way communication of multimedia information and asynchronous transfer of multiple documents. The multi-threaded nature of both the client and the server connections allows the client to simultaneously upload and download multiple, multi-media documents. This requires a high bandwidth. Experience has shown that real-time communications capabilities, such as those provided by the ISJS chat feature, are useful in bringing groups of learners together to engage in a dialogue to share information and discuss problems and their solutions. The limiting factor in providing media-rich, real-time experiences is the speed of the network connection. As a result, an important component of this work is to investigate the quality improvement of the user experience when working in an unconstrained networking environment.
A collaboration has been formed with Dr. Keith Hall from the Ohio State University who is investigating the use of the Internet as an asynchronous tool for offering courses beyond the campus. ISJS will be one of the tools that his team will explore beginning the Fall 1997. In addition, the opportunity to use ISJS in the OSU teacher education program is being explored. The goal is to eventually provide ISJS to a range of education and research institutions. Given the needs of the system, the first institutions will be those that have access to high speed networks.
As a community of learners, teachers, and mentors engage in the journaling process, they build an information base that can be useful to members of other similar communities. For example, the content of the journal system at MU could be very useful to students in other teacher education programs. A student in the teacher education program at Ohio State could access the MU system to learn what it is like to student teach or aid in a K-12 classroom. The student at Ohio State could converse with a student at MU to gain a deeper, and more personal, understanding of the experience. The problems, solutions, and insights of learning to become a teacher are embedded in the journal entries and their appends in the journal system.
The development of the ISJS software has not only addressed innovations in how technology can be applied to support teaching and learning in new ways, but advances the technologies themselves. These advances address methods of media storage, architectures and protocols utilized by the server, techniques for locating documents and media objects that match user needs and interests, and methods of creating multimedia documents. Improved network speeds will allow the ISJS research efforts to push the limits of what can be delivered to the user and therefore push advances in all of the technologies underlying the development of the Interactive Shared Journal System.
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