learning. The influence of the new information technology of intelligent multi-agent. systems is also discussed in the context of computer-supported cooperative ...
COMPUTER SUPPORTED COOPERATIVE LEARNING Adina Magda FLOREA The paper presents the impact of using computer-supported cooperative work tools in building educational environments and the facilities such tools bring to educational methodologies. It also shows the relation between this new technique and the learnercentered approach in education, a participative style of education in which the learner is actively involved in the learning process, while stressing the importance of collaborative learning. The influence of the new information technology of intelligent multi-agent systems is also discussed in the context of computer-supported cooperative and active learning.
EDUCATION IN THE INFORMATION AGE We are in the middle of a technological revolution that will definitely set our century apart from the others: the creation of the information society, known also as the cyberspace, the information superhighway or the global digital village. The digital world will support almost all activities in the next century and will change significantly how people learn, how they work, what they produce and how they produce. At the same time, these changes will not withdraw the need to offer children and young people an intellectual education as well as a moral one. The education we give must prepare people to live in this new world and to make the best use of the New Information Technologies (NIT) in learning. Giving access to information and knowledge and the necessary preparation to access, understand, use, and evaluate this knowledge is one of the most important aspects of insuring equal opportunity for people in the years to come. “The only feasible way of fostering equality is education, which requires not just giving, but helping people to take and to learn” says E. Dyson in the Special Anniversary Issue of Communications of the ACM (1997, p.35). We shall all live in the information society and we shall have to cope with many aspects of this new world. Therefore, the use of NIT must be no more the privilege of computer scientists but a common knowledge of everyone. In this respect, we are already witnessing the first steps. Most of our children are really fascinated by the computer, be it only to play games on it. The Internet and the Web have become an immense reservoir of information, accessed by more and more people, used to timely communicate and develop electronic presences. There is an evolving consensus to paraphrase Decartes’s words “cogito ergo sum” to the information age variation of it: “we have a Web presence so we exist”. In the same time, the twentieth century is the cause of a cultural transformation by giving birth to a new communication language: the screen language, as Prof. H. Murgu of the Romanian Academy of Theater and Film called it. The screen language may be found in motion pictures, TVs, camcorders, computer programs, multimedia, CD-ROMs and DVD design, teleconferences, Web authoring. NIT play an essential role in the dissemination of this new language that will soon be universally accepted. All these new technologies have created the premises of a major modification in our pedagogical and educational methodologies. This refers to the philosophy of how one teaches, to the relationship between teacher and student, and to the nature of the curriculum, embracing personalized and committed learning, life-long learning, the culture of the classroom, and social issues. We are going to see in the near future a new and more active
educational approach. In addition to traditional methods and tools, the NIT offer the possibility to explore alternate styles of teaching and learning, to develop and experience the notion of networking and collaborative knowledge acquisition.
A NEW WAY OF LEARNING Knowledge that is accessed or transmitted but never put to use during learning may be difficult to remember or use properly afterwards, in real-life situations. In the same time, people learn best when motivated by a certain task or challenge, or when they need knowledge and skills to solve a problem at hand. These observations lead to a new philosophy and style of education called “learner-centered”, “constructivism”, “participative learning”, or “problem-based”. The goal is active exploration, construction, and active learning rather than the passive attendance of lectures or textbooks reading (Norman and Spohrer, 1996). Most of our current teaching is focused on the content of the curriculum, structured around basic topics of a discipline, and on knowledge and information transmission. Although this is and will definitively remain an essential aspect of teaching, the learnercentered approach must by no means complement the current way of teaching. We are thus witnessing to a shift from the paradigm of “the sage on the stage” to the one of “the guide on the side”. Besides, as knowledge and technology is evolving rapidly, we can no longer expect that all learning activities will take place under a teacher supervision and new directions such as distance, life-long, and further learning, which are currently gaining larger and larger audience, are good proofs to support this idea. The philosophy of the participative learning is not new but the NIT offer the possibility to develop novel applications and learning environments that will focus education around problem solving, collaborative learning and exchange of ideas. Computer-based learning brings added value to education by providing rapid interaction and feed-back, real-time simulations, information seeking and retrieving in a form that is easy to understand and process. Communication through computer networks, be they Internet or Intranets (Internet applied to local groups of persons and computers), permits the learners to collaborate with others in solving problems, to explore new means of communication and information access, and to develop group reasoning skills. One could argue that such facilities are also available to students, if they are correctly oriented, in a traditional (computer-free) learning environment. This might be true if they are taken separately and not counting speed, size of covered areas and ease of utilization. If we take all these into consideration, computer communication and Web access are the major means to achieve the best and the most of learner-centered facilities. Computers and networks give the possibility of widespread collaboration in learning, both at the level of peer to peer and at the one of teacher supervising and interacting with student work.
COMPUTER-SUPPORTED COOPERATIVE WORK Computer-supported cooperative work refers to people working together on a product, research area, topic, or scholarly endeavor with help from computers. This field is also known as computer-supported collaboration, GroupWare, Workflow, and Group DecisionSupport Systems. In 1984, I. Greif of MIT and P. Cashman of Digital Equipment Corporation organized a workshop that had far-reaching effects (Grudin, 1994). Twenty people from different fields - but with a shared interest on how people work - gathered to explore technology’s role in the work environment and launched the term “computer2
supported cooperative work” (CSCW) to describe it. In the last years, due to the important development of global communication networks and speed of communication, CSCW became a fertile are of research and development that tend to be an effective and wide spread collaborative technology. Group interaction may take place in the same location or in geographically dispersed locations, in which case communication is either face to face or distributed. Interactions may also take place at the same time, namely in synchronous mode, or at different times, asyncronously. A combination of the time/place categorization gives the basic ways in which people can work together supported by computers. For example, if the group activities take place at the same time but participants are located at different sites, they are working in distributed synchronous mode. CSCW spans a wide area of applications. Typical applications refer to videoconferencing systems, synchronous Web exploration, collaborative authorship applications such as shared editing of a paper or collaborative design of a product, shared whiteboards or shared electronic notebooks, chatting, and electronic meeting rooms. Recently, CSCW tools contributed to the development of what is now called virtual organizations. A virtual organization may be defined as an organization without walls in which complementary resources of cooperating entities are left in place but are integrated to support a particular group endeavor, regardless of the geographically locations of people or resources. Virtual organizations include virtual laboratories (Kouzes, Myers, and Wulf, 1996), virtual office processing systems, virtual environment for design and virtual manufacturing companies, virtual classrooms and virtual environments for training. New developments at the level of hardware, distributed operating systems and distributed databases have provided the means for developing the necessary infrastructure of virtual organizations.
Video/Audio Conferencing
Shared Computer Display - interaction with running programs - data processing - data visualization
Whiteboard - slides - text - pictures/drawings
Shared Electronic Notebook
Chatting - message exchange
Private Area - commands - electronic nootebook - interactions with programs - data processing - visualization
Web browser syncronization
Figure 1. Components of a CSCW environment
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The typical components of a CSCW environment are presented in Figure 1. Depending on a particular task, such an environment might include some or all of the components presented in the figure. For example, when a group of researchers are working collaboratively to develop a scientific paper, one may use the whiteboard to present the others the basic issues to be covered, the shared electronic notebook may be used to comment ideas, and the chatting facility to exchange opinions. The shared computer display will present the results of a running program seen by all members of the group, Web references are highlighted by one member in the Web browser and seen by all others, while each member has the possibility to use his own program or data files in the private area. A CSCW system relates functional features with social aspects of teamwork. Each functionality has an impact on the work behavior and efficiency of the entire group using the system. These functionalities also influence the behavior of individual group members. Therefore, the psychological, social, and cultural processes within groups of collaborators are important aspects to be taken into account in CSCW systems. Within a group of people working together, several types of relations are possible. Most common found ones are peer to peer, in which persons on the same level are involved in cooperative problem solving, and mentor-student, in which a professor or a senior scientist is guiding the work of the team members. Computer-supported cooperative work applications offer a powerful tool to implement new methodologies in education and to make the best use of both collaborative and openended activities in learning. CSCW applications conceived for education can, on one side, make use of alternate styles of learning, including user-centered learning, and on the other, are able to free up learners from carrying some cumbersome and routine tasks and focus on the content of learning.
CSCW IN EDUCATION One obvious application of CSCW in education is videoconferencing used in distance learning. CSCW tools permit the visualization and hearing of the teacher, the presentation of course materials on the whiteboard and the interaction with the audience for question answering. Despite all the benefits of such an on-line distance learning approach, this is only one aspect of CSCW in education and it does not necessarily include collaborative learning and a learner-centered approach. The following two scenarios will reveal some more capabilities of CSCW in education. The professor is conducting a class on how to solve a problem collaboratively. It uses a part of the screen, seen by all students, to formulate the problem and the stages necessary to follow for finding the solution. In each stage, students are required to enter facts, ideas, learning issues, and tasks in the shared area of the screen. The teacher critiques each stage of the work then make assignments to teams of students from the identified issues. A possible overview of a snapshot of such a session is presented in Figure 2, which shares some elements with the Collaboratoty Notebook product (Edelson, Pea, and Gomez, ?). The teams then cooperatively work to solve the assignments. Each member of the team has his private activity, performed in the private area, and has the possibility to communicate with the others through the shared part of the display. All the members of one team have access to their shared area. The teacher has the possibility to bring to her display any private display part of a team member or the shared display of a team to see how the work is going on, make comments, suggestions or critiques. When a team has completed an assignment, the result is transmitted to the teacher and visualized by all teams in the classrooms. 4
Discussions and feed-backs on the results then follow, which may lead to modifications of the performed work. Such a scenario is obviously synchronously and may occur in the same laboratory (same place) with direct discussions and comments, or distributed, in which case discussions will also take place through computer communication. Whiteboard Stage: Identify problems Issues
Ideas
- Build a database - Define record with students structure - Student data
...
- Select a DB software
...
Learning Tasks
Plan
- Learn to use the selected software
1. Check for other examples 2. Use the help facility 3. Retreive relevant part of course
- Appreciate optimality of the structure
... Private Area - Course reffers optimality in sections 3 and 5 (Plan-3)
... Chatting
Text of course
To Daniel: What relevant examples did you find?
Commands
Figure 2. An instance of a cooperative problem-solving task The second scenario refers to the development of an assessment project by a group of students, without the supervision of a teacher. The members of the group will develop a plan of how to build the project in the shared whiteboard, will interactively criticize and modify the plan, and will start working. During the development of the project the students will probably need Web search for retrieving relevant information, invocation of one or more programs for simulations, validation of results or graphical visualization. A record of the project development will be kept so as to permit both members of the group and the teacher, who will evaluate the project later on, to have access not only to the end result of the project but also to the development phase of it. Being capable of reviewing and/or criticizing the process of learning how to design is as important, from an educational point of view, as evaluating the final project. The project may be developed in the same place and synchronously but it is more likely to be developed both synchronously and asynchronously, and distributed. In such a way, the members of the group will be permitted to work on the project at the time and place of their convenience. At the end of the project, they are requested to develop a report of their work which should contain text, drawings, pictures and maybe audio effects, and active Web links. The development of such a report is also a CSCW activity which requires, for example, access to a shared editor and shared access to files. For the synchronous activities, a Web browser synchronizer (Figure 1) which shows to all members, in the same time, the active page accessed by one of them is also a useful tool. We may see that certain tasks are generically present in many application scenarios. Problem-solving work, for instance, comprises such general-purpose tasks as brainstorming to generate ideas, structuring those ideas, and then evaluate them. Another cooperative tool that may support groupwork is a shared calendar, which help manage such events as appointments, tasks, and meetings. Other tools help in composing and sending messages. 5
Tools like shared editors, shared spreadsheets, and shared drawing support are needed in almost any kind of cooperative activity, for example for developing reports as presented before. Several existing projects tackled the use of CSCW in education. Although it is impossible to present all of them, I shall mention some. The Multiple Case-based Approach to Generative Environments for Learning (McBagel) of Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta is an environment for synchronous collaboration where students gather for brainstorming and planning activity and where a problem gets understood and broken into solvable pieces (Gruzdial et. al., 1996). McBagel is based on the problem-solving learning method and is used with success in medical and business schools. Also from Georgia Tech is the Collaborative and Multimedia Learning Environment (CaMILLE) which supports asynchronous collaboration: students share resources found or invented while working separately. The environment is used in mechanical design classes. The Digital Agora project, developed at Acadia University in Canada, provides a Webbased training system that facilitates the collaborative analysis of complex problems, such as peace initiatives, bioethics questions, consensus negotiation, and environmental issues. The Digital Agora (Watters, Conley, and Alexander, 1998) allows users to access the huge amount of information available on the Web in these areas, organize it, and work collaboratively to understand and resolve problems concerning these complex issues. The project supports Web-based hypertext design with authorship of nodes and links, discussion groups, collaborative analysis and writing, simulations, graphical representations of complex issues using lateral maps, quizzes and evaluation. The Royal Center for Learning and Academic Technologies that serves Penn Sate’s 12campus Commonwealth College plus four additional undergraduate campuses, has developed Project Vision, a learning environment for creating courses which integrates technology skill development and use with content learning, requiring local and distributed team project work, and building cooperative learning skills (Deden, 1998). In the beginning, students take a first Vision course that teaches them how to use and evaluate Internet tools and resources in research, abilities to communicate in a computer environment, and requirements of Web-based presentations. They can afterwards be enrolled in one of several subject-oriented Vision courses that requires them to design case studies and work in a team, including multidisciplinary teams. For example, students in computer science are paired with philosophy students to produce multimedia interpretations of the levels of hell in Dante’s Inferno. The Computer Science Department at “Politehnica” University of Bucharest is also aiming to develop CSCW tools to support both research and education. This effort is part of a larger multi-university project, namely “CoLaborator: Development of a Multi-User Research Environment for High-Performance Computing in Romania”. The project is coordinated by Prof. V. Cristea of “Politehnica” and is funded by the Romanian Ministry of National Education and the World Bank. Among the goals of the project are the development of a research center for parallel, distributed, and cooperative computing, the acquisition of a high performance computing system, widely accessible to the Romanian academic community through Internet, and the stimulation of education and research in the domain of high-performance computing. To achieve these ambitious goals, CSCW tools, both for education and research, are a must. The previous described scenarios are inspired from the initial specifications of the tools we want to build.
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INTELLIGENT AGENTS IN CSCW-BASED EDUCATION The invention of autonomous agent and multi-agent technology is one of the landmark events in computer science community of the ‘90s. Multi-agent systems, especially those based on intelligent agents, draw from a wealth of domains such as distributed systems, distributed artificial intelligence, software engineering, computer-supported cooperative work, knowledge representation, organizational theory, sociology, linguistics, philosophy, economics, and cognitive science. It is widely expected that multi-agent technology systems will become the major paradigm in the development of complex distributed systems, networked information systems, and computer interfaces during the 21st century. The world of agents comprises a broad range of intelligent programs that perform specific tasks on behalf of their users. Agents are distinguished from other types of software by their status as independent computing entities capable of performing complex tasks without explicit intervention of the user. Agents may and must communicate with other agents (artificial or human) to achieve cooperation or coordination in solving a given task. They are also able to take the initiative, to generate goals and plans to achieve their goals. Intelligent agent models includes several other features, drawn from artificial intelligence research, such as capacity of reasoning and rational acting, representation of other agents, and intentional notions. They have thus knowledge, beliefs, desires, intentions and commitments, notions that are usually applied to people to model informational and motivational attitudes but that prove to be useful features in describing the functioning of complex and distributed systems. For an in-depth discussion of multi-agent technology see (Mueller, Wooldridge, and Jennings, 1997). Agents are used in a diversity of applications such as personalized information management, interface design, management of complex commercial and industrial processes, and, recently, in learner-centered computer-supported environments. Agent technology applied to CSCW is a promising field of research and development. In an agentbased CSCW environment, the agents are an active part of the cooperative processes, give participants intelligent support for their activities, and lead to a collaborative humanmachine problem solving paradigm. One important contribution of intelligent agent technology to CSCW is represented by information agents. Information agents are intelligent program modules that are able to travel in Internet and access multiple information sources for seeking relevant data. In contrast to traditional Web search engines, an information agent is capable of a semantic interpretation of the retrieved information, of filtering this information according to user’s preferences and criteria, and of an heuristic classification of data based on the user’s profile. The agent learns the user’s preferences and profile while working for her. It may also be able to collaborate with other similar agents to discover new sources of information and to cooperatively filter what was found. Such agents are an invaluable tool in CSCW, being able to drastically reduce the time needed for finding references. Instead of retrieving two millions entries for, say, peace in the world, an intelligent information agent will select and present only those entries that are significant for the user’s interests and for the problem to be solved. The research results from the multi-agent domain in directions such as mechanisms of cooperation, coordination, cooperation, and agent communication using high-level primitives based on speech acts are now contributing to enhance the intelligent facilities of educational CSCW environments and tools. To illustrate this idea, let us revise the first previously discussed scenario and see how agents can contribute to reduce the work 7
overload and intelligent assist students in the learning process. Each student will be endowed with a personal agent that will assist him in his work, automatically recording interesting items during chatting, sorting emails according to the student’s profile, indexing displayed documents, and communicating with the other agents in the system. One planning agent for each team will assist the activity of developing and carrying out plans. It may use a plan library from which it autonomously retrieves similar plans and associated actions, proposing them to the team, and records the new instance of the current plan as the plan is modified or developed by the team, for further use. A general planning agent for all teams will be informed by each team planning agent about plans. This agent will identify interactions among plan actions, possible actions that are common between two plans and will notify the team agents so that this information is further transmitted to team members. If endowed with more intelligent capabilities, the general planning agent may also assist in problem decomposition. Each team will have also an information agent responsible of retrieving useful sources of information. Each information agent will be able to communicate with the other agents in the system in order to focus the search and eliminate redundant work. As one may see from this scenario, the agents will be responsible of a lot of hard work in coordination and will relive the students from loosing time with “routine” tasks. One important effort towards building such a system is realized by the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Unit of the Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London, under the coordination of Dr. N. Jennings. Another way in which intelligent agents may support CSCW in learning is by developing a learner’s model and using this model to custom problem solving to suit the student level of knowledge and achievement. In working collaboratively, student models have to be correlated so that a common problem solving level is achieved. This is a rather new direction of research in which things have just begun to move. A team of professors from the Department of Computer Science, “Politehnica” University of Bucharest, under the coordination of the author of this article, is actively involved in developing intelligent multi-agent systems and one goal is to apply the research to design and build agent-based learning environments. The Department of Computer Science at “Politehnica” has also recently made a proposition of an academic Joint European Tempus Phare project devoted to graduate and post-graduate education in the domain of virtual organizations design and use. The project, which involves five Romanian and eight EU partners, has as one of its goals the development of a user-centered virtual learning environment in which CSCW and intelligent agent technologies will play a key role. The realization of the project will contribute to the preparation of both computer professionals and users for the future information society in Romania.
BARRIERS TO ADOPTION The barriers to implement CSCW learning environment and intelligent agent-based ones are both technical and sociological. Existing tools are not mature enough, they are hard to support and costly to maintain. For example, videoconferences have been rather slow to disseminate partly because of their costs, hardware restrictions, and high demands of communication speed. The high cost hardware needed to support CSCW tools, although presumed to decrease rapidly in the next years, is a big problem, especially for countries with difficult economic situations. On the other side, some technical issues presented in this article are still in the stage of research and it will take a while until they will be incorporated in effective teaching and learning tools.
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From a human point of view, the shift in the methodologies and styles of education required by CSCW tools and learner-centered approaches impose extra effort and stress to teachers, as several experiences already showed. A computer-supported course and collaborative project may be more difficult to develop, certainly requires the teachers to master the use of NIT and to spend more time for preparing the lectures and the seminars. This extra work, which might be scaring at first sight for some teachers, is highly rewarded afterwards by the benefits brought in the learning process and by the increased interest of students. Students in all domains are, to my opinion, really fascinating by using computers, talk and collaborate with peers, browse the Web, so giving them knowledge and making them discover knowledge in an environment they enjoy is one of the key success in education.
CONCLUSIONS In higher education, we are facing two important challenges. I think that we, as educators, are meant primarily to form people, to shape their minds, and teach them how to think and how to learn. Developing such skills is maybe more important than the actual transfer of knowledge because it prepares young people to face any context and any possible development of the world in which they are going to leave. In the same time, as recent history has proven, it is not always easy to predict the future technologies that will be the fundamental forces of change in the years ahead. If we were to remember the science fiction movies from 20-30 years ago, we could discover robots and flying objects but seldom any reference to the burst of digital information flow that we are facing nowadays. In this domain, events seem to outdistance even the wildest predictions. There are however some general directions that may be estimated to follow. Today, it seems clear that we shall not be able to live any more without the tools-toys we have created, namely computers. There is a strong evidence that the information systems will become a pervasive technology, namely a technology more noticeable by its absence than its presence. More and more people will gain access to the Web, will be interconnected and will work together regardless of geographical, social or temporal differences. Wide access to education, life-long learning and universal educational support will be essential elements to survive and to adapt to this new, continually changing world. Higher education must thus prepare people for using the new information technologies and do the preparation by means of these technologies, so as to give any professional the premises to feel conformable with them, in any profession and in any discipline. Besides, as Shneiderman said (1993), computing is already dramatically altering education, but it is not enough to teach people about surfing the net, we must also teach them about making waves. The second challenge we face is that there is an increasing demand to prepare high qualified people, capable of a rapid integration in their workplace. And give them the possibility to enhance continually their skills and performances, to keep competitive in the workmarket. Capabilities to work in teams, to solve real world problems, to accurately communicate ideas and results of their work, and to develop vivid professional presences are a must for any graduate nowadays. All these assets must be ensured by higher education and this is possible only by means of structural changes in our teaching methodologies, by a learner-centered education, by the stimulation of an active and participative attitude in the learning process. The new information technologies, intelligent agent-based CSCW in particular, gives us the possibility of an effective and novel approach to achieving these aims.
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I strongly hope that computer-supported cooperative work will be one of the relevant technology in the next education environments and that we shall be able to develop more and more intelligent programs, personal agents that will effectively support teachers, students, and project development. I do not fear that computer programs and automatic education tools, as intelligent as they could be, would ever replace the human mentor but I hope that we shall develop a synergy of human and machine supported education. To end, I shall quote again Shneiderman (1997): “A quick search on the Web revealed an encouraging pattern: More than a million entries for hope, and only a third of a million for fear”, which seems to prove that we are striving for our hopes to come true.
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