Learning Through Collaborative Visualization: A Model for Sixth-Generation Project Science

August 1st, 1992 - July 31st, 1995 | PROJECT

Project Enhanced Science Learning (PESL) offers learning partners opportunities to engage in authentic scientific inquiry through apprenticeship. Such inquiry is often enabled by dynamic interactions among learning partners in physical proximity. Yet scientific and business practice using Internet and broadband services recognizes that not all partners necessary to an interaction can be co-located. Our vision uses new technologies to extend the collaborative "reach" of PESL to include diverse expertise among remote learners, teachers, and scientists. This work, in atmospheric sciences, extends collaborative media beyond asynchronous text-only email to shared workspaces and two-way audio/video connections that allow for collaborative visualization of science phenomena, data, models - What You See Is What I See (WYSIWIS). Tools for local- and wide-area networked learning environments will enable highly interactive, media-rich communications among learning partners. Research on these learning architectures will provide pedagogy and social protocols for authenticating the science learning experience in classrooms and other spaces. Greater motivation to learn and enhanced science learning in terms of more valid, performance assessments should result from students' participations. The next decade brings widespread, networked multi-media interpersonal computing. This project will provide a blueprint to inform the effective use of interpersonal collaborative media for science education.

Project Website(s)

(no project website provided)

Team Members

Roy Pea, Principal Investigator, Northwestern University
Elliot Soloway, Co-Principal Investigator, University of Michigan
Louis Gomez, Co-Principal Investigator, Northwestern University

Funders

Funding Source: NSF
Funding Program: ISE/AISL
Award Number: 9253462
Funding Amount: 2341832

Tags

Audience: Educators | Teachers | Museum | ISE Professionals | Scientists | Youth | Teen (up to 17)
Discipline: Computing and information science | Education and learning science | General STEM | Geoscience and geography | Technology
Resource Type: Project Descriptions
Environment Type: Higher Education Programs | Informal | Formal Connections | K-12 Programs | Media and Technology | Websites | Mobile Apps | Online Media