marina@ai.toronto.edu (Marina Haloulos) (11/20/89)
Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto
(GB = Gailbraith Building, 35 St. George Street)
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GRAPHICS & INTERACTION SEMINAR
GB305, at 11:00 a.m., Friday 1 December 1989
Dr. Mette Ringsted
Jutland Technological Institute, Denmark
"Multi Media in Distance Education and Cooperative Work"
Six years ago we started the process of defining our requirements for new
technology (hw/sw/nw) in educational and cooperative environments.
The aim was not to develop equipment but to test end evaluate functions and
principles by using existing technology in full scale experiments to
simulate future use. Also our aim was to evaluate roles of the
participants in order to further develop pedagogical, communication and
cooperation strategies. And finally we wanted to test and validate ISDN
possibilites in these fields.
The participating organisations were: Jutland Technological Institute,
Aarhus Technical College and Jutland Telephone Company. And the target
group would be enterprises wanting continous education as distance
education.
For a number of years we've based our pedagogical concept of distance
learning on the socalled third generation.
Our learning concept is founded on the following kea aspects: learning
process is understood as a * SOCIAL PROCESS. Learning should be organised
as: * regular FACE-TO-FACE seminars/sessions * PROJECT-ORIENTED, GROUP
BASED PROCESSES *High degree of LEARNERS INFLUENCE
Designing an educational workstation we've tried to develop and test future
learner's and teacher's stations using known technology to simulate use in
a future learning environment basing ourselves on this pedagogical concept.
Our plan was to establish MULTI MEDIA experiments, organised as ON-THE-
JOB-TRAINING distance education.
The controlling element in the design process was the methodological
concept which had the following headings as mentioned above and where
COMMUNICATION is a very important element. This means to a great extent
that the organization of the training is based on group work.
Communication showed to be a great part of what turned out to be similar
processes: cooperative work, quality control, meetings etc. The
pedagogical situation had a lot in common with other situations where you
wanted to deal with knowledge transfer - not as a one way feature but more
like a multiple-cross-road for group discussions, learning and decision.
Our first tool in this area was computer conferencing. We added media
which were based on pictures, sound and stored material and simultaneous
communication to see what happened. Now we want to go back to the computer
conferencing and enrich this tool with some of the features tested via
other media.
And we're still working on the concepts for the best way of transferring
knowledge as group processes.