James A. Levin

Building electronic communities: success and failure in computer networking

This paper is about networking failures as well as networking successes. A research strategy for comparing educational activities conducted across electronic networks was employed to examine the critical features of successes as well as failures in designing electronic communities. The analysis provides a set of guidelines for those who plan to use telecommunications as a tool for creating global communities.

Educational Technology: Media for Inquiry, Communication, Construction, and Expression

We describe a new way of classifying uses of educational technologies, based on a four-part division suggested years ago by John Dewey: inquiry, communication, construction, and expression. This taxonomy is compared to previous taxonomies of educational technologies, and is found to cover a wider range of uses, including many of the cutting-edge uses of educational technologies. We have tested the utility of this taxonomy by using it to classify a set of “advanced applications” of educational technologies supported by the National Science Foundation, and we use the taxonomy to point to new potential uses of technologies to support learning.

Real and non‐real time interaction: Unraveling multiple threads of discourse∗

Recent analyses of discourse have focused on recurring sequential structures. An examination of discourse in different communication media has shown that strict sequentially is not universal. Instead, discourse in some media is structured with “multiple threads.” The significant property of the media producing this difference in discourse was identified as the temporal delay between turns. Discourse in “non‐real time” media, such as electronic message systems, contain time‐saving devices that produce multiple threads. These differences between media are discussed in light of the relative resource limitation of real time interaction and the data limitation of non‐real time interaction.

REAL EDUCATION IN NON-REAL TIME: THE USE OF ELECTRONIC MESSAGE SYSTEMS FOR INSTRUCTION

Education in different communication media takes place with functional differences that have consequences for the course of instructional interaction. In this paper, we examine instructional interaction among people using a computer-based electronic message system, contrasting it with conventional face-to-face discussion in a college level class. Interaction via the non-real time message system contained multiple “threads of discourse,” a higher proportion of student turns to teacher turns, and other deviations from the “initiation-response-evaluation” sequences usually found in face-to-face classroom interactions. Based on the results of our contrast, we describe ways to organize instruction using electronic message systems to take advantage of new properties and to avoid shortcomings of these new instructional media.

The principal role in data-driven decision making: using case-study data to develop multi-mediator models of educational reform

The expectation that educators will use data in the service of school improvement and planning is a major feature of national and local reform agendas. Prior research has found that the principal plays a critical role in making policymakers’ visions for data use a reality at the school and classroom levels. Most prior studies, however, have not fleshed out how the principal functions as a key agent in influencing other key players in data use. This article will illustrate the actions of the principal, teachers, students, and district personnel through simulation models of principal leadership that we developed based on a case study of a high school implementing this reform. We use these models both as a framework for understanding our findings and as a way to enhance understanding of the processes by which educational reform is co-constructed through the simultaneous mediation of the multiple agents involved in the system.

Education on the Electronic Frontier: Teleapprentices in Globally Distributed Educational Contexts

The instructional media created by microcomputers interconnected by modems to form long-distance networks present some powerful new opportunities for education. While other uses of computers in education have been built on conventional instructional models of classroom interaction, instructional electronic networks facilitate a wider use of apprenticeship education, in which students learn skills and acquire knowledge in contexts similar to those in which they will be used. To investigate these possibilities, we have created an instructional electronic network interconnecting students and teachers in the United States, Mexico, Japan, and Israel. In this paper, we analyze one project conducted in this Inter-Cultural Network. Students tackled a problem in their own community, the problem of the shortage of water. By addressing a problem shared across the different locations, students learned to transfer solutions used elsewhere to their own problems, which is one strategy for dealing with the difficulty people have with transferring knowledge from one domain to another. They also acquired science concepts in an instructional setting that provided dynamic support for the acquisition of problem solving skills. This study raises a challenge to education: that the dominant form of instruction could become “teleapprenticeships.” In this form of instruction, students would participate in globally distributed electronic problem solving networks, jointly tackling problems with other students, with teachers, and with adults outside the school.

Technologies in Contexts: Implications for Teacher Education.

This paper discusses the interaction among school and university contexts, instruction, and individual practice that occurs as telecommunications technology is integrated into teacher education programs. Data from a series of studies of such integration within one university are presented and discussed. A model to guide future research is proposed. ( 2000 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd.

Multiplicity in Learning and Teaching: A Framework for Developing Innovative Online Education.

AbstractWe describe here the power of multiplicity in learning and teaching. Multiplicity decreases efficiency in the short run, but it encourages the development of powerful new learning and teaching environments in the longer term. If multiplicity is embedded in a systematic evaluation framework, then we can learn from comparisons of what worked and what did not. We will show how six types of multiplicity have been useful for developing and implementing an online master of education program. The comparisons of multiple ways of learning and teaching encourage the examination of the instructional goals and resources available and suggest new ways to choose the technology, activities, format, contexts, and evaluation and assessment tools that are most appropriate for these goals and resources. They allow us to determine both formatively and summatively the effects these educational innovations have on learning and teaching.

Teaching Teleapprenticeships: Electronic Network-Based Educational Frameworks for Improving Teacher Education

New technologies can be used to create new educational frameworks for learning that go beyond the standard schooling paradigm. This paper describes research and development efforts to investigate “teleapprenticeships,” interaction frameworks that support learning in the context of remote practice. The studies summarized here have focused on teleapprenticeships embedded in teacher education, exploring a range of different “teaching teleapprenticeships,” in which education students at a wide range of levels have learned to become teachers within the context of teaching practice. Five kinds of teaching teleapprenticeships were studied: question answering and asking, collaborations, student publishing, web-weaving, and project generation and coordination. Different implementations of these frameworks are compared and contrasted to uncover important general features of successful network use, including the need for institutional support for new learner and te acher roles.

Estimation techniques for arithmetic: Everyday math and mathematics instruction

Recent advances in the way that adults perform computation in our society require reconsideration of the assumptions underlying current elementary mathematics instruction. The widespread use of calculators and computers for situations requiring precise calculation removes much of the motivation for teaching the current addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division algorithms. Yet precisely this use of computing technology now puts a premium on the exercise of estimation techniques for verifying the reasonableness of computations. These techniques, especially those that can be used “mentally” (without the use of any external tools), have been used informally for years, but never formalized for instruction. This paper discusses a range of estimation techniques, and presents in detail a series of mental estimation procedures based on the concepts of measurement and real numbers rather than on counting and integers. A set of techniques for teaching these procedures is described. These estimation techniques are evaluated against the multiple functions that elementary mathematics instruction needs to serve.