2East: Bibliographic Resources and Scholarly Technologies
December 10 , 2002
Issue 3 Volume 4

 

 

 

 

 

Learning Technologies

This is an article about learning technologies, not about urban planning or art history, but begins with a story about searching for a relationship between urban planning and art history:

Recently I became interested in the way the Arts and Crafts movement influenced urban planning at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. Some time ago I happened to see a facsimile of the plan for Vancouver BC and I noticed that the printed plan made use of an Arts and Crafts font. I also knew that some of the principal artists of the movement (such as William Morris) were involved in political movements, and I wondered if their ideas extended into urban planning.

This story captures an important moment in scholarship and research. When I asked myself about Arts and Crafts and urban planning I set off on an intellectual journey. This is what every student does when they begin a research paper or a research project. If we want students to learn to do research and formulate critical arguments, we need to give them opportunities to practice with the support and advice of skilled instructors.

I am interested in two questions:

  • Do current class management and learning systems help students in learning to do research, and if so in what way?
  • Can we design and develop tools that would do a better job of supporting the work of scholarship and help students to learn to formulate and answer research questions?

Today's Systems and Tools

Using the Northwestern library catalog, I quickly found many books on the Arts and Crafts movement and on urban planning. I wasn't surprised when combined keywords ("Arts and Crafts" AND "urban planning") resulted in no matches. My topic provided some challenges, because it relates two different subjects. Since I did not find a book relating urban planning to Arts and Crafts, I would have to do a lot of reading to find mention of this relationship. To approach my topic effectively, I would have to search various bibliographic databases or try searching the web.

More and more scholarly writing and resources are available online. I tried some of Northwestern's online database offerings with mixed results. Each database offered a different user interface and query language. In particular, some of the databases I tried did not let me search for all of the terms, so that a query such as "Arts and Crafts AND urban planning" resulted in matching every abstract that included the word "arts" and the word "crafts" and turned up many irrelevant items.

Of course if my topic were one that an instructor had researched then she or he might post relevant articles in the "Course Documents" section on the Blackboard course site. As a student, while using those materials I would not learn to find and evaluate materials on my own. Blackboard and similar systems are only beginning to move in a direction that will bring selected reference materials to the student. While these systems may be useful, there is quite a bit of material that is not collected in such systems. So far their offerings have been limited. Providing an online folder of class resources is not enough.

Finally, I went to Google and typed in the search terms "Arts and Crafts" and "Urban planning". I found quite a bit that was not relevant: contemporary architects and urban planners with an interest in the Arts and Crafts revival; and a number of notices for arts and crafts fairs in places like Singapore and Ohio. About five items, however, were right on target. The results included a paper on just this topic presented at an urban history conference at the University of Edinburgh.

As I found relevant items I created bookmarks to those items. The browser's bookmark facility was an adequate but clumsy mechanism for gathering my materials. First, the browser offered no really convenient way to organize the materials and attach my own comments on each item. What I did was to open a word processing document and type my notes as I discovered each item. Of course there was no way to connect my notes to the notes to materials I found on-line.

After my first search I discovered that there was a late nineteenth century movement called the "Town Planning" movement so I began to search for "town planning" and "arts and crafts." This turned up several additional items, one of which was a site on the heritage of Letchworth Garden City. According to the web page, one of the Letchworth designers, a man named Unwin, was inspired by the work of Ruskin and Morris and was the secretary of the local Morris's Socialist League (see http://www.letchworthgardencity.net/heritage/index-4.htm).

As with any material, students need to learn to critically evaluate their sources. To what degree could I trust the Letchworth web site? To use this material I would have to dig further into Unwin's life and biography. This is especially important for web-based materials where there is no careful evaluation and review by libraries and people working in the field. Even when material has a reputable scholarly source, there may be controversies about certain issues and a student may unwittingly grab on to partial information without learning about and forming an opinion on those controversies. Such controversies can present important opportunities for learning and understanding the social context of scholarly work.

The materials used in teaching are increasingly already available through online resources. Learning systems such as Blackboard are designed as a closed system. The user logs into Blackboard and finds all needed resources within that system. Like most course management systems (CMS's), Blackboard is not designed to work seamlessly with outside materials and does not enable students to use its tools to organize that material into their own outline. It is becoming increasingly important to design and develop learning tools and systems so that they connect to and bring in outside learning resources.

To be successful in using technology, today's student is faced with piecing together a number of diverse tools and technologies that work with incompatible data formats, user interfaces, and query languages. Right now there is only spotty online support for using such resources.

Tomorrow's Systems

As my Arts and Craft project suggests, there are several ways that we can use technology to provide better tools and opportunities for online student research.

  1. We can begin to provide standard access to bibliographic tools and databases. These have to support work at a high level. It is not enough to offer a minimum set of features. Such systems should also work to integrate tools that annotate and organize material found on the web.
  2. We can design general tools for annotating and organizing materials we find on the web. A student or instructor should be able to create their own outlines and notes around the materials that exist and those that they add to the web. Such tools should also make it easy to download the student's work and materials into standard writing tools such as Microsoft Word.
  3. We can make it easy to share work in progress with others. This can be used to support working in groups, but also allow suggestions and critique from instructors, experts, and more experienced students. This can be done by making our annotations and research notes available to other users.
  4. We can supply targeted "leaning by doing" interactive tutorials to build research skills. Some skills that would have helped my Arts and Crafts and urban planning research include:

    · Advanced online search strategies
    · Learning to select and evaluate and use historical materials
    · Learning to cite materials found on the web

Prospects and Projects

The problems and opportunities I mention in this article will not have a single easy solution. The work that libraries and others are doing to develop standards for metadata, user queries, and bibliographic databases will be ongoing and may take quite a long time to work out.

In the meantime, the Distributed Learning group at Academic Technologies is working to develop some of the tools mentioned. Our group typically focuses on projects where we work with faculty to bring particular research tools and learning materials to students. While we are at it, we are developing shared and reusable software components that can be applied more broadly by students and faculty within the University. We call these components Learning Components.

One of the key components under development is called Note Taker 2. Note Taker is an annotation application that lets a student bookmark and organize materials they find on the web. Using a simple drag-and-drop interface the student can create an outline that is linked to places on the web. The outline can be shared among the members of a work group or with an instructor so that she or he can add comments to the student's work in progress.

We anticipate demonstrating the functionality of Note Taker 2 at an upcoming 2East New Technology Series event soon. Watch the 2East eNewsletter for an announcement, and for other news on our work in AT and the Library to contribute to the University's teaching mission.

Jonathan Smith
Distributed Learning Architect,
IT Academic Technologies

Northwestern University •2East: Bibliographic Resources and Scholarly Technologies • 2eNTS@atlas.northwestern.edu
Last Revision 12/6/02
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