On the way back, at the airport, I met a journalist who had been investigating a story for a national paper in the UK. In fact, he looked like a journalist, and I approached him because I wondered what his impression of Romania was: "Oh, it's in deep trouble" he replied "It's the same people in all the key positions.. the infrastructure is still basically corrupt..there's a long way to go". My impression could not have been more different... optimism, intelligence, kindness, joy of freedom and planning ahead. Our missions, however, were very different and probably both viewpoints are valid.
It was the attendance at a conference (RILW) on the Internet as a Vehicle for Teaching and my wish to visit Eastern Europe that took me to Romania. As a research student studying aspects of cooperative learning, on the campus and in a virtual classroom, the subject matter was interesting. In fact, it was through the internet that I contacted someone in South Africa who put me in touch with his virtual seminar course leader in Germany (Nic Nistor), who is Romanian and was assisting Mihai Jalobeanu in Romania to organise this event, that I had the opportunity to experience this country and meet some most amazing people. So, this example alone highlights the value of the internet for me.
In Romania the facility of this medium of communication is so important as it emphasises and expands the possibilities of this newly liberated country and freedom of speech. In reality, all the old people are not still in all the positions of power. It was explained to me that pre -1990, those in positions of responsibility in education (at Universities) must have joined The Party to have promotion. Of course, now, all those who held onto their principles and took on responsibilities without recognition are now in their rightful positions. So, the prospect is better, times are changing, connections are being made, debate is in progress and although there will be hardship ahead, the spirit is strong and growing.
The conference took place in a small village - Illieni, in Transylvania - at a modern ecumenical youth centre surrounded by wonderful trees and birds with mountains in the distance. We may have been in a wilderness but we were on-line and it was far easier to keep in contact with those back home via email.. than it would have been to make a telephone call.
The most outstanding and extraordinary aspect of my experience at this conference was the good-naturedness of all the participators and organisors. Thoughtfulness, attention to various needs and complete tolerance and acceptance of everyone - be they student or proffessor was very comforting and allowed an atmosphere of open exchange between us to reach a far higher level than the normal social chat at these affairs. This enabled an enrichment of learning - through greater knowledge and ideas exchanged - not only with regard to the educational and technological aspects of the conference papers (actually, it was referred to as a Workshop), but with regard to history, science, culture and humanity. Undoubtedly, the POLYGON society had successfully achieved their aims by the end of the RILW week.
What follows will reflect entirely my own perspective of the proceedings and does not attempt to include the entire number of ideas and variety of work in progress that was presented to us. So this is the view of the educationalist, rather than the technologist.
A wonderful example of the potential that Chris was promoting was given to us by a Romanian English teacher called Cornelia Platon. She joined the I*EARN Network (International Education and Resource Network) which enabled a team from her class to work with another team from a different country. Each team worked on their own project and also contributed to that of another team. Each completed project is published by the Learning Circle (the model adopted by the network - co-ordinated by Margaret Riel), in the form of a magazine. The outcome of this way of working - pioneered by Cornelia as the only interested member of staff at her school, was all positive. Firstly, the students became more motivated to learn (they had been given responsibility to choose the subject matter and freedom to pursue it in any way they decided), their fluency in reading, writing and speaking English increased and their knowledge of their own and other countries was enhanced. The most exciting of these results was the motivation factor which was also increased by the links they were making with their own peers in other countries and the realisation that there were so many similarities. The enthusiasm spread to other children who were not directly involved but wanted to be and a general interest in learning English was achieved.
Children, it was noted, seem to have less problems using the Internet than adults do. Perhaps this could be attributed to a natural fearlessness and curiosity. Mircea Rusu hosted a round table discussion entitled The Optimisation of Teaching. His concern, as a teacher trainer, is how teachers can evolve and improve themselves. He knew that some form of teacher empowerment was needed... but in order to do this a secure foundation was essential - professional and technical. Equally important is the breaking down of social barriers to learning.. such as the fear of making mistakes and the inferiority complex. It was, again, stressed how particularly relevant this was to Romania due to fairly recent freedom and access to knowledge and communication with the rest of the world. In my mind, it highlighted this widespread problem that also existed with many teachers in the UK. In this country, there is serious danger of children (especially at primary level) having more knowledge and skill with computing in the classroom than the teachers. The age-old problem appears to be the lack of longterm investment in time, resources and technological training for teachers.
The question of how to use an internet-based learning environment most effectively was the subject of much discussion. Nic Nistor, in the belief that course design should include constructivist principles of learning, illustrated the development of this idea by explaining his thinking behind the Virtual Seminars he has lead which focused on learning in computer networks. The first design was structured on the traditional approach of research, action, analysis and evaluation. The students were all working in small groups, but with later evaluation of the course, it was found that the interactions within the groups were mainly about negotiation of the learning activity and other task-orientated contributions were more practical and administrative than thoughtful and challenging. The new version of the Virtual Seminar included more steps in the structure and began with an authentic problem which required research in the application of the solution. It is hoped that the new version will show less negotiation of the learning activity, more information evaluation and result in a greater number of successful participants. The role of Nic, as a leader, was discussed. He has learnt to keep a back seat position during the three month seminars. When he had tried joining in with the discussions in the past (as a group member) it had not worked.. due to the student perceptions regarding him as the all-knowing one! The problem of how to handle non-cooperation (with difficulty) lead on to the idea that there is a need to address the area of developing cooperative skills in students who are required to work in this way. This is an area of particular personal interest and planned future work.
Two ex-Virtual Seminar students (Andriani Kraan and Bernhard Ertl) made a novel presentation regarding constructivism and its advantageous features for learning on the Internet. They made some interesting points that stressed the need for self- motivation in students - they are required to be active, self-regulating and social. The design can assist students by making the demands of the task equal to the ability level of the students. The Internet is an immediate and rewarding medium for the fluent browser and of great benefit is the equality of access to information - be they experts or students. It was concluded that the suitability of constructivist features in a course design is very much dependent on the context, purpose and content of the course.
This point was illustrated perfectly in a presentation given by Bela Erdelyi about an Internet-based course in Beam Physics that he had assisted in designing and running from Michigan State University in the spring term of this year. This subject matter is extremely specialised and is offered at only two other Universities in the U.S. There were 100 global participants. Lectures were delivered by video- conferencing technology and were also available on video and audio tapes as well as downloadable notes. There were weekly assignments that were delivered using CAPA (Computer-Assisted Personalized Approach), consisting of multiple-choice or single answer questions. The results were centrally filed, but the students were given immediate feedback which also supplied hints after the first wrong answer, allowing students to improve or have a little more time. There was a course homepage with News Bulletin and Office Hours (available for up to 4 hours a week, but in practise only about 2 hours were used). A network of local experts were set up to assist students in their area and guest lecturers were invited to contribute.
This was a very strong and well-defined system for the instruction of beam physics - which took only a few months to design, organise and prepare. Incredibly, it was considered not important for any communication to be encouraged between the students. No list-server was made available (too time-consuming to process). Impressively, all participants completed the course and the grades achieved were generally quite high. The course must have been set at the optimum level of required competence. It was acknowledged that motivation was very highland this could also have been due to the rarity of this subject being offered and also that about 70% of the participants were not studying as part of a credited course, but for their own interest. Most of the future plans refer to technological improvements apart from the idea of extending this concept to other courses. So, here is an example of purpose, context and content that does not require constructivist principles and that works very successfully in a highly structured and individually isolated learning environment.
An example of effective use of new technology was given to us by Bill Lindsay (University of Strathclyde). His concern was that the Highland and Island students in Scotland were being denied the possibility of a teacher training placement in a local school for economic reasons. The budget could not stretch to regular visits from the supporting tutor. Therefore, city students were also being denied experience of rural schools. Research of recent experiments using video-conferencing for the support of undergraduates in training revealed a positive potential. This proved to be the case for Bill also. The tutors did identify the requirement of new skills in using this medium, for instance - not both talking at the same time. The students responses were also mainly positive but there was some anxiety expressed about the lack of experience with the equipment or seeing their own image.. and not being able to bluff! There are many future developments planned with this technique including course selection interviews, placement assessment, collaborative activities (possibly global) and the development of simulation activities designed to enhance student learning.
This same phrase to enhance student learning was employed by Liana Razmerita (Univ. 'Dunarea de Jos' of Galati) when she was explaining the benefits of the Computer Based Training System she was currently involved with, and, in particular, the functions of the Testing Assessment Module. It sounded a bit like CAPA, the system used in the Beam Physics course, but this design has development plans to include dynamic graphics and motion pictures as well as becoming more problem solving orientated to stimulate student creativity. One more aspect that will be incorporated in the future is a function to allow student feedback and proposals of new instruction in the package. This possibility would be worthwhile especially with regard to student motivation which may be connected to the level of responsibility and involvement they feel in their own learning.
Connected to Liana's work is the development of an Intelligent Tutoring System explained by Stefan Trausan-Matu (Univ. of Bucharest). He argued the need for a Knowledge-based Automatic generation of Educational Web pages. The main principle was that students needed guidance to explore the web and the system should customise itself to the needs of each student.
Now I am in the realms of Computer Science and although there were many extremely stimulating papers and discussions about hardware and software systems - this is where I need to finish! I look forward to the NEXT International Workshop in Romania.