| http://virtualschool.edu/nsf | Updated May 15, 1998 by Brad Cox |
The formal analysis and diagnosis of organizations, like the process of reading, always rests in applying some kind of theory to the situation being considered. For theories, like readings, are interpretations of reality. We theorize about or "read" situations as we attempt to formulate images and explanations that help us to make sense of their fundamental nature. And an effective analysis, like an effective reading, rests in being able to do this in ways that take account of rival theories or explanations, rather than being committed to a fixed and unshakable point of view.
Gareth Morgan, Images of Organizations [Morgan97]
We propose to deploy two levels of web-based technology (T1-T2) within three academic organizations (O1-O3), and to conduct an interdisciplinary study of the impact from the worldviews of the multiple disciplines in this team (V1-V7). For example, an economist will provide a management view by doing an accounting-style study of the effects on costs/benefits, a psychologist will examine the effects on paradigms and cognitive models, a sociologist will do an ethnographic study of the effects on institutional power relationships, and so forth as explained in the viewpoints section of the project description.
The hypothesis of the interdisciplinary study is that the organizational impacts of T1 will be appreciable but less than for T1 and T2 combined, and that the combined impact will be large and generally beneficial, even revolutionary. We do not expect all effects to be seen as beneficial from all viewpoints, just as the effects of the Industrial Revolution were not beneficial from all points of view.
The hypothesis of the deployment component is that T1 and particularly T2, and the new pedagogies they enable, can improve educational productivity and learning outcomes. Education is a significant fraction of the GNP and widely criticized for poor productivity and unsatisfactory outcomes. Our experience with one course suggests that the technologies and pedagogies we're using can improve learning outcomes. This project extends this approach, by an order of magnitude, from one course to an international degree program.
The productivity hypothesis is that we can demonstrate that courses can be assembled from pre-fabricated reusable course components (called tasks) that are developed by teams of specialized labor within the project team and ultimately within other universities or companies. Although we don't expect to achieve the latter goal in this project, we hope that the technologies and pedagogies we will be deploying, in combination with the standards, inspection gauges, and revenue collection mechanisms from our work with the Educom/IMS Coalition [imsproject.org], will help to make the Software Industrial Revolution [Cox90] a reality within education.
T1 is a synonym for how the internet is mainly used today, to empower anyone to communicate with everyone regardless of organizational roles and responsibilities. In a course, for example, T1 would involve supplementing paper-based syllabi and readings with static html documents, using telephone consultations, email, chat and web-based discussions to supplement face to face lectures and office hours, and so forth. We call these communication technologies because they facilitate unstructured communications without regard for the organizational roles, responsibilities, and commitments of the participants.
T2 emphasizes structured communications within an explicit organizational context as implied by terms such as workflow, groupware and enterprise systems. T2 focuses on the opposite extreme of the unstructured-structured continuum by using organizationally "intelligent" applications to provide explicit support for workflow between roles whose organizational responsibilities are known to the infrastructure which uses this knowledge to expedite structured action within organizations. The communication (T1) versus coordination (T2) distinction is described in [Winograd95], [Cox98CT], [Syvertsen98], [Ciancarini96], and [Malone90] and is briefly summarized below.
The pivotal technical difference is that T1 is based on passive data (html documents) whereas T2 is based on active computer programs, e.g. objects [Cox94]. When web pages are static documents, everyone is presented exactly the same information as a textual TV. The information presented is therefore me-centric, centered on the content provider' view of the world, not you-centric, centered on the individual viewer's worldview.
T2 uses active computer programs to determine what each viewer will see. For example, NSF's FastLane is a coordination technology. It uses a database to determine the roles and responsibilities of each user and presents just what is timely and relevant to that individual's role. It uses forms to gather information from that role and maintains it to be re-purposed and re-displayed for other roles.
Since T2 is based on active programs and not passive html documents, T2 can easily support interaction: bilateral coordination between organizational role-players. T1 supports unilateral communication between atomic individuals without regard to their organizational role. Since T1 amplifies both signal (timely, relevant) and noise (untimely, irrelevant), the signal is often lost in the noise as is common on the internet today. Since T2 uses a database to determine what is timely and relevant, it can in principle discard noise and deliver signal alone.
Our current coordination technology (T2) uses an object-oriented database [Cox91] to record information about the organization such as the roles and responsibilities of each member and the status of work in progress. Web-based applications (CGI programs) consult the database to determine what is timely and relevant to each role (signal) and distribute it in a many-to-many fashion. The classes and instances in this database have been tested and refined by five years of use [Cox96] in several courses (O1) by the software developer and partially implemented for a different degree program (O2). A key technical goal is to determine how well these constructs hold up for courses taught by other faculty and to extend the existing degree program automation to a different degree program (O2).
Based this experience, we believe we can reduce the reliance on weekly face to face lectures within courses and regular commutes to campus for degree program administrative tasks to one or two longer stays per year. We do not intend to dispense with paper, occasional face to face lectures or close teacher-student relationships. We only expect that a flexible "use the right tool for the job" approach will let us deliver an educational experience that does not sacrifice quality to students in homes, offices and overseas.
We view courses as micro-scale organizations: companies in a test-tube. The faculty teaching them is researchers under this study and can exercise greater control over experimental conditions than would be possible in larger organizations. The courses that will be used are the core curriculum of the MA in International Transactions degree program within The Institute of Public Policy at George Mason University. Taming the Electronic Frontier, a core course for the MA in Telecommunications Program will also be used as a fully developed example of how communication and coordination technologies can be applied to education [Cox98a]. This course will also be used to train support personnel for this project.
Degree programs are intermediate-sized organizations comparable to independent lines of businesses within non-academic organizations. The degree program is the MA in International Transactions degree program. In the degree program context, T1 involves provided degree program information as static web pages. This is partially in place already. T2 involves applying dynamic task-based workflow and groupware technologies to the structured events of a degree program. For example, students will register for the degree via web-based forms, pay registration fees digitally if desired, and monitor and respond to scheduled events via a database-driven program that presents scheduled events relevant to the particular student's role in the program.
O3: Research Project
The researchers in this study are an organization with roles and responsibilities that can be expedited with the same technologies. T1 was used in the proposal writing stage (see http://virtualschool.edu/nsf) to publish drafts as static web pages and gather revisions via email. T2 was not used because of the short deadline and the fact that faculty wasn't yet accustomed to working in this manner. But a coordination infrastructure that lets students log in, read task descriptions, and submit homework for a 15 week course could obviously be adapted to help researchers meet milestones in a multi-year research project, crucial for a busy, often dispersed, interdisciplinary team such as ours.
Background
Higher education is the third largest export industry in the United States, behind agriculture and commercial aircraft. It generates over $3 billion in foreign exchange for the United States every year. For all the complaints about higher education in the U.S., this sector is obviously doing something that appeals to parents, students, firms, and government agencies of foreign countries.
However, although lifestyles have changed beyond recognition, the predominant delivery mechanism for education is little different from in Socrates' day. Classroom-based education is not convenient for working students even when they live near the university and impossible for international students without the time and money for a course of study in the U.S. [Melmed94].
Early indications from five years experience with several courses at GMU ([Cox94]) suggests that the internet, used in combination with other technologies including television and telephones and educational innovations including peer assessment, experiential learning, and perfection-based grading [Potter98], can reduce the dependence on face to face lectures and paper to where education could be delivered to homes, offices and overseas without loss of quality. An important goal of this study is to demonstrate that these early indications hold true for courses (O1) taught by other than the software developer, degree programs (O2), and interdisciplinary research projects (O3).
However, the same experience caution that what "internet in the classroom" usually means is not sufficient by itself. Although replacing paper syllabi and readings with web-based equivalents is clearly a useful part of the mix, empowering everyone to speak to everyone is like giving everyone a megaphone. Empowering everyone to shout louder can mean that the signal can be lost in the noise as is happening to the internet today. The ability to access unstructured information is valuable and appreciated by most students However, students are busy people who need and demand focus, order and structure too.
The second goal of this study is to deploy another way of using the internet that we call coordination technology (T2). T2's goal is to discard noise and convey signal alone by amplifying only the information that is timely and relevant to the roles and responsibilities of the particular student. Coordination technologies do not replace communication technologies, which will always be useful for unstructured communication. Coordination technology provides a currently missing synergistic compliment focused on the structured aspects of organizational work.
Our hypothesis is that the impact of T1 on distributed intelligence will be less than T2. Replacing traditional paper with static web pages will no doubt have an appreciable effect on cost and timeliness. However, the impact is small because the organizational dynamics of the teacher-student-GRA relationship are no different than with traditional technologies. T2 will have a larger impact because it changes the dynamics of knowledge distribution by facilitating many-to-many interaction within distributed learning communities.
Finally, reflection on the effects of technological innovation in major paradigm shifts of history, and our own experiences within education to date, warn that the organizational and cultural implications are neither small nor even positive from every point of view. Therefore, the third component of this proposal is a sociocentric study of the impacts of technological deployment from the multiple interdisciplinary viewpoints of our research team.
In Planning the Software Industrial Revolution [Cox90] described the impact of inspection gauges on manufacturing. Inspection gauges were an early industrial age coordination technology like those we'll be using in this project. Unlike water-powered machine tools, which focused on solitary worker productivity, inspection gauges focused on facilitating each worker's ability to coordinate with others by ensuring that parts could be interchanged.
The effects were far-reaching indeed, effectively displacing the cut-to-fit craftsmanship of the generalist master gunsmith with specialized teams with quite different skills. The companies probably justified the capital investments in inspection gauges from an accounting-style cost/benefit analysis of the corporate bottom line. However, in retrospect we now see that the Industrial Revolution was not only a technological change. It changed the very fabric of society from every disciplinary viewpoint imaginable. We expect to find that the effects of technological innovation on organizations are neither small nor necessarily beneficial from each of the disciplinary viewpoints we've proposed in this study.
For example, today's faculty work much as the generalist master craftsmen once did, serving as content expert, consultant to students, and evaluator of student performance in addition to the mundane production roles of running the copier, collecting homework, distributing grades and so forth. Faculty support is provided janitors and copier repair personnel with no influence on course content and presentation.
Communication and especially coordination technologies require skills that most faculty will lack so tighter collaboration with technical specialists will be needed. Social conflict, and new opportunities for organizational learning, can be expected when faculty responsibilities change. For example, in the limit case of a well-produced televised distance education course, faculty's role might be only to provide content expertise to a technical production team with much greater responsibility for course presentation and delivery. This is comparable to the displacement of the generalist master craftsmen by teams of specialized labor and is likely to lead to similar conflict while also providing creative new opportunities for organizational learning within academia.
In practice, there will be considerable temporal overlap between the three components listed below. However, it will simplify this discussion to describe the three project components as if they were three yearlong phases of work.
The concentration in this phase will involve bringing most of the courses in the MA in International Transactions program to state-of-the-practice at a rate of two courses per semester. This involves getting each course syllabus and readings (subject to intellectual property issues) expressed as static html pages.
The critical item in this phase is not primarily technological but building an infrastructure for faculty training and support and getting everyone accustomed to teaching from web-based material. We will rely on existing GMU training and support capabilities for low-level training (word processing, etc) and the Taming the Electronic Frontier course will be used to deliver T1 training to research assistants and interested faculty. This course teaches the relevant T1 skill set (HTML, FTP, etc) while demonstrating the ideal we'll be striving for in the other courses. The course involves a team project, for 50% of the grade. These have traditionally been intern projects for local industry and non-profit groups. If we assign each GRA to a team with MA in Telecommunication students and make each team responsible for bringing a MA in International Transactions course online, this significantly increases the skills and support for the initial semester of this project.
We budgeted four research assistants to work under the direction of the faculty responsible for the O1 courses to help them negotiate intellectual property rights, to scan and OCR paper-based documents, and to add HTML markup by hand or via WYSIWG editors such as Navigator 4, Word Internet Assistant or FrontPage. We have also budgeted software licenses for Caucus (an asynchronous web-based conferencing tool) and a synchronous chat utility (brand to be determined summer 1998). These will replace the synchronous and asynchronous communication tools now used in the Taming course (WebCrossing). This should help us to introduce these tools within other courses during the first year.
Technology-based education requires that technology must disappear into the woodwork and receive as much attention from students as the pipes in the school plumbing system; i.e. no attention at all. Anything that impacts homework and grades must be invisible, must work 100% of the time, when students lack the expertise to deal with server and network problems on their own. Therefore, we have budgeted a substantial amount for co-location costs that will allow our servers to be located at, managed by, and connected to the internet backbone by a commercial ISP with the expertise to provide no-excuses reliability and support. Our existing server, virtualschool.edu = rembrandt.erols.com, was donated by a local ISP three years ago (erols.com) and has been co-located for that time. Experience has shown that reliability and support can meet our requirements. We've experienced just one hour-long outage in the last 12 months.
Coordination Technology (T2)
This component of the work involves improving the generality of the existing coordination technology infrastructure, applying it to additional courses (O1), a new degree program (O2), and this project (O3), and conducting foundation research to advance the current foundation beyond its present state.
Improving the Existing Infrastructure:
The existing coordination infrastructure is explained in [Cox98CT] and [Cox98CI] as applied to Taming the Electronic Frontier course and other courses. The software developer [Cox98a] was also the instructor. No teaching assistants were available. Thomasina Borkman helped to coteach the Taming course. This history is reflected in the extent to which the implied roles are supported in the existing infrastructure.
The existing infrastructure explicitly recognizes the roles of Visitor, Student, Faculty, Grader (GRA), System and 'Pending' (a visitor who has applied as a student but has not yet been accepted by the instructor as such), most development attention has been paid to the Student role. The Grader role hasn't been developed at all and support for the Faculty and System roles is still primitive (e.g. assumes too much knowledge of the underlying software); too much so for the multi-course, multi-faculty, GRA-intensive application we've proposed.
Preparation of a course consists of timeline editing, during which a pre-existing inventory of reusable course components, called tasks, are assembled into a (typically) weekly lesson plan. The task creation process will be described in the next section. The timeline editor is presently based on FileMaker Pro. A flat-file database is used to maintain the course timeline on the faculty's PC and to present it for editing. This relational database is converted as a batch operation to object-oriented format by a perl CGI program. The timeline is displayed as the student's "locker" by a collection of CGI scripts that are also written in perl. Work is already underway and due for completion Summer 1998, to eliminate the File Maker Pro database and replace the course editing function with a new solution based on CGI/perl or possibly Java.
In principle, the underlying infrastructure will already be in place by Spring 1998 for the O1 (courses) component of this work. The O2 component (degree program) will be adapted from work on another degree program, which was started and partially completed during the Summer of 1997. The O3 (research project) component is almost isomorphic with the O1 component and we foresee no difficulties there.
In practice, however, the perl-based infrastructure and its object-oriented database are concerns. The existing system has handled 100 students without problem but four times that number is expected in this project. In addition, the present backup and recovery system is manual, suitable when a single individual handles development but questionable for a multi-person project such as this. Performance has been adequate to date, without optimizations (Fast-CGI) that are planned for this summer (not part of this project). We are also concerned about the training and support implications of teaching non-technical students and faculty to use text-based linear languages such as perl.
We plan to evaluate alternative approaches during the summer of 1998 (not part of this proposal). NetObjects has donated copies of TeamFusion and ColdFusion that might be a more trainable alternative to perl. We will evaluate Object Design International's (ODI) object-oriented database this summer as an alternative to the flat-file implementation now in use. We also expect to develop a client-side substitute (in Java) for the course editing functionality now being done as a File maker Pro database. A robust and intuitive timeline editor is important because this must be done by faculty and, unlike the tasks, cannot be easily delegated to research assistants.
Applying the Infrastructure
Each task in the task inventory is presently a text file and is edited as such. Each file consists of a sequence of task pages separated by a line of text that serves as the page header. The body of each task page is a computer program, written in perl, which generates the HTML commands that make up the body of the page. Interactivity is achieved by calling perl subroutines that emit HTML forms commands that are initialized with the information the student provided when they last visited this page, plus the feedback the instructor provided for each answer when evaluating the task submission. The grading policy is perfection-based, which means that students are invited, expected and required to resubmit work until the work is perfect. Grades are assigned when perfect work is accepted according to whether the work was completed by the deadline for that each task.
Managing multi-page tasks as text files works out extremely well architecturally. The html documents (course readings) constructed during the previous stage can be used intact by the tasks via hotlinks. The task files amount to an inventory of small-granularity modules that can be assembled into new courses as needed by simply editing the course timeline.
The concern with this architecture is that it is not easy for those with limited programming experience to write and maintain tasks as computer programs. For example, here is the full text of a very simple task page that asks a question and collects a multiple-choice answer.
##Faculty-Student Interaction
print qq[
<p>Most tasks contain "Talk to Me" questions for
one on one conversations of the sort that are
rare in high enrollment face to face classes.
Do you view these questions as:<br>
],
AskOption("Question15", '',
qq[Annoying makework],
qq[Useful communication channel],
);
The demanding syntax requirements are obviously a concern for anyone but experienced programmers. This could be relieved for simple cases with an html- or Java-based task-editing tool but many examples require access to the full power of a programming language. We plan to evaluate TeamFusion, ColdFusion and comparable systems as alternatives to perl during Summer 1998 (not part of this grant). Converting to the chosen tool will however be part of this project.
Fortunately much of the work of building an educational task is gathering paper-based task-oriented information (schedules, calendars, homework assignments, and so forth) that already exist and only need conversion to digital html documents. Non-programmers can do this because it only needs OCR and html skills. These html files can be handed off to programmers to paste into the print qq[...] statement with other code for displaying forms and integrating information from the database. Borkman and Cox cooperated in this way for the group dynamics questionnaires she uses in the Taming course and the specialization of labor worked flawlessly. Determining whether such cooperation can be extended to others, possibly supported by T1 and T2 technologies, is an explicit goal of this project.
Our budget includes a server capable of handling 400 students with CPU-intensive perl applications via CGI. The existing server would be relegated to software development and testing and the new server used for production.
Research into coordination technology has always been a goal. However, research and development have been secondary to providing a stable and productive learning environment for students. Since our system is continually in use and no backup system is available, research and development been done entirely between semesters.
The existing infrastructure is based entirely on proven technologies such as HTML, perl and CGI. We do not use advanced technologies such as Java or Cobra because compatibility issues make them unusable for non-specialists such as the students in these courses. However, since compatibility may improve over the life of this project, we will consider state-of-the-art technologies as they stabilize. Two levels of ambition are envisioned; an incremental server-based approach and a radical approach that distributes much of the intelligence to the client.
Incremental: In the current system, the object-oriented database supplies global data (models) to CGI programs (views and controllers) which present tasks to the role-players who are responsible for them. The association between tasks and roles is hard coded in the CGI programs in an ad-hoc manner. This has been adequate for slowly changing applications such as courses but is quite inappropriate for fast-changing corporate applications. We will replace the hard-coded task management system with a new one whose conceptual design arises from an analogy with biological systems. Tasks are like antigens and roles are like antibodies. That is, roles locate the tasks they're responsible for by examining tags that work like surface proteins. This will be undertaken as funded research within this proposal.
Radical: This involves adopting an active agents approach in which tasks are expressed as Java applets that move from role-player to role-player to provide explicit support for workflow within distributed client-server systems. For example, see [Rifkin98]. This work will be undertaken by the PI with support from another enterprise and is not included in this proposal.
Therefore, our budget includes two Ph.D. level students with object-oriented programming expertise to conduct research into coordination technology.
We have requested a software budget to replace the free tool set we've been using with commercial, presumably more robust, alternatives. Evaluation of possible alternatives is already planned for Summer 1998 and is not funded under this proposal.
Interdisciplinary Viewpoints
Thus, we have three experimental subjects (O1, O2, and O3) and an independent variable, two levels of technological innovation (T1 and T2). The study will examine the impact of technological innovation from the following interdisciplinary points of view. Each section contains text by each researcher that explains the viewpoint they'll be adopting. Various research methods will be used by each researcher. These are not detailed in the viewpoint descriptions.
The research team is itself one of the subjects of study (O3). Based on our experience with using coordination tools in courses, we expect that T1 and T2 will a primary method for recording and sharing experimental data. Considerable data will also be available to the team via the T1 and T2 technologies we're deploying within the other organizations. For example, the weekly and end-of-semester course evaluations by each student can be easily shared and even supplemented with questions by the research team.
One of the interesting questions facing higher education today is whether on-line learning can further the reach of the U.S. university. I propose to study this question by taking a managerial view of the subject. A manager who is planning to expand his operations overseas will take a hard look at potential customers, at what the competition is offering, and at his costs of doing business. Based on his findings, he will decide whether he can cost-effectively enter the new market. His decision will rest on whether he can tailor his service so that it meets the needs of customers at a price that they are willing and able to pay. He will then compare the estimated revenue with the costs of supplying the service, usually by conducting a net present value calculation or by computing internal rates of return.
One of the crucial elements of exporting higher education through on-line technology is whether the quality can be maintained. The student obviously loses something by not coming into face-to-face contact with his instructor and other students. Can technology that enables "many to many" communication compensate for the loss of face-to-face contact? Preliminary educational experiments, which have been conducted by Brad Cox [Cox98a] and Don Lavoie [Lavoie97] at George Mason University, and Jack Vigilante at New York University, suggest that it can. If this is true, it has two vital implications for the export of higher education. First, it implies that the current price structure of U.S. higher education can be maintained for on-line degrees; if quality can be maintained, so can price. Second, it implies that the cost to the student can be substantially lowered. A foreign student who gets a U.S. degree incurs two main expenses--the cost paid to the university in the form of tuition, fees, books, etc., and the cost of travel to and living in the United States. Since the U.S. is one of the higher cost living areas in the world, the overall cost to the student can be substantially lowered by delivering high quality education to her in her own country.
I propose to study whether or not on-line degrees from the United States can be offered at lower costs to students from developing countries. I will do this by focusing on a particular degree at George Mason University, the Master of Arts in International Business and Politics, and students from two particular developing countries--Mexico and Indonesia. I think it is necessary to focus on a particular degree, because we do not yet know if an entire degree can be effectively offered on-line to students from foreign counties. I have chosen students from Mexico and Indonesia because students from these countries have been particularly hard hit by currency devaluations the past few years. If we can effectively deliver high quality education at a lower cost to these students, we can enhance educational opportunities to many deserving students in poor countries.
Jack High
Previously: Dean of School of Management
The Institute of Public Policy
T1 and T2 will be innovations for O1 (courses) and O2 (degree program) from the point of view of the actors (teachers, students), social systems (courses or degree programs), and parent organization (university). The process of developing the innovations needs to be documented as formative evaluation which will provide information about the Knowledge Networking objective of enhancing communication across disciplines, languages, and cultures.
Ethnographic research (or overt participant observation) will be used to describe the process of developing T1 and T2 for O1 and O2; it will provide face-to-face documentation that triangulates methodologically with the electronic record. For example, what new role relationships are established as the "master craftsmen' teacher learns to work with the computer programmer to produce a new product? What opportunities and obstacles to fruitful relationships emerge, and how are they handled? How much cross training occurs?
When the development phases are completed and T1 and T2 are operational, what are the social implications of the new organizational arrangements? Traditional organizations have a sharp division between providers and consumers in terms of prestige, knowledge, social networks and social status. Are these divisions reduced or changed between teacher/student and other actors? Are levels of the hierarchy flattened as a consequence of the new human-technological relationships?
Ethnographic observations will identify the emerging cultures of T1 and T2 as well as document unexpected situations and unanticipated implications of the innovations. Alvin Toffler in The Third Wave (1980) predicted that with the widespread use of computer technology, the conventional distinction between producer and consumer would collapse; more people would become prosumers--those who simultaneously provide goods/services and consume them. To what extent will teachers, students, and other actors become prosumers in T1 and especially T2?
To what extent do providers and consumers develop additional social networks in these T1 and T2 organizations? We expect T2 networks to be more global, diverse, and complex than T1 networks. What kinds of information are exchanged? What kinds of collaborative relationships or projects are developed among actors? What kinds of new alliances among organizations are created? Do social statuses of race/ethnicity, gender and social class become less important in T1 and especially T2 organizations than in traditional ones?
Do the new organizations during T1 and especially T2 become "instruments of domination" in [Morgan97]'s terms: "the focus is on the potentially exploitative aspects of organization....and how the essence of organization rests in a process of domination where certain people impose their will on others." For example, some research questions are: (1) Do communication and/or coordination technologies intrude into or complement the actor's work or private life? Are new and demanding expectations created for individuals to be available around the clock, to respond to organizational demands? (2) To what extent do actors become technology-dependent with what social implications for their private life? (3) What new forms of deviance (i.e., beliefs or actions regarded as undesirably different and sanctioned informally or by authorities) will be produced by the new organizations? What kinds of wastage of human talent from dropouts, withdrawals, or flunking out will occur in T1 or T2? Technophobes fit within traditional organizations but how will they or slow technological-learners be regarded in these new organizations? Will new requirements for admission be instituted such as internet-literacy or written-English skills that produce a bigger gap between the "information-rich" and the "information-poor."
Thomasina Borkman
GMU Sociology Department
I am interested in the distinction between classical (focus on underlying form) and romantic (focus on surface appearance) world views of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values [Pirsig74], and how this relates to the technophile versus technophobe, classical versus romantic, misunderstandings of the Dilbert cartoon strip. The Taming the Electronic Frontier course [Cox98a] exposes the conflict between indigenous tribes (technosavvy nerds) and foreign invaders (peoplesavvy newbies) as these groups struggle and typically fail to understand each other's ways of understanding the world [King98].
Brad Cox
Program on Social and Organizational Learning
The Institute of Public Policy
Richard Klimosky of the GMU Center for Behavioral and Cognitive Studies has agreed to view the impacts of technology from the Psychology point of view, in particular by measuring how cognitive, meta cognitive and interpersonal processes affect design features and in turn the outcomes of interest. He's also agreed to observe how organizations can serve as psychic prisons (as [Morgan97] puts it), by identification of individual and collective "fears" or preoccupations, in creating suitable measures of processes, and in specifying models of when, where and why these might operate to affect individual and collective learning.
Richard Klimosky
Center of Cognitive and Behavioral Studies
GMU Psychology Department
The task here is to develop reasonably objective measures of the overall effectiveness of technologies T1 and T2 when applied in the organizational context of O1 (courses) and O2 (degree programs), to test the superiority of T2 over T1. In estimating the efficiency of organizations and economies, standard productivity measures are based on purely machine-like conceptions derived from pre-information technology industrial processes. Productivity is the ratio of output to input, with both output and input quantified in mechanical terms. Capital, which boosts labor productivity is seen as technology rigidly hard-coded in machines, which then merely depreciates in the process of production.
The conventional formulae for productivity are problematic when applied to information technology processes in which knowledge enters into both input and output. When organizations are conceived as learning-adapting systems, the conventional metric needs to be revised radically. Here, productivity enhancing capital is largely soft-coded in human and organizational knowledge-skill-capability (KSC). Furthermore, this multi-dimensional capital, rather than being depreciated in the course of producing output, is itself augmented in the production process.
The underlying rationale is that learning consists of the purposive organization of input information into knowledge that then enhances the effectiveness of the student. Learning is then a process of purposive human capital building that is directed and channeled by the organizational framework of O1 and O2. The initial hypothesis is that the coordination technology T2 is more effective than the communication technology T1, because it draws on the conscious, creative adaptations of the student in addition to the a priori design imposed by the teacher.
This component will develop new, over-arching measures of productivity that are meaningful in the context of the project. KSC-capital is conceptualized as soft-coded in the learning formats designed a priori in O1 and O2, but also enhanced by adaptations and innovations generated by students and teacher in the course of implementation. All of which is of course supplemented and supported by the bedrock technology hard-coded in the computers and communication systems used in both T1 and T2. The new productivity measures will take full account of the costs and benefits associated with a) hard-coded physical capital, b) the soft-coded KSC capital that exists prior to each phase and c) the KSC generated in-process.
These new productivity measures, which are applicable to T0, T1 & T2, will be developed in Fall 1998 and refined in the course of implementation. Estimations will be based on evaluations of entire O1 groups and selected O2 participants. Since I teach at least one of the courses targeted for study, I will be directly involved in the design and adaptation of the technologies as operationalized.
G. Chris Rodrigo
The Institute of Public Policy
Like a brain, an organization has a formal structure. At the same time, it is flexible so that it can give rise to spontaneous organization. Organizations are made of many agents with distributed control. These agents are analogous to neurons in the human brain. A cluster of agents together organize themselves around functions, very much like neurons do in the brain. Like a brain, certain functions are essential for survival. Agents and functions continually adapt to dynamics in the external environment, similar to the way in which the brain responds to external stimuli. Adaptation occurs in such a way that the organization can gain an advantage in handling future variations in dynamics. This represents learning. Parts of an organization may be thought of as "communities of practice", which are similar to the organization of a brain.
Laurie Schintler
Rajendra Kulkarni
The Institute of Public Policy
Technology is the most important driver of our global, capitalist, free trade economy. Both the technology and the science that undergirds it are increasingly international. How will this affect our scientific institutions, and what will life be like in the research universities and laboratories of the future?
The world of tomorrow will most likely have a global market dominated by technology. Assuming no unforeseen military or natural disaster, the outlook is bright for most people. However, there is a profound challenge facing individuals, institutions and governments to reconcile the increasingly efficient knowledge production and utilization system with the needs of a compassionate society.
Thomas Ratchford [Ratchford98]
Director: Center for Trade, Science and Technology
The Institute for Public Policy
I will contribute an article about the software engineering issues underlying coordination technology as we've deployed it in this project.
During 1998, I've been leading the digital commerce task force within Educom/IMS (Instructional Management Systems) project (www.imsproject.org). Educom is a consortium of universities who formed IMS as a standards body to facilitate the exchange of digital courseware between universities. Thus, the IMS project as a whole is relevant because it is defining standards for interchanging courseware parts between courses, degree programs and even universities.
My role in this project has been to write a standard for using superdistribution ([Cox96]) as the mechanism for digital commerce in multigranular courseware. In other words, IMS standards provides the basis for a modular course ware, with the economic incentive for providing modules supplied by superdistribution as the revenue collection mechanism.
Brad Cox
Program on Social and Organizational Learning
The Institute of Public Policy
The technology deployment schedule is shown in this table assuming the project begins in Spring 1999. T0 provides a chance for the impacts team to gather baseline information on the technologies used in the past. T0+T1 indicates the addition of T1 and T0+T1+T2 indicates the addition of T2. We delayed T2 deployment until halfway through the project to allow time to train support staff and to provide time for the impact team to establish pre-deployment baselines. We may accelerate this schedule and introduce newer (T1 and T2) technologies sooner if this seems warranted when we get underway.
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Year |
1998 |
1999 |
2000 |
2001 |
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Technology |
T0 |
T0+T1 |
T0+T1+T2 |
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Semester |
Fall |
Spr |
Sum |
Fall |
Spr |
Sum |
Fall |
Spr |
Sum |
Fall |
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1998 |
1998 Cohort |
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1999 |
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1999 Cohort |
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2000 |
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2000 Cohort |
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2001 |
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2001 |
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Approximately 100 students join this degree each year, mostly in the fall (a "cohort"). So 100 students will experience traditional technologies to provide an experimental baseline for the impacts team. Ignoring attrition from graduations and so forth, 400 will experience T0+T1+T2 within two courses in at least one semester. The server load will start at 100 and increase by 100 per semester to 400 plus the project team and external internet users not part of this project.
The deployment team will work under the direction of the faculty responsible each course to bring two courses per semester to the indicated technological level (T0+T1 or T0+T1+T2) before the course starts. This implies a beginning-of-semester deadline for each course for the syllabus, timeline and first week's task assignments. Faculty typically bring subsequent weeks' tasks online the week before the task is assigned, so deployment and support activities will continue thereafter.
The colored boxes show the milestones for each team; the others show activities leading to the milestones.
Project Milestones |
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Deployment Team Cox (lead), 4 research assistants, 2 MAIT faculty per semester |
Development Team Cox (lead), 2 research assistants |
Impacts Team Borkman (lead), Ratchford, Rodrigo, High, Klimoski, Schintler, Kulkarni |
Management Team Melmed (lead), Cox, Borkman Advisors: Haynes, Finkelstein, Fukuyama, Stowe Consultants: Perelman |
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| 1998 | Fall | Study T0 Baseline | Ongoing project management and support | |||
| 1999 | Spr |
T1 training completed via the Taming the Electronic Frontier course. |
Delivery of T1 training to deployment team completed |
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Sum |
Initial release of O2 coordination tool. Ongoing support and extension hereafter. |
Initial release of O3 (project) coordination tool. Ongoing support and extension hereafter. |
T0 baseline research completed |
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Fall |
T1 deployed within 2 O1 courses. |
Technology development and support to other teams |
Study T1 deployment within O1 and O2 |
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2000 |
Spr |
T1 deployed within 2 O1 courses. |
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Sum |
T1 deployed within 2 O1 courses. |
T0+T1 Research Completed |
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Fall |
T2 deployed within 2 O1 courses. |
Study T0+T1+T2 Deployment within O1 and O2 |
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2001 |
Spr |
T2 deployed within 2 O1 courses. |
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Sum |
T2 deployed within 2 O1 courses. |
T0+T1+T2 Research Completed |
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Fall |
T2 deployed within 2 O1 courses. |
Articles accepted for publication. |
Articles accepted for publication. |
Articles accepted for publication. |
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Semester-by-semester performance goals are in the "Project Milestones" section. This summary omits detail in the interest of brevity:
Arthur Melmed is lead for overall project management, Thomasina Borkman is the lead for the interdisciplinary impacts team, and Brad Cox is the lead for the deployment and development teams.
Since this team is an experimental subject under this proposal (O3), we will use T0 (traditional), T1 (communication) and T2 (coordination) technologies for project management as explained in the project description.
Dissemination of Results
Each senior researcher, individually or as part of a team, will publish work emerging from this research in relevant academic journals and trade publications based on this research.
GMU contributed in-kind and cash to the costs of this project to cover salary overheads and the costs of laboratory and office space, time of faculty and administrative personnel indirectly involved in this project but not listed, and the following amounts for the project members.
We did not include costs of five years of development for the coordination technologies upon which this project is based. According to the contract between GMU and the software developer (the PI in this proposal), GMU owns the intellectual property rights to this work as long as the PI is employed by GMU after which these rights return to the PI.
Brad Cox (PI) was PI for proposals with DARPA and NIST/ATP. This is the first NSF proposal.
Arthur S. Melmed (CO-PI): "A Learning Infrastructure for All Americans," Machine Mediated Learning, vol. 4, no. 4, 1994, based on NSF project support, argued that computer, multimedia and network technologies could combine to create substantial, new opportunities for learning outside the classroom. This potential would not soon be realized absent government stimulation of the educational software market and attention to enhanced public learning as a goal of federal regulatory decisions about telephone and cable-TV services, and new high-definition television standards.
The paper was used by an Office of Science and Technology (OSTP) task force to help structure a White House initiative in educational technology. Follow-on support by OSTP together with the U.S. Department of Education resulted in a study report, with Thomas K. Glennan, "Fostering the Use of Educational Technology: Elements of a National Strategy," RAND 1996, ISBN: 0-8330-2372-1. Focusing on the elements of a national strategy for (primarily K-12) education, this empirical policy study identified school organization and finance, and software applications as the principal barriers to expanded use of technology in education. As in business and industry, technology can not successfully be an independent input in education. Organization and practice adjusted to the technology will affect its utility and benefits decisively. Institutional Commitment
Prior NSF Project Support