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As Michael Hillinger points out in this article, the Internet is used most often as a reference source -- in fact, one might liken much of the Internet to a huge and changing encyclopedia, and it is used in most classrooms much like encyclopedia are used. Yet, capabilities provided by tools Mike describes allow the Internet to be used for applications that incorporate what we know about good instruction. Providing instruction in ways that allow the learning of concepts and facts in addition to their application, and doing so in mediated, incremental steps that relate to a learner’s zone of proximal development, is feasible. Mike presents us with a Web site that demonstrates these features in a context that is appropriate for secondary school and adult learners. His article lets us see how interactive Internet teaching and learning could be applied in many contexts with learners of all ages. I recommend that you move through the Web site that Mike describes. Doing so will provide a context for the discussion and demonstrate clearly the capabilities that are possible through the Internet. If your Web browser does not already have the Shockwave plug-in required to view the site under discussion, you will need to download this first. This can be done quickly and easily by following the instructions at the Macromedia Shockwave Player Download Center. Mike has requested comments and feedback on his article and his work. Please correspond with him directly by e-mail, and also share your views in our Online Communities. Chuck Kinzer |
Thinking Outside the Browser: Experiencing New Approaches to Web-Based Instruction
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The instructional potential of the Web, though vast, is not yet fully realized. As a resource, it links us to millions of pieces of information, expert opinions, and research. But other instructional uses have been slow to materialize, and the Web’s capacity to deliver online, first-person, immersive experiences has been particularly underutilized. Many children and adult “gamers” are familiar with immersive experiences from playing games such as Doom, Quake, or Alien X. In these experiences, the graphics, movement, and objects are presented from the user’s perspective, so that the user feels that he or she has entered a three-dimensional environment. For example, Figure 1 shows a screen from Alien X. In this game, the user moves through a simulated three-dimensional spaceship while encountering and destroying robots. While the violence in some of these experiences is unfortunate, there is no denying the power of immersion. |
Related Postings from the Archives
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What makes these experiences so compelling? As a user, you are fully immersed in the context yet have considerable freedom to move around, gather and use different tools, make decisions, and react to unexpected events. Is there an educational role for this? Several educational products have attempted to take advantage of immersive experiences. For example, products based on research concepts of situated cognition or anchored instruction situate learning within rich contexts (Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989; Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt, 1994). An early version of such products is The Oregon Trail, now in its fourth edition from The Learning Company; other products include The Voyage of the Mimi, published by Sunburst, and the Jasper mathematics program from Lawrence Erlbaum.
At LexIcon Systems, we have created such a learning environment to teach basic skills. The program, called The Office, presents these basic skills within the kind of tasks -- indeed, within the kind of environment (see Figure 2) -- in which they are most naturally found. Instead of moving through an alien spaceship, the user/learner is able to move to different areas around the desk, use the office equipment, plan and make decisions, and react to challenges and crises. While the target audience is the older student, many of the methods and techniques can easily be used for younger readers as well.
This article describes the background and design of The Office. In the spirit of immersion, I invite you to step inside the actual program and experience it for yourself while or after you read this article. As The Office is a work in progress, we welcome your comments and suggestions.
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User Note (To assist your use of the online program, user notes are placed throughout this article, boxed and indented to separate them from the main text.) The Office is a wholly interactive learning experience that runs within your browser. To explore it, go to www.workingsimulations.com/theOffice.html. If you do not already have the Shockwave browser plug-in, begin by clicking on the “Get Shockwave” button to download it. (A sound card and speakers are not required, but will enhance your experience.) Once Shockwave is downloaded and installed, click The Office button and the program will begin to download to your system. On a 56k bps connection, the download will take about 5 minutes. |
Background
The Office was developed with funding from a U.S. Department of Education, Office of Adult and Vocational Education grant. The Department of Education request for proposals for this grant program was created in response to the Secretary’s Commission for the Acquisition of Necessary Skills (SCANS), a series of reports from the U.S. Department of Labor that describe the skills needed for the 21st century workforce. (For more information about SCANS, visit wdr.doleta.gov/SCANS or www.scans.jhu.edu.) In addition to “Foundation Skills,” which include basic literacy and numeracy, SCANS describes higher order “Workplace Competencies,” such as the ability to manage resources, to work amicably and productively with others, to acquire and use information, to master complex systems, and to work with a variety of technologies.
Our project’s goal was to create an instructional program integrating the general SCANS skills with job-specific training objectives. In September 1998, we assembled a diverse group of professionals in adult education, reading instruction, business training, and technology to brainstorm a prototype design. The first iteration of the prototype went live in January 1999, and in the first month was downloaded more than 500 times by clients in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and other countries around the world. As comments and feedback came in, we made changes to the prototype, often completing revisions the same day that suggestions were received. Using this feedback, we began developing the current version, which went live in January 2001.
Defining Our Approach
Almost from its inception, the Web has been a platform for instruction. We wanted to take a fresh look at how the Web could be used and question some of the basic assumptions.
Our development of The Office was guided by three goals. First, the Web is a vast resource of text, graphics, audio, and video information. We wanted to take advantage of this multimedia capacity but also provide a framework that defines specific instructional goals, offers guidance and feedback, and adapts and reacts to the user’s performance. Our goal was an instructionally rich site that was also bounded.
Second, we wanted instruction to be available any time, any place -- that is, we wanted to avoid components that required intervention by an instructor or peer. Our goal was to have feedback, performance tracking, skill assignments, and guidance provided automatically. There is nothing in our approach that precludes instructor-based assistance, but making the program self-contained meant that it would always be available when the student was ready for it and could make the best use of its content.
Finally, we wanted instruction that took full advantage of the emerging capacity of Web-based presentation. Much of distance learning on the Web still relies on extended text components, flat graphics, and multiple-choice questions. The instructional sequence is often very linear, learners move in stepwise fashion from one component to the next. Our goal was to break from these restrictions, to create a space where the learner chooses where to focus his or her attention, receives help when needed, and interacts with the environment at his or her own pace. Indeed, there are few online educational products that provide the level of interactive experience found in our material.
To create such an immersive environment we developed our simulation using Macromedia Director, an authoring tool that makes full use of the computer’s capabilities. Unlike standard HTML (hypertext mark-up language, the tagging system used for creation and display of most Web pages), Director allows development of complex simulations that can then be viewed through a Web browser such as Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator. Viewing a Director-created program requires the Shockwave browser plug-in, available easily and at no cost. The minimal effort required for the user to download the plug-in is repaid by the extraordinary interactivity that it affords. Running through the browser, Shockwave gives the same level of interactivity as found on a CD-ROM product.
Building an Immersive Instructional Environment: Characteristics and Challenges
What are the characteristics of the immersive learning experience offered in The Office?
Developing these characteristics presented us with many design challenges. A description of these challenges, and how we chose to deal with them, may be useful for anyone considering using or developing this kind of instructional material.
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User Note Start the program. Fill in your full name on the blank and click the “next” button that becomes visible. If you want to see an overview, use the “welcome” button to start a tutorial. Otherwise, use the “settings” button to bring you to the control panel. We will use the default settings, so click “start” at the bottom right corner of the control panel. On the opening screen, explore the office space by clicking the “computer/desktop/books” buttons. Return to the desktop and explore the objects on the desk, clicking once on the calculator, in-baskets, pink message sheet, etc. |
Creating a first-person user experience. Instructional material is most effective when the learner is actively engaged by it (Piaget, 1978; Vygotsky, 1978). The Office puts the user in the driver’s seat -- or, in this case, the desk chair -- in a virtual office. In addition to the desktop, there is also a bookshelf and virtual computer available (Figure 3). Buttons can be clicked to “turn” to those areas in virtual space.
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The illusion of being at your desk is maintained by making components on the computer/desktop/bookshelf into active objects. Each object functions in ways that reflect its respective use in the real world: Click the calculator image on the desk and it opens into a working calculator; click the lower in-basket and read the current memo (Figure 4). The books on the shelf open to different text passages, and the icons on the virtual computer lead to working e-mail and spreadsheets.
All information, responses, and feedback are channeled through these objects. Telephone calls come in, memos appear on the desk, e-mail is received, and book sections are referred to as needed for solving work-related problems. E-mail can be responded to or forwarded, memos and book sections have notes attached to them, and telephone dialogues can occur with an embedded dialogue box. In short, we created a complete workplace simulation into which skills can be embedded.
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User Note The default setting queues up two tasks, forwarding e-mail and selecting bids. The first task, forwarding e-mail, will start 60 seconds after you begin the program, and you will be alerted by a message from the guide in the upper-right portion of the screen. Because the default setting is to sequence tasks, the next task (selecting bids) will not start until after the e-mail task has been successfully completed. |
Teaching of skills in combination and in context. Contextualized instruction is a key component of SCANS. In the case of instruction in workplace skills, this means examples must be relevant to an employee’s job. The primary SCANS report, Learning a Living (Secretary’s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills, 1992, online document), emphasizes that teaching should be offered “in context” -- that is, students should learn content while solving realistic problems. “Learning in order to know” should not be separated from “learning in order to do.”
We combined many of the SCANS Foundation Skills and Workplace Competencies into multilevel tasks that simulate likely office activities. Consider, for example, reading and forwarding e-mail. The user receives an e-mail from her or his supervisor, announcing a meeting for that afternoon and asking that the message be forwarded to another person. At level 1, the most basic level, the user has the first and last names of the person who needs to receive the forwarded e-mail and must only scan a one-column list of recipients to find the e-mail address. The program monitors progress, automatically moving the user to the next skill level when she or he completes a given task. At level 2, the user gets the recipient’s first name but is told only that he works in customer service. The task now includes searching the company directory, located on the bookshelf, or scanning the name column to find matches for the first name and then the department column to see if that person is in customer service. At level 3, the user has a first name and the name of that person’s supervisor. It is then necessary to use the company organizational chart to find the employee to whom the e-mail should be forwarded.
Prose, document, and quantitative literacy (Kirsch, Jungeblut, Jenkins, & Kolstad, 1993) are also tapped in task strands that require comparing different bids, interpreting the meaning of memos, and finding information on a completed spreadsheet. Quantitative tasks include reading and interpreting graphs, correcting invoices, and constructing or modifying spreadsheets.
Higher order thinking skills are utilized in several tasks. A customer service activity requires listening and replying appropriately to a customer on the phone (although this is done through text rather than orally) while correcting a data-entry error in his order. In another activity the user must rearrange the priorities on a to-do list based on the relative importance and time sensitivity of items.
Balancing instruction and support. While contextualization is a central component of our design, there is an inherent tension between creating a realistic simulation of the workplace and providing the optimal environment for learning basic skills. As Bransford, Brown, and Cocking (1999, online document) note, one of the challenges in designing learning environments is to strike a balance between activities designed to promote understanding and those designed to promote automaticity of skills. A realistic simulation of a workplace would have many things occurring simultaneously -- telephones ringing, e-mail arriving, tasks piling up. Learners struggling with a skill or being introduced to a new task might benefit from less confusion and more support. Once they achieve a level of automaticity in the skill, they might then benefit from practicing the skill in a realistic context.
One way to balance these needs is to provide a choice in how the skill strands are presented. The “Settings” panel controls the number of skills presented, how often they are presented, and the difficulty level of the presentation (Figure 5). New users, or those who need a more structured experience, might get only a single task strand in a session. As they gain confidence, multiple task strands may appear in a session, but can be sequenced to ensure that a new task is not introduced until the current one is completed.
Those seeking a more challenging and representative workplace experience, can be assigned multiple, overlapping tasks. For example, one might be required to forward e-mail while the phone is ringing and memos are piling up in the in-basket. At this level, the skills of the collective tasks are augmented by the challenge of ordering task priorities and balancing multiple demands in the workplace.
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User Note Return to the settings page. You can now select skills individually or use the automatic assignment slider. Moving the slider farther to the right engages more skills at higher levels; moving the slider from sequence tasks to overlap tasks makes it possible for more than one skill task to be active at a time. To see how a more complex setting can change the instructional environment, move the automatic slider at the bottom of the screen to the right. With each increment, more skills are assigned with less time between skill introductions. Also, the skills move from sequential to overlapping presentation. |
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An important support component in The Office is the always-available guide, or mediator (Figure 6). The guide, currently personified as a helpful co-worker named Bernie, tracks your action and offers commentary, feedback, and suggestions. The guide has up to three types of specific information available through three buttons. The first button (“Why?”) gives the rationale behind an activity or action. The second button (“Stuck?”) suggests possible next steps. The third button (“How?”) uses text or animation to describe an activity. Finally, support is also provided by giving the user feedback on what activities or tasks have been done and what is left to do. As in the rest of the program, this feedback is provided in context. The “To Do” list shows the tasks that have been completed and those pending. When all assigned tasks are completed, or on exiting the program, a final evaluation of performance is placed in the in-basket. |
Bernie, The Office Guide  |
How Can Programs Like The Office Be Used?
The large potential audience for The Office includes adult education and workplace literacy programs. But it also may be used in school-to-work programs, vocational education, and on-site workplace education.
Beyond the above applications, though, The Office demonstrates techniques that can be readily extended to many kinds of instruction. For example, Donald J. Leu and I constructed an immersive environment for teaching middle school students about the properties of light and reflections (Hillinger & Leu, 1997). While this program was developed on CD-ROM, advances in Web delivery and available bandwidth would now permit us to deliver the same program directly over the Internet.
At a more general level, the increased interactivity, feedback, and user control demonstrated in The Office could be applied to Web-based reading instruction. For example, in an earlier work (Hillinger, 1992), I outlined development of a computer-based scaffolded reading program for workplace literacy called Responsive Text. We have applied some of the techniques described here to bring a sample lesson to the Web. With a younger audience, Web-delivered audio and graphics can be combined with age-appropriate literature to create scaffolded reading instruction.
Next Steps
In its current version, The Office is a free online resource that serves as a vehicle for collecting user reactions and feedback. As such, it can promote and test the potential and ideas associated with instructional systems that are based on inclusive, contextualized, interactive environments. We are continuing to expand the skill strands and to add new tasks to existing strands. These new skills will be part of an enhanced version of the program targeted for a December 2001 release. We also expect to expand the number of simulations available for learners, based on what we learn from feedback on The Office.
The current program uses an office for its workplace context. We hope to develop at least two other contexts, one covering health care and the other manufacturing. Because the underlying skills in all three contexts are similar, we expect to create the new materials by making relatively minor changes in the current program. Graphics, examples, and some content will be revised, but the underlying logic should be transferable among contexts. This transferability of instructional procedures is a major strength of our contextualized learning philosophy and has promise for creating school learning environments as well.
References
Bransford, J.D., Brown, A.L., & Cocking, R.R. (Eds.). (1999). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school. Washington, DC: National Academy Press. Available: www.nap.edu/catalog/6160.html
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Brown, J.S., Collins, A., & Duguid, A. (1989). Situated cognition and the culture of learning. Educational Researcher, 18(1), 32-42.
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Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt. (1994). Anchored instruction and situated cognition revisited: A response to Tripp. Educational Technology, 34(8), 28-32.
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Hillinger, M.L. (1992). Computer speech and responsive text: Hypermedia support for reading instruction. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 4, 219-229.
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Hillinger, M.L. & Leu, D.J., Jr. (1997). Using multimedia to promote conceptual change. Final grant report to the National Science Foundation for SBIR Phase I grant.
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Kirsch, I.S., Jungeblut, A., Jenkins, L., & Kolstad, A. (1993). Adult literacy in America. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education.
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Piaget, J. (1978). Success and understanding. Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press.
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Secretary’s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills, U.S. Department of Labor. (1992, April). Learning a living: A blueprint for high performance. Washington, DC: Author. Available: wdr.doleta.gov/SCANS/lal/LAL.HTM
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Vygotsky, L.S., (1978). Mind in society. Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press.
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About the Author
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Mike Hillinger describes his work as “exploring innovative ways of restructuring text, graphic, and video information for new instructional technologies.” His efforts have been funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, Department of Defense, Department of Education, and many university and private clients. Mike has a Ph.D. in cognitve psychology from Rutgers University (New Brunswick, NJ, USA) and spent 2 years as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas in Austin. After a stint as executive editor for a large textbook publisher’s educational software division, he now does most of his work from a small office in the Green Mountains of Vermont. Stop by at www.lexiconsys.com/ to see what he has been up to. |
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Citation: Hillinger, M. (2001, September). Thinking outside the browser: Experiencing new approaches to Web-based instruction. Reading Online, 5(2). Available: http://www.readingonline.org/electronic/elec_index.asp?HREF=hillinger/index.html
Reading Online, www.readingonline.org
Posted September 2001
© 2001 International Reading Association, Inc. ISSN 1096-1232