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Learning and the digital library - Children and the Digital Library
Library Trends, Spring, 1997 by Delia Neuman
A number of today's instructional technology researchers are exploring what are known as "open-ended learning environments" -- settings that seek to integrate instructional and informational components and in which students perform tasks and processes that are similar to those they must perform to learn within the digital library. Michael Hannafin, who has emerged as a leader in this effort, describes a range of individual settings that researchers are developing and testing in order to enhance our understanding of how students learn in electronic environments that do not just present concepts to be learned but that incorporate extensive information resources. "Macro-level environments" include both rich collections of resources and tools students use to explore them "to pursue interests or needs beyond the parameters typically provided in isolated lessons" (Hannafin, 1992, p. 58888); "micro-level environments" offer similar arrays of materials but focus within more discrete domains. Generative environments," such as the Jasper Woodbury series created by the Cognition and Technology Group ar Vanderbilt University, consist of scenarios with embedded information that students must identify, evaluate, and manipulate to solve problems. "Mathemagenic environments" support access to various representatives of content in a particular area (often through hypermedia links) and allow students to "move rapidly among networks of concepts [and] to construct their own sets of relationships within the networks" (p.59). According to Hannafin, these various settings can support either goal-directed learning -- as do traditional instructional media -- or exploratory learning. The question for instructional technology -- clearly an echo of Kozma's (1994) questions noted above -- seems to be how to adapt traditional design theories and methods to the creation of environments that can support both kinds of learning, perhaps within the same "package." The question for those who are concerned with learning and the digital library is how to extrapolate the insights gained through research in these individual settings into a wider world that includes many discrete many discrete resources and also requires traversal across and among them.
A great deal of discussion in instructional technology has focused on these settings, which have proliferated in recents years. Goodrum, Dorsey, and Schwen (1993), for example, described the conceptual and practical difficulties in designing an "enriched learning and information environment" that accommodates the difficulties that Perkins (1991) had identified for students operating within such setting: high cognitive load, increased responsibility for managing their own learning, and need to adopt an unfamiliar learning process. Scardamalia and her colleagues (1989, 1992) have worked for years on the developments and refinement of CSILE -- "Computer-Supported Intentional Learning Environment" -- a shell that allows students to create their own knowledge base related to classroom instruction by working collaboratively in an electronic environment to generate hypotheses, ask questions, and revise their understandings of that information. Rieber (1990, 1996) has explored how both animation and elements of simulations and games can enhance students' abilities to focus on and learn from multimedia "microwolds." In their exploration of the assumptions, methods, and implications for learning inherent in the various kinds of open-ended learning environments, Hannafin, Hall, Land, and Hill (1994) noted the lack of compelling empirical evidence of how open-ended learning environments influence learning and, further, discussed the difficulty of obtaining such evidence: these environments are "designed to promote fundamentally different kinds of learning" than the field is used to studying; its tools for understanding "different kinds of learning goals" and for "assessing the successes or failures of such system" are underdeveloped; and its "design science for such systems" is "very weak" (p.52). Clearly, the authors might be describing that state of our knowledge about designing materials to enchance learning within the digital library.
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