SEED aims to generate integrated communities, consisting of teachers, researchers and software developers, who will combine their educational and technological expertise in designing, developing and implementing innovative activities at small scale. The project will integrate a socio-constructivist educational framework with a component-oriented software approach. The experience extracted by the communities will, at a later stage, be propagated to large scale initiatives. The project's main objectives are:
· to design innovative activities,
· to develop methods for generating integrated communities of practice,
· to develop technologies that support user engagement, and
· to articulate scaling up methods for proliferating innovation in the school system.
Within this general framework, TECFA is workpackage leader of a Centre for Collaboration and Exchange developed by a Greek partner, but our main research effort is dedicated towards supporting innovative 'orchestrations' of collaborative and cooperative educational scenarios. We define 'socio-constructivist learning' in a very broad sense. First of all as an understanding of learning that stresses the importance of knowledge construction based on previous knowledge and interaction with the social environment, e.g. theories that have grown out of constructionism (Piaget) and socio-culturalism (Vygotsky). Second as a set of pedagogies that use strategies like project, problem, case-based learning and/or working within authentic contexts.
Currently, there exist many variants of web-supported pedagogies, e.g. transmission of contents by teleconferencing or virtual libraries, web-based instruction, learning by apprenticeship in virtual environments, pedagogical work flow scenarios. The pedagogical use of Web technology started out in 1993 with early adopters using the web for innovative project-based 'teaching and learning'. On the other hand, web-based training systems inspired by traditional CBT software started appearing on the market and form the core of today's so-called 'Learning Management' or 'E-learning' systems. While these systems anchored in the behaviorist tradition are making interesting progress as far as modularity of contents and standardization are concerned, they do not fundamentally seek to improve pedagogies by supporting rich socio-constructivist scenarios.
Our current work aims to provide affordable support for innovative scenarios described by various socio-constructivist schools of thought, test, enhance and enrich them. Frequently, scenarios evolve in cycles, e.g. a basic teaching/learning phase has the following structure: (a) Look /discovery - (b) Discuss /interaction - (c) Do/production - (d) Deposit/sharing - (e) Feedback /discussion of results.
In order to promote socio-constructivist scenarios we have established an initial catalog of simple learning activities that we are field testing in several educational projects and that we would like to share with the community. Each scenario described in the catalogue is composed of a certain amount of steps that can be described in terms of generic educational activities. Within the last two years an impressive number of what the authors coin C3MS (Community, Content and Collaboration Management Systems) have sprung into existence and we are currently trying to repurpose this technology (which is mainly focused on the 'orchestration' of social communities) to education, e.g. by providing a catalog of C3MS bricks supporting most of the generic activities mentioned above. A teacher can therefore plan educational scenarios with the help of a more abstract vocabulary that will help him to choose from a set of supporting technology.
Initial practical and theoretical results (in particular a first version of 'the catalog') can be found on the new project website at
http://tecfaseed.unige.ch/. Early results of our work are encouraging (teachers are quite enthusiastic about this general framework) but some further development and training efforts have to be made before this new framework becomes fully operational.
