Technological Support
for
Educational Communities
Michael Bieber
Information Systems Department
College of Computing Sciences
October 10, 2001
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On-Line Support for
Educational Communities
• More efficient
– ubiquitous access (anytime, anyplace)
– information/opinions recorded for future
reference
– streamlined administrative meetings
• More effective (“sense of community”)
– makes people feel part of a group
– all inclusive, regardless of location
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Four Educational Communities
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IS Graduate Students (advising)
IS Co-op Students
IS Department
individual IS Courses
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NJIT has a lot of
Community Research Expertise
side note:
• Deek: educational communities
• Hiltz, Turoff: educational, governmental, business,
research communities
• Bieber et al.: virtual community infrastructure
• Whitworth: legitimacy and ethics
• department-wide: counter-terrorism
• outside IS: many others...
• Gurstein (SOM): community informatics
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On-Line Community
Components
• people
• shared-purpose
• policies
– conduct within the community
(rituals, rules, guidelines, norms)
– tacit expectations
• computer support
* from Jenny Preece: On-line Communities [2000]
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IS Graduate Students
• people
(Advising)
– potential applicants, current students, graduate advising office
• shared-purpose: advising, course feedback
• policies
– you can always visit the advisor, but
– check Web site first
– then ask questions in discussion forum
(so everyone can benefit from answers)
– provide course feedback (may be anonymous)
• computer support
– Web Site: http://is.njit.edu/msis/
– Discussion Forum: http://webboard.njit.edu:8080/~GISadvise/
Conferences
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Graduate
Advising
WebBoard
Conferences
(showing number of
comments in each)
+Entry Request Conference (5)
+ Necessary MS IS Information (1)
+ Necessary IS Ph.D. Information (32)
+ Necessary Distance Learning Information (9)
— MS Applicants Questions (66, 1 New)
GMAT score (senthil chenniappa) 10/4/01
+ IS vs. CS / GMAT or GRE? 9/24/01 (4)
+ Part-Time Course Scheduling 9/21/01 (2)
+ Is GMAT, GRE, etc. Required? 9/18/01 (2)
+ Last Minute Questions 9/9/01 (2)
+ Admission with a low undergrad GPA 9/7/01 (2)
+ Question about Credits from India 8/30/01 (2)
+ General Question 7/17/01 (2)
+ Bridge courses - CIS 465 & CIS 505 6/8/01 (6)
Do NOT post your Student ID/SSN here (Michael Bieber) 5/17/01
Next Bottom
+ Ph.D. Applicants Questions (1)
+ Current MS Students Advising Questions (54, 1 New)
+ Current Ph.D. Students Advising Questions (6)
+ Distance Learning Advising - Questions (1)
+ Comments by Others (1)
+ Administrative Conference (2)
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+ Course Evaluations (44)
+ Suggestions and Feedback (2)
Computer Support
• Discussion --> Discussion Forum
WebBoard
– create a comment
– reply to a comment
– see all new comments
– create a conference
(similar functionality on WebCT)
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Computer Support
• Discussion --> WebBoard Discussion Forum
(what information to include)
• Information --> MS IS Web site
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Co-Op Community
• people
– co-op students, professor, co-op office, supervisors
• shared-purpose: learning during the co-op experience
• policies/assumptions
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participants should introduce themselves
students must post 1 comment and 2 replies bi-monthly
students can ask for advice with any kind of problem
separate private areas for students and for supervisors
• computer support
– Discussion Forum: http://webboard.njit.edu:8080/~SP2001CIS590-591-592-IS/
(italics) planned additions after Spring 2001
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Conferences
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IS
Co-Op WebBoard
Conferences
(showing number of
comments in each)
+ Co-op Administration (10)
+ Questions, Problems, Advice, Misc. (1)
+ Getting to Know You (45)
— Work Discussion (A-L) (128)
Work experience with different projects (Vauhini Vakati) 5/10/01
+ Discussion#3 4/13/01 (2)
Jane Liao-Panasonic (DISCUSSION 3) (Zhen Liao) 4/12/01
Jane Liao-Panasonic (DISCUSSION 2) (Zhen Liao) 4/12/01
+ Status Report 3/27/01 (10)
+ Discussion 3/26/01 (6)
+ Status report and Issue 3/26/01 (2)
Discussion#2-Kartik Bayyareddy (ADP) (Kartik Bayyareddy) 3/25/01
+ Guru Ramnath Kathiresan - Work Description 3/19/01 (5)
+ Kartik Bayyareddy-ADP 3/13/01 (9)
+ Dipal Gandhi- ADP Inc. 3/12/01 (13)
+ Work Description (Sridhar Anne) 3/12/01 (15)
+ Ramnish Gupta (netForensics) 3/12/01 (8)
+ Madhu S Kolla(ADP) 3/10/01 (9)
+ Amit Lalwani (NeST Technologies) 3/10/01 (8)
+ Work Description - Vijay Babaria 3/9/01 (10)
+ Information System & infrastructure 3/7/01 (9)
+ ePlanets 3/5/01 (10)
+ Jane Liao--Panasonic 2/23/01 (8)
+ Work Discussion (M-Z) (87)
+ Final Report (12)
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IS Department
• people
– faculty, Ph.D. students, research fellows, invited guests, dean
• shared-purpose
– creating a close-knit community for conducting education,
research, and (streamlined) administration
• policies
– a major collaboration forum: everyone should participate!
– private discussions for certain groups (e.g., faculty meeting;
recruiting; research teams)
• computer support
– Discussion Forum: http://fire.njit.edu:8080/~ISSeminar/
– Web Site: http://is.njit.edu/
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Conferences
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IS Department
WebBoard
Conferences
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America Under Attack (24, 4 New)
experiment discussion (110, 66 New)
facultyresearchAgenda (69)
IS dept meeting 2001 (89)
New Faculty Orientation (14, 4 New)
Qualitative Research (54, 51 New)
Recruiting2001 (195, 2 New)
Seminar-Fall2001 (85)
Virtual Communities (93)
Seminarspr2001 (170)
Introductions (64)
ISClubHouse (275, 1 New)
Events & Meetings (137, 30 New)
Article Reviews (91, 18 New)
IS website design (69, 24 New)
New Students (86, 9 New)
State of the art (2)
PublicForum (163, 38 New)
Useful & interesting websites (45)
HICSS35 (24)
Paper Fair (2, 1 New)
Webcenter project (221, 49 New)
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CIS677 (a course community)
• people
– students (Newark, Mt. Laurel, Distance), professors
• shared-purpose: learning from each other
• policies
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students from all sections mixed into small discussion groups
participants introduce themselves
1 comment and 2 replies weekly
on-line project presentations
• computer support
– Web Site: http://ccsweb.njit.edu/~bieber/CIS677S01/
– Discussion: http://webboard.njit.edu:8080/~ArchiveSP2001CIS677_All_Sections/
Conferences
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CIS677 WebBoard
Conferences
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General Admin - all sections (24)
General Admin - Distance sections (30)
General Admin - Wednesday sections (20)
Final Exam (545)
Questions and Answers (202)
General Discussion (16)
Feedback (18)
Interesting Weekly Materials (47)
Other Interesting Stuff (19)
Getting to Know You (102)
Chunking A-C (166)
Chunking D-I (262)
Chunking J-Ma and Y (300)
Chunking Mc-P and Z (251)
Chunking R-W (249)
Discussion A-G (Distance) (218)
Discussion H-O (Distance) (293)
Discussion P-Z (Distance) (266)
Mentoring Teams Matchmaking (Distance) (41)
Intermediate Grader Discussion (11)
Individual Article Review Approval - Spring 2001 (242)
Individual Article Review Approval - Fall 2000 (225)
Individual Article Review Approval - Spring 2000 (361)
mentoring team - ethics (distance) (43)
mentoring team - strategic (distance) (9)
mentoring team - vitual orgs (distance) (45)
private (1)
Testing Testing... (15)
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Learning & Communities
Learning is a constructionist, often social activity occurring through knowledge
building (Vygotsky, 1962). Knowledge building activities include contributing to,
authoring within, discussing, sharing, exploring, deploying a collective
knowledge base (O’Neill & Gomez 1994; Perkins 1993). People learn as they
navigate to solve problems (Koschmann et al, 1996). Learning requires cognitive
flexibility (Spiro et al. 1991), and results from interaction with people having
different experiences and perspectives (Goldman-Segall et al. 1998). Much
learning between and within communities occurs with boundaries rich in
interactions, whether formal, informal, or through a computer based system
(Wenger 1998). Student-centered teaching theories (McCown & Driscoll 1995) state
that students learn through collaboration.
* Bieber et al. (2002). “Towards Knowledge-Sharing and Learning in Virtual
Professional Communities,” 35th HICSS Conference
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On-Line Support for
Educational Communities
• More efficient
– ubiquitous access (anytime, anyplace)
– information/opinions recorded for future
reference
– streamlined administrative meetings
• More effective (“sense of community”)
– makes people feel part of a group
– all inclusive, regardless of location
17
References
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Bieber, M., I. Im, R. Rice, R.Goldman-Segall, R. Paul, E. Stohr, S. Hiltz, J. Preece, M. Turoff. (2002).
Towards Knowledge-Sharing and Learning in Virtual Professional Communities. Proceedings of the
35th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.
Goldman-Segall, R., Rao, Srinivasan V. (1998). A Collaborative On-Line Digital Data Tool for
Creating Living Narratives in Organizational Knowledge Systems, Proceedings of the Hawaii
International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS), Hawaii.
Koschmann (1996), CSCL, Theory and Practice of an emerging paradigm. 1-23.Mahwah, NJ:
Lawrence Erlbaum.
McCown, R. R. & Driscoll, M. P. (1995). Using Collaborative Writing and Problem-Based Learning
in the College Classroom. Proceedings of the Computer Supported Collaborative Learning
Conference, 1995.
O'Neill, D. K., & Gomez, L. M. (1994). The collaboratory notebook: A distributed knowledgebuilding environment for project-enhanced learning. Proceedings of Ed-Media '94, Vancouver.
Perin, C. (1991). Electronic social fields in bureaucracies. Comm. of the ACM, 34(12), 75-82.
Preece. J. (2000). Online Communities: Designing Usability, Supporting Sociability. Chichester,
England: John Wiley.
Spiro, R. J., Feltovich, P. J., Jacobson, M. J. & Coulson, R. L. (1991). Cognitive Flexibility,
Constructivism, and Hypertext. Educational Technology, 24-33.
Vygotsky, L. (1962). Thought and language. Cambridge, MA. MIT Press.
Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: The social fabric of a learning organization. NY, NY:
Cambridge U. Press.
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