Research Article
Jyoon Yoon, Lynn Brice
CONT ED TECHNOLOGY, Volume 2, Issue 3, pp. 250-263
ABSTRACT
This article reports a qualitative study on computer-supported collaborative learning during a multidisciplinary education project on environment. The water project is designed to provide the elementary teacher candidates opportunities to explore issues related to water and find solutions to them through the Internet. As a production of the water project, they created posters and fliers in a photograph application to educate people regarding water issues and discussed how their creations affected people’s awareness of water issues, using a web-discussion tool. The teacher candidates’ reflections revealed that the water project was a meaningful e-learning activity to raise awareness of the global water issues and create an opportunity for them to share their learning, incorporating science and social studies. This water project provided a computer-supported collaborative e-learning model for integrating science and social studies.
Keywords: E-learning, Computer supported learning, Collaborative learning, Integrated education, Science education, Social studies
Research Article
Sinem Aslan, Yeol Huh, Dabae Lee, Charles M. Reigeluth
CONT ED TECHNOLOGY, Volume 2, Issue 2, pp. 95-117
ABSTRACT
Aslan and Reigeluth (2011) described a possible future period of educational computing as a “Personalized Computing Period” (p. 12). They described a potential educational technology system, PIES (Personalized Integrated Educational System), to support student learning in this period of educational computing, based on the major and secondary functions proposed by Reigeluth, Watson, Watson, Dutta, Chen, and Powell (2008) for the information-age paradigm of education. Major functions include record keeping for, planning for, instruction for, and assessment for/of student learning. Secondary functions include communication, general student data, school personnel information, and technology administration. In this qualitative research study, seven classroom teachers and one technology coordinator from three high schools were interviewed to reveal how they used their current technology systems with respect to the functions described by Reigeluth et al. (2008). The results revealed that there were discrepancies between the participants’ current use of the systems and the ideal use for the information-age paradigm of education. Based on the results, recommendations are offered to teachers, policy makers and technology system designers for better meeting students’ information-age educational needs.
Keywords: Information-age learning paradigm, Personalized integrated educational system (PIES), Learning management system (LMS), Functions of technology
Research Article
Sinem Aslan, Charles M. Reigeluth
CONT ED TECHNOLOGY, Volume 2, Issue 1, pp. 1-17
ABSTRACT
Although machine use in education was introduced in the 1920s with instructional radio and 1950s with instructional television, these technologies lacked one of the most important components of learning - interaction. Computers have filled this void. The functions they have served, the ways they have been used, and the terms they have been given have changed since their introduction to our schools, but their rooted presence in our educational lives has continually increased over time. Our in-depth review of the literature illustrated that there are three distinct periods of educational computing based on the predominant computer technologies and computer functions of the time. We named these three periods the "Mainframe Period", "Microcomputer Period", and "Internet Period". Taking the past and current trends into account and considering such shifts in society as moving from standardization to customization and personalization, from proprietary resources to open resources and from using different tools for different functions to convergence of functionalities in one tool. We propose the next period, which we call the "Personalized Computing Period", in which the predominant computer technology will be "Personalized Integrated Educational Systems" that serve four major functions to support the information-age paradigm of education: Record-keeping, planning, instruction, and assessment, as well as such secondary functions as communication, general student data, school personnel information and system administration.
Keywords: History of educational computing, Information-age paradigm, Personalized Integrated Educational System, Social networking