ENGAGEMENT AND CONSTRUCTION:
EDUCATION STRATEGIES FOR THE POST-TV ERA
Ben Shneiderman*
Department of Computer Science
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742
* Also Head of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory and
a Member of the Systems Research Center. Parts of this
paper were derived from [Shn92a].
Introduction
We all remember the empty faces of students seated in rows,
intermittently taking notes, and trying to retain disjointed
facts. This old lecture style seems as antiquated as a 19th
century clockwork mechanism; familiar and charming, but erratic
and no longer adequate. The orderly structure of industrial age
mechanisms and the repetitiveness of the assembly line are giving
way to the all-at-once immediacy of McLuhan's non-linear
electrified global village [McL64]. The early electronic media
such as radio, stereos, and television have created a snap-
crackle-and-popular culture that is enjoyable, but passive. The
post-TV era will be different. Computing and communication
technologies offer opportunities for engagement with other people
and the power tools to construct remarkable artifacts and
experiences.
Educators can now create engaging processes for their students
that will motivate them to work together and explore the frontiers
of knowledge. Students from elementary schools through college
can apply computing technology (word processors, spreadsheets,
databases, drawing programs, design tools, music composition
software, etc.) to construct high quality products that they can
proudly share with others. Advanced communications tools
(electronic mail, network access, bulletin board systems,
videotape recorders, TV broadcasts) support engagement among
students, connection to the external world, information
gathering, and dissemination of results.
Defining Engagement
My definition of engagement focuses on interaction with people;
students working together, as they must in the workplace,
community, and family. Paired collaborations, team projects, and
class presentations can teach valuable skills that are now left to
sports teams and after school clubs. Secondly, students can
interact with people outside the classroom; by visiting adults in
the workplace, interviewing community leaders, and communicating
with students in other schools, cities, states, and countries.
Instead of requiring conjugation of French verbs, teachers might
set the goal for students to make a videotape about their
community in French to send to students in Canada or Togo. The
students would have to learn conjugation, but they would work as a
team to create a product of which they could all be proud.
Instead of memorizing the sequence of British monarchs, students
might create a hypermedia document with a timeline, photos, music,
and biographies that could be stored in the library for future
students to access or expand. Instead of merely reading about the
disease patterns in urban areas, students might collect data from
local hospitals on patterns of flu outbreaks and build a
simulation model of disease epidemics in communities as a function
of age, gender, and sociological factors, with the goal of
reporting results at community meetings, to medical groups, in
local newspapers, or in electronic bulletin boards.
In support of these projects students would have to work together
and also reach out to others to collect information from
librarians, city officials, physicians, scientists, bankers,
business leaders, etc. Imagine how a report on World War II would
be enriched by an interview with a D-Day participant in a
retirement home. Imagine how an ecology report would be enlivened
after a discussion with a local park naturalist, a political
science project would become livelier after an interview with a
local or state politician, and biology would become more
meaningful after a visit with a hospital lab technician. The
experience of speaking to adults at work would be educational, the
process could improve social and communication skills, and the
discussions are potentially illuminating for everyone involved.
The second aspect of engagement is the cooperation among students
needed to complete projects. When working in teams students can
take on more ambitious projects, can learn from each other, and
must make their plans explicit to coordinate. Engagement with
fellow students can help make learning more lively and effective
as a model for the future world of work, family, and community.
The rich environment of computers and networks is already being
used to support engagement across cities and countries. For
example, approximately 10,000 elementary school children at 150
sites collected and exchanged acid rain data. In another project,
high school students in the U.S. were paired with Russian students
for email exchanges. A science project involved hundreds of sixth
graders simultaneously measuring the length of a shadow and
exchanging data to measure the earth's diameter.
Electronic mail opens up new possibilities for cooperation among
students, guidance from teachers, and communication with national
or international leaders. For example, students in my graduate
seminar on user interface design undertook the common task of
reading research journal papers and critiquing them, but interest
in the task increased when they were required to send their
critiques to the authors by email. The discussions were deeper,
the usual off-hand attacks were softer in tone, but sharper in
insight. The replies and contact with leading professionals gave
my students a sense of importance and maturity.
Defining Construction
The second part of my theme is construction, by which I mean that
students create a product from their collaboration. This may not
seem so different from current expectations of writing a computer
program or a term paper. But when coupled with the engagement
theme, I mean constructing something of importance to someone
else. Instead of having database management students write the
same safe class project, my students have implemented database
management programs for the University's bus service, generated a
scheduling program for a local TV station, prepared an online
information retrieval program for a suicide prevention clinic, and
developed record keeping software for a student scuba club.
Instead of writing a term paper on computer applications for the
elderly, two of my students in a Computers and Society course
offered computing lessons for elderly residents of a local
apartment complex. Then the students prepared a report for the
director of the complex, with a copy for me to grade. Several
teams of students worked with their former high schools or
elementary schools to suggest ways to improve the use of
computers. One student wrote computer programs to manage lists of
volunteers and contributors for a local soup kitchen. One student
challenged the University's legal policy about student access and
privacy rights with respect to their accounts. Another student
wrote a handbook about educational software for parents of deaf
children, while another pair of students prepared a hypertext
guide to coping with computer software viruses. Computer tools
enable construction of ambitious projects; there is a special
sense of pride when students produce an animated hypertext, laser-
printed report, or collect/disseminate data through networks.
In addition to these semester-long projects, there are many
opportunities for short-term construction projects ranging from
the traditional programming exercise done as a team project to
class presentations by students on normal lecture material.
Requiring a team of two students to present a topic to the entire
class can make the topic appealing for the whole class, and the
designated students will be likely to take their responsibility
seriously. Turning work into a communal experience is made
practical by the presence of word processors/text editors because
making suggested revisions has become easy.
Cooperative groups in general studies
College level computer science has been my academic domain, so it
might seem that these notions are only suitable for that age group
and subject. However, I feel that engagement and construction are
appropriate at most ages and in most fields. In fact, related
ideas have been proposed by many reports on education during the
past decade. The Final Report of the Study Group on the
Conditions of Excellence in American Higher Education, National
Institute of Education wrote that "Active modes of teaching
require that students be inquirers - creators, as well as
receivers of knowledge." That report also stressed projects,
internships, discussion groups, collaborations, simulations, and
presentations (Figure 1). Similarly, the Principles for Good
Practice in Undergraduate Education presented by the American
Association for Higher Education (Figure 2) pushed for cooperation
among students and active learning projects.
1) Student Involvement
- involving students in faculty research projects
- encouraging internships
- organizing small discussion groups
- requiring in-class presentations and debates
- developing simulations
- creating opportunities for individual learning projects
2) High Expectations
3) Assessment and Feedback
Figure 1: Conditions for Excellence in Undergraduate Education,
Involvement in Learning: Realizing the Potential of American
Higher Education, Final Report of the Study Group on the
Conditions of Excellence in American Higher Education [NIE84].
Encourage Student-Faculty Contact
Encourage Cooperation Among Students
Encourage Active Learning
Give Prompt Feedback
Emphasize Time on Task
Communicate High Expectations
Respect Diverse Talents and Ways of Learning
Figure 2: Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education
[AAH87].
Exploration and Creation
The spirit of engagement is to enable students to experience the
challenge of exploratory research and the satisfaction of creative
accomplishment. I believe that imaginative teachers can find ways
in every discipline and at every grade to create an atmosphere of
exploration, novelty, and challenge. Whether collecting
scientific data or studying Greek theater, there are provocative
open questions that students can attempt to answer. My
undergraduate students regularly conduct empirical studies related
to my research in user interface design [Shn92b] and their work is
published in scientific journals. Only one in ten projects leads
to a publishable result, but the atmosphere of exploration at the
frontier of research produces a high level of engagement even for
introverted and blase computer science students at my state
university. Similarly, my 12-year old daughter did her 7th-grade
science project on spaced vs. massed practice with 3rd-graders in
her school learning to type.
The concepts of exploration and creation are well-established in
the education literature from John Dewey to Seymour Papert.
Piaget wrote that "Knowledge is not a copy of reality. To know an
object, to know an event is not simply to look at it and make a
mental copy, or image, of it. To know an object is to act on it.
To know is to modify, to transform the object, and to understand
the process of transformation, and as a consequence to understand
the way the object is constructed [Pia64]." The phrase "discovery
learning" conveys the key notion that "whatever knowledge children
gain they create themselves; whatever character they develop they
create themselves" as Wees wrote in his aptly titled book Nobody
Can Teach Anybody Anything [Wee71].
Summary
The post-TV media of computers and communications enables
teachers, students, and parents to creatively develop education by
engagement and construction (Figure 3). Students should be given
the chance to engage with each other in team projects, possibly
situated in the world outside the classroom, with the goal of
constructing a product that is useful or interesting to someone
other than the teacher. Challenges remain such as scaling up from
small class projects to lecture sections with hundreds of
students, covering the curriculum that is currently required by
many school districts, evaluating peformance, and assigning
grades. However, there seems to be no turning back and, anyway,
the children of the Nintendo and Video Age are eager to press fast
forward.
Students want to engage with people to:
Students will be engaged by constructing products:
Teachers should promote:
Multimedia technologies can empower students:
Project orientation enhances engagement:
Figure 3: Strategies for increasing Engagement and Construction
References
[AAH87] American Association for Higher Education. Principles for
Good Practice in Undergraduate Education, 1987.
[McL64] Marshall McLuhan. Understanding Media: The Extensions of
Man, McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York, NY, 1964.
[NIE84] National Institute of Education. Involvement in Learning:
Realizing the Potential of American Higher Education,
Final Report of the Study Group on the Conditions of
Excellence in American Higher Education, 1984.
[Pia64] Jean Piaget. Cognitive development in children: the
Piaget papers, In R. E. Ripple and V. N. Rockcastle
(Editors), Piaget rediscovered: a report of the conference
on cognitive studies and curriculum development, Ithaca
School of Education, Cornell University, pp. 6-48, 1964.
[Shn92a] Ben Shneiderman. Education by Engagement and
Construction: A Strategic Education Initiative for a
Multimedia Renewal of American Education, In, Barrett, Ed
(Editor), The Social Creation of Knowledge: Multimedia and
Information Technologies in the University, MIT Press,
Cambridge, MA, 1992.
[Shn92b] Ben Shneiderman. Designing the User Interface:
Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction,
Second Edition, Addison-Wesley Publ. Co., Reading, MA,
1992.
[Wee71] W. R. Wees. Nobody Can Teach Anybody Anything, Doubleday
Canada, Toronto, Ontario, 1971.