Background
The current trend to globalization and the growing influence of technology on our lives mean that today’s students need to acquire different and evolving skill sets to cope and thrive in this changing society. As computers are growing in importance in every aspect of society, many consider that it is better to expose children early to this evolving technology. Our education institutions must prepare students to work in a computer-filled economy. Over 50% of American workers use a computer at work and this is growing rapidly. Rules-based tasks are increasingly being computerized and/or outsourced; therefore work for a growing number of Americans will be tasks that cannot be processed simply by following rules. We will need to teach our students to identify and solve problems (expert thinking); and to engage in complex human interactions (leading, teaching, marketing & negotiating). If the U.S. is to maintain its high technology status in today’s global economy, computers must be given a more integral role in our schools. We will need to focus on fostering 21st century skills and knowledge rather than preparing students to do well on high stakes standardized tests. Students are more than ready to embrace technology in education. Today’s students have grown up using digital technology. Surveys show that, of young people aged 12-17:
• Over 50% have their own blog or contribute to another blog or website
• Over 50% download music
• 90% use the internet to search for information for class assignments
• 80% are given internet assignments to complete at school
• 60% are using online dictionaries, encyclopedias and thesauruses
• Over 70% say that having access to the internet helps them earn better grades & be stronger
students
Technology adoption in U.S. schools
Despite the prevalence of technology in many parts of society, schools lag far behind in the use of technology. This is the case, despite massive investments in educational technology. Since 1996, state and district level agencies have invested over $10 billion to acquire and integrate computer-based technologies into American schools. The federal government has spent an additional $3 billion. This has been one of the most costly educational initiatives in recent times. The U.S. ratio of students to computers has dropped from 125:1 in 1983 to 4:1 in 2002. From 1984 to 1997, the number of computers in U.S. schools increased eleven-fold to over 8 million units. At present, approximately 98% of U.S. schools have Internet access. The use of laptops in schools is increasing as well. An estimated 12% of U.S. schools have used laptops as an instructional tool. There is a growing trend to employ 1:1 laptop programs to provide students with 24/7 access. This is made possible, partly due to the decreasing weight of laptop computers and the increasing availability of wireless access. A leader in laptop use, the State of Maine has provided Apple iBooks to all middle school students and teachers and 25% of high school students and teachers. Henrico County in Virginia and Cobb County in Georgia have provided laptops to all middle and high school students. Texas is currently implementing a statewide rollout by providing laptops to all high school students. Goals of laptop programs often include some or all of the following:
• Improved academic achievement
• Increased equity of access/overcoming digital divide
• Increased economic competitiveness of state or region
• Effecting a transformation in quality of instruction through increased student-centered
instruction; differentiated learning; problem or project-based learning & use of higher order
thinking skills.
Current and future applications of technology in education
Students and teachers are using a variety of technologies across subject areas including:
• Developing online blogs and podcasts to refine reading, writing & research skills
• Using Voice over IP to talk to other students around the world for free
• Online education to reach rural & remote students
• Teachers using video clips from IPTV to streaming video to enhance lessons
• Interactive whiteboards to replace chalkboards, handouts and possibly, even textbooks
• E-books are replacing textbooks in some schools
• Handheld technologies: podcasting, digital video, & GPS
• Texas using iPods for vocabulary development through preloaded songs and course lessons for
English language learners and kindergarten students
• Use of classroom blogs to enhance communications with students & parents
• Using software and online resources to learn foreign languages
• Use of online dictionaries, encyclopedias & thesauruses
• Use of word processing and hypermedia authoring software in writing process
• Spreadsheet creation
• Collecting data from CD-Rom encyclopedias, internet, science probes & GPS
• Using laptops to write, take notes, complete homework, keep organized, communicate with peers & teachers and research topics on internet In 2004, the federal Department of Commerce encouraged students to participate in developing “Visions 2020” by providing input on potential technologies and how they might be applied in education. Over 160,000 students participated, 38% from K-5 and 62% were 6-12th grade. Student responses were broad and far-reaching and have been encapsulated in the following quote:
“Every student would use a small, handheld wireless computer that is voice activated. The computer would offer high-speed access to a kid-friendly Internet, populated with websites that are safe, designed specifically for use by students, with no pop-up ads. Using this device, students would complete most of their in-school work and homework, as well as take online classes both at school and at home. Students would use the small computer to play mathematics-learning games and read interactive e-textbooks. In completing their schoolwork, students would work closely and routinely with an intelligent digital tutor, and tap a knowledge utility to obtain factual answers to questions they pose. In their history studies, students could participate in 3-D virtual reality-based historic reenactments.”
This suggests a multitude of directions to go with educational technologies in the future that will require changes in many aspects of schooling including instructional strategies, scheduling and more.
Studying the impact of technology on student achievement & instructional practices
As is the case with many educational reforms, it is difficult to isolate the impact of technology on student achievement. Much of the literature relies on survey data rather than pure empirical research. In addition, many researchers suggest that the traditional measure of student achievement, namely standardized test scores may not adequately assess the impacts of technology. The reason for this is that test scores do not necessarily measure the development of the higher order creative and critical thinking skills that are identified as a valuable outcome of the use of educational technologies. Despite these difficulties, it is critical to evaluate whether the tremendous investment in computer technologies in schools is providing an adequate return in terms of student achievement to guide ongoing multibillion dollar policy decisions. Prior educational research has shown that students who engage in collaborative work and participate in more project-based learning have higher levels of motivation leading to higher levels of achievement; and that learning increases significantly when students are engaged in academic study through authentic, real-world experiences. Much of the research on the impact of technology considers the degree to which the use of computers results in an increase in these practices and the resultant impact on student achievement. The following are highlights of a number of studies, which examined the impact of educational technology:
• A 1994 meta-analysis of over 500 studies regarding the impact of computer-based instruction (CBI), defined primarily as tutorial, drill and practice software found that students learned more in less time; liked classes more; and developed more positive attitudes when classes used CBI.
• In the early 90’s, the “Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow” (ACOT) project encouraged instruction innovation and emphasized to teachers the potential of computers to support student initiative, long-term projects, access to multimedia resources and cooperative learning. A 1994 analysis of the impact of ACOT identified a positive impact on student attitudes and a change in teaching practice to more cooperative group work and less teacher stand-up learning, but did not find any positive impacts on student performance on standardized tests.
• As a part of the “Computer Supported Intentional Learning Environment” (CSILE) project, children were to ask questions, search for other students’ answers to their questions, comment on and review other students’ work, and then restructure and formulate answers to their original questions. A 1996 study found that CSILE students surpassed other students on measures of depth of understanding, reflection and on standardized tests in reading, language arts & vocabulary.
• A 1998 review of 219 studies on the effects of technology on learning, consistently found that students in technology rich environments experienced positive effects on achievement in all subject areas and that this was the case for both regular and special needs students. The author also concluded that attitudes towards learning and self-concepts improved when computers were used for instruction.
• A study, published in 1998, analyzed the impact of computer use on 1996 4th & 8th grade math scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The researcher concluded that both 4th & 8th grade students who used simulation and higher order thinking software had significantly higher math achievement. However, he also concluded that students who used drill and practice technologies performed worse on NAEP math tests than did students not using these techniques.
• Analyses of West Virginia’s Basic Skills/Computer Education (BS/CE) program found positive impacts on student achievement among 5th graders who had been involved in this initiative as measured by significant gains in Stanford 9 reading, writing and math scores. The greatest gains were associated with lower achieving students. A cost/benefit analysis of BS/CE in 1999 found it to be more cost effective, in raising student achievement, than other popular interventions including reducing class size from 35 to 20; increasing instructional time; or cross-age tutoring programs.
• Microsoft’s “Anytime Anywhere Learning Project” provided laptops to 125,000 students in 800 schools beginning in 1996. An evaluation of the project, conducted in 2000, found that teachers and students report that students involved in the project were more likely to:
• engage in collaborative work
• participate in project-based instruction
• produce more writing & higher quality writing
• have greater access to information & improve research analysis skills
• direct their own learning
• readily engage in problem-solving & critical thinking skills
• spend more time doing homework on computers.
• A 2000 study sponsored by the Heritage Foundation compared student achievement with the frequency of in-class computer use by trained teachers as well as a number of other factors such as race, parents educational levels, income, gender, etc. The study results demonstrated that the frequency of computer use in school did not have a statistically significant impact on academic achievement in 4th or 8th grade based on NAEP data.
• A 2003 meta-analysis of 99 recent studies considered the effect of the use of word processing on student writing in terms of both quantity and quality, using a wide range of measures of writing dimensions. Results of the data analysis showed that use of a word processor for writing had a positive impact on the quantity of student writing, more so for middle and high school students than for elementary school students. A positive effect on the quality of writing was also identified but the effect was smaller. Further analysis of the non-quantitative studies suggested that the use of word processing in the writing process leads to increased collaborative writing and peer editing; higher motivation to write; more positive attitudes about writing; and an increase in the number of students demonstrating higher order thinking skills in their writing.
• In 2004, an evaluation of a laptop immersion program at a small, rural high school in Maine identified an improvement in student motivation and interest in school; an increase in daily attendance; improved interaction among students and between students and teachers; reduced reliance on textbooks; and a belief among students, teachers and parents that the use of the laptops had improved the quality of student work and had a positive impact on student achievement. This was especially true for low achieving students. Students also experienced more personalized learning opportunities by exploring topics on their own; selecting their own areas of research; and influencing lessons through their interests.
• A study, published in 2005, explored the relationship between home and school computer use and English language arts test scores among 4th grade students in Massachusetts. The authors concluded that instructional use of computers during the writing process had a positive relationship with student performance on the essay portion of the test. However, they also found that students who use computers to create presentations during class perform worse than expected on the writing portion of the test; they theorized that students are spending class-time to create and revise multimedia presentations & therefore, spend less time writing and developing writing skills. Finally, they suggested that students who spend more time on recreational computer use at home perform worse than expected on reading & literature portion of test; likely due to less time spent reading at home.
• A 2005 literature review of 30 studies on the impact of 1:1 laptop programs concluded that the available research-based evidence is generally positive, especially with respect to technology use; technological proficiency; and writing skills.
• An evaluation of the first 9 months of a 1:1 laptop program in 6 of New Hampshire’s most needy schools, published in 2005, found similar results to other studies. Teachers believed that increased computer use had led to greater student participation in class, particularly for low achieving students; higher levels of student motivation and engagement; increased ability of students to work independently and in groups; an increased level of positive interaction with other students and with teachers; an improvement in the quality of student writing; and a slightly higher ability to retain content material.
• PUSD’s 2005 evaluation of the laptop immersion program at Harvest Park found that participation in the program led to an overall significant impact on student achievement as those students who had participated in the program tended to:
• Attained higher GPAs
• Received higher grades in English & math
• Were more likely to meet or exceed grade level expectations on district writing assessment, offered in 6th & 8th grades
• Were more likely to score at or above national average on language & math portions of CAT 6 at all 3 grade levels
• Scored proficient or advanced on English language & math portions of the California STAR tests
Barriers to technology in schools
Despite the apparent benefits of the use of educational technology, a number of factors may hinder the effective, widespread use of technology in schools:
• Putting together an effective and well-implemented technology plan is difficult. Many believe that teacher input on technology decisions is critical.
• Without sufficient and high quality professional development for teachers, benefits of educational technology use may be negligible or minimal. Some believe that up to 1/3 of technology budgets should be set aside for professional development. This may range from informal sharing and joint curriculum planning among teachers to intensive 10-day sessions on instructional strategies and computer tools.
• Funding of the infrastructure will continue to be a major barrier, both in terms of providing a current base of technology in schools and in maintaining it. Additional difficulties arise as a result of the inequities between schools in funding of technology initiatives.
• There is a need to provide effective and ongoing support for teachers with the integration of technology into the curriculum in terms of both technical and digital content expertise as well as the necessary time for planning.
• Potential for student misuse of wireless access. Students must be taught appropriate and safe uses of technology and policies must be in place with consequences for misuse.
• Evaluations of the impact of technology on student achievement may be difficult to fully assess in direct terms such as test scores and may have to be broadened to include indicators such as discipline referrals; complexity of homework assignments completed; enrollment in more challenging courses; declines in special education placements; lower drop out rates; rises in numbers of college-bound students; and greater parent participation.
• Teacher and student standards for technological literacy/proficiency are not available and/or well developed. In many cases, students’ computer literacy exceeds that of their teachers, which may lead to awkward instructional situations.
• Finally, teacher attitudes towards technology are critical. Teachers must believe that students are capable of completing complex assignments independently or with peers; that technology is a tool with a wide variety of applications; and that adequate software and internet-based resources are available to support their content area.
Summary and conclusions
Despite some limitations in the scope of the research-based evidence, there does seem to be a sufficient body of data, both quantitative and qualitative, to determine a positive relationship between increased use of educational technologies and student achievement. This is demonstrated directly, by increased scores on standardized testing, particularly in the areas of writing and mathematics; as well as indirectly through an increase in student motivation, engagement and positive attitudes toward learning. All of these are well known to be critical contributing factors to increases in student achievement. These gains in student achievement are often proven to be greater for low achieving and/or at risk students. Finally, many of the studies referenced student gains in higher order thinking skills including creative and critical thinking. Although, these are more difficult to measure, the broad range of anecdotal data, suggests that this is a credible, positive conclusion. The provision of laptops to middle and high school students appears to be a promising approach in building technology proficiency as well as writing and other academic skills; overcoming inequities; promoting communication and collaboration; and providing higher levels of student engagement and motivation; as well as producing identifiable gains in test scores and grades. Certain conditions must be satisfied to ensure that the gains in student achievement associated with the effective use of technology in education are realized and/or maximized. For example, a comprehensive plan must be developed that links technology with core instructional objectives. There must be sufficient funding to provide up-to-date equipment and software, to maintain it, and to train and provide ongoing support to teachers in integrating technology into the curriculum and employing appropriate instructional strategies. Technologies used should be those that promote higher order thinking rather than the drill and practice forms of software, which are less likely to prove effective.
Safeguards must be put into place to protect students and the integrity of the systems. Finally, ongoing evaluations of the impact of technology must take a broader view of student achievement, beyond test scores and consider impacts on student motivation, engagement and other critical factors.
RESOURCES: TECHNOLOGY
*Apple Computer, “Research: what it says about 1 to 1 learning” June 2005.
Armstrong, S. & D. Warlick, “The New Literacy: the 3 Rs evolve into the 4 Es”. Technology and
Learning. September 2004. www.techlearning.com
*Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, “Educational Technology, Part I” ASCD Smart Brief. November 16, 2005. www.smartbrief.com
*Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, “Educational Technology, Part II” ASCD Smart Brief. November 17, 2005. www.smartbrief.com
*Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, “The effect of computers on student
writing: what the research tells us”. ASCD Research Brief. April 1, 2003. Volume 1, Number
www.ascd.org
*Bebell, D. “Technology promoting student excellence: an investigation of the 1st year of 1:1
computing in New Hampshire middle schools”. Technology and Assessment Study
Collaborative. May 2005. www.intasc.org
*Goldberg, A.& others, “The effect of computers on student writing: a meta-analysis of studies from 1992 to 2002”. The Journal of Technology, Learning and Assessment. Volume 2, Number 1, February 2003. www.jtla.org
*Gulek, J.C. & H. Demirtas, “Learning with technology: the impact of laptop use on student
achievement”. The Journal of Technology, Learning and Assessment. Volume 3, Number 2,
January 2005. www.jtla.org
*IBM Learning Solutions, “In the future: learning will reshape our world at work, at home and at
school”. 2004. www.ibm.com/learning
*Johnson, K.A., “Do computers in the classroom boost academic achievement?”. A report of the
Heritage Center for Data Analysis. June 14, 2000. CDA00-08. www.heritage.org
*Levy, F. & R.J. Murnane, “Preparing students for work in a computer-filled economy”. Education Week. Editorial Projects in Education. Vol. 24, number 1, page 56,44.
http://webct.ulv.edu/Edd_LC/symposium2005/EdWkPreparingStdntsforWrk904.htm
*Lindquist, J. “The future of anytime, anywhere education”. T.H.E. Journal, November 2004, Vol. 32 Issue 4, p.32. http://webct.ulv.edu/Edd_LC/symposium2005/The%20Future%20of%20Anytime
*McNabb, M. & others, “Critical Issues in Evaluating the Effectiveness of Technology”. North Central Regional Educational Laboratory. 1999. http://www.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/tech/techconf99/confsum.html
*Metiri Group & Learning Point Associates, “enGauge 21st Century Skills for 21st Century Learners” www.metiri.com
*Mitchell Institute, “Great Maine Schools Project: One-to-one laptops in a high school environment: Piscataquis Community High School Study Final Report”. February 2004.
http://www.mitchellinstitute.org/Gates/init_research.html
*National Education Association, “Technology in Schools”.
www.nea.org/technology/index.html?mode=print
*O’Dwyer, L.M. & others, “Examining the relationship between home and school computer use and students’ English/Language Arts test scores”. The Journal of Technology, Learning and
Assessment. Volume 3, Number 3, January 2005. www.jtla.org
*Schacter, J., “The impact of education technology on student achievement: what the most current research has to say”. Milken Exchange on Education Technology. 1999. www.milkenexchange.org
*U.S. Department of Commerce, “Visions 2020.2 Student Views on Transforming Education and
Training Through Advanced Technologies” http://www.netday.org/speakup_forstudents_2004.htm#Visions
Sunday, December 14, 2008
Digital Technology and its Impact on Education
The Present
Many believe a revolution is taking place in education in the way people learn and the way instruction is given. The education community has been hearing of reforms and revolutions for the past few decades, but most of them have been nonexistent or without any long-term merit or real value. Some believe the method of an instructor lecturing while students listen and "absorb" is really the only viable way to teach or learn. About two decades ago, when personal computers started to become affordable, many thought that computers would revolutionize education, that computer-based teaching and learning would become the savior of education and the solution to falling test scores. This has never really happened. Over the past two decades, many teachers have successfully prepared students, some with computers in the classroom and some without. Teachers could avoid computers, either because they chose not to learn how to use them or because they had none in their classroom or school to use. Teachers entering the profession have not been required to understand computational technology in order to graduate from college.
The Internet has been in existence for almost two decades and began to extend into schools about 15 years ago, first into universities and then into K-12. Did the Internet revolutionize education? Well, not exactly. It did provide an opportunity to expand learning options for teachers and students who were fortunate enough to have Internet access, a few computers, and appropriate guidance on usage. Often this took place in only one classroom and only one school within a system and did not become systemic throughout the school. There are many factors affecting this slow implementation of computing and communication technology in schools, including administrations with no knowledge of its value or no willingness to realign school budgets to include computational technology; insufficient in-service professional development programs for teachers; a lack of specific curriculum benefits or of resources for teachers to use in their courses; and deficient preservice preparation of teachers in technology or computation.
Why do some of us believe there is now a revolution taking place that cannot be ignored by educators or administrators? In November 1993, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) released Mosaic, the first World Wide Web browser for all three computing platforms (UNIX, PC, and Macintosh). The Internet had become the World Wide Web, and now Mosaic allowed anyone who knew the basics about using a computer and a mouse to go out onto the Web and easily and quickly locate multimedia information. Suddenly text, images, sound, and video could come to the desktop and be used by students from the kindergarten through Ph.D. levels. Files rapidly became hypermedia text pages, and nascent searching and information integration tools became easily accessible. So what is the difference between the past two decades of computers and Internet access and the present, since even now WWW access requires computers and an Internet connection? The difference is that the Web represents Information, and information cannot be disregarded the way that computers can be ignored. Teachers cannot choose to ignore or have their students omit available information on any subject when the goal is for them to learn. A revolution is taking place in education.
The Future
While the first impetus for schools to connect to the Web has been simply to access information and this incentive has made a great deal possible collaboration around numerous kinds of educational activities will become a primary motivation for connectivity among schools, teachers, parents, and students. When students, teachers, parents, administrators, and even legislators can communicate via the Internet and begin to collaborate electronically on issues, the traditional educational process may see a fundamental transformation, with decisions about a student's learning being resolved in new and hopefully better ways.
Traditionally, schools and classrooms have tended to discourage many forms of collaboration. In the archetypical system, decisions related to course content and delivery arrive top down from the administration, teachers spend all but a small portion of their day confined to a room, telephones are not easily available to teachers in most situations, students are rewarded for not talking and for working independently, and communication between teacher and parents is scheduled once or twice a year at most. Teachers who value communication with parents and students generally must do it on their own time from home. Students who want to or have to collaborate must often do it outside of the scheduled "work day."
In contrast, success in graduate school, business, or life in general relies on collaboration and teamwork. The traditional education system, being more evolutionary than revolutionary, is unlikely to transform itself any time soon into an environment that teaches and encourages collaboration as a part of learning; emerging technologies, however, can catalyze this change much sooner than it would happen otherwise.
electronic mail and "surfing" for information with a browser, such as Mosaic, involve communicating with others and locating information, but the real power of the Web will come from people being better able to accomplish their "work," regardless of its focus. Communication via e-mail is a form of asynchronous collaboration. People enter messages that are sent to other people who read them, and perhaps respond, at a later point in time. Bulletin boards, such as the nearly ubiquitous Usenet newsgroups, are another form of asynchronous communication, to an open audience. Listserves based on e-mail are a very similar form of asynchronous, group communication. Desktop video teleconferencing, on the other hand, allows real-time, synchronous collaboration, although bandwidth is consumed quickly with this technology. Chat sessions are a text-based version of synchronous collaboration, as are Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs), Object-Oriented MUDs (MOOs), or Multi-User Shared Hallucinations (MUSHes), where a number of people participate simultaneously in a shared conversation or activity. The real power of digital technologies is not yet tapped; other applications on the desktop for doing exciting and robust synchronous and asynchronous collaboration are just now emerging.
Although a number of schools in the nation have invested in traditional video teleconferencing classrooms, and although some students have probably benefited from these facilities, this technological investment is not expected to be a cost effective or a pedagogically valuable way to extend distance learning to the nation's students. What we do expect to flourish and grow are asynchronous and synchronous collaboration applications between desktop computers, some of which may be hooked to a projection system so that many people in the same location can participate. All the desktops will be connected through the Internet. An instructor can sit at a desktop workstation and communicate with a "classroom" of students, each of whom has a workstation in front of him and a connection to the Internet. The students no longer have to be in the same room; they can interact with other students and teachers in different locations.
Emerging Technology in the Service of Collaboration
An example of the kind of collaborative software that we have in mind is growing out of a software project of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. A few years ago, NCSA developed a system called NCSA Collage intended to help computational researchers share data from simulations, images generated from that data, text, drawings, diagrams, animation sequences, and screen shots from other analysis software with remotely located colleagues in a real-time, synchronous session. This software addressed a continuing need of research teams scattered across the globe. Combined with a conference phone call or a chat session, Collage allowed researchers to carry on a virtual meeting, with many of the resources of their digital tools available to the meeting. Researchers soon began asking us to find a way to enable them to easily locate relevant papers or journal preprints on the Net and bring them into their Collage discussion sessions. Looking for an answer led us to the early existing WWW software. We saw that with improvements in their ease of use, additional functionality, and a cross-platform implementation, these graphical, hypertext-based Web browsers could be of great help in addressing our problem. This led to the development of NCSA Mosaic.
The Mosaic story is by now well known. Soon after its introduction, NCSA Mosaic caused a 100,000-fold increase in WWW NSFnet backbone traffic and brought in millions of users, thus creating a market for the dozens of commercial browsers that subsequently have been introduced. Since then, the commercial market has taken off phenomenally. Spyglass, Netscape, and Microsoft all have produced widely used browsers and Web technology, and scores of companies have jumped into the Web market. Spyglass alone has created a licensing family of 36 companies with over 80 products. Netscape was created by a half dozen NCSA-trained programmers and is currently a market leader. The Microsoft Internet Explorer is a licensed derivative product from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Spyglass that is available to anyone with a Windows 95 interface a potential market projected to number in the millions within one year. At last count, there were over 40 different browsers available on the Web. On the server side, NCSA WWW server software is used on roughly 50 percent of the installed base of WWW servers on the open Internet and about 70 percent of those in the .EDU domain (which consists of educational institutions). In addition, commercialization of server software is proceeding at an astounding rate.
With the explosion of commercial effort in Web-based technologies, it is clear that the Web is here to stay. In one form or another (and the exact form is both extremely important and virtually impossible to predict), the growth of access to TCP/IP-based networks the Internet as we generally know it and the availability of Web-based software and services, will only increase, driven by a vision of huge market potential. At the same time, the cost of access and services in this extraordinarily competitive sector will only decrease. The rise of new technologies and the constantly decreasing cost of network bandwidth and processor power will help to insure that the Web is more than just a short-term trend. The next generation of collaborative tools needs to be Web-based.
It is also important to recognize that the unique culture of the Internet, based historically in the cooperative environments of the academic and research communities, will not disappear in a more commercialized Internet. While there is a continuing desire on the part of companies to lock users and developers into proprietary formats and programming interfaces, there is also a need for open systems that can be extended and modified in various ways and that can cross the boundaries of different operating systems and applications. This quality of interoperability has been one of the fundamental advantages of Web-based applications.
The research and education communities also have established a tradition of placing their software in the public domain or, alternately, making it "free with copyright" along the model of the NCSA Mosaic software. Under this approach, individuals can use software for free, while the authors still retain the rights for commercialization. The dynamics of the Web have transported this idea into an increasing number of commercial software sectors, from browsers to programming languages. This makes new technology widely available almost instantaneously and gives users and developers a rapidly expanding spectrum of possibilities for tool development. On the other hand, some have dubbed this the "heroin approach" to software adoption: users get "hooked" on free tools, then later pay to get the latest versions, full support, or software that is no longer available for free. It is too soon to tell how these proprietary issues will turn out in the long term, but the educational community is often one of the main beneficiaries of free or low-cost software.
Integration with the Web
NCSA is now working to bring to the Web the kind of technology developed in Collage and to integrate synchronous collaboration with asynchronous methods. The Web provides a set of standards for handling a wide variety of media types and an installed base of browser software and server environments that can be integrated fruitfully into a framework for using collaboration methods in education. The Web has become a condensation point for virtually every advanced technology developed over the last two decades by the computational science and computer science communities. All of these technologies are streaming onto the Web at fantastic rates, each bringing its own revolution in how we conceptualize the future digital communication infrastructure. Many advanced and disparate technologies are being integrated into the global system, including object-oriented frameworks for application environments and databases; state-of-the-art security methods implemented at the connection, document, compiler, and interpreter levels; efficient distributed three-dimensional modeling and scientific visualization schemes; robust and truly persistent global naming and location methods; semantic-based object description and search techniques; and our focus in this paper workgroup and workflow software support environments in real and non-real time. The following examples show what these technological advancements can mean for learning environments.
Remotely controlled Mosaics represent a collaborative capability that could make distance teaching a much easier and more meaningful way to learn. An instructor who knew the Internet Protocol address of each student's machine and had control privileges could regulate the presentation being delivered to the students and, via the WWW and a browser, could present multimedia material and information just as he or she would in a traditional classroom with all the students present. The instructor could also release control of the students' machines to enable them to work on exercises, look for information, or communicate with other, remotely located students involved in a group project. The instructor could regain control at a future time to "discuss" an item with the entire class. In addition to presenting previously prepared information to the student machines, the instructor could give new information to all students by preparing it in advance for delivery, by typing it in, or by using voice and, eventually, real-time digital video.
In this type of classroom, anything on the Web would become material for shared, real-time presentation and discussion. Adding a simple capability to draw on the browser window would provide the users with "white board" interaction. Any changes that the instructor or a student made in this window could be seen by all the participants in the virtual classroom, and it would become easy to point out across the Net the important features of an article, a map, an image, or a 3-D drawing.
By generalizing the capability that allows one user to control or drive the software running on another user's machine when both are connected to the Internet, it becomes possible to bring any collaboration-capable software tool into the interaction. In this way, specialized educational software could be integrated into the virtual classroom; an instructor could demonstrate to a remotely located student how to execute an application. The ability to run simulations on remote or local machines is another application that is very important in teaching computational science and indeed could be useful in teaching chemistry, physics, and other high school science subjects. In the past, this application has been accomplished not with a browser, but with a series of File Transfer Protocols (FTPs), telnets, or other operations that allowed connectivity to another machine. Providing interaction with remote machines through a straightforward interface like a Web browser would make this capability available to a much larger audience.
Building these types of applications for the Web requires much more power in the Web browser than we currently have. In fact, the idea of a browser needs to give way to the more encompassing idea of a Web environment that is flexible and dynamic and can be customized to the needs of the moment. Java, a new programming language from Sun Microsystems, opens up these possibilities by allowing programs to be sent over the Web in a secure fashion. Programs that are executed locally when they arrive at the user's desktop are an example of "mobile code." The possibilities engendered by secure mobile code on the Internet are staggering. Sun's Java is an example of a C++like language that was developed specifically to address network security considerations. The capability to send executing programs that can link dynamically with existing desktop browsers and other software means that whole applications, protocols, and interfaces can be sent over the Net with HTML documents.
NCSA is evaluating the Java framework and working with Sun to make this technology available to educational users. We are working with Sun's Hot Java Web browser, investigating the use of Java in high performance systems and applications, and developing a foundation set of software to enable advanced collaboration across the Net for all users. NCSA is also collaborating with the Open Software Foundation to evaluate Java's security features, with the University of Illinois Digital Library Initiative project to develop advanced search interfaces in Java, and with the Online Computer Library Center, Inc. to study the use of Hot Java for complex scientific documents. The use of mobile code (and Java is only one example of mobile code systems) very likely will revolutionize how students and teachers use the WWW, equivalent in impact to the introduction of Mosaic and the WWW a few years ago or to the advent of NCSA Telnet and FTP before that.
Habanero
Java is also the foundation for a new environment, named Habanero, that will encompass, and go beyond, the capabilities of Mosaic and the synchronous collaborative features of Collage. The collaborative engine developed in Java will allow users to share anything that can be sent over the Web (HTML, graphics, data, etc.), in addition to live sound and video. The basic Habanero engine will include a software interface that will allow any application to become collaborative by conforming to the interface. As in the above hypothetical scenario, a white board setup would allow users to share a drawing appearing on any page in the browser by sending drawing messages to the collaboration engine. Any piece of data analysis or visualization software could become part of a collaborative session by exposing part of its interface to the Habanero engine, thereby allowing users to incorporate advanced or discipline-specific applications into their collaborative sessions. In addition, any collaborative session could be recorded, reviewed later, synopsized, annotated, and distributed to those who missed the virtual meeting or classroom session, with all the media and interactions of the original session intact.
NCSA's initial efforts focused on incorporating the functionality of Collage in Habanero, which will provide a core set of collaboration tools for all researchers. Our latest efforts focus on developing shared HTML editors, audio, easy third-party software integration, and agents for meetings (which serve as your representative to collect data or notify you of the need to respond to a request).
The availability of additional bandwidth through, say, cable TV Internet access, would be of obvious value in enhancing real-time collaborations, especially those involving huge data sets, high speed visualization, and real-time video. Collaborative uses of Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) would also be enhanced by the increased speed and would pave the way for the next generation of research and development of fully 3-D collaborative environments. NCSA's strategy builds on exploratory research done in the CAVE, a fully 3-D virtual environment with virtual presence of the collaborators in the form of "avatars," or rendered representations of the participants. This technology is moving toward fully digital conferencing techniques that go beyond video and encompass a completely rendered, customizable, bandwidth-sensitive, 3-D representation of each participant, in a fully 3-D environment for the conference and any accompanying data or simulation results. Bandwidth and workstation capabilities available to users can define a spectrum of these kinds of environments, from full immersion in something like the CAVE, to VRML-based 3-D environments on widely available desktop systems.
Web as Habanero: Integrating Synchronous and Asynchronous Activities
The Habanero development is part of a more encompassing effort to bring the power of high-performance computing to researchers and educators on the Web. In its initial development by Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailleau at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics near Geneva, Switzerland, the World Wide Web was originally envisioned as a system to organize and enhance the work of research teams in high-energy physics. The popularity of the Web as a means of information discovery and retrieval (the global electronic library metaphor), and as a foundation for electronic commerce (the electronic market metaphor), has tended to push into the background considerations about its use as a global research lab (the virtual institute or virtual classroom metaphor). NCSA is focusing on developing a Web infrastructure that would change this and provide capabilities directly targeted on globally distributed research and learning communities. An example is the development of HyperNews (a Web-based bulletin board system) and of global annotation capabilities, which can be used as a foundation for virtual research colleges (in the classic sense) or research institutes on the Web.
These kinds of Web-based virtual institutes could include most or all of the functions of a brick-and-mortar research institute. A research team or a class could form an institute by placing notes or annotations on documents, data, services, indexes, bulletin boards, discussion groups, or anything else on the Net, thereby signifying that these objects are part of the work of the institute, part of the relevant neighborhood. A reader would be notified when she entered the neighborhood of the virtual institute and would be given information on who else was visiting, what the rules of the institute were, what members' office hours were, what research projects were underway and their status, and whether any active collaborat)ons with others were being sought. In addition to participating in asynchronous collaborations via bulletin boards, e-mail, and the like, a visitor to the virtual institute could establish synchronous collaboration based on a chat session, a Collage session, a digital video teleconferencing center, a shared VRML scene, or any combination of these. She could then join an existing collaboration or inquire whether any institute members would like to start up a new one. A more simple use of this system would allow any geographically distributed research team or learning group to organize their activities with full-media support, or would allow a teacher to organize the lesson or project material of students.
An alpha version of this Neighborhoods software has been completed, and work is starting on a VRML neighborhoods application. With the VRML application, users visiting a VRML scene can "appear" in the scene via an icon and, with the aid of an integrated chat box, can communicate with other users that they can see. Future work aims toward a collaborative VRML environment, where users can run shared VRML simulations or take "group tours" through a VRML world. Integration with the Habanero framework and HyperNews will proceed over the next months.
Repositories
To provide some of this functionality, server-side capabilities must be enhanced and made available in forms as easily adoptable as current HyperText Transfer Protocol servers are. Many of the ideas discussed above were first applied to high-performance computing and communication systems, and a wealth of experience and collaborations with technology innovators has led us to establish a framework that will allow Web testbeds to be prototyped rapidly and permit numerous technologies to be investigated and integrated. This modular, flexible, and extensible framework allows various kinds of functionality, including collaboration, to be included.
NCSA is using this Repository framework, as it is called, to pursue work in many different areas: high-speed Asynchronous Transfer Mode networks for the Web; digital libraries for managing Standard General Markup Language collections and other complex, highly structured scientific documents; global naming, annotation, and collaboration systems; sites for managing and distributing valued objects with strict terms and conditions governing their use and their intellectual property rights; massive digital data manipulation and access points; object-oriented databases for Web site contents; advanced semantic-based searching of information across disciplines; and distributed site management for large public data sets. NCSA is also working to rapidly integrate those capabilities that prove themselves in the prototyping phase of our next generation of public software.
Federations of Repositories
A Repository is a framework for integrating advanced Web services. NCSA has defined a structure to enable individual Repositories to better manage their information and has gained experience from building several Repositories; our next task is to determine how Repositories interrelate. The basic framework will establish the capability of communication between Repositories, but what they communicate about and how several of them cooperate to provide larger federated services are open questions at this time.
One way in which Repositories can interrelate is by providing a search service that transcends Repository boundaries. Support for manual searching, or browsing, already exists in the WWW; here the user selects links to follow from one document to the next across the Web of related documents. Automatic searching over the Web that uses the same links between documents requires standards across servers for query language, knowledge representation, and metadata semantics (a new and very powerful way to search semantically). Automatic analysis of collections of interlinked documents can also help produce cross-collection indexes to optimize searching in fairly focused areas. Collaboration technologies and this Repository framework can also allow users to contribute to the incremental self-organization of the Web.
NCSA is currently developing a framework for educational information in Illinois called the Illinois Learning Mosaic (ILM) project. This Web-based information resource and database will support information of interest to students in kindergarten through the Ph.D level, as well as to teachers, administrators, parents, legislators, and other citizens. The ILM is being designed within the Repository framework of future Internet server software, so that any other information databases on the Internet built within this same Repository framework will automatically share data. When this work is complete, servers will be communicating and sharing with servers for the first time. This will allow anyone on the Internet to develop interrelated data bases and collections that automatically share similar data. This type of sharing between servers also forms the foundation of the annotation capabilities underlying the Neighborhoods and Habanero projects.
Workplace of the Future
NCSA has just finished the beta version of a new framework for collaboration on the World Wide Web called the NetWorkPlace. Completed for Vice President Gore's National Performance Review, this environment of asynchronous communication and collaboration tools allows distributed team members to work on the Web in a new and potentially revolutionary way. Some of the current tools include a Web-based group calendar, chatting capability, capability for threaded discussion and group meetings, writing tools, document storage and publication tools, a project management tool, a forms tool, workspace management tools, and more. New asynchronous tools are currently under development, and the synchronous tools being developed through the Habanero effort will become features of this workplace very soon. NCSA is also implementing tools and capabilities for classrooms and schools to use the new collaborative framework, and within a few months we plan to produce a framework for a "virtual school."
Conclusion
Technology is affecting education in revolutionary ways, and the momentum toward these changes is irreversible. Teachers who have begun to use the Web see this change occurring, even if they only have experience with static information-gathering and display capabilities. Most of these educators have not yet used or even seen the potential of collaborative technologies for their classroom and their school. The majority of the capabilities discussed in this paper have not yet become functional in the classroom, but they will very soon.
Universities need to become leaders in applying technology to education for learning and for collaboration. Colleges of education need to become leaders in applying computational and information technology for the K-12 community, and university administrators need to begin to chart the 21st century vision of their institutions, a journey that will include information technology and collaborative learning and teaching.
An obstacle that needs to be overcome is the view many hold that computers and Internet connectivity are "tools" for learning, and thus an increased grade point average is the only measure of value for these resources. A more important perspective is for administrators and school boards to realize that the Web represents a new environment for learning and teaching and that very soon every teacher and student will need access to the information represented on the Web in order to be competitive in their work and in their lives.
Many believe a revolution is taking place in education in the way people learn and the way instruction is given. The education community has been hearing of reforms and revolutions for the past few decades, but most of them have been nonexistent or without any long-term merit or real value. Some believe the method of an instructor lecturing while students listen and "absorb" is really the only viable way to teach or learn. About two decades ago, when personal computers started to become affordable, many thought that computers would revolutionize education, that computer-based teaching and learning would become the savior of education and the solution to falling test scores. This has never really happened. Over the past two decades, many teachers have successfully prepared students, some with computers in the classroom and some without. Teachers could avoid computers, either because they chose not to learn how to use them or because they had none in their classroom or school to use. Teachers entering the profession have not been required to understand computational technology in order to graduate from college.
The Internet has been in existence for almost two decades and began to extend into schools about 15 years ago, first into universities and then into K-12. Did the Internet revolutionize education? Well, not exactly. It did provide an opportunity to expand learning options for teachers and students who were fortunate enough to have Internet access, a few computers, and appropriate guidance on usage. Often this took place in only one classroom and only one school within a system and did not become systemic throughout the school. There are many factors affecting this slow implementation of computing and communication technology in schools, including administrations with no knowledge of its value or no willingness to realign school budgets to include computational technology; insufficient in-service professional development programs for teachers; a lack of specific curriculum benefits or of resources for teachers to use in their courses; and deficient preservice preparation of teachers in technology or computation.
Why do some of us believe there is now a revolution taking place that cannot be ignored by educators or administrators? In November 1993, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) released Mosaic, the first World Wide Web browser for all three computing platforms (UNIX, PC, and Macintosh). The Internet had become the World Wide Web, and now Mosaic allowed anyone who knew the basics about using a computer and a mouse to go out onto the Web and easily and quickly locate multimedia information. Suddenly text, images, sound, and video could come to the desktop and be used by students from the kindergarten through Ph.D. levels. Files rapidly became hypermedia text pages, and nascent searching and information integration tools became easily accessible. So what is the difference between the past two decades of computers and Internet access and the present, since even now WWW access requires computers and an Internet connection? The difference is that the Web represents Information, and information cannot be disregarded the way that computers can be ignored. Teachers cannot choose to ignore or have their students omit available information on any subject when the goal is for them to learn. A revolution is taking place in education.
The Future
While the first impetus for schools to connect to the Web has been simply to access information and this incentive has made a great deal possible collaboration around numerous kinds of educational activities will become a primary motivation for connectivity among schools, teachers, parents, and students. When students, teachers, parents, administrators, and even legislators can communicate via the Internet and begin to collaborate electronically on issues, the traditional educational process may see a fundamental transformation, with decisions about a student's learning being resolved in new and hopefully better ways.
Traditionally, schools and classrooms have tended to discourage many forms of collaboration. In the archetypical system, decisions related to course content and delivery arrive top down from the administration, teachers spend all but a small portion of their day confined to a room, telephones are not easily available to teachers in most situations, students are rewarded for not talking and for working independently, and communication between teacher and parents is scheduled once or twice a year at most. Teachers who value communication with parents and students generally must do it on their own time from home. Students who want to or have to collaborate must often do it outside of the scheduled "work day."
In contrast, success in graduate school, business, or life in general relies on collaboration and teamwork. The traditional education system, being more evolutionary than revolutionary, is unlikely to transform itself any time soon into an environment that teaches and encourages collaboration as a part of learning; emerging technologies, however, can catalyze this change much sooner than it would happen otherwise.
electronic mail and "surfing" for information with a browser, such as Mosaic, involve communicating with others and locating information, but the real power of the Web will come from people being better able to accomplish their "work," regardless of its focus. Communication via e-mail is a form of asynchronous collaboration. People enter messages that are sent to other people who read them, and perhaps respond, at a later point in time. Bulletin boards, such as the nearly ubiquitous Usenet newsgroups, are another form of asynchronous communication, to an open audience. Listserves based on e-mail are a very similar form of asynchronous, group communication. Desktop video teleconferencing, on the other hand, allows real-time, synchronous collaboration, although bandwidth is consumed quickly with this technology. Chat sessions are a text-based version of synchronous collaboration, as are Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs), Object-Oriented MUDs (MOOs), or Multi-User Shared Hallucinations (MUSHes), where a number of people participate simultaneously in a shared conversation or activity. The real power of digital technologies is not yet tapped; other applications on the desktop for doing exciting and robust synchronous and asynchronous collaboration are just now emerging.
Although a number of schools in the nation have invested in traditional video teleconferencing classrooms, and although some students have probably benefited from these facilities, this technological investment is not expected to be a cost effective or a pedagogically valuable way to extend distance learning to the nation's students. What we do expect to flourish and grow are asynchronous and synchronous collaboration applications between desktop computers, some of which may be hooked to a projection system so that many people in the same location can participate. All the desktops will be connected through the Internet. An instructor can sit at a desktop workstation and communicate with a "classroom" of students, each of whom has a workstation in front of him and a connection to the Internet. The students no longer have to be in the same room; they can interact with other students and teachers in different locations.
Emerging Technology in the Service of Collaboration
An example of the kind of collaborative software that we have in mind is growing out of a software project of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. A few years ago, NCSA developed a system called NCSA Collage intended to help computational researchers share data from simulations, images generated from that data, text, drawings, diagrams, animation sequences, and screen shots from other analysis software with remotely located colleagues in a real-time, synchronous session. This software addressed a continuing need of research teams scattered across the globe. Combined with a conference phone call or a chat session, Collage allowed researchers to carry on a virtual meeting, with many of the resources of their digital tools available to the meeting. Researchers soon began asking us to find a way to enable them to easily locate relevant papers or journal preprints on the Net and bring them into their Collage discussion sessions. Looking for an answer led us to the early existing WWW software. We saw that with improvements in their ease of use, additional functionality, and a cross-platform implementation, these graphical, hypertext-based Web browsers could be of great help in addressing our problem. This led to the development of NCSA Mosaic.
The Mosaic story is by now well known. Soon after its introduction, NCSA Mosaic caused a 100,000-fold increase in WWW NSFnet backbone traffic and brought in millions of users, thus creating a market for the dozens of commercial browsers that subsequently have been introduced. Since then, the commercial market has taken off phenomenally. Spyglass, Netscape, and Microsoft all have produced widely used browsers and Web technology, and scores of companies have jumped into the Web market. Spyglass alone has created a licensing family of 36 companies with over 80 products. Netscape was created by a half dozen NCSA-trained programmers and is currently a market leader. The Microsoft Internet Explorer is a licensed derivative product from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Spyglass that is available to anyone with a Windows 95 interface a potential market projected to number in the millions within one year. At last count, there were over 40 different browsers available on the Web. On the server side, NCSA WWW server software is used on roughly 50 percent of the installed base of WWW servers on the open Internet and about 70 percent of those in the .EDU domain (which consists of educational institutions). In addition, commercialization of server software is proceeding at an astounding rate.
With the explosion of commercial effort in Web-based technologies, it is clear that the Web is here to stay. In one form or another (and the exact form is both extremely important and virtually impossible to predict), the growth of access to TCP/IP-based networks the Internet as we generally know it and the availability of Web-based software and services, will only increase, driven by a vision of huge market potential. At the same time, the cost of access and services in this extraordinarily competitive sector will only decrease. The rise of new technologies and the constantly decreasing cost of network bandwidth and processor power will help to insure that the Web is more than just a short-term trend. The next generation of collaborative tools needs to be Web-based.
It is also important to recognize that the unique culture of the Internet, based historically in the cooperative environments of the academic and research communities, will not disappear in a more commercialized Internet. While there is a continuing desire on the part of companies to lock users and developers into proprietary formats and programming interfaces, there is also a need for open systems that can be extended and modified in various ways and that can cross the boundaries of different operating systems and applications. This quality of interoperability has been one of the fundamental advantages of Web-based applications.
The research and education communities also have established a tradition of placing their software in the public domain or, alternately, making it "free with copyright" along the model of the NCSA Mosaic software. Under this approach, individuals can use software for free, while the authors still retain the rights for commercialization. The dynamics of the Web have transported this idea into an increasing number of commercial software sectors, from browsers to programming languages. This makes new technology widely available almost instantaneously and gives users and developers a rapidly expanding spectrum of possibilities for tool development. On the other hand, some have dubbed this the "heroin approach" to software adoption: users get "hooked" on free tools, then later pay to get the latest versions, full support, or software that is no longer available for free. It is too soon to tell how these proprietary issues will turn out in the long term, but the educational community is often one of the main beneficiaries of free or low-cost software.
Integration with the Web
NCSA is now working to bring to the Web the kind of technology developed in Collage and to integrate synchronous collaboration with asynchronous methods. The Web provides a set of standards for handling a wide variety of media types and an installed base of browser software and server environments that can be integrated fruitfully into a framework for using collaboration methods in education. The Web has become a condensation point for virtually every advanced technology developed over the last two decades by the computational science and computer science communities. All of these technologies are streaming onto the Web at fantastic rates, each bringing its own revolution in how we conceptualize the future digital communication infrastructure. Many advanced and disparate technologies are being integrated into the global system, including object-oriented frameworks for application environments and databases; state-of-the-art security methods implemented at the connection, document, compiler, and interpreter levels; efficient distributed three-dimensional modeling and scientific visualization schemes; robust and truly persistent global naming and location methods; semantic-based object description and search techniques; and our focus in this paper workgroup and workflow software support environments in real and non-real time. The following examples show what these technological advancements can mean for learning environments.
Remotely controlled Mosaics represent a collaborative capability that could make distance teaching a much easier and more meaningful way to learn. An instructor who knew the Internet Protocol address of each student's machine and had control privileges could regulate the presentation being delivered to the students and, via the WWW and a browser, could present multimedia material and information just as he or she would in a traditional classroom with all the students present. The instructor could also release control of the students' machines to enable them to work on exercises, look for information, or communicate with other, remotely located students involved in a group project. The instructor could regain control at a future time to "discuss" an item with the entire class. In addition to presenting previously prepared information to the student machines, the instructor could give new information to all students by preparing it in advance for delivery, by typing it in, or by using voice and, eventually, real-time digital video.
In this type of classroom, anything on the Web would become material for shared, real-time presentation and discussion. Adding a simple capability to draw on the browser window would provide the users with "white board" interaction. Any changes that the instructor or a student made in this window could be seen by all the participants in the virtual classroom, and it would become easy to point out across the Net the important features of an article, a map, an image, or a 3-D drawing.
By generalizing the capability that allows one user to control or drive the software running on another user's machine when both are connected to the Internet, it becomes possible to bring any collaboration-capable software tool into the interaction. In this way, specialized educational software could be integrated into the virtual classroom; an instructor could demonstrate to a remotely located student how to execute an application. The ability to run simulations on remote or local machines is another application that is very important in teaching computational science and indeed could be useful in teaching chemistry, physics, and other high school science subjects. In the past, this application has been accomplished not with a browser, but with a series of File Transfer Protocols (FTPs), telnets, or other operations that allowed connectivity to another machine. Providing interaction with remote machines through a straightforward interface like a Web browser would make this capability available to a much larger audience.
Building these types of applications for the Web requires much more power in the Web browser than we currently have. In fact, the idea of a browser needs to give way to the more encompassing idea of a Web environment that is flexible and dynamic and can be customized to the needs of the moment. Java, a new programming language from Sun Microsystems, opens up these possibilities by allowing programs to be sent over the Web in a secure fashion. Programs that are executed locally when they arrive at the user's desktop are an example of "mobile code." The possibilities engendered by secure mobile code on the Internet are staggering. Sun's Java is an example of a C++like language that was developed specifically to address network security considerations. The capability to send executing programs that can link dynamically with existing desktop browsers and other software means that whole applications, protocols, and interfaces can be sent over the Net with HTML documents.
NCSA is evaluating the Java framework and working with Sun to make this technology available to educational users. We are working with Sun's Hot Java Web browser, investigating the use of Java in high performance systems and applications, and developing a foundation set of software to enable advanced collaboration across the Net for all users. NCSA is also collaborating with the Open Software Foundation to evaluate Java's security features, with the University of Illinois Digital Library Initiative project to develop advanced search interfaces in Java, and with the Online Computer Library Center, Inc. to study the use of Hot Java for complex scientific documents. The use of mobile code (and Java is only one example of mobile code systems) very likely will revolutionize how students and teachers use the WWW, equivalent in impact to the introduction of Mosaic and the WWW a few years ago or to the advent of NCSA Telnet and FTP before that.
Habanero
Java is also the foundation for a new environment, named Habanero, that will encompass, and go beyond, the capabilities of Mosaic and the synchronous collaborative features of Collage. The collaborative engine developed in Java will allow users to share anything that can be sent over the Web (HTML, graphics, data, etc.), in addition to live sound and video. The basic Habanero engine will include a software interface that will allow any application to become collaborative by conforming to the interface. As in the above hypothetical scenario, a white board setup would allow users to share a drawing appearing on any page in the browser by sending drawing messages to the collaboration engine. Any piece of data analysis or visualization software could become part of a collaborative session by exposing part of its interface to the Habanero engine, thereby allowing users to incorporate advanced or discipline-specific applications into their collaborative sessions. In addition, any collaborative session could be recorded, reviewed later, synopsized, annotated, and distributed to those who missed the virtual meeting or classroom session, with all the media and interactions of the original session intact.
NCSA's initial efforts focused on incorporating the functionality of Collage in Habanero, which will provide a core set of collaboration tools for all researchers. Our latest efforts focus on developing shared HTML editors, audio, easy third-party software integration, and agents for meetings (which serve as your representative to collect data or notify you of the need to respond to a request).
The availability of additional bandwidth through, say, cable TV Internet access, would be of obvious value in enhancing real-time collaborations, especially those involving huge data sets, high speed visualization, and real-time video. Collaborative uses of Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) would also be enhanced by the increased speed and would pave the way for the next generation of research and development of fully 3-D collaborative environments. NCSA's strategy builds on exploratory research done in the CAVE, a fully 3-D virtual environment with virtual presence of the collaborators in the form of "avatars," or rendered representations of the participants. This technology is moving toward fully digital conferencing techniques that go beyond video and encompass a completely rendered, customizable, bandwidth-sensitive, 3-D representation of each participant, in a fully 3-D environment for the conference and any accompanying data or simulation results. Bandwidth and workstation capabilities available to users can define a spectrum of these kinds of environments, from full immersion in something like the CAVE, to VRML-based 3-D environments on widely available desktop systems.
Web as Habanero: Integrating Synchronous and Asynchronous Activities
The Habanero development is part of a more encompassing effort to bring the power of high-performance computing to researchers and educators on the Web. In its initial development by Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailleau at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics near Geneva, Switzerland, the World Wide Web was originally envisioned as a system to organize and enhance the work of research teams in high-energy physics. The popularity of the Web as a means of information discovery and retrieval (the global electronic library metaphor), and as a foundation for electronic commerce (the electronic market metaphor), has tended to push into the background considerations about its use as a global research lab (the virtual institute or virtual classroom metaphor). NCSA is focusing on developing a Web infrastructure that would change this and provide capabilities directly targeted on globally distributed research and learning communities. An example is the development of HyperNews (a Web-based bulletin board system) and of global annotation capabilities, which can be used as a foundation for virtual research colleges (in the classic sense) or research institutes on the Web.
These kinds of Web-based virtual institutes could include most or all of the functions of a brick-and-mortar research institute. A research team or a class could form an institute by placing notes or annotations on documents, data, services, indexes, bulletin boards, discussion groups, or anything else on the Net, thereby signifying that these objects are part of the work of the institute, part of the relevant neighborhood. A reader would be notified when she entered the neighborhood of the virtual institute and would be given information on who else was visiting, what the rules of the institute were, what members' office hours were, what research projects were underway and their status, and whether any active collaborat)ons with others were being sought. In addition to participating in asynchronous collaborations via bulletin boards, e-mail, and the like, a visitor to the virtual institute could establish synchronous collaboration based on a chat session, a Collage session, a digital video teleconferencing center, a shared VRML scene, or any combination of these. She could then join an existing collaboration or inquire whether any institute members would like to start up a new one. A more simple use of this system would allow any geographically distributed research team or learning group to organize their activities with full-media support, or would allow a teacher to organize the lesson or project material of students.
An alpha version of this Neighborhoods software has been completed, and work is starting on a VRML neighborhoods application. With the VRML application, users visiting a VRML scene can "appear" in the scene via an icon and, with the aid of an integrated chat box, can communicate with other users that they can see. Future work aims toward a collaborative VRML environment, where users can run shared VRML simulations or take "group tours" through a VRML world. Integration with the Habanero framework and HyperNews will proceed over the next months.
Repositories
To provide some of this functionality, server-side capabilities must be enhanced and made available in forms as easily adoptable as current HyperText Transfer Protocol servers are. Many of the ideas discussed above were first applied to high-performance computing and communication systems, and a wealth of experience and collaborations with technology innovators has led us to establish a framework that will allow Web testbeds to be prototyped rapidly and permit numerous technologies to be investigated and integrated. This modular, flexible, and extensible framework allows various kinds of functionality, including collaboration, to be included.
NCSA is using this Repository framework, as it is called, to pursue work in many different areas: high-speed Asynchronous Transfer Mode networks for the Web; digital libraries for managing Standard General Markup Language collections and other complex, highly structured scientific documents; global naming, annotation, and collaboration systems; sites for managing and distributing valued objects with strict terms and conditions governing their use and their intellectual property rights; massive digital data manipulation and access points; object-oriented databases for Web site contents; advanced semantic-based searching of information across disciplines; and distributed site management for large public data sets. NCSA is also working to rapidly integrate those capabilities that prove themselves in the prototyping phase of our next generation of public software.
Federations of Repositories
A Repository is a framework for integrating advanced Web services. NCSA has defined a structure to enable individual Repositories to better manage their information and has gained experience from building several Repositories; our next task is to determine how Repositories interrelate. The basic framework will establish the capability of communication between Repositories, but what they communicate about and how several of them cooperate to provide larger federated services are open questions at this time.
One way in which Repositories can interrelate is by providing a search service that transcends Repository boundaries. Support for manual searching, or browsing, already exists in the WWW; here the user selects links to follow from one document to the next across the Web of related documents. Automatic searching over the Web that uses the same links between documents requires standards across servers for query language, knowledge representation, and metadata semantics (a new and very powerful way to search semantically). Automatic analysis of collections of interlinked documents can also help produce cross-collection indexes to optimize searching in fairly focused areas. Collaboration technologies and this Repository framework can also allow users to contribute to the incremental self-organization of the Web.
NCSA is currently developing a framework for educational information in Illinois called the Illinois Learning Mosaic (ILM) project. This Web-based information resource and database will support information of interest to students in kindergarten through the Ph.D level, as well as to teachers, administrators, parents, legislators, and other citizens. The ILM is being designed within the Repository framework of future Internet server software, so that any other information databases on the Internet built within this same Repository framework will automatically share data. When this work is complete, servers will be communicating and sharing with servers for the first time. This will allow anyone on the Internet to develop interrelated data bases and collections that automatically share similar data. This type of sharing between servers also forms the foundation of the annotation capabilities underlying the Neighborhoods and Habanero projects.
Workplace of the Future
NCSA has just finished the beta version of a new framework for collaboration on the World Wide Web called the NetWorkPlace. Completed for Vice President Gore's National Performance Review, this environment of asynchronous communication and collaboration tools allows distributed team members to work on the Web in a new and potentially revolutionary way. Some of the current tools include a Web-based group calendar, chatting capability, capability for threaded discussion and group meetings, writing tools, document storage and publication tools, a project management tool, a forms tool, workspace management tools, and more. New asynchronous tools are currently under development, and the synchronous tools being developed through the Habanero effort will become features of this workplace very soon. NCSA is also implementing tools and capabilities for classrooms and schools to use the new collaborative framework, and within a few months we plan to produce a framework for a "virtual school."
Conclusion
Technology is affecting education in revolutionary ways, and the momentum toward these changes is irreversible. Teachers who have begun to use the Web see this change occurring, even if they only have experience with static information-gathering and display capabilities. Most of these educators have not yet used or even seen the potential of collaborative technologies for their classroom and their school. The majority of the capabilities discussed in this paper have not yet become functional in the classroom, but they will very soon.
Universities need to become leaders in applying technology to education for learning and for collaboration. Colleges of education need to become leaders in applying computational and information technology for the K-12 community, and university administrators need to begin to chart the 21st century vision of their institutions, a journey that will include information technology and collaborative learning and teaching.
An obstacle that needs to be overcome is the view many hold that computers and Internet connectivity are "tools" for learning, and thus an increased grade point average is the only measure of value for these resources. A more important perspective is for administrators and school boards to realize that the Web represents a new environment for learning and teaching and that very soon every teacher and student will need access to the information represented on the Web in order to be competitive in their work and in their lives.
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