Adapting Digital Libraries for Learners: Accessibility Vs. Availability

C&I 336

Tony Lee

The Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD)

The distance between the level a child can reach by independent problem solving and the level he/she can achieve with the assistance of a more competent adult or peer. (Vygotsky, 1978).

Digital Libraries: Good for Education?

Goal: making digital libraries designed for scientists useful for learners.

Why would they be good for education?1) authentic, real, and complex data.2) students study their world.3) science as inquiry.4) links to the community of practicing scientists.

Resource for doing science instead of memorizing.

Availability Vs. Accessibility

Can we leverage the efforts expended in constructing digital libraries for experts in order to provide valuable digital libraries for learners?

…However, as the pile of resources on hiccups accumulated in his carrel, he was confronted with the fact that he was unable to make sense of their contents. …While the full resources of the National Library of Medicine were available, to him they were inaccessible.

Research on accessibility is primarily about users.

Accessibility: A Digital Libraries Research Question How can we close the gap between the user and the

digital library resources?

Take resources that enable experts to extend their knowledge and turn them into resources that enable learners to develop some of the knowledge possessed by experts by performing personally meaningful tasks.

 Experts Learners

MotivationCreate new knowledge or create new instrumental techniques

Academic achievement and curiosity about the world.

Goals Expressed in terms of tools and resources

Expressed in terms of tasks or knowledge

ActivitiesStructured by research community and funding sources

Structured by school assignments and personal interests

Background knowledge

Mastery of fundamental principles and significant experience in practice

Sketchy knowledge of elementary science

Example“What would be the effect of a 100ppmv increase on CO2 on the earth's net energy balance?”

“Is global warming going to happen?”

Accessibility Through Bridging

3 steps of bridging 1) Initial understanding: study of scientists, the resources

they use, and the activities they engage in. 2) Redesign: redesign the resources to provide enough

support for learners to engage in activities that are closely modeled on those of the experts.

3) Adaptation: the adaptation process is to develop carefully constructed activities that capitalize on students' intrinsic motivations to introduce them to the capabilities of the resources.

Bridging Through Interface Design

The goal of a supportive interface for accessing data is to help the learner to understand what data is available and what its uses might be.

  Viewing and manipulating data is to make it clear what the

user is seeing and what operations can be meaningfully performed.

Bridging Through Resource Selection and Organization Learners may not know how to translate their questions

into requests for data.

Organizing data around questions: organizing data or other digital resources around questions and themes that are meaningful to learners can provide a bridge that will enable them to locate resources that are appropriate to their needs.

Resource selection can also provide a bridge for learners: supplement the core resources with additional resources that can serve as a bridge to the experiences and interests of learners

Bridging Through Activity Design

Activities provide an introduction to the techniques and resources supported by the library of digital data.

- Allow students to engage in familiar activities.- Pursue goals that are meaningful to them.- Help students to develop new understanding of

the value of available digital resources and learn expert practices for the use of the resources.

Bridging with Documentation

Scaffold to support learners as they learn to take advantage of the available resources

Links

Coastal Ocean Modeling at the USGS USGS Woods Hole Science Center (http://woodshole.er.usgs.gov/operations/modeling/)

  Tropical Atmosphere Ocean  project.

(http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/tao/)

Air Pollution: What the solution? (http://k12science.ati.stevens-tech.edu/curriculum/airproj/)

NCSA ChemViz (http://chemviz.ncsa.uiuc.edu/) 

Population Growth Project (http://k12science.ati.stevens-tech.edu/curriculum/popgrowthproj/)

 Chickscope project (http://chickscope.beckman.uiuc.edu/about/overview/)  Bugscope project

(http://www.itg.uiuc.edu/publications/techreports/00-008/evaluation.htm)

  Ask Jeeves Kids (http://ajkids.com/)