Printing Designing for Re-Use and Accessibility


Designing for Re-Use and Accessibility



Robby Robson, Eduworks Corporation

Bruce Caron, New Media Studio

Mimi Recker, Utah State University

Ted Sicker, WGBH

Session Description

An important but as yet unfilled promise of digital repositories of learning resources is that they will enable instructors and learners to find and use existing learning resource, thereby improving instructor productivity and instructional quality. Reuse can also help foster communities of practitioners, who develop and share best practices. Designing, or retro-fitting, resources that adhere to accessibility guidelines are also key to their reuse. This session will examine the potentials of and barriers to reuse of learning resources. As appropriate, we will draw upon existing literature and participant expertise to discuss issues such as resource granularity, resource design, standards, and pedagogy. Participants will be asked to bring examples of learning resources that have been successfully reused in different instructional contexts.

Notes - Designing for Re-Use and Accessibility

Introductions

RR: Design today will be different. Short introductions (5 minutes) followed by Socratic panel, with questions designed to encourage debate. Will start questions, incorporate audience questions.

BC: w/ new media studio (a nonprofit digital media center to finish application development) have data discovery toolkit and foundry�way to help all NSDL projects add services to projects. Concerned about issues of re-use, breaking items down into new terms. Building reusable code objects that can become learning objects with applications.
Think about making sure the code is the same all the way down.
Focusing on patterns not standards. Patterns will reveal ways of operating that are not obvious. When you put patterns together come up to reusablility paradox� the more Ssomething is exactly what YOU want, the less it can be used by others. Reusability works best at a certain level of generality. Join the Foundry�its� free, all data is free. www.newmediastudio.org/DataDiscovery

MR: My name is Mimi Recker. I�m going to talk about Instructional Architect�how we�ve used it and how it can be used to study teacher use. IA simple tool to let teachers find digital objects, use, and republish on the web. Have search interface to number of libraries and can then create account. Findings put into 4 categories: motivations, barriers, search strategies and selection criteria, adaptation and use strategies.

Design guidelines: sample small w/ experienced teachers. Participating during in school year. Different groups would have different results.

What are they looking for: provide current, accurate, and quality resources
When searching: need to know it was appropriate for audience and what kind of resource it way�and how it linked to standards

Wanted to find resources that were small�that they could use the next day, not interested in modifying

2 social context issues wrapped around their searches:
Liked tools w/ search/browse and with teacher recommendations
Wanted to be able to communicate w/ those teachers using similar material.

TC: I�m from WGBH and on teachers� domain: Original design to collect materials for teachers from GBH. Lots of public station materials, as well as lots of 3rd party materials w/ numerous restrictions. Constraints for reusability within the larger NSDL

Life sciences has 350 resources
Working on life sciences�


Ways teachers use teachers� domain
Accessbility: All videos are closed-captions. Others have descriptive videos�and others have multiple language sound tracks. As Mimi found, one way teachers come to materials is through browsing. Worked w/ teachers to determine language, we call commonly taught topics. Subject to topic into subtopic as levels for resources in search.

Can also get resources by key word search.

Resource itself has resource page, with description of what will find with background essay. This helps teacher understand what they need to know in order to use it. Key to heling teachers use materials, includes questions for discussions�ways to intergrate immediately into the classroom.

Single resource can be used in a number of ways. Could have different backgrounder depending on classroom/level use. Aligned/correlated with different state standards.

Another way to get to materials is through a structured lesson plan�eg, one that could be used in 1-2 classes. Teachers either use directly or adapt to their class.

Save to teacher folder�can be annotated. Teachers can create space�teachers and students want to export to plug into powerpoints�are working on this now.

New way to use: as a base for professional development

RR: Questions: Let�s start w/ Greg Crane�s talk. Underlying his talk was data. The way data is displayed today is not the way it will be used tomorrow. So the questions is, is it the data or the material or the context that will be reused.

TS: All video is there, so we can recode. We�ve separated our data base in parts: MiDS and MADES; Hard to separate data from content.

MR: We�re seeing a pretty opportunistic reuse by teachers. They have specific activity in mind and looking for something to add spice. Saw granularity mismatch problems�teachers were looking for much smaller objects than the way resources were organized.

RR: Bruce you have reusable code

BC: Such as macromedia director, with code that links to other higher level code.

RR: A lot of our assumptions are that this is based on the idea of reusable code. What if we had a library of reusable code, would that be of use.

BC: there are lots of places creating reusable code. Need to be created as modular components of reusable code.

MR: We looked at code reuse but not use it�s the best model, but is used among engineers. Most reuse happens within an organization because there is a shared context.

RR: Mimi talked about research. Any research about use in different contexts?

TS: Annecdotol: At the beginning of the year, teachers would point students to the site, but by end of the year teachers portfolio use increased and in one school over 80% of materials from Teachers� Domain.

Denise: We introduced this in the school year. Seems the longer time they have to use, get comfortable.

TS: When the pilot box was removed in one school, we had the biggest number of hits and most were from that school and its students.

BC: Most of our reuse is �within the family�.

RR: Does the NSDL have any statistics on reuse of NSDL materials.
K.Howe: We�re looking at these projects to learn

Denise: Tell us what you want to look at and we�ll incorporate this into our work.

Kaye: Mimi, maybe Ted, Isn�t the illustrative detail what the teachers are looking for.

TS: Our teachers didn�t want to have something that was fully packaged. Eg, removed the results part of video for kids exploration. This allowed teachers and students to conduct the experiment/activity,

(?): GBH: were there ways for other users to see annotations.
TS: when you create not �My Resources� but went down into �Groups�. Used mostly with students. Didn�t see much in school collaboration among teachers.

Denise: rating system wasn�t stuff teachers liked. They didn�t know the quality of the teachers who rated, so preferred information on how other teachers used specific objects.

RR: Business Models: Reuse implies sharing. What have you learned, especially if materials can�t be reused because of restrictions

TS: The Functionality might be divided from the resources.

RR: Business model you described, by making something more reusable it�s more saleable, but there�s a tax on reuse. Instead, could there be a different way to reuse?

BC: re GBH� I can�t go in and pull out video, add new resources, and resue.

TC: you�d still have to be connected to teachers domain. Trying to develop resource exporter.

BC: But I couldn�t put into my server without licensing. Couldn�t put into new site and change.

MR: We�re committed to open source. So we�re providing code. But a business model can�t be built around a code, needs to be a bigger package. Eg, could be organized around professional development

RR: What do you mean by open source
MR: Code is copyrighted. But want to use�we were surprised when a project downloaded, adapted, and reused code.
(?) What�s the long-term indicator of use over time?
TS: in the first year use increased over time, but we don�t know how it will go over time. Teachers who were using it, were using it more not handing off to students.
Our professional development is being designed to meet accreditation by state. But if we sell to others they will have to have to develop state by state credit. Should be content based as well as technology based.
BC: we�re talking about middle school teachers, what about librarians. Most connections are in school libraries.

RR: We�re at the height of arrogance if we assume we know how computers/technology will be used. What are you doing to allow for the innovation, the best variety of uses, and how are you trying to foster that?
MR: Listen to the audience
RR: What if it�s a different audience? What if you�re designing for teachers, what if parents become the audience? How do you help them? Or how do you help an unknown community?
BC: ESIP thought of developing Napster like program to store information for NASA, a week later got call from Napster users, trying to figure out what was going on�content is different from the service.
TS: everyone told us the audience would be teachers. We found students were using it. Middle school students didn�t like the colors or level of reading. But we haven�t changed the look or content because they�re using it. We aren�t worried about parents. We have limited resources.

RR: Why not Google? Or if you have a browser. If you have metadata, it�s an assertion from a point of view. If you do something for middle school teachers, what role does meta data play?
TS: Metadata always has a point of view. We need to figure out how to indicate what is the point of view and one object can show us in multiple forms.
(?) We�re pointing the camera in the wrong place. If we studied their work patterns, and see that media experience is absent. We have impedance matching problem�maybe we need to look at the students of future, where the students are reusing more. Second follow-up, at Exploratorium have 18 million in our online audience. We see ourselves as local museum, but we need to look at what folks beyond San Francisco doing on our site.

RR� What about reuse and does it have anything to do with learning?
MR: More people have access to resources. We�re interested in having teachers solve that problem.
RR: Aren�t teachers not prepared for reuse or adaptation.
TS: We�ve been grappling with this. Discussion of putting materials in hands of teachers and how they use. If they have learned something, they can use it to appropriately teach with it or use it other ways that are appropriate. There may be some things in the NSDL that shouldn�t be re-used or should be used in only some ways. If the value isn�t clear to the teachers, they won�t use. We need to develop some �wrapper� to help teachers think about how to use with what
RR: Need to structure for reusable and for information on how to reuse, reusable LEARNING, rather than reusable learning objects.
JF: Thinking about Teachers� Domain, there is an individual focus, where teacher could focus on creating group later. What if the focus changed to a different social distributed structure. So motivation might be more in the context.
BC: I like to build communities of users who talk to one another. But want to talk about something else: There is always a tendency to build something to find whatever you want. You end up with multiple hierarchical menus. Instead we�re saying let�s build smaller modules. Eg, teacher could pull down small module to teach X. Next week could teach Y, with different content. How do you make it small enough to fit into a context, with reusable templates and reusable structures.

D: Comment on reuse and learning. All the answers seem to come back to teachers, as if learning has to be mediated by teachers. By own view is that the act of doing something w/ materials is itself the learning. The real learning is when the students use the materials. Learning takes place in the re-use, especially when it�s in the community.

Data Discovery Toolkit and Foundry

Building in Reuse at the Code Level

Code TOapp

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