Proposal
1. *Describe your project. Max 600 words.
Include information about the project's significance and the contribution it will make to advancing participatory learning, the goals for the project in the 12-month grant term, and goals beyond the grant term. Explain why your idea is novel.
Problem:
Contemporary learning management systems (LMSs) are powerful tools for education, but also present barriers to many organizations and individuals who need to offer instruction to an audience. These obstacles include requirements for web development and other technical skills, making them too expensive and laborious to use. Because of these limitations, LMSs only benefit a small number of learners -- typically students in college and recipients of corporate training. LMS implementations also tend to be viewed as intellectual property and are rarely shared, resulting in very little reuse and rapid obsolescence.
Solution:
The Novice Learners' Network (NLN) will allow individuals and organizations to develop educational content, and will provide a rich resource for learners seeking information on diverse topics. The goal is for the publication medium of the NLN to be as accessible as a blog, and similar in structure to an online encyclopedia. However, since its mission is education, i.e. the transfer of knowledge, features include measurements that verify that learning has occurred. Quiz results and metadata such as aggregate success rate for a given question will help would-be educators improve their strategy for enabling students to learn.
Community comes into play in this model in two ways. First, educators collaborate with each other developing content, sharing ideas, and solving problems in the "Educators' Forums" on the NLN website. The forums are highly searchable, and are designed to allow educators to have insight into other content on the site which may be similar or overlapping with their own. The website's tools facilitate copying and adapting content from within the community's catalog of content. This philosophy of cooperation, collaboration, and participatory learning is established in the NLN's terms of use, which allow reuse and adaptation with attribution through a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
Second, community comes into play for learners as they explore content. The site's design features a ubiquitous interactive side-bar which connects them to a community of other learners, offering the ability to post comments, ask questions, seek help from one another, etc. This strategy is similar to content-based advertising in Google mail and to Amazon's use of suggestions for tangential browsing which are triggered by a user's historical interests and behavior. Educators and other experts play a role moderating discourse in the "Users' Forums" for their content, in much the same way that contemporary blogs and forums rely on forum administrators to solve problems and keep the peace. Content creators also are able to control whether help appears on screen during quizzes, and they may choose to switch from an actively moderated forum to a frozen historical discourse if they wish.
The goal for the 12-month grant term is to make a splash in the media and add to the existing channels of free web publishing (blog, wiki, listserve, and social networks) a new and exciting mode of communication specifically oriented to knowledge creators and knowledge seekers. If this project is successful, curriculum development will enter popular culture and the principles of sound educational skills (for both learners and teachers) will cross over to the mainstream.
Beyond the 12-month grant term, this project will hopefully be able to attract individual and philanthropic support modelled on that of the Wikimedia Foundation. One of the key goals of this project is to create a vehicle for educational content to travel between language groups. The critical questions for the future really depend on whether multi-language content and communities can work together successfully. Thus, a key goal will be to make sure that the business model supports the localization of content going forward.
2. *Describe the participatory learning you are trying to achieve. Max 450 words.
Explain how your project will help people participate, reflect on their experiences, and share their efforts and observations with others. Describe the different kinds of learning experiences users will have, how these experiences are promoted by your design approach, and the kinds of technological solutions necessary to implement your approach to participatory learning.
In the Novice Learners' Network anyone with a connection to the Internet who can read and type can set up content on any topic. They can use the online tools on the website to communicate with the audience they wish to educate, who can be online at any time, anywhere in the world and proceed through their learning process. There are online forums for both educators and for learners, so each group can seek advice or share experiences with their peers.
A good example of participatory learning would be in the field of drivers' Education. The first instructor who develops content in the Novice Learners' Network creates content in several modules, for simplicity let's say they are: controls, road signage, driving technique, safety, and principles of right of way. Each module consists of text, images, and HTML links to other content, and each module has a short quiz that establishes whether a student has mastered the material.
The instructor enters the web site's administration tools and uploads a list of student emails which invites them to review the content and take the test. At the end of the test their results are retained by the site and are available to the instructor.
However, elsewhere in the same state there is also another drivers ed. class for ESL students who mainly speak Spanish, although there are a smattering of other languages in the classroom. Since the content was evaluated to be a good candidate for translation, the translation process has made the content available in Spanish. The ESL teacher is also developing content for driver's ed. and through the tools for educators is able to adapt existing content to the needs of her class.
More remarkably however, students in the NLN have the ability to specify language preferences, and set-based logic in the NLN's content management system will provide content if available in the preferred language of the student. Thus, whether the teacher knew it or not, a student might receive content in another language than the one the teacher personally created.
This design for a CMS has already been implemented and tested. The key assumption is that content from one language to another has to be equivalent for language-specific content substitution to take place. This is not a trivial thing to accomplish, but since the framework for serving the content works, it is an inspiring goal to try to keep multilingual content moving together, so that it can serve the widest audience.
3. *Project Timeline. Max 350 Words.
Detailed workflow management plan and timeline.
July-August 2009
- Architecture and template development
- Testing
- Implementing previously developed content into the NLN system
- Project management process kick-off
- Solicit non-profits for content to seed network (Seek diversity in language, location, and mission). Give preference to multi-lingual content or content that would serve different language audiences.
September-October 2009
- Graphic Design Phase 1.: Apply graphic design and creative content to functionally tested, working website
- Publish a working CMS that is capable of taking educators through the process of setting up content and quizzes. Users should be able to see content, take quizzes, persist scores, maintain accounts
- Usability Testing Round: 1.
- Visioning
- Project management/requirements building process
- Planning enhancements and further development
November-December 2009
- Graphic Design Phase 2.: Refine designs in light of usability test results, and develop new assets for community features
- Develop community features for educators
- Test/Publish/Promote new features
- Develop community features for students
- Test/Publish/Promote new features
January-February 2010
- Usability Testing Round: 2.
- Visioning
- Project management/requirements building process
- Planning enhancements and further development, especially international content and promotion
- Further develop community features for educators
- Test/Publish (Begin to focus on international/multi-lingual content and promotion.)
March-April 2010
- Intense focus here on widely localizing existing content in system (the goal is to make the most of what we have by localizing it to the widest possible audience.)
- Further develop community features for students (Focus on international/multi-lingual.)
- Test/Publish (Focus on international/multi-lingual content and promotion.)
- Usability Testing Round: 3.
- Create mechanism for receiving individual donations and integrate a request for support into the site content
May-June 2010
- Visioning for the future
- Establish plan for continuity of project as funding model changes
4. Project URL
List and briefly explain any URLs associated with your project.
Exploring the process of learning for novice computer users has been a recurring focus of my graduate studies in Interaction Design and Information Architecture at the University of Baltimore. While it appears in many different ways throughout my portfolio, I want to draw your attention to a research paper I wrote in Fall 2007, in a core class called "Humans, Computers and Cognition". This piece of writing explores the idea of novices in the field of human-computer interaction (HCI) research. The key finding (which is borrowed from socio-linguistic research) is that processes of intentional learning (such as school) are at heart communicative processes in which experts and novices (or teachers and students) act on one another to negotiate an information exchange.
What this means to us is that people learn in groups, and they all pursue personal goals within the learning space. Groups of experts and peer groups play a critical role in the success of the most successful learners. This idea of the importance of participatory learning is the impetus for creating a network to support novice learners and teachers.
The insights from this research paper were immediately applied to the task of creating a prototype for a web-budgeting tool for senior novices. This presentation shows the prototype and summarizes some of the reasons for the design choices. It shows how academic research can be applied to interface design, and it shows a little bit of my design work.
Two other links which may grant insight into the prospects of this project are the whole of my student coursework portfolio, and my LinkedIn profile.
5. Image or Video File
You may upload an image or video file related to your narrative proposal, if applicable. ".JPG", ".GIF", ".AVI", ".MPG", ".MOV", or ".MP4" format required. (Max Size: 1MB). Files that exceed the size limitations may be uploaded to a third party site such as youtube.com. Include links to these files in the box above.
Not applicable.
6. Image or Video Description
Briefly explain the contents of the file.
Not applicable.
