This paper grew out of a series of AERA symposia organized by Margaret Honey, CCT/EDC, focusing on the topic of organizing on-line learning communities. The discussant of one of those symposia, John Clement, then at the NSF, asked whether we couldn't specify a guide to organizing, to help people who were organizing network-based communities. This paper and its companion "Guidelines" web site http://lrs.ed.uiuc.edu/guidelines/ were the result of John's request.
Just listing a set of important dimensions seemed to be too abstract, so I used an online course that Michael Waugh and I co-taught each Spring for eleven years (1988-1998) as an example illustrating how the dimensions played out in practice. This course, C&I 300CN "Educational Uses of Electronic Networks," was an early attempt to use electronic networks in an online course. Since we were interested in comparing online and oncampus interactions,we typically had three face-to-face meetings in this course (one at the very start, one mid-course, and one at the end of the course), with the rest of the interactions done over the network. Since we were aiming at K-12 teachers, these face-to-face meetings were scheduled on Saturdays. Thus the course came to be known as the "SatEx" course, since it was a Saturday Extramural course http://www.ed.uiuc.edu/courses/satex/.
My hope is that specifying these dimensions may lead us to a more general framework for thinking about network-based learning, especially the kind of problem-based learning that engages learners and teachers alike in meaningful contexts provided by the diversity made available by new communication and computer technologies.
- James A. Levin, Ph.D., University of Illinois
This interactive paper is available at: http://lrsdb.ed.uiuc.edu:591/ipp/dimensions.html.
About Interactive Papers
The "Interactive Paper Project" developed by Jim Buell and Jim Levin of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign provides a simple way to create interactive papers using a web-enabled database thereby allowing a wide range of writers to create much richer ways to interact with their readers.
An Interactive Paper is stored in a database with each "chunk" of the paper to be commented on stored in a separate database record. The author can select what these chunks are, whether multiple paragraphs, single paragraphs, multiple sentences or single sentences. When a reader sees the paper, a "button" for making or reading commentaries appears after each chunk of text. Each reader can see the commentaries made by others, and can either add a separate commentary or can respond to a commentary. By responding to a commentary, a reader is joining in a "thread" of conversation between the writer and one or more readers, contextualized by the part of the paper being commented upon.
There are two different ways of viewing and commenting on this paper. In the "linked commentaries" view, a reader sees the paper and the commentary buttons, and only sees the commentaries when he/she selects it from a selected button. In the "inline commentaries" view, a reader see the paper with all commentaries displayed immediately following the chunk for which they are a commentary. Each view is useful for different purposes, but any comment entered through one view is seen through the other view. This concept of an interactive paper being an entity that can be viewed in many different ways depending on the viewer's goals is a way in which this use of interactive media is qualitatively different from the more static medium of print on paper.
We of course welcome your comments on the substance of this interactive paper by Levin. We also welcome your comments on the use of this Interactive Paper format, especially your feedback on whether this is useful for broader use in future issues of this International Journal of Educational Technology.
