Component Architectures for Software in Education: Planning for Systemic Impact

9705650 Kaput使用技术来推进教育需要注意设计中局部因素和系统因素之间的相互作用。从某种意义上说，所有的学习都是局部的：学生根据手头的问题和资源构建知识。然而，如果技术设计只处理这些局部因素，结果往往是系统失败：软件是支离破碎的，缺乏支持的，并且很容易被边缘化。为了广泛的教育改进，我们必须愿意解决一些因素，使当地的成功能够服务于更大的议程，扩大到广泛的受众，并不断发展以迎接新的挑战。为了解决这些因素，教育研究和开发团体必须开始关注实现策略和软件架构。组件软件体系结构的新兴行业标准，如JavaBeans、OpenDoc和ActiveX，将很快为教育技术设计提供强大的新基础——支持快速原型、即插即用互操作性和分布式创作。然而，行业解决方案的目标是提高业务生产力，而不是学习过程。由于教育技术的历史低利润，将需要公共部门投资将商业基础设施发展成强大的教育平台。该项目将吸引研究人员、政策制定者和出版商参与围绕以下三个广泛问题组织的一系列电子讨论和区域会议：需要对行业标准组件体系结构进行哪些扩展来支持教育需求，例如链接的多个表示、可发布的学生作品集和交互式教学助手？2. 什么样的设计框架，无论是概念上的还是技术上的，将使教育者能够顺利地整合不同的层次和对象，以充分满足学生的需求？3. 什么样的组织、资金和分配安排将使分布式教育研究和开发社区的增长能够产生互操作、集成和扩展到教育改革运动需要的数学和科学组件套件？这些计划会议将为基金会和社区提供有关教育技术中组件体系结构的有前途的方向和关键障碍的详细、简明的报告。组织（如知识产权、项目管理）和技术（如互操作性、标准）问题都将被考虑。在规划工作之后，将提出一个或多个教育组件研发的多机构联盟。＊＊＊

9705650 Kaput Using technology to advance education will require attention to the interplay between local and systemic factors in design. In some sense, all learning is local: students construct knowledge in response to the problem and resources at hand. Yet if technology design addresses only these local factors, the result is often systemic failure: software that is fragmentary, poorly supported, and easily marginalized. For broad educational improvement, we must be willing to address factors that will enable local successes to serve larger agendas, scale up to widespread audiences, and evolve to meet new challenges. To address these factors, the educational research and development community must begin to attend to implementation strategies and software architectures. Emerging industry standards for component software architecture such as JavaBeans, OpenDoc and ActiveX will soon provide a powerful new substrate for educational technology design-supporting rapid prototyping, plug and play interoperability, and distributed authoring. However, industry solutions are aimed at business productivity, rather than learning processes. Due to historically low profits in educational technology, public sector investment will be needed to develop commercial infrastructures into powerful educational platforms. This project will engage researchers, policy makers, and publishers in a series of electronic discussions and regional meetings organized around three broad questions: 1. What extensions to industry-standard component architectures are needed to support educational needs such as linked multiple representations, publishable student portfolios, and interactive instructional aides? 2. What sorts of design frameworks, both conceptual and technological, will enable educators to smoothly integrate diverse layers and objects to fully meet the needs of their students? 3. What organizational, funding, and distribution arrangements will enable the growth of a distributed educational researc h and development community to produce suites of math and scientific components that interoperate, integrate, and scale to the needs of the educational reform movements? These planning meetings will provide the Foundation and the community with detailed, concise reports about the promising directions and critical obstacles for component architecture in educational technology. Both organizational (i.e. intellectual property, project management) and technological (i.e. interoperability, standards) issues will be considered. Following the planning work, one or more multi-institutional consortia for educational component R&D will be proposed. ***