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Browsing by Author "Harrison, Steve"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
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    Learning When Less is More: “Bootstrapping” Undergraduate Programmers as Coordination Designers
    Lin, Strong; Tatar, Deborah; Harrison, Steve; Roschelle, Jeremy; Patton, Charles (Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, 2006)
    In this paper, we describe an undergraduate computer science class in the United States that we started with the intention of creating a participatory design experience to create distributed mobile collaborative technologies for education. The case highlights the ways in which programmer understanding of an innovative new technology can depend on understanding the context of use. The students were to use Tuple-spaces, a language for coordination. However, it soon became clear that while the coordination of machines may be thought of as a computer science problem, the students could not understand the technical system without richer models of how, why, or when coordination is desirable. We were in the ironic position of teaching human coordination at the same time as describing the technical properties of a system to support it. To “bootstrap” the learning process, we asked the students to draw on their own coordination expertise by implementing familiar coordinative games. We propose games as an addition to the PD toolkit when implementers need help in stepping outside their everyday mindset.
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    Using Place as Provocation: In Situ Collaborative Narrative Construction
    Schaefer, Matthew; Tatar, Deborah; Harrison, Steve; Crandell, Alli (Research Center for Educational Technology, 2008)
    This paper describes a unique model for mobile, collaborative learning embodied in the use of a new software tool called PlaceMark©. The model is overtly intended to help learners reflect on their relationship to particular places, and the relationship between their own experience and other people’s experiences of those spaces. PlaceMark does this not by telling people what a place is, but by instead asking them, as they reflect and write about their own experiences of place. This paper describes how PlaceMark facilitates distributed control in coordinated classroom activities. We believe that the stance to knowledge embodied in the system encourages student responsibility within the learning process and helps teach about multiplicity of perspective in a visceral way. Additionally, as cell phones and other technologies become part of ordinary life, it is increasingly important that children (and all of us) come to have a deeper consciousness of place. This work reports on a pilot study of the software conducted with middle school students, and provides an analysis of the study activity.