November 2001 — Features
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Authentic Tasks as the Basis for Multimedia Design Curriculum
Virtual Reality Project Enables Students to Pursue Their Own Interests and Guide Their Own Learning
At the beginning of the 2000-2001 school year, 12 seventh- and eighth-graders in the Highland School District in Highland, Ill., moved from an overcrowded building - whose structure was unable to support the exploding progress of educational technology - to a building where the possibilities for technology curriculum projects were nearly limitless. And what better way to show off a new school building, as well as give students a chance to experience an authentic multimedia Web development project, than to turn them loose to create a virtual 3-D walk-through of the school? One of the new elective course offerings was in Web design, and the course's content relied heavily on creating informational and interactive Web products that could become part of the Highland Middle School Web site. The structure of the course was one that attempted to present students with authentic tasks and professional-quality software tools to enable them to pursue their own interests and guide their own learning.
Classroom Environment
Specifically, the structure of the middle school Web design course was based on two principles outlined in a summary of Jean Lave's writings on "situated learning" (Kearsley 1994-2001). The two principles are:
- Knowledge needs to be presented in an authentic context, i.e. settings and applications that would normally involve knowledge.
- Learning requires social interaction and collaboration.
In addition, the climate of the learning environment was designed to be student-directed in nature, paralleling North Central Regional Education Lab's (NCREL) Engaged Learning Model. The Engaged Learning Model - a detailed description of which is available online at www.ncrel.org/sdrs/engaged.htm - suggests that small, heterogeneous groups of students should make decisions about how they will encounter real-world learning challenges, and then have an active role in carrying out projects that relate to their own learning.
Setting the Stage
Throughout the first part of the quarter, the students learned skills similar to those taught in comparable middle and high school courses in various schools, including HTML, image editing, design principles and file management. Students worked in groups of two or three on a variety of ongoing projects such as informational Web pages for the school's site. This included athletic information and schedules, curriculum resource pages for teachers, and information of general interest to the community. Each student was encouraged to maintain a personal Web page that would serve as a portfolio of their work and progress in the class. After the students had attained a certain level of competency - both with the basic Web development tools and with working in a relatively self-directed manner on projects in small groups - a biggerproject was proposed to them.
The culminating project in the course consisted of a challenge.
