Web Watch

The Encyclopedia of Educational Technology: A Resource for Designed Learning Bob Hoffman

The Encyclopedia of Educational Technology (EET) is an online resource for people in all walks of life who design training, instruction, and presentation of information: teachers, trainers, educational and performance technologists, and instructional designers. It features short multimedia articles on topics from educational psychology to media production. The articles are contributed, for the most part, by graduate students in the Department of Educational Technology at San Diego State University (SDSU), California, USA, where the EET is served on the World Wide Web.

The encyclopedia grew out of a 1994 idea for a multimedia resource database to serve SDSU students enrolled in a masters degree course in educational television production. The first EET consisted of about 20 articles authored by faculty members who taught the course, illustrating design and production topics such as needs assessment, storyboarding, and planning an educational video. The first EET was developed in Apple's HyperCard application and delivered to students on a floppy disk.

The idea soon captured the imagination of students and faculty alike. Students liked being able to access concise presentations of information they could apply immediately in their school projects and, later, in their careers. Faculty liked being able to off-load material that would typically be delivered in lectures or demonstrations, or through sometimes contradictory (and consequently, confusing) collections of journal articles and book chapters. Although contradiction and confusion spur dialog and learning, students need a context before they can debate the real controversies intelligently. They don't usually want three different definitions of an instructional objective, for instance, until they've mastered one. Much of the material in the EET is foundational and definitional, intended to provide a context for further discussion and study.

With the Web emerging at around the same time as the first version of the EET, it was natural that the encyclopedia would migrate from floppy disk to browser. With a simpler, expanded distribution channel, the EET soon broadened to embrace a wider spectrum of topics in educational technology. At the same time, we began to encourage students to write EET articles themselves, and the articles soon included ideas and information to which their authors were exposed in other graduate courses and through their own reading and experience. An even more positive development was that students from many backgrounds, including K-12 educators and corporate and military trainers, began to develop articles from -- and for -- their own interests and perspectives.

Product, Process, or Both?

But as a process, the EET serves our graduate students well. The advanced multimedia development course is about designing representations for information and education. Students study the art, science, craft, and engineering involved in effectively communicating both concrete and abstract ideas with text, still and moving images, and sound. They put what they learn to work in their articles for the EET. The task they receive is couched in the following scenario:

Imagine that you've graduated and have taken a job as a novice instructional designer for a company or school district. Your boss says, “This new project that just came in -- the client [or superintendent] wants to know if we can use some virtual reality [or knowledge management, or distance learning, or whatever]. You just got your masters degree -- can you give me a quick idea of what this thing is all about? I don't need to know all the details, I just need to know what we're talking about. The meeting is at 2:00 this afternoon. Can you brief me before then?” You should be able to go to the EET, find a short article or two on the topic, and give your boss a quick overview and perhaps a couple of resources for further reading. OK? So that's what we're doing: writing an article that will provide that kind of information at that level.

The audience for the EET, then, is novice instructional designers. We interpret that in its broadest sense, to mean everyone from school teachers to trainers to distance educators to project managers to assessment specialists -- anyone with an interest in how people learn and in how to create products or activities to facilitate learning. In the EET they should find definitions and overviews of important ideas and methods used in education and training.

The process is also interesting for our students because they must play all the roles in the development process. They assess the audience (conveniently, the audience is “us”), design and develop their articles, and test them with users. They develop a proposal, draft storyboards and content outlines, develop and test prototypes, and then complete production, including creation and mounting of graphics, animation, video, and sound. They work hard at designing visuals and sound to serve as more than mere decoration, but instead as knowledge representations that can “pull their weight.”

Part of the challenge involves following our set EET style, which uses Web page templates and simple, but specific, technical guidelines. What student authors find most difficult is keeping their articles short. With a strict word limit, they are forced to scope their topic down, think carefully about the important ideas, and write parsimoniously, if not elegantly.

The EET currently receives about a thousand hits a month. A search engine gives us feedback on what users are looking for, which in turn informs future topic selection. We encourage students and faculty from other institutions to contribute articles -- and, in fact, a comprehensive loose-leaf notebook-based workshop (Hoffman, 1999) is available for students or instructors who would like to make authoring an EET article an assignment in their own courses.

Contenidos, one of the largest providers of educational media in Argentina, is translating the EET into Spanish and will host the site for Latin America. The presence of a “real” audience -- not just the course instructor -- is a mighty incentive for student authors. They often receive feedback from readers in farflung parts of the world.

A Work in Progress

One of the characteristics of Web-based media is that they are almost always works in progress. Few Web sites claim to be -- or even aspire to be -- “finished.” Such is the case with the EET. It has evolved steadily over nearly the entire, short life of the Web, and there is no reason to think -- or wish -- that it will ever be complete. As new ideas come along in our field, we hope to offer them a small but cozy home in the EET.

Reference

Hoffman, B. (1999). Educational multimedia workshop. San Diego, CA: Montezuma Press.
Back

About the Author

Bob Hoffman, the general editor of The Encyclopedia of Educational Technology, is an associate professor of in the Department of Educational Technology at San Diego State University (5500 Campanile Drive, San Diego, CA 92182-1182, USA; e-mail Bob.Hoffman@sdsu.edu). His research is on the effective use of multimedia for learning, particularly with “through-the-screen” virtual reality and distance learning. His article with Donn Ritchie, “Using Instructional Design Principles to Amplify Learning on the World Wide Web,” won the AACE SITE 96 Outstanding Paper Award in the Telecommunications for Preservice Applications category. His online Tools, Templates, and Training workshop for authoring pedagogically effective online courses, developed with Donn Ritchie and Brock Allen, features the I CARE system now being adopted by a number of colleges and universities for their online courses. His Mystery of the Mission Museum virtual reality California Mission project for fourth-grade students and teachers, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, is in its first release.

Back