Using the Internet in the Classroom: Variety in the Use of Walden's Paths

WaldenÕs Paths provides annotated guided paths over World-Wide Web pages. Designed as an approach for organizing classroom use of contextualized Web-based material, WaldenÕs Paths provides a general mechanism suitable for use in implementing a range of different pedagogical strategies. This paper reports on some of the uses that teachers have made of WaldenÕs Paths. One of the surprises for us in this project has been the range of ways in which WaldenÕs Paths can be used in practice. Introduction Over the past three years we have been developing WaldenÕs Paths (Shipman et al. 1997; Furuta et al. 1997; Shipman et al. 1998), software supporting the use of existing Web-based materials in elementary and secondary classrooms. This work has been motivated by the belief that as more information is made available via the Web, that there is a greater potential, and indeed need, for educators to make use of this resource. The Internet is becoming an intrinsic part of society and the most effective method of distributing many types of information. Because of the relatively low publication cost of the Internet, economic pressures will favor increased use of it for information dissemination. Schools will have to find methods of making use of this resource or ignore a growing amount of content with educational potential. The question should not be whether to use the Internet in the classroom but how. There are a number of problems with using the Web in the classroom. The Web is an unedited publication media and so there is information that is inaccurate and inappropriate for students. Web materials, when on topic, are most often authored for other purposes than education, leaving students confused due to their lack of vocabulary or context. Finally, browsing Web materials can reduce the student to being a Òbutton presserÓ, navigating from page to page as they might flip from channel to channel on television. WaldenÕs Paths represents one attempt to ameliorate these difficulties by providing teachers a way to focus student exploration, to add explanation and context to materials, and to integrate the Web resources in the existing classroom environment. The next section of this paper provides an overview of WaldenÕs PathsÕ functionality and interface. After this we present examples of how teachers have made use of WaldenÕs Paths within the context of their existing curriculum. This leads to a discussion of issues for the use of WaldenÕs Paths and, more generally, the use of the Web in the classroom. What is WaldenÕs Paths? WaldenÕs Paths, named after the paths Thoreau unselfconsciously created through the woods while living at Walden Pond, is a tool that allows teachers to construct guided paths using the information on the Internet. Like ThoreauÕs trails, guided paths provide structure through an otherwise unstructured environment. The guided path as a concept goes back at least as far as Vannevar BushÕs Memex (1945). Paths have been developed in specialized software environments and investigated with limited user communities in the late 1980Õs (Zellweger 1989; Trigg 1988). Paths in WaldenÕs Paths are an ordering of Web pages with associated annotations. The pages used can be from anywhere on the Internet and their ordering in the path is independent of any existing navigational structure. WaldenÕs Paths consists of three components, a Path Authoring Tool for creating and editing paths, a Path Database for storing, retrieving, and sharing paths, and a Path Server that provides access to published paths. The Path Authoring Tool, shown in Figure 1, is a Java-based interface that allows keyword searches for Web materials, the display of those materials in an external browser (e.g. Netscape Navigator), and the selection, ordering, and annotation of pages for the current path. The authoring tool also includes a ÒWork SpaceÓ for storing pages that do not fit into the current path but may be of use in the future. Authored paths are stored in the Path Database. This database provides each authorized path author with a working area for storing paths. Paths stored here are not visible to the students and may be recovered for editing or continued work. When a path is ready for access by readers (here we are using the term reader instead of student to convey that the person accessing the path is not necessarily a student) it is ÒpublishedÓ to the Path Server. The Path Server is a Common Gateway Interface (CGI) program that creates the list of available paths and their presentation for readers. When a reader requests a path page, the Path Server constructs control-flow and annotation frames to appear at the top of the browser and requests the material from the source site on the Internet to appear in a lower frame (as shown in Figure 2). The reader can use the control-flow controls to step along the path. In addition, the links in the source page remain active. Following any of them takes the reader off the path, as shown in Figure 3. In this mode, further unconstrained browsing is permitted. The reader can return to the path departure point at any time by selecting the Òreturn to pathÓ button in the WaldenÕs Paths navigation area of the display. Use in the Classroom The variety of ways in which WaldenÕs Paths has been used to take advantage of Web-based materials in the classroom has been one of the surprises during the project. Our original conception of educational paths was that they would be created by teachers for use in the classroom as a convenient way for collecting widespread materials. We expected that teachers would then use the paths in ways similar to the use of traditional filmstripsÑas an enabling way to direct their studentsÕ traversal of a sequence of related information items. In use, we discovered that Figure 1: The Path Authoring Tool Figure 2: A path page created by the Path Server this, indeed, did occur. However we also discovered that unexpected uses arose as well; uses that reflected a mixture of roles for both the materials and for the students. The following subsections will describe five separate uses of the system by teachers. For privacy reasons we do not identify the specific classrooms involved; some are located in Texas and others on military bases in Germany and Italy. Embedded Assignments A middle-school science teacher decided to use the path mechanism to create a virtual tour of the Kitt Peak Observatory. By collecting pages from different Web sites, he created a tour that not only described Kitt Peak, but also compared it to other observatories. A page from this path is shown as Figure 4. The teacher made much use of the annotation feature of WaldenÕs Paths, helping provide transitions between the information on the different pages and embedding questions for the students to answer on each page. The students, while traversing the path, were asked to answer (on paper) the various questions making use of the information provided on the pages. The features are most interesting with this use of WaldenÕs Paths are the mixtures of mediaÑelectronic and paperÑused in achieving the teacherÕs classroom goals. Here, the teacher has blended WaldenÕs Paths annotation feature with a paper-based assignment to focus and enhance the acquisition of information from the mixture of electronic information resources presented. Modernizing Existing Practices In a high school art and art history class, a teacher who had been using slides of paintings and sculptures for reviews and exams decided to use WaldenÕs Paths to improve current teaching practices. Traditionally, during an art history review or exam, the students have to fill out a form as the teachers presents images in a 35mm slide show. Questions on the form might include the artistic period or style of the piece, the artist, defining characteristics of the piece, etc. One problem with this approach is that each slide is available to the student during a short period of time. The student must quickly write down answers to the questions before the next slide appears. The teacher decided to replace the 35mm slide show with paths of images from on-line museums. In the revised exam each student could spend as much they needed on each image (within the time constraints of the class period). The interesting feature of this use is the way in which a traditional teaching practice could be adapted and improved using the new medium. The updated solution preserves the familiar characteristics of the original situation while overcoming the technological limitations imposed by the equipment used previously. Figure 3: Off the path Figure 4: Kitt Peak Observatory path Resources for Creative Work A high-school computer music class teacher used WaldenÕs Paths as a way to identify useful resources to students. Due to the technical nature of the computer music class there were few textbook resources available but much information on the Web. The students, whose task it was to compose a new piece of music using MIDI, needed both explanatory and reference materials on the equipment and software they were using. The teacher created paths connecting sites with useful information on MIDI to act as a shared bookmark list for the whole class. Thus the teacher created a resource that enabled the use of Web-based materials in support of existing creative/constructive tasks. The use of WaldenÕs Paths to collect separate resources together to form a convenient package appears to be a common use of the system as we have observed it in other teachersÕ applications as well. In this use of WaldenÕs Paths, the contextualization of information is not as important as is the coalescing of it in one place. Class Projects Another high-school music class used WaldenÕs Paths in support of learning about musicians and music history. The unique aspect of this use is that WaldenÕs Paths became an authoring environment for the students. The students had to form groups, pick topics, and author paths on these