Dr. Leon James
Professor of Psychology
College of Social Sciences
University of Hawaii (Manoa)
1997
This paper presents the results of analyzing various aspects of an online generational community of students who enroll in an Internet-integrated college course. Students write self-reports on various aspects of their experience as part of their class work. Content analysis of these reports help identify various dimensions of learning in an online environment. Results indicate that students go through 3 phases during the semester: (1) Becoming information literate; (2) Becoming self-directed autonomous learners; (3) Exercising leadership and inventiveness. Within each of these phases, evidence reveals student behaviors in three behavioral areas: affective (e.g., improving self-confidence), cognitive (e.g., acquiring content and vocabulary), and sensorimotor (e.g., acting as a generational participant). The paper details each of these with references to the student reports. All generational student reports are available on the Web. A classified inventory of online student behaviors was prepared with samples of text from the student reports. The online generational approach is suitable for any subject field in any instructional setting. The taxonomy of online educational objectives and skills is usable for planning and assessing online instruction. Several principles of online instruction are identified including how to help students to think creatively and use group forces as a learning resource.
A recent issue of the Journal of the American Society for Information Science (November 1996) is devoted entirely to the "Perspectives on ...Distance Independent Education." Among the important issues raised is the instructional challenge of transforming passive classroom students into active, self-directed learners capable of benefiting from the special advantages of the new online technology that is now becoming available in traditional instructional settings. In an article focusing on "Cognition and Distance Learning" Linn [1] describes passive learners as expecting to "absorb information," failing to "identify connections between ideas," and "frequently forget what they learn" (p.827). In contrast, "autonomous learners" use books, electronic media, networked communication, even computer manuals to gain a linked, connected, integrated and cohesive understanding of a topic.
Linn [1] identifies some features of an online environment that would support the development of autonomous lifelong learners:
(1) Helping students make effective decisions and creating new ideas;
(2) Helping learners recognize when, how, and why they learn new material;
(3) Helping students diagnose personal goals, strengths, and limitations, and select activities compatible with their goals;
(4) Providing opportunities for independent projects tailored to personal goals within an academic discipline;
(5) Encouraging students to take responsibility for their own learning -- setting realistic goals for themselves, monitoring their own progress, reflect on their understanding, and seek guidance from peers as well as instructors;
(6) Creating activities that permit students to practice these skills.
(7) Making disciplinary knowledge, practice, and culture visible to students through autonomous learning activities that include linking ideas, comparing alternatives, reflecting on progress, critiquing ideas with guidance and support;
(8) Structuring courses so as to take advantage of the social nature of learning and social contributions to learning by engaging students in collaborative practices and providing for their mutual support as a helping community. These eight characteristics are according to Linn essential for creating autonomous lifelong learners in an online instructional setting. I believe that the online generational project I am describing here meets many of these desirable objectives.
This project started in the 1970s using typed student papers that were written, read, collected, bound, and referenced by each succeeding generation of students in each of several college courses that I taught at the University of Hawaii (Social Psychology; Statistics; Personality Theory; History of Psychology as a Science). In the 1980s, the collection of student reports was augmented by electronic course-integrated activities on the PLATO system (discussion groups by topics across classes). Starting in 1993 all required course activities were conducted on the World Wide Web through the facilities of the College of Social Sciences on the Manoa campus.
I have been calling this approach "The Generational Curriculum" [2] [3] [4] [5] because it has these two components. First, there is the creation of a social learning community through the metaphor of "generations." Each semester a new crop of students start from scratch in terms of the target skills that are presented by the instructor in a generational context. They look back on the finished work of prior generations and see their own work as serving the future generations. Second, the generational reports of all prior students are read, processed, and augmented by each succeeding generation. Thus a significant portion of the student's work and grade come from these "generational curriculum" activities.
The Fall 1997 Semester marked the Fifth Generation of the Online Generational Curriculum in two Internet-integrated courses I teach every semester: Cyber-Psychology and Traffic Psychology. Students are computer novices and unfamiliar with the Internet. On day 1 they find out what is expected of them and they are given weekly exercises designed to help them acquire basic skills such as using a Web browser and search engine, learning basic HTML code, using UNIX commands, uploading/downloading, and Home Page architecture. Half of each class is devoted to group discussions and lectures, and half to lab sessions where each student sits next to an online workstation. At the end of 16 weeks all students who did not quit by midterm (about 80%) are successful in this pragmatic respect: each student leaves behind a self-produced generational Web site containing various assigned reports and integrated by hyperlink to specific content in the reports of prior generations.
The earlier "print" generations of the 1970s and 1980s are slowly being scanned in and made available to the new generations. At this point (Spring 1997) the Online Generational Curriculum is a hypertext superdocument of about 160 megabytes composed of linked reports and commentaries involving hundreds of students, 11,000 multimedia files, and innumerable paragraph-to-paragraph links that leave an intellectual trail rich in meaning and value in several areas-- educational, scientific, community, and personal. The site may be visited at this URL: http://www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/leonj/leonpsy/gc/generations.html
There is no theoretical limit to the generations, though I expect to run into new kinds of technical problems as the generational super-document grows into the gigabyte size. In terms of cultural and instructional resources, the longer a particular online generational project goes on, the richer is its content and the educational opportunities it can provide. I believe that the approach can be replicated in all subject fields in any online learning setting, equally suitable for college, high school, or elementary school. Other institutional settings that may benefit from an online generational approach include social clubs, work teams, and correctional retraining facilities. The rationale for this expectation is fully outlined below.
I confess that in the current frontier-mentality of campus computer lab environments, there is much frustration instructors can encounter, and quite a bit of additional demands on their time. However, this may not be unrealistic for a brand new course produced in a lovely new instructional medium. Each semester I expect to spend less extra hours in preparation, and I would do so were it not for the fact that I'm always tinkering with the structure and content of the approach. My work habits also have had to accommodate to a new pattern. Right now, I feel the need to spend about four hours a day, six days a week, managing my electronic educational community. This involves logging on, taking care of student e-mail business, browsing through their reports and new links, typing in comments to their reports (when I think they're called for), and continuing to construct and build-up the cyberspace zone -- a task which involves my acquiring more skills in using software for Web design and maintenance.
Analysis of Generation 4 Student Reports
Using prior research on an empirical taxonomy for Generation 2 reports, I set up the Generational Curriculum Taxonomy of Instructional Objectives (see Appendix 1 below). Since this taxonomy is based on the reports of Generation 2 students, the question arises whether it is accurate or general enough to describe the reports of Generation 4 students. Thus, the taxonomy in this current form represents the prediction that Generation 4 reports will contain evidence for student behaviors within each of the nine zones of the taxonomy. In other words, if I inspect the Generation 4 student reports will I be able to find student behaviors that fit within each of the nine zones of the taxonomy? If the answer is yes, it would suggest that the taxonomy may be used by other researchers or instructors in different online settings. The taxonomy provides an explicit map for what specific online skills one wishes to target for. It also provides a guide for constructing comprehensive assessment measures of learner skills.
The taxonomy shown in Appendix 1 and Tables 1 and 2 , will be used to define or categorize segments of text taken from the students' self-witnessing reports. There are nine zones or classification categories and I was interested in finding statements by students that illustrated each of these zones. I systematically read all the online reports of the 35 students who made up Generation 4 in the Fall of 1996 and copied segments that illustrated one of the nine zones of the taxonomy. I thus obtained 95 statements.
This classified inventory of student statements corresponds to the taxonomy in Appendix 1 and Tables 1 and 2 . Each student statement is a small segment of the report and is taken as an index that a certain skill has been acquired. For example, here is a report segment from Appendix 2 (not available in this format) that I take as evidence for level 1 affective (A1) and cognitive skills (C1):
"I benefited greatly from being able to read others failures and successes (A1) and I learned a lot about what it takes to be successful with computers (C1). At first I was overwhelmed (A1) by the topics and all the different commands that you need to know (C1)." said CA from Generation 4b -- quoted by LV from Generation 4b.
Here the student shows evidence of learning to overcome his initial feeling of being overwhelmed and of acquiring new online skills. The fact that I was able to obtain one or more student statements for each of the nine zones of the taxonomy indicates that the classified inventory is sufficiently general to apply to different generations of students. To me this means that instructors in different settings might benefit from adopting it as a working hypothesis.
The Three Phases of Internalizing Learned Online Skills
The three predicted phases (or levels) of student learnings represent a continuum of internalization of skills from external (phase 1) to internal (phase 3). "Internal" refers to the top-down hierarchical organization of a system so that what is higher is more internal or central to the control system (refer to Appendix 1). The more internal or central areas of a motivational hierarchy exert control over the lower or more external items. For instance, the skill of perseverance or sustaining a project effort rather than quitting is a level 2 skill. Prior to that one needs to learn better self-efficacy expectations and to overcome technophobia (level 1 skills). Generally, the development of expertise proceeds from the acquisition of lower, external items and continues with higher more internal items. For example, in the educational taxonomies [6], lower objectives and learnings in, say the cognitive domain, consist of "memorizing items" in coherent clusters called "knowledge." Somewhat higher or more internal learnings consist of "analyzing and interpreting" knowledge structures. The most internalized cognitive skills, and also the highest, consist of "re-structuring, evaluating, and synthesizing" new principles of knowledge. The number of steps, levels, or phases may vary from theory to theory, but the idea of a progression is universal. For the sake of convenience, all continuums for internalization will be assumed to have three phases or levels, corresponding to the popular and non-technical sub-divisions of Beginner (or Novice); Intermediate; and Advanced.
Note that the from the perspective of learners, the progression is from lower and external (phase 1) to higher and more internal (phase 3), see Appendix 1 and Tables 1 and 2 . This corresponds to the general idea of advancement from rookie (greenhorn, inexperienced, beginner, novice, etc.) to expert (professional, advanced, skilled, etc.). This progression is analytic because it proceeds from external (phase 1) to internal (phase 3) -- also known as "bottom-up" direction; in other words, from effects to causes. However, from the perspective of graduates or practitioners, the progression is synthetic because it proceeds from internal (phase 3) to external (phase 1) -- which is known as "top-bottom" direction; in other words, from managed causes to resultant effects.
In an earlier report on Generation 2 students [5], the three phases of learning and adapting to the Internet were identified from the students' bi-weekly self-witnessing reports. These were based on journals or records students kept of their feelings and thoughts over the course of the semester as they were learning to put up their Web sites and carrying out the weekly assignments (e.g., access, search, navigation, telnet, ftp, HTML). A taxonomic inventory of affective and cognitive skills and errors was extracted from the self-witnessing reports. Level 1, which is called Achieving Focus on Internet, proceeds when learners, under the motivation to be accurate and persistent (affective skills), make appropriate observations and identify sub-tasks (cognitive skills). Level 2 is called Achieving Engagement and denotes that phase of information seeking which requires that the user become engaged, affectively and cognitively, by proceeding with self-confidence to gaining mastery over Internet navigation and file management techniques. Level 3, Personalizing, is entered when users begin to accept Internet by contextualizing and personalizing it in the presence of feelings of attraction and the desire for task completion.
The results of this study conformed to the findings of earlier taxonomic research on library skills and errors [6]. In that behavioral area, Level 1 was titled Orientation to the Library and included the willingness to follow instructions (affective skills) and memorizing library terms (cognitive skills). Level 2 internalization was called Interacting with the Library and consisted of acquiring attitudes (affective skills) and reasoning procedures (cognitive skills) similar to what librarians used in their classification and retrieval operations. Through this they were enabled to select keywords for a search and plan a workable retrieval strategy. Level 3 was called Internalizing the Library and included the acquisition of positive affect for libraries and their mission in society (affective skills), coupled with understanding how knowledge and information structure are tied to disciplines (cognitive skills).
Phase 1 is thus an initial stage of operation in which learners acquire the ability to orient and focus on those elements that are the most external of a task or situation. In the Generational Curriculum teaching context, the most external elements involve maintaining self-confidence (affective skills -- not quitting when the going gets tough), acquiring disciplinary content (cognitive skills -- knowing what the earlier generations wrote), and acting out membership status (sensorimotor skills -- performing requisite activities online). In the context of online community-classroom, these external phases of learning are enabled through the psychological process of generational identification. As Appendix 1 and Tables 1 and 2 show, Phase 1 is the activity of becoming information literate through generational identification.
This phase is marked affectively as recurrent attempts by learners to postpone quitting and to eliminate procrastinating. Self-confidence and self-efficacy expectations have to be maintained through self-pep-talks and social identification with other students -- those who had similar difficulties yet ended up successful. Cognitively, phase 1 involves getting familiar with the content of the generational curriculum by reading, processing, and commenting on what prior students have written. The affective and the cognitive necessarily interact. There is no finding out the curriculum content if the activity is continuously postponed. The thoroughness with which the curriculum is studied depends on affective effort or persistence. The affective and the cognitive together determine the outcome and performance. At this external level, the sensorimotor process involves learning how to act out the behaviors of a generational member or cyber-community netizen.
This general taxonomic principle has been applied to the Generational Curriculum objectives as shown in Appendix 1 and Tables 1 and 2 . This scheme tries to retain face validity in terms of common knowledge about teaching, training, or coaching efforts. In education at all levels there appears such a progression of objectives as represented here. Becoming information literate is the first phase of any new online professionalism or expertise to which one aspires. One needs to learn the vocabulary (cognitive skills) within a context of acquired work attitudes and ethics (affective skills) that are appropriate in the performance of acts (sensorimotor skills) in the chosen field of acquisition. The online community-classroom approach provides the mechanism of generational identification through which learners can more easily acquire information literacy.
While this is a continuous process that will go on and on, phase 2 will start at some point and will overlap with phase 1. As learners become literate in their chosen field (phase 1), they need to learn how to continue learning (phase 2) by becoming self-directed autonomous learners. The online community-classroom approach provides the mechanism of generational modeling through which members can more easily become self-directed autonomous learners. Modeling (phase 2) is a more internal control phase than identification (phase 1) because it requires interactive involvement. One can identify with a performer through being a passive audience and thus become familiar with a cultural milieu. But modeling requires an active participation and social fabrication so that more inward elements of the learner are engaged.
Even as learners are still active in phases 1 and 2, they also begin a more interior involvement as innovators and leaders of their learning community (phase 3). This requires going beyond identification, beyond modeling, and on to generational loyalty. The motive to be an innovator (affective skills) depends on the desire to strengthen one's ties to the target community (affective skills). Phase 3 of learning and adapting to the Internet depended on learners' willingness to continue learning until they are able to see a personal use. This new context makes the effort of learning the Internet ultimately worthwhile. Personalizing, contextualizing, and feeling loyalty are the deepest, highest and most central control activities in becoming an expert at something.
The online community-classroom context thus provides the generational curriculum approach with social facilitators for learners. Identifying (phase 1), modeling (phase 2) and showing loyalty (phase 3) are three types of activities that go on more or less simultaneously as the novice is transformed into an expert. Appendix 1 and Tables 1 and 2 specify the instructional objectives in the three domains for each phase (9 zones). The affective internalization process starts with identifying with successful peers, which improves self-efficacy expectations, thus allowing them to overcome technophobia and resistance (phase 1 affective skills). As this becomes stabilized, learners begin modeling and can acquire the motive of sustained effort and project completion (phase 2 affective skills). Finally, learners develop loyalty and become motivated to be inventive and innovative (phase 3 affective skills).
A similar internalization procedure occurs in the cognitive domain as learners internalize the affective involvement (refer to Appendix 1 and Tables 1 and 2 ). By identifying with prior generations, learners empower themselves to acquire disciplinary and cultural content that members refer to and discuss (phase 1 cognitive skills). Identification insures that learners are motivated to focus on relevant details and remember them. When they start modeling or acting like a member themselves, they acquire the style of reasoning and assessment criteria (phase 2 cognitive skills) which is part of the culture as the online generational community evolves. Finally, when they start showing loyalty to the generational curriculum, their cognitive activities become more complex and creative (phase 2 cognitive skills).
The sensorimotor domain undergoes a parallel and overlapping process of internalization (refer to Appendix 1 and Tables 1 and 2 ). Starting with generational identification (phase 1), learners are given the opportunity to practice their cyber-community citizenship by taking their place in the sequence of generations and class presence (phase 1 sensorimotor skills -- e.g., attaching their files to their own Home Page which is attached to their class Page which is attached to the generational Page). Going further with generational modeling, learners begin cumulating their role activities and coalescing them into a sustained, meaningful project (phase 2 sensorimotor skills). Finally, when generational loyalty begins, achieving excellence becomes visible through products and performances achieved for the benefit of the community's survival and enrichment.
Educational Principles of the Online Generational Community-Classroom
Principle 1. Mining Hypertext as a Learning Resource:
The World Wide Web allows the creation of knowledge through inter-linking ideas and has taken on new significance for culture, education, and commerce. It is now instructionally feasible as a routine activity to build learning communities in an academic setting. Course-integrated use of the Internet opens up new educational possibilities for augmenting classroom learning. Students can now produce Web documents with hot-links to other students and to whatever the instructor's assignments direct them. The electronic hypertext environment, accessed through the information superhighway, provides the medium in which students can practice authorship, critical analysis, and social development through community integration.
This course-integrated telecommunications activity has two valuable instructional features, in my view: (1) involving students in reading each other's work and commentaries, and (2) creating a collective, virtual 'super-document' out of the students' individual and independent efforts. These features transform the students' work into an intellectual contribution through their participation in a generational cyberspace learning community for one semester. Each semester a new generation of students add to the super-document and integrate their writing into its hypertext fabric. This process simulates the growth and evolution of a virtual learning community in cyberspace. At any time in the future former students may re-visit their Home Page architecture through the Internet, and see how it has been weaved or integrated into the evolving and living fabric of the continuously evolving generational virtual super-document [3].
The power of hypertext to create new knowledge lies in linking text to text. For instance, scientific reports contain references to prior reports by the author and others. Each reference is a link that integrates the current work to earlier work. Making a link is equivalent to creating a new context. Two ideas may exist independently, but when someone makes a link between them, new knowledge has been created, thus new solutions to existing problems. With each new crop of students, the generational super-document is enriched in two ways. First, students add their home pages and reports, thus lengthening the super-document in absolute terms. Second, students add links between their own work and prior reports. Note however that the links are not merely to each other's reports globally but to each other's paragraphs. These paragraph-to-paragraph links make a creative association between one of their ideas or claims and the idea or claim of one or more prior students. The assignment structure insures that each student will add dozens of screens of materials to the super-document and hundreds of hypertext links.
The generational curriculum thus grows at an exponential rate (see diagram in [3]). It not only serves as a constantly growing educational and cultural resource, but also as an impressive ethnographic record of the development and evolution of a cyber-community classroom. This record can be analyzed and studied from the perspective of educational anthropology and instructional psychology, since the virtual super-document (now equaling 160 megabytes) contains the feelings, thoughts, and actions of succeeding generations of students learning from each other over time and space. Questions of interest include how the growth of knowledge takes place in an online community and the type of community-building forces that encourage successful learning and the acquisition of excellence. For instance, the first 4 generations brought out the effectiveness of encouraging generational identification, modeling, and loyalty (see Appendix 1 and Tables 1 and 2 . In addition, the hypertext super-document is a cumulatively growing database or repository of student behaviors in an online social context from which researchers can build inventories and taxonomies useful for instructional design, planning, evaluation, and measurement.
Principle 2. Creating Community-Building Forces Among Learners:
A critical factor in the success of a cyberspace learning community is the ability of the instructor to create community-building forces within the class. A group of people who are given a collaborative task to accomplish can find motivation in group solidarity as well as in competitiveness. Because few can accomplish complex tasks on their own, a socially organized framework of mutual assistance needs to be put in place so that no one is left behind in failure and embarrassment. A visible communal product to which all contribute, and with which all can identify, needs to be developed and perceived as the outcome of their labor and effort. In short, the cyber-community created within an instructional context needs to be real, believable, and authentic. To the extent that it has these properties, to that extent the virtual learning community will be effective.
The educational project described here will be examined to see how these community-building forces were built up to maintain effective cyber-socialization practices, and what instructional management mechanisms need to be maintained in order to foster the growth of a cyberspace learning community. The social and educational context for the first five online generations has been a continuation of the community-classroom techniques that I developed through forty generations of students in the pre-computer era.
In 1979 I attempted to formulate some of the principles that were evolving in my instructional practice which I came to call "the generational community-classroom approach" [7]. In terms of educational philosophy, I identified three properties of this naturally evolving approach in my teaching. They were (a) intentionality, (b) generational, and (c) organicity.
I found that I can promote intentionality in learners through assignments that required an objective self-focus. For instance, if the course was Social Psychology, the reports had to do with social psychology concepts applied to one's experience or self-witnessing on the daily round of social exchanges. In other words, learning about "social forces" meant studying how my feelings, thoughts, and acts are influenced by the presence of others. Students kept notes, records, transcripts of their conversations, cognitive maps, interviews, and lists of places they go to, people they talk to, and personal objects they collect and sort. The focus on the self through the course subject created the positive condition of intentionality.
Interestingly the approach worked equally well with the statistics course I taught during the same semesters, thus allowing me to confirm the appropriateness of the generational community-classroom approach in more than one subject. In statistics, the focus on self-help creates intentionality in learners. The issue students had to handle in their reports was not "What's the difference between correlated and independent treatment conditions?" but rather, "How do I explain to myself the difference between correlated and independent treatment conditions?" Intentionality in the acquisition of statistics concepts was fostered by switching the topic focus from formal or abstract formulations to one's actual reasoning behaviors. As a supplement to this, students were assigned the task of teaching a friend or family member some statistical piece of reasoning they acquired (e.g., the difference between median and mean). It was not enough for them to teach; they also had to report on how the teaching went, and it is here that intentionality was greatly strengthened.
The generational approach started in 1971 with my search for methods that help students write authentically [8] [9]. I was trying to go beyond skills of plagiarism which students display when they write about an assigned topic in a style that imitates the journal articles and books from which they obtain the information. Paraphrasing and referencing -- that's about as far as it used to go. This type of student writing is inauthentic, even if they add a section at the end titled "My Own Views." I realized that inauthentic writing inhibits independent, autonomous, and self-directed learning of a topic. One symptom of inauthentic writing is that students have nothing to say about the concept, they can only repeat. And yet, as soon as class breaks up into small work groups, the room is filled with talk and students are fighting to get their views aired by the others. What then is the difference between having nothing to say and fighting to say things? The answer came to me: get them to write for each other not for the instructor!
From then on all student assignments were directed for reading by other students. Now they had to come up with an authentic point of view; they had to find something of value to say to other students about the assigned concept. Instead of mimicking the statistics textbook, for instance, now students had to write "for next semester's class" on various subjects that would help them out (e.g., "Tell them how to remember which is the dependent and which is the independent variable" or "Make up study questions that will help them find the median of an uneven distribution" etc.). Each semester students began by studying prior semester reports as a way of preparing themselves for their own reports. And that's how the generational approach came into existence.
In addition to authentic writing assignments (or writing for each other), other methods that work to strengthen the benefits of generational forces include:
* making up indexes and annotations for prior student reports (to help information retrieval);
* forming teams that leave behind some legacy or service;
* allowing for "alumni" contacts and activities (e.g., coaching);
* fostering the growth of generational lore (e.g., comparisons between generations;
* featuring the work of certain individuals from the past;
* taking and displaying class photos.
This third aspect of the generational community-classroom evolved from my involvement with Kurt Lewin's field-dynamic concepts [10]. His lifetime work was dedicated to show the ways in which new social forces are created when you form a group of individuals and give them a joint task to accomplish. The interactivity under a joint purpose creates an organic social entity capable of releasing and fostering social forces that strongly influence activities and outcomes. I tried to apply this principle in the classroom by fostering the idea among students that "this is a community classroom" and "you are one of the generations" and "this is a community of learners in which each person is essential" and so on. Along with this declared philosophy, came assignments that put it into practice. In addition to individual reports and quizzes, part of the grade was determined by collaborative efforts, teams sharing authorship, team quizzes, collective assignments, a newsletter, committee reports, mini-conferences and poster sessions; awards and certificates; etc. The community-building forces of organicity, along with generational writing and intentionality coalesced into a new approach to teaching.
Principle 3. Maintaining a Focus on Learning Skills:
The skills students acquire through this course-integrated cyber-community fall into three categories: (phase 1) information literacy skills; (phase 2) scientific or scholarly skills; and (phase 3) leadership and citizenship skills (refer to Appendix 1 and Tables 1 and 2 ).
(1) Information Literacy Skills
In terms of information literacy skills, students achieve the following significant steps by the end of the semester which consists of16 weekly 3-hour meetings, about half of each class being spent in a computer lab with online workstations for each of the 20 students:
(i) they stop feeling panicky or depressed about technology and start feeling enthusiastic and self-confident;
(ii) they become familiar with the use of the electronic medium of communication (e-mail, telnet, ftp, online editors, and UNIX directory management commands);
(iii) they learn to upload their work from a word processing diskette and to translate their text into HTML format that includes multimedia appearance and interactivity;
(iv) they learn to use a Web browser to search the Internet;
(v) each student creates a complex Web site consisting of about a dozen integrated files (or about 40 screens viewed with a Web browser), and up to 100 hot-links that include numerous text-to-text connections through tagged anchors to the work of prior students online.
(2) Scientific and Scholarly Skills
In terms of scientific and scholarly skills, students are engaged in the following:
(i) learning to write in public and for an interactive purpose;
(ii) learning to perform critical analyses of other people's writings;
(iii) making individual contributions to the building of a virtual super-document and thus meeting the responsibility of being a published author;
(iv) learning to express one's intellectual position on pre-assigned topics;
(v) modeling scholarly activities through special assignments such as the maintenance of a Web database or the design of Web facilities (e.g., a way of collecting biographical data from visitors to their Web Page).
(3) Leadership and Citizenship Skills
In terms of leadership and citizenship skills, students are given opportunity and encouragement to acquire a service orientation within the generational membership role. For example:
(i) maintaining an intellectual presence or voice within a generational learning community through citizenship activities in cyber-community, e.g., maintaining a Home Page on the World Wide Web and acting as host to cybernaut browsers both inside and outside the learning community;
(ii) encouraging volunteer projects for the sake of community benefit (e.g., Tour Guides and Indexes to facilitate retrieval of information by students and visitors);
(iii) introducing innovations that are pleasing or useful to current and future students (e.g., clocks, counters, ticker tapes, applets, special effects, frames, etc.);
(iv) going beyond what's required and expected for the sake of loyalty and service to the community, and thereby achieving excellence in appearance, content, and use;
(v) encouraging the practice of maintenance and continuous improvement of projects so that they never end (e.g., scanning in typed pre-computer generational reports and creating a Home Page for them that is integrated with the online curriculum reports).
4. Students as a Cyberspace Learning Community:
I foster an informal discussion atmosphere in class and I openly rely on the group's solidarity with each other to get an individual unstuck when in trouble. The faster learners help the slower, and within 6 to 7 weeks 80% of the class is on board, surfing the Internet and creating World Wide Web documents. Yes, you can hear them complaining a lot, very excitedly but also very happily. In my 25 years of teaching on the Manoa campus, I have never seen more student enthusiasm and pride for learning than in my course-integrated telecommunications classes. The written student comments reveal that many experience a changed self-image that no longer is tainted with depressive technophobia. I feel terrific when I read their expression of heartfelt and genuine appreciation for the course. In this new medium, students are challenged to find their own voices, to express their own thoughts and feelings in a public and scholarly context. Students see their own writing on the World Wide Web, impressed by the fact that their writings are, in a real sense, "published" and available to millions of browsers. Students are in effect modeling the role of author, scholar, and scientist. They are thus awakened and introduced to intellectual citizenship.
Principle 5. Creating Ethnographic Instructions:
I found through much experience that besides providing a community-classroom atmosphere, a second essential component is the creation of what I call "ethnographic instructions." To prepare these, I go over every single activity students must go through, and witness myself executing the micro-steps. I record these steps in their sequence and exactitude, and instruct students to step through them in this identical way. I indicate the steps by number so they can keep track of each one in its own right. A report may have as many as 50 steps specified and each must be addressed by the student. This is an effective learning procedure insuring a positive outcome even with the least prepared students.
Here are sample instructions for
[1] Linn, Marcia C. (1996) Cognition and Distance Learning. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 47 (11), (November), 827-842.
[2] James, Leon. (1997) Ethnography of an Academic Cyber-Community: The Hawaii Generational Curriculum Project. Available online at this URL: http://www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/leonj/leonpsy/gc/gcintro.html
[3] James, Leon and Bogan, Kevin. (1995) Analyzing Linkage Structure in a Course-Integrated Virtual Learning Community on the World Wide Web. INET '95 Conference Proceedings, June, Honolulu. Also available online at this URL: http://www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/leonj/leonpsy/instructor/inet95.html
[4] James, Leon. (1995) Course Integrated Use of the World Wide Web. InfoBITS --University of Hawaii Information Technology Services, Mar-May, 2(2), 8-9. Also available online at this URL:
http://www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/leonj/leonpsy/instructor/infobits1.html
[5] Nahl, Diane and James, Leon. (1992) Achieving Focus, Engagement, and Acceptance: Three Phases of Adapting to Internet Use. Available online at URL:
http://www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/leonj/leonpsy/instructor/compedutext.html
[6] James, Leon A. (now James, Leon) and Diane Nahl-James. (1987) Learning the Library: Taxonomy of Skills and Errors. College and Research Libraries, 48 (3) (May), 203-14.
[7] James, Leon and Nahl, Diane. (1979) Social Psychology of the Generational Community Classroom. Available online at this URL:
http://www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/leonj/leonpsy/gc/spcc.html
[8] James, Leon A. (now James, Leon) and Gordon, Barbara Y. (1974) The Context of Foreign Language Teaching, Rowley, Mass.: Newbury House.
[9] James, Leon. (1972) The Third Force in Language Teaching: Discourse Analysis Within an Ethnomethodological Approach. Available online at this URL:
http://www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/leonj/leonpsy/instructor/thirdforce/toc.html
[10] James, Leon and Nahl, Diane. (1981) Society's Witnesses. Department of Psychology, University of Hawaii. Available online at this URL:
http://www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/leonj/leonpsy/instructor/society/hp.html