Overall description of process

The school is Audentes Secondary School in Estonia.

The grade is 10 (ages from 16 to 18)

Lessons take place in computer lab (one computer per student).

Some of those lessons are virtual – teacher is missing because of the tasks in other projects

Duration of lesson 90 min

Start 10^th January 2007, end 23^th May 2007

Totally 19 lessons (19 * 90 min)

The subject is Project management.

 

With in this subject students must plan and execute in teams small project in the school. The projects are school final ceremony, summer party and ceremony of 1th September.

 

Learning materials are published in LeMill – the tool for collaborative creation of materials. LeMill was selected, because it’s very easy to use and also because to test its functionalities in Calibrate project (to provide feedback to LeMill developers). Because LeMill is not learning environment for students but authoring tool for teachers, teacher creates starting page for course in del.icio.us.

 

In first lesson students create there del.icio.us user accounts, join with teachers network and barrow his bookmarks. Teacher provide as les as possible tags for bookmark. Students must read through the content of material and define meaningful tags. If teacher will provide too many tags to describe the content of material, students do not have anything to do (they don’t even have to think, only copy).

Later students must create project plan document, publish this in some open space (e.g. Google docs) and bookmark this in there del.icio.us page.

 

The meaningfulness of tags created by students will be measured on final examination. This examination will be like interview. Students will present there personal tagcloud and they must explain what is the meaning of that. Teacher will ask additional questions to guide them and to collect additional information. Examination will be recorded to videotape and analyzed afterwards. The qualitative analyze method will be used.

 

The concept mapping method will be used when there is already sufficient amount of tags. Then based on tagcloud information the concept map of project management will be designed. Before that – to practice the concept mapping method and the tool cMap will be used for creation of project plan subdocuments e.g. organization chart and problem tree.

Intro

The goal of this blog is to reflect ideas, plans and open questions related with using the knowledge creation tools in learning process. Hopefully this blog will be place for collecting ideas from other experts interested in same topic. You are warmly welcome to add comments.

The topic (Tools for knowledge creation and visualization) is related with my PhD plan Explorative knowledge construction environments. The hypothesis of this paper is – the learning process will be more effective (the learning process is shorter and the understanding is deeper) if we let students to explore (focus, select, browse, order, change, create) learning objects and their relations, as they want. The aim is to develop or redesign existing learning environments so the students can use knowledge creation tools.

The first part of research was getting overview of methods and tools for knowledge management and visualization. The research results are presented in article IT vahendid teadmiste konstrueerimiseks ja visualiseerimiseks (Est: The IT tools for knowledge construction and visualization. A&A 2006 #6) and in presentation The tools for knowledge construction and visualization.

The second part is the testing of few knowledge construction tools in learning process to prove the hypothesis and to collect important information for learning software development. From number of method and tools have chosen only two:

1. Tagcloud method and del.icio.us tool. Del.icio.us is good web service that allows users to bookmark and tag (define keywords) to internet pages. The tags cab presented in tagcloud.
2. Concept map method and cMap tool. cMap is freeware for mind or concept map creation. Based on authors personal opinion the functionality of cMap is best compared to alternative concept map reators.

The tagcloud method was selected because it is very easy to use and the result is easy to present and understand. The concept map was selected because it is very good method for creating and understanding the relations among pieces of information. The del.icio.us and cMap software was chosen because they are open environments or freeware.