The Journal of Interactive Media in Education (JIME) has been using an innovative collaborative online review process for the past three years. This review process was designed to meet the journal¼s goals of promoting interdisciplinary debate in the international educational media community. In essence, JIME has tried to shift the review process from a closed, solitary monologic process to an open, collaborative dialogic process. The key questions are how well has this goal been met and what are the types of conversations that take place? Are distributed participants aware of each other? Are they talking with each other or about each other? Could JIME call itself a virtual 'community'?
This is a research and analysis project. The JIME review debates have been archived. The project team would need to:The team would work with the JIME editors (Tammy Sumner ‚ CU; Simon Buckingham Shum - The Open University, UK) and possibly with our french partners (Nathalie Bonnardel and Annie Piolat ‚ Universite de Provence). This is a good project for people interested in computer-mediated communication and understanding how such systems can be used to change the organization of work and conversational practices.
There has been a lot of criticism of the jobs the public schools are doing of educating our children. One of the focuses researchers are concentrating on is increasing parent involvement in their own child's education. There are numerous areas where parents can become more involved such as curriculum determination, activity participation, and learning partnerships.
My project concentrates on using the Internet to increase the educational partnership in the parent/child relationship. Presently the most successful technological advance that is being used is a telephone messaging system where the teacher can leave a message and the parent can retrieve it at any time. The power is the flexibility it allows the parent to fit in his/her participation in their child's education into their own busy schedule.
What I want to do is conduct a survey to explore the possibility of having a web site at schools. The web site would have secure log ins where the parent can check on their child's progress via grades and progress reports, download homework assignment help sheets, and have the ability to email teachers. There may be a chat room and bulletin board for the parents to communicate with each other and school officials and a calendar of school of events.
The survey would hopefully shed some light on a number of issues. For example, would parents have security and privacy concerns about having their child's academic information on the Internet? Do parents really believe the most difficult aspect of learning participation is time constraints? Would parents without computers use a library to gain access to their child's academic information?
What happens when a group of people scattered across the nation or the world decide to create a digital library devoted to a disciplinary area? How will they classify their materials? How will they collaboratively decide how to classify their materials? This is an important emerging dilemma as more learned societies and disciplinary groups undertake this process. This raises both technical and social process challenges. One challenge is to understand what are the different "standards" or techniques for representing vocabularies (i.e., thesaurii, metadata, etc.). Another challenge is to devise ways for groups of people to discuss and articulate emerging vocabularies in online forums. These challenges are currently manifesting themselves in the Geoscience Digital Library project, which is a nationwide effort funded by the NSF to create a digital library of educational resources in the geoscience area. This project is being spearheaded by the Program for the Advancement of Geoscience Education at the University Corporation of Atmospheric Research.
There are numerous possible class projects in this broad area. A project of key importance to the GDL consortia is to design a classification scheme for the library¼s educational resources. Such a scheme should take into account the domain vocabulary (geoscience), media types, and educational criteria. The scheme should also be based on existing "standards¼ where it makes sense. This is a great project for anyone interested in understanding emerging metadata standards (such as Dublin Core, RDF, IMS) and for understanding how these standards are or are not used in the major digital library projects. It also involves real design and would be a great addition to anyone¼s resume.
Another related project would be to investigate how an emerging vocabulary could be productively discussed in online forums. This would involve user interface design and prototyping. How could the emerging vocabulary and relationships between terms be visualized and displayed? How could it be annotated and discussed? Could such a discussion forum build on existing systems (i.e., D3E, Gabe¼s annotation system prototype, WebGuide¼s perspective server)?
In our class virtual library we are primarily investigating human classification schemes and the roles, skills, and activities necessary for building and maintaining virtual libraries using such schemes. This project would investigate how our human scheme could be augmented with an automatic harvester. Could we build a web harvester that could reliably åfill in¼ the relevant classification data that we currently åharvest¼ by hand. How does the performance of the system compare with people? This would require design and prototyping skills. Automatically extracting the information will be challenging and will require the investigation of suitable techniques that may have an AI component and may involve working with other digital library projects. Time permitting, this could also get into user interface issues when thinking about how to distinguish between human and automatically classified resources in the library¼s interface.
What are the costs of running an e-journal? Of running a digital library? Where do the largest costs lie and could these costs be eliminated through process redesign or computational support? These are very important and very difficult questions! This is an open-ended and challenging project, which requires the willingness to ask total strangers hard questions, diligent and methodical analysis, and the ability to construct different models and compare across them. A starting point for the project could be a cost analysis of JIME and the articulation of the JIME cost model.