use of web 2.0 technologies and interaction design to ...

ISBN: 978-972-8924-69-0 © 2008 IADIS

USE OF WEB 2.0 TECHNOLOGIES AND INTERACTION DESIGN TO ENHANCE A NETWORKING INSTRUCTOR COMMUNITY OF PRACTICE Dennis C. Frezzo Cisco Systems, Inc.Mail Stop SJC05/3/4 325 East Tasman Drive San Jose , CALIFORNIA 95134 United States

Giuseppe Cinque Cisco Academy Training Centre – CONSEL Consorzio ELIS Via S.Sandri, 45 00159 Rome - Italy

Maria Cinque Department of Educational Research - Campus Bio-Medico University - Rome Via Álvaro del Portillo, 21 - 00128 Roma

ABSTRACT The Cisco Networking Academy (CNA) is a private-public partnership between Cisco and thousands of educational institutions in over 160 countries. Cisco provides a comprehensive e-learning package for integration into courses at educational institutions, which designate local instructors to deliver a mixture of hands-on and online instruction in basic computer networking. One key e-learning tool in this package, provided free to all students and instructors in the CNA, is Packet Tracer (PT) 5.0. PT 5.0 has extensive network simulation, visualization and collaboration features. Three features of PT 5.0 are particularly relevant for a CNA instructor community of practice (CoP): an authoring capability called the activity wizard, a multi-user capability that allows interconnection of different users’ virtual networks, and an open application programming interface (API) which allows development of e-learning applications based on PT 5.0. To support instructor activities around these features, a pilot collaboration web site, the PT Portal, for 500 instructors and developers, has been operating since February 2008. It will be evaluated by November 2008 using a CoP framework. During this pilot, instructors have been active as users, authors, and co-developers. After evaluation, the portal will be redesigned with a goal of scaling to support the entire CNA community of over fifteen thousand instructors. Enabling, supporting and optimizing interactions in the portal are considered important for the instructional effectiveness of the PT 5.0 tool. We seek to encourage the development of the community by emphasizing interaction design with Web 2.0 technologies. The preliminary evaluation and redesign results will be presented. KEYWORDS Community of practice, Web 2.0, interaction design, computer supported collaborative learning, algorithm visualization.

1. INTRODUCTION The expression "community of practice" (CoP) is relatively recent, even though the phenomenon it refers to is not new. A tribe learning to survive, a band of artists seeking new forms of expression, a group of engineers working on similar problems, a network of surgeons exploring novel techniques: are all examples of communities of practice. A CoP is formed by “people who engage in a process of collective learning in a shared domain of human endeavor” (Wenger 1998). Lave and Wenger (1991) argue that learning should not be viewed as simply the transmission of abstract and decontextualized knowledge from one individual to another, but a social process whereby knowledge is co-constructed; they suggest that such learning is situated in a specific context and embedded within a particular social and physical environment.

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The concept of the CoP has found a number of practical applications in business, organizational design, government, education, professional associations, development projects, and civic life. New technologies, such as the Internet, expand beyond geographical limitations the possibilities for community and call for new kinds of communities based on shared practice. Concerning the technologies designed to support communities of practice, we have to distinguish between tools that were explicitly designed for a given CoP and tools that were designed for other purposes such as instruction, collaboration, document storage, and conversation, but that communities of practice adopted. This process has occurred with Packet Tracer (PT) 5.0, a Cisco Networking Academy (CNA) tool for network simulation, visualization, and collaboration. We believe that the approximately fifteen thousand CNA instructors, most of whom are teaching very similar courses to beginning students of networking, form a potentially powerful CoP, particularly around PT 5.0 as a tool with such collaborative affordances as an activity wizard, multi-user capability, and an application programming interface (API). In this work we describe preliminary efforts at facilitating, with Web 2.0 tools and interaction design, a networking instructor CoP around the use of the PT 5.0 simulation, visualization, and collaboration features.

2. BUILDING A PORTAL TO SUPPORT A COP AROUND PT 5.0 To understand the collective domain around which a PT 5.0-oriented instructor CoP may be formed, we first look at the process of teaching and learning networking. We then examine the ways in which PT may be considered a Web 2.0 Tool. We examine the piloting of the PT Portal as a preliminary Web 2.0-enabled space in which the CoP could interact. Finally, we look at the possibilities for interaction design to enhance the PT Portal.

2.1 Teaching and Learning Networking Cisco provides a comprehensive e-learning package for integration into courses at educational institutions, which designate local instructors to deliver a mixture of hands-on and online instruction in basic computer networking. Many networking instructors agree that some theoretical concepts, the operation of networking protocols, the procedures for configuring networking devices, and troubleshooting all need to be visualized in order to enhance understanding and mastery. Hundhausen et al. (2002, p. 15) analyzed many studies on algorithm visualization in computer science and concluded that rather than passively viewing expert-created algorithm visualizations, learners in a cognitive constructivist model would be “constructing their own input data sets … making predictions regarding future visualization states … programming the target algorithm … answering strategic questions about the visualization ... and constructing their own visualizations.” This work influenced the evolving design of Packet Tracer in the direction of student-directed, constructivist pedagogy. In the cognitive constructivist view, then, algorithm visualization (AV) technology is seen as educationally effective to the extent that it actively engages learners in such constructive activities. Hundhausen et al. (2002, p. 23) concluded “that the form of activity is more important than the form of the visualization.” Packet Tracer allows students and instructors to create their own simulated network microworlds, which obey the basic “physics of networking.” PT also provides users access to a variety of visual representations, central to networking, to run experiments and conduct analyses. The AV roots of PT 5.0 are important to our community study: we seek to encourage instructors to share their instructional innovations, such as authoring PT visualizations to contribute to a community library. As PT has evolved, opportunities for instructor collaboration have arisen. Instructors in the CNA began to consider themselves as a large expert community and to reflect on the possibilities of sharing their knowledge. Leaders in the community began to ask, “How can we collectively construct something that leverages all the small incremental innovations that each of us introduces day after day in our classes?” What is envisioned is a community of peers that generates content by collectively sharing their knowledge via Web 2.0 technologies. PT 5.0, as software, has been distributed, for beta testing purposes, on a pilot web site called the PT Portal, where PT 5.0 users, authors, and developers, all seeking to improve the teaching and learning of networking, can more readily interact.

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2.2 Packet Tracer as a Web 2.0 Tool PT 5.0 was designed by Cisco’s CNA development team to provide free access to powerful network simulation, visualization, and collaboration for hundreds of thousands of networking academy students and instructors. Three features of PT 5.0 are particularly relevant as foci for activity in a CNA instructor community of practice: (1) an authoring tool called the activity wizard; (2) a multi-user capability that allows interconnection of different users’ virtual networks; and (3) an open application programming interface (API) which allows development of external e-learning applications based on PT 5.0. These affordances of PT 5.0 lead directly to features in the portal. First, the PT activity wizard allows the creation of scaffolded virtual lab experiences, with instructions, timers, answer and initial networks, formative assessment, grading, and feedback. These packaged activities can be in local languages with local annotations; instructors are encouraged to edit existing activities or author new ones and share them. Second, the multi-user feature opens new possibilities for collaborative and competitive network building, where individuals or teams of students can interconnect their virtual PT 5.0 networks over real network connections, at the same time using Web 2.0 collaboration tools. The PT Portal serves as a place to share these multi-user games, ideas for LAN parties, and success stories. Finally, the publication of the API enables the creation of an ecosystem of developers that use the core capabilities of PT to extend the software with external applications in networking curriculum, accessibility, assessment, equipment interfaces, mashups, and games. We believe these three features transform PT 5.0 into a software development kit (SDK) for developing digital artifacts (virtual lab activities, competitions, quizzes, external programs) to assist in the teaching of networking. Instructors may adapt PT 5.0 to serve their localized needs (translation) or pedagogical approaches; in a worldwide community of fifteen thousand instructors even a small amount of interaction could create incredible shared resources. The PT Portal has different sections that afford instructor and developer collaborative activities via Web 2.0 tools such as wikis, blogs, discussion forums, chats, RSS feeds, and file repositories. The portal is organized by common instructor work flows: Support (bug reporting, validation, discussion; obtaining tips); Share (activity files, external applications); Communicate (forums, blogs, wikis); Play (games, contests); Develop (code repository); Download (Updates, Activities, external applications, tutorials); Search; and Personalize.

2.3 Piloting the PT Portal The selected approach for the design and implementation of the portal has been iterative. The aim of the portal itself is to be considered as a live laboratory where it is possible to model and evaluate different kinds of instructor interactions. In the planned lifecycle, the portal has a first Beta Phase released in late February and online until the end of the year that is open only to nearly 500 invited instructors. The second version of the portal will be opened to a larger community of participants eventually to the full community of fifteen thousand instructors. The evaluation of the Beta version of the Portal is focused with the main goals of attracting enthusiastic power users that could help with the debugging of the software and creating awareness, interest, and conversation around the new collaborative features of the software. Thus, in the first phase (February –August 2008) the main effort has been oriented in supporting the beta testing of the different internal PT 5.0 releases. As part of a study conducted with the Cisco Learning Institute (Duran & Yamasaki, 2008) the community was surveyed with an online questionnaire. The 55 participants suggested the Portal concept had potential: 94% were satisfied with the Packet Tracer Beta program, 88% agreed the Packet Tracer Portal enables collaboration between Cisco and instructors, 86% agreed the Packet Tracer Portal enables collaboration between instructors; 51% have not reported any issues (bugs); 87% have not uploaded any Packet Tracer activities to the Portal; 78% have used Packet Tracer v5.0 Beta software more than 4 hours. The interactions have been monitored using a framework described in Table 1, where we illustrate the three main roles instructors now play in this community, the relevant affordances of PT 5.0 around which collaboration can occur, and a task description for which we did preliminary interaction design.

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Table 1. Different roles in the pilot of the PT Portal Role Users

Relevant PT 5.0 Affordances Task Description Simulation and visualization of Use already-authored activities networking to teach students; report bugs and get support

Authors

Activity Wizard; multi-user functions

Co-Developers API

Author new single-user and multi-user scaffolded activities Develop external networking elearning applications based on PT 5.0

In the second phase (September-November 2008), in correspondence with the start of a new academic year, the main goal of the Beta portal will be experimenting with the instructor interaction in terms of the creation of new activities, and co-development of external extensions. The model and the effectiveness of the interactions will be evaluated using online survey and phone interview with selected participants. After this preliminary testing, we intend to redesign the community to support all fifteen thousand CNA instructors and developers. Enabling, supporting, and optimizing the instructor interactions in the portal, and more generally among community peers, is seen as a significant opportunity to enhance teaching and learning with PT 5.0. Thus we are focusing on interaction design in order to monitor portal interaction, redesign it, and to enhance community membership.

2.4 Interaction Design to Enhance the Community Portal Interaction design is the activity of defining the interface of products and systems with which a user can interact. It is multidisciplinary, involving inputs from wide-reaching disciplines and fields; in the case of our educationally oriented CoP, these include human computer interaction (HCI) and computer supported collaborative learning (CSCL). Certain basic principles of cognitive psychology provide grounding for interaction design. These include mental models, mapping, interface metaphors, and affordances (Norman 1998). Recently interaction design has focused on the design of interactive products to support the way people communicate and interact in their everyday and working lives (Preece, Rogers, & Sharp, 2002). It is concerned with how to create quality user experiences and requires taking into account a number of interdependent factors, including context of use, type of activities, cultural differences, and user groups. Suthers (2005) called for an eclectic methodological fusion between experimental, descriptive (ethnographic), and iterative design approaches to research into collaborative software, emphasizing the importance of “designers to generate and assess promising new technology affordances in terms of the meaning-making activities they enable” (p. 8). This informs our approach: a design-oriented study of community development, where instructor meaning-making, in the roles of users, authors, and co-developers, might be facilitated with Web 2.0-enabled collaboration. Our attempt to use interaction design to enhance the PT 5.0 community will focus on (Wenger et al. 2005): (1) design for ease of use and learning (adoption of familiar tools is faster and less painful than tools that seem too new or too different); (2) design for evolution (it is always a good idea to design technology that can evolve, but with communities, the need to design for evolution is paramount because communities change; they often start rather tentatively, with only an initial sense of why they should come together; they reinvent themselves continuously; new members join, their practice evolves); (3) design for “closeness at hand” (solutions that are “one click away” from the tools that members use day-to-day are preferable to those that seem “farther away” from their working environment and require effort to switch context); (4) design from a user’s perspective (as in any technology design, the user perspective has to be the focus; however, because community technology is designed for communities but experienced by individuals, the process has to balance community and individual perspectives). Ways of measuring results will focus on surveys and interviews, though analysis of the portal web site statistics and limited video analysis are also being considered.

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3. CONCLUSION In order to apply the principles of interaction design we will study the CNA instructor CoP, as manifested in the PT Portal, by taking into account Wenger’s four indicators (Wenger et al. 2005): (1) configuration-level considerations, the technology configuration has to reflect the constitution of the community, its stage of development, and its diversity; (2) tool-level considerations, communities tend to engage in a complex set of activities to support the various ways members learn from each other; (3) feature-level considerations, not all tools for the same activity are created equal¸ they have features that define their usability; addressing this level of detail is important because usability is key; and (4) platform-level considerations, comparing candidates for inclusion in the technology configuration also requires some analysis of the platform to be used. These considerations require an understanding not only of the range of activities but also of how a community conducts these activities. Today, in the use of technologies by communities of practice we can observe two – seemingly opposed – trends: aggregation into platforms versus use of hybrid tools. We have chosen the first approach, but sometimes individuals belong to multiple communities that may be on different platforms. For them integration calls for a bridging logic. From a bridging perspective, it may be more productive to have light modules that are made compatible through standards like XML, API, and RSS syndication. The results of this first phase of monitoring, evaluation, and redesign, based on Wenger’s four indicators, will be gathered in September and early evidence of data will be presented at the IADIS Conference in October.

REFERENCES Duran, T. & Yamasaki, L. 2008. Summary of the “Packet Tracer Portal” Survey, unpublished Cisco Learning Institute internal report. Frezzo, D. C. et al, 2008. Design Patterns for Learning and Assessment: Facilitating the Introduction of a Complex Simulation-Based Learning Environment into a Community of Instructors, submitted for publication. Hundhausen, C.D. et al, 2002. A Meta-study of Algorithm Visualization Effectiveness. Journal of Visual Languages and Computing 13(3), 259-290. Lave, J. & Wenger E. 1991. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation, Cambridge University Press. Norman, D., 1988. The Design of Everyday Things, New York, Doubleday. Preece, J. et al, 2002. Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction, New York, John Wiley & Sons. Suthers, D. 2005. Technology Affordances for Intersubjective Learning, A Thematic Agenda for CSCL. In T. Koschmann, D. Suthers, & T. W. Chan (Eds.) (2005). Computer Supported Collaborative Learning 2005: The Next 10 Years! International Society of the Learning Sciences. (pp. 662-671). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Wenger, E., 1998- Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity, Cambridge University Press. Wenger, E. et al, 2005. Technology for communities, Cefrio.

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