PBLE Development
SCEE Wiki and Ask System
| Graduate Research Assistant |
| Summer 2011 - present |
| Supervisor: Dr. David Jonassen |
Supporting Collaboration In Engineering Education (SCEE) is a grant funded project designed to implement and study use of collaborative wiki systems in Engineering education. The project involves two components: A system of structured wiki activity pages that groups of engineering students use in their collaborative project work; and the Engineering Collaborative Coach (ECC) Ask system that will guide instructors on the effective implementation and use the wiki activity pages.
Ask systems are a means of promoting learner indexing of stories and content where an expert is not immediately available to scaffold knowledge construction (Ferguson, Bareiss, Birnbaum, & Osgood, 1992). Ask systems consist of a hierarchical representation of questions an expert would ask themselves about problems related to a given topic. The questions are implemented as a hypertext menu, linked to answers, which are often in the form of stories that address the desired learning.
My roles in this project are as technical support, system administrator and system designer. In preparation for the project I evaluated several open source and commercial wiki systems for suitability. We determined that the commercial wiki service, PBworks.com, would best serve the project requirements. I set up the PBworks wiki workspaces for the student activity system necessary for two engineering courses (IMSE 3200 and MA 3810); and for the ECC Ask System. I also created utilities that facilitate wiki page management and automate the Ask system menu creation. In addition, I worked with fellow doctoral student, Christopher Larsen, to refine the automatic Ask system generation feature and populate the ECC Ask system page content.
| Result |
MA 3200 Materials Analysis  |
IMSE
3810 Ergonomics  |
ECC Ask System  (live system:  Login with ID: teststudent Password: teststudent) |
Pbworks admin untilites  |
Ferguson, W., Bareiss, R., Birnbaum, L., & Osgood, R. (1992). ASK Systems: An Approach to the Realization of Story-Based Teachers. The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 2(1), 95-134.
Structured Discourse System
| Independent Study |
| Fall 2010 |
| Supervisor: Dr. David Jonassen |
Goal directed and structured instructions are important strategies used to effectively guide student discussion in activities such as argumentation (Nussbaum, 2005). Jonassen and Remidez (2005) created a structured discussion system for an argumentation study on Shadownet, which is no longer available. I recreated and updated their work using the open source discussion forum system, MyBB. MyBB was selected because it offers programming hooks for customization as well as being a full-featured, hierarchically threaded discussion forum system, and has been implemented by large support community of users. Hierarchical discussion forum threading is necessary to direct and capture the structure of discussion reply types necessary for argumentation, for example, where each reply is categorized according to a given argument schema.
My work recreating this system opens a door to a generalized approach to collaborative and structured communications system design of the types we find enabled through discussion forums, argumentation systems, wiki systems, and even concept mapping tools. Underlying all of these is a stored message which may be linked to other messages. The stored linkages between messages are determined by how we want to interpret or represent the relationships between messages, i.e. whether they are replies in a discussion forum or linked ideas in concept map. In the past, systems that support these activities have been proprietary - that is, they have been designed for a single activity and representation, and bound by specific system implementations. We need not reinvent the wheel for each type of activity. By generalizing the underlying storage of messages and links, the outward representation and interactivity can be moved to a semantic layer (XML/HTML) plug-in, to be flexibly re-visualized without altering the underlying implementation. Such a system could be repurposed from a discussion forum activity to a concept mapping activity at the flip of a switch. While my work does not implement multiple visual representations at this time, it is structured to do so.
| Result | |
| structuredForums.org |
Guest access is open -
no log-in necessary Instructions: Click "new thread", or click on an existing thread and reply to explore the hierchical structure of reply types. Click the edit link at the top of any thread to view or edit the applied schema. |
Nussbaum, M. E. (2005). The effect of goal instructions and need for cognition on interactive argumentation. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 30(3), 286-313. doi: 10.1016/j.cedpsych.2004.11.00
Jonassen, D., Remidez, H. (2005). Mapping alternative discourse structures onto computer conferences. Int. J. Knowledge and Learning, Vol. 1, Nos. 1/2, pp.113–12
SBTDC Ask System
| Graduate Research Assistant |
| Fall 2009 - Spring 2010 |
| Supervisor: Dr. David Jonassen |
This development project resulted in an Ask system module plug-in for the LMS, Moodle, designed for my graduate research assistant work contracted through SISLT for the Missouri Small Business Technical Development Centers. The project team was tasked with redesigning the SBTDC course, First Steps to Starting a Business.
The module was a modification of the existing Moodle plug-in, Course Menu, which automatically builds a hierarchical menu of course content pages. Modification was necessary to show only designated Ask pages in the hypertext menu, as well as styling the menu display using the content pages' titles as the respective Ask system question. This approach facilitated the inclusion of new Ask system questions simply by creating a new Moodle content page, and tagging it as type "question" along with adding the page's title. The same strategy for automatic Ask system generation was employed in the SCEE Ask system, noted above.
| Result |
SBTDC Ask System  |
Through my participation in this project, I learned more about instructional systems design and gained experience with project team work. I also interacted with subject matter experts and helped to develop the content pages that constituted the answers to the Ask system questions.
Math Education Problem Based Learning Environment
| Student Project for ISLT 9478 Problem Based Learning Environments |
| Spring 2009 |
| Instructor: Dr. David Jonassen |
Problem Based Learning Environments (PBLE) pull together any number of PBL activities (e.g., case-based reasoning, causal reasoning, analogical reasoning) into an integrated environment that address complex and ill-defined problems presented to students. PBLE incorporate scaffolding of student knowledge in order to progressively build the skills needed to solve the problems presented.
This system was created with teammates, Weichao Chen and Yayun Yang for ISLT 9478. We partnered with a professor in Mathematics Education, Dr. Oscar Chavez, and created a PBLE to address issues pre-service middle school teachers face, such as how to interact with students in ways that foster enthusiasm and positive attitudes toward math.
Flash was chosen as the medium for the PBLE because my teammates were not proficient with Web design technologies, and because Flash afforded a method for integrating highly interactive activities without having to manage separate web pages - the design could be contained in one file.
| Result | |
| Math PBLE |
Log in with any name to explore (system will store your progress file locally). |