An Inventory of Pedagogical Considerations for Interactive Television1 |
VOL. 10, No. 1, 75-94
This article describes several "multi-point" interactive television conferences that have taken place in British Columbia using a fibre optics telephone network developed by BC Tel, Ubiquity. The Ubiquity network connects Victoria and the Vancouver area to cities in the Southern Interior and Northern regions of the province. These early experiences with interactive television are analyzed in terms of pedagogical styles and considerations related to particular types of interaction afforded among conference participants. This work is part of a research project that is investigating the development and use of interactive television in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University (SFU). The project aims to augment campus-based components and remote sites of SFU's teacher education program with "studio" experiences in schools throughout the province.
Cet article décrit plusieurs conférences télévisées interactives multipoint qui se sont déroulées en Colombie-Britannique au moyen d'un réseau téléphonique par fibres optiques, conçu par la compagnie de téléphone de la C.-B. et appelé Ubiquity. Le réseau Ubiquity relie Victoria et la région de Vancouver à plusieurs villes dans les régions intérieures de la province. On y analyse ces premières expériences de télévision interactive à la lumière de leurs styles pédagogiques et des facteurs liés à certains types d'interaction auxquels ont eu accès les participants aux conférences. Il s'agit d'un travail effectué dans le cadre d'un projet de recherche sur le développement et l'utilisation de la télévision interactive à la faculté d'éducation de l'Université Simon Fraser (SFU). L'objectif du projet était d'accroître, sur le campus et sur les sites éloignés, les composantes du programme de formation des enseignants de l'Université Simon Fraser, par des expériences « studio » faites dans les écoles, partout dans la province.
Interactive television is a technology that allows people to communicate at a distance, seeing and hearing each other through television screens. The development of this technology has been accompanied with arguments about how it will enable us to transcend our geography and join us culturally and intellectually with colleagues across the world, how it will change what and how we learn, and how “information highways” will be accessible in schools and homes in remote areas (Kelly, 1993; Murphy, 1991). Yet developers caution that this medium is only effective when it is used in ways that support “interactivity”; its use in disseminating information in a more didactic fashion seems to be ineffective. Although studies have shown superior learning outcomes (Kelly, 1993; Wagner, 1991) and positive student attitudes toward interactive television (Fyock & Sutphin, 1995), there is dearth of information in the literature about pedagogical considerations in using interactive television in public schools and universities.
This paper reports on a research and development project based at Simon Fraser University involving the use of interactive television in teacher education. The broad purpose of this project is to provide students of education, experienced teachers, and university faculty access to classrooms in several locations in British Columbia. This work is grounded in an image of professional knowledge that stresses the need to embed learning to teach in actual classroom experiences and dialogue (Schön, 1983, 1987, 1991). Notions of apprenticeship and studio learning are central to our work, providing a backdrop against which interactive television can be understood as a medium with potential to strengthen teacher education programs. In this paper we discuss several educational interactive television conferences that have occurred in British Columbia over the past four years. This sample of early work with interactive television represents several distinct pedagogical styles and considerations that have been employed to accommodate various kinds of interaction among participants. In this article we put forward a preliminary inventory of these along with analyses of various features of design that seem to be important in using interactive television.
Numerous kinds of laboratory schools have been developed in this century, from demonstration theatres in faculties of education to entire schools built for teacher education and research. Whether it has been through one-way mirrors, video, or face-to-face interaction, the effort to bring the university and school together has been justified in terms of bridging theory, practice, and research in teacher education. Our interest in developing and analyzing strategies for using interactive television to link a university faculty of education with classrooms is part of this more general concern to provide meaningful and effective means of educating teachers.
Although our project is in its infancy, the authors have considerable experience designing and moderating interactive television conferences. In a collaborative project with the Burnaby School Board, SFU pioneered a video link between the campus and Cariboo Hill Secondary School, enabling two-way audio and video communication between the two locations.2 In about 150 transmissions over a two-year period, we explored a number of styles of interaction from observing lessons taught at the school to linking panels of high school students with groups of student teachers, to connecting students from different schools using curriculum units designed to engage them in the exchange of ideas (MacKinnon & Scarr, 1992).
In addition to numerous “two-point” transmissions with the Cariboo Connection, several interactive television conferences have taken place using a full-band fibre optics technology developed by BC Tel, which makes possible audio-video communication between up to eight sites at once. This fibre optics network, Ubiquity, has extended our reach to other cities in British Columbia. Interactive television conferences have taken place between Victoria, Vancouver, Prince George, and Kamloops, for example. This feature of the fibre optics network has obvious benefits for SFU, which has several “external sites” of teacher education in the interior and northern regions of the province. Further, we have found that interactive television conferences engaging students from various regions of the province enable a rich exchange of ideas and opinions.
The pedagogical styles of the interactive television conferences we have experienced vary considerably. In general, they are more complicated for interactive television conferences involving four or more sites. In this paper we describe and assess these various pedagogical styles in terms of the kinds of interaction they afford. We hope that our experiences and insights will be useful for others who are also exploring the use of interactive television in either public schooling or university programs. We have selected excerpts from interactive television conferences that represent a range of pedagogical styles and offer suggestions from our experiences with several projects carried out by groups of educators in schools. Although not all of the interactive television conferences reviewed here involved SFU education students, they are included as part of the early history of work done with interactive television.
The interactive television conferences reported here took place over a four-year period. The authors participated in various ways in planning and developing the conferences during this time, either collectively or individually in our work at SFU and the Association for the Promotion and Advancement of Science Education (APASE). These early experiments with interactive television varied from transmissions involving two students at each site to transmissions between up to four whole classes of 25 to 30 students. After several of these early experiments, we collected a library of video tapes that could be examined for various features and qualities of dialogue. We conducted a comparative study of the interaction taking place in the various conferences and of the factors that seemed important in the design of the interactive television conferences. We held weekly meetings in the spring term of 1994 (a four-month period), during which we studied the tapes and selected seven for a more detailed analysis. Portions of each tape were transcribed and analysed for the depth and quality of students’ interaction. As we viewed the conferences and discussed the kinds of interactions taking place in them, several categories emerged to help us make sense of their likenesses and differences. We found that our analyses were refined over the four-month period, largely because of the formation of these categories, which represent the language and concepts we developed in making sense of the pedagogical features of the conferences. We also drew inferences about the “elements of design” that seemed important in bringing about a particular kind of exchange.
After our preliminary work in the weekly meetings, we discussed our findings at several larger meetings and presentations in which we were able to share with colleagues and students our ideas about the types of interaction we had observed and their relation to the design of interactive television conferencing. Some further refinement in our language and concepts took place as a result of the feedback we received in these meetings, which is reflected in the analysis below. We proceed, in turn, from one interactive television conference to another, building our understandings of the character of interaction along the way.
This project brought together Grade 12 students in Prince George, Kamloops, Victoria, and Vancouver for a interactive television conference with Mikhail Gorbachev. The pedagogical style emphasized students’ personal involvement in a discussion of international affairs with an otherwise inaccessible person. Because of the prohibitive cost of flying students to a central location, an exchange of this sort would be unlikely without interactive television.
Gorbachev was in Vancouver at Science World for the transmission. With a translator at his side, he sat at a table with four students facing a live audience. There were two students at each of the three additional sites, and they were shown on television monitors positioned around the theatre. A moderator was on stage at Science World to direct the conference. The design of this conference was a question/answer exchange between the students and Gorbachev. Questions had been formulated by the students in their Social Studies classes prior to the conference. These questions had been selected and arranged by the moderator, who introduced and cued students when their turn came to ask a question. Although students asked astute questions, the exchange was more like a campaign speech than a sustained dialogue about issues related to public policy. The following excerpt is illustrative of the campaign quality of Gorbachev’s responses to the students’ questions:3
Kamloops: Mr. Gorbachev, the Soviet Union up until very recently had always been under control of a dictatorship. This form of government sustained the Soviet Union as a major world power for decades. I would like to ask you why you decided to depart from this system, why you made the political changes in the Soviet Union that resulted in a decrease in Soviet power. Why was change necessary?
Gorbachev: Had things been so good and so glorious in the former Soviet Union, then our people would not have supported Mikhail Gorbachev and reformers . . . the reformist government. It was not all that good and glorious. Toward the end of the 1970s, we felt particularly acutely that the Soviet Union was lagging behind the more developed countries.
Although this conference provided a unique opportunity for students to formulate questions and interact with Gorbachev, we note certain limitations to the interaction created by the design. For example, students were not invited to engage directly with any participants other than Gorbachev. Nor was there opportunity for students to pursue a line of questioning once Gorbachev had responded to their initial question. Despite the moderator’s efforts to orchestrate questions and responses, these pedagogical limitations may have contributed to a lack of continuity from one question/response to another.
The pedagogical style of the Gorbachev conference afforded a particular kind of interaction among participants-one we refer to as a “summit.” We would hesitate to characterize the exchange as a genuine dialogue for several reasons: the lack of continuity from one question/response to the next; the campaign quality of Gorbachev’s discourse; the time taken for translation between languages; the degree of orchestration provided by the moderator. Despite the pedagogical limitations we have pointed out, the Gorbachev forum was a very successful interactive television conference. As one of the earliest experiments using the Ubiquity fibre optics system, it was an important benchmark in beginning to think about the complicated relationships between the pedagogical style of the conference design, the kind of interaction among participants, the role of the moderator, and various technical considerations that are taken up in more depth below.
A considerably more sophisticated interactive television conference took place in the fall of 1993. This interactive television conference enabled a more dynamic dialogue. The pedagogical style was based on a forensic science unit developed to engage Grade 5 students in the analysis of Who Killed Roger Rabbit. The project connected classrooms in Vancouver, Burnaby, New Westminster, and Prince George. A video tape of a mock crime scene at SFU was produced and distributed to the schools together with kits of the physical evidence collected at the scene of the crime.
The unit engaged students in learning the skills of forensic science in cooperative groups. The areas of forensic work included using chroma-tography to analyze various ink samples, testing the pH of soil, analyzing finger prints, comparing hair and clothing with microscopes, studying foot prints, and detecting the components of various white powders. The interactive television conference was designed as a trial in which students presented and argued about evidence collected from the scene of the murder. Students from Prince George represented the Crown prosecution while students in Burnaby represented the defence, countering the arguments and questioning the evidence put forward. Document cameras were used to examine the evidence presented by the various groups of “forensic experts.” Witnesses and suspects-including SFU president Dr. John Stubbs-were present at the Vancouver site for questioning by students at remote sites.
The following excerpt from the interactive television conference illustrates the lively character of the exchange, beginning with the summary statement from the prosecution in Prince George. The moderator of the interactive television conference was located in Vancouver.
Prince George: Your Honour, this is my summation of Dr. Stubbs. A lot of evidence has pointed to Dr. Stubbs including:
However, we do not think he is guilty. Your Honour this is my summation of David Bell. From the evidence that we have presented, we feel that David Bell committed the crime for the following reasons:
Your Honour we believe David Bell is guilty.
Moderator: Thank you very much. We have a similar opportunity for a summation from the defence attorney. . . .
Burnaby: I disagree with the . . . with the method . . . with the pen that you wrote the threatening note because the pen that David Bell had was [pause to confer with partner] was a permanent one, not a . . . not the same kind of pen as the washable one found at the scene of the crime.
Moderator: So on the basis of the fact that the David Bell’s pen was permanent- not water soluble-you are disagreeing with the entire platform given from the prosecuting attorneys at Prince George? [Throughout the Moderator’s rephrasing, students from the Burnaby school are huddled in a discussion and preparing their next evidence for the document camera.]
Moderator: Is there anything else you would like to say by way of summation?
Burnaby: Uhm [still conferring] How do that . . . the . . . like the fingerprints, uh, of David Bell’s . . . how do we know the fingerprints on the scissors were his?
Prince George: We didn’t find a match.
Burnaby: You didn’t?
Moderator: Okay, thank you very mu . . .
Burnaby: Why did . . . why do you think that David Bell is innocent if you didn’t find a match with the fingerprints on the scissors?
Prince George: We think David Bell is guilty!
Burnaby: Ah . . . then why . . . I mean guilty . . . if you didn’t find a match.
Prince George: We think that he is guilty because Dr. Stubbs does not remember if he picked up the scissors or not.
Burnaby: So . . . but then he said that he doesn’t remember. So if he . . . if he did touch it would have been the same. It would have been the same, uhm, finger prints, uhm as the . . . as the scissors.
Prince George: Uhm, there were three fingerprints that we could not identify. Those could have been David Bell’s.
Burnaby: But you couldn’t identify them, so you can’t be super sure.
Moderator: Well I’m afraid we’re at the point of the trial where our jurors will have to help us out now. Unless there is . . .
Burnaby: I do.
Moderator: Anything further that remains to be said from Prince George?
Burnaby: I do.
Moderator: . . . or from Burnaby? Then we’ll proceed to ask our . . .
Burnaby: I do.
Moderator . . . jurors to consider the arguments that they’ve heard and the evidence that they’ve seen, uh . . . [still being interrupted Burnaby students]. I’m sorry, is there something further?
Burnaby: Yes uhm, the . . . our fingerprints from David Bell’s hand had seven . . . had seven rings of ridges. And the one found at the scene of the crime had six ridges.
Moderator: And on that basis you are saying there is no match?
Burnaby: No. And, uhm, and the one on the letter about the movie is . . . David Bell should have signed the letter . . . David Bell would have signed the letter if he wanted Roger to show the movie to the students at Simon Fraser.
Moderator: Okay, thank you very much.
The first thing that is evident in this excerpt of the interactive television conference is the high quality of the dialogue between students at the two sites. We would argue that the technology became “invisible” as the children argued back and forth about the evidence presented to the jury. The document cameras worked very well in portraying fingerprints, hair samples, footprints, and so on, and the children were able to use them with ease.
The second point that is worth mentioning has to do with the amount of consultation that took place at the Burnaby site as a group of five students sat in front of the camera huddled about their evidence and notes during the transmission. This contrasted with the Prince George site, where a single student had been selected to come forward to present the prosecution in each of the expert forensic areas. It seems that the microphone and seating arrangement are critical in accommodating a more natural response from the children. This was evident from the animated interaction of the Burnaby students in comparison to the visibly nervous student in Prince George. The dialogue that took place among the students in Burnaby was animated during and after the groups’ contributions to the interactive television conference.
The issue of how to involve the rest of the class that is sitting back and watching needs to be addressed. Perhaps these students could have been assigned to small groups, each having its own press-to-talk microphone so their commentary could also have been included. Observing students could have been more actively engaged if there had been time scheduled “off air” for discussion and reaction to various issues that arose during the conference-a technique that we observed being used extensively in the Private Universe Project, which is described later in this article. The physical arrangement of the room presents an additional challenge for camera work, but it seems crucial to us. We have found that the more effective interactive television conferences present participants full-screen rather than as small faces in a crowd. A final comment should be made about the importance of the central moderator in a “multi-point” transmission. On the one hand, moderation is critical in keeping order and focus. On the other hand, it is also critical for the moderator to be able to “step out” of the interaction and allow the children to engage with one another directly. As noted above, it is when participants are absorbed in issues that the conferencing equipment seems to disappear, allowing children to interact more naturally.
In late 1993 and 1994, The Association for the Promotion and Advancement of Science Education (APASE) used interactive television for a project called “Interactive Ingenuity.” This project brought together teachers, parents, and engineers in each of three sites in Vancouver, Victoria, and Prince George to participate in a full day workshop on the science of inventions (Walshe, 1994).
Interactive Ingenuity involved twenty participants from each city, facilitated simultaneously by one moderator located at a fourth site. In addition, local facilitators were present at each workshop site. Participants at each location sat around four tables aligned theatre-style toward the centre of the room.
This interactive television conference provided teachers, engineers, and parents access to APASE curriculum workshops. The conference gave participants the opportunity to engage in science activities designed for elementary school students, to form community connections both locally and with the remote sites, and to experience interactive television first hand. A variety of perspectives were provided by the grouping of engineers, parents, and teachers participating in the workshop. This arrangement, combined with the noncompetitive nature of the activities and the celebratory presentations, facilitated a community-building workshop.
Interactive Ingenuity involved a number of stages. First, participants engaged in warm-up activities, investigating simple machines at their separate sites. These activities gave participants an opportunity to explore materials and concepts used in the next stage of the workshop. During this time interactive television was only used for the moderator to communicate with the local facilitators. Second, participants presented their warm-up activities to each other over the interactive television. These presentations were followed by a brief question and answer period. The third stage involved participants in groups of three at all sites presenting their “Rube Goldberg machines.” Each group consisted of a teacher, a parent, and an engineer. Using ordinary household materials, contraptions were constructed, much as they are in the game Mousetrap(tm) in which one mechanical event triggers another and so on until a final goal is reached-popping a balloon, snuffing a candle, or launching a paper aeroplane, for example. As the Goldberg machines were presented, participants at the observing sites asked questions, and the central moderator assisted in developing understandings about science, technology, and teaching.
The Interactive Ingenuity conference illustrated several noteworthy design features. First, participants were given time to “mess about” with materials during extended warm-up activities. Not only did this allow for learning that would be integral to the later stages of the conference, but also it provided for the development of a relationship and dialogue between the central moderator and local facilitators that would eventually direct inter-actions between participants in subsequent stages. This direction can be likened to a “joint-Donahue”4 style of moderation, which, we would argue, is very effective for this “workshop” style of interactive television conference.
Another noteworthy feature of this conference was the variety of opinion and expertise among the participants that resulted from grouping teachers, parents, and engineers together for the invention activities. We believe this feature of design led to a particularly rich exchange of ideas during the conference. Related to this feature, was the celebratory quality to the final activity, in which the Rube Goldberg machines were demonstrated and discussed. After each presentation there was resounding applause from each site, which we think illustrated the sense of community among teachers, parents, and engineers.
The Interactive Ingenuity project also demonstrated the importance of location for a central moderator. In one of the preparatory workshops, the central moderator was placed on location at one site. This resulted in the problem of “site bias,” where the moderator would pay more attention either to the remote sites or to the “live” site. When this bias appeared, the frustration of the “neglected” participants was evident. By removing the moderator to a fourth site with no “live” participants, the three-way final workshop became easier to manage and the bias was eliminated. A central moderator was a key to the success of this project. By managing the interactive television environment, the moderator could direct participants’ attention to contributors from the various locations. The moderator kept track of the time and ensured that all sites had an equal opportunity to speak. In addition, the moderator was the curriculum expert, providing questions designed to consolidate participants’ understanding, making connections between the various stages of activity, and providing a relevant context for both the invention activities and the participants’ involvement in interactive television.
The local facilitators were also essential in Interactive Ingenuity. They provided the moderator with a sense of the mood in the room at each site, acted as trouble-shooters, and made sure the camera and microphones were moved about the room appropriately. The local facilitators acted as the “arms and legs” of the moderator, setting up equipment and encouraging site participants to interact both within the site and with participants at other sites. Finally, the presence of local facilitators helped to ensure a smooth transition from one stage of the workshop to another.
The camera equipment was arranged to allow participants as much control of the technology as possible. There were several benefits associated with this aspect of the interactive television conference. First, the participants could change the camera angle or speaker volume or virtually any aspect they were dissatisfied with almost instantaneously. Second, participants were actively engaged with both the communications technology and the workshop content, which helped to alleviate their “technophobia” more quickly than had been the case in a preliminary workshop in which participants had less control of the technology.
Whereas the approach used in Interactive Ingenuity allowed the more outspoken individuals a chance to speak to the other sites, the quieter and more timid participants did not take advantage of the technology to express their ideas. Although this problem would also be present in a regular workshop, we feel that interactive television makes it even more difficult for timid people to speak, perhaps because being “camera shy” adds to their reluctance to speak out. A further limitation is that no more than one small group could interact with another remote group at a time. Fortunately, there are alternate ways to address this problem, as we describe in our discussion of the Private Universe Project.
The Interactive Ingenuity project involved sixty participants, three local facilitators, and a central moderator. Because of the number of participants and the presentation format used in both the warm-up activities and Goldberg inventions, participants spent considerable time sitting, observing, and listening. Spectator passivity was alleviated with roving cameras that provided various views of the Goldberg inventions. The inventions themselves were entertaining and dynamic-quite different from listening to a “talking head.” This experience does raise questions, however, about the optimum number of participants for an interactive television conference of this nature.
The Private Universe Project is an example of a teleconference rather than an interactive television conference. The main difference is that the remote sites can view and hear a central studio via satellite television, but the central studio cannot view the remote sites and the remote sites cannot view each other. In the fall of 1994, the Private Universe Project connected over 200 remote sites across North America and the United Kingdom in a nine-episode broadcast on science education. The remote sites could communicate back to the central studio via telephone, fax, or electronic mail. The central moderators and a group of participants were located at the Massachusetts Corporation for Educational Telecommunications. The purpose of the project was to engage educators in a discussion of a “constructivist perspective” of learning in science. Video tapes of teachers and students engaged in science classrooms were used as discussion starters. The central moderator allowed time for participants at remote sites to discuss questions related to the video episodes before responding to the central site. Each remote site selected individuals to represent the group’s response. Telephone calls were televised “live” so that all sites could hear the discussion. If the response was written, it was read aloud.
Of all the projects described in this paper, the Private Universe Project was the only one designed to allow all participants to engage in discussion. This factor may seem odd since this project also had the largest number of participants. However, the deliberate attempt to allow time “off the air” for discussion and the process of choosing a group representative at the remote sites begin to address the problem of having only one telephone line per site.
The Private Universe Project allowed for a large number of sites to participate-many more than can currently be connected through fibre optics cables and interactive television. The disadvantage in large numbers of participants is the loss of intimacy and the decrease in interaction between individual participants. This conference demonstrated how groups of people can communicate with each other without using the fibre system. The visual information and “live” transmission to remote sites stimulated rich local discussion and reflection at SFU, where a group of graduate students in the Faculty of Education observed the video conference.
The Power Futures Student Forum project was designed for the purpose of facilitating a discussion on energy issues through interactive television conferencing between high school students from different regions of British Columbia. During the fall of 1994, two separate interactive television conferences were held: in the first, four student groups presented their perspectives on local energy; in the second, they discussed their vision for their community energy needs in the year 2020.
The objectives were to give the students a better understanding of the relationship between lifestyle choices, community design, and environmental impacts as these relate to energy consumption. The interactive television conferences were designed to ensure discussion that reflected regional variation in energy production and consumption and thus promoted a meaningful, informed exchange.
In both conferences a central moderator facilitated a discussion between the four student groups. The pedagogical style was quite different from the “summit” or “workshop” style of other interactive television conferences we have experienced. The moderation was crucial for identifying common threads in the students’ discussion, for encouraging students to engage more actively, and for achieving clarity with respect to energy issues.
During the Power Futures Student Forum, three distinct stages of interaction became apparent to us, each requiring a different style of moderation. In the first stage, student groups presented their research on local energy supply and demand; the function of the moderator was to remain “in the background” as an observer and attentive listener as information was given for each of the four regions of the province. In the second stage of interaction, the moderator’s style was to stimulate an increasingly lively and dynamic involvement of all students by encouraging differing points of view about energy supply and consumption. During the third stage, the moderator’s role shifted to a more contemplative and deliberative style of intervention that seemed to be designed to highlight the development of students’ tolerance toward other points of view, changes in understanding, and revised judgments concerning energy issues.
An excerpt of the first interactive television conference (below) illustrates the engagement of the students in the conference. At the height of the discussion, a lively debate occurred as all student groups were expressing their views. The students were so engaged that the technology seemed “invisible.” The following excerpt illustrates the flow of the discussion and the oppositional points voiced by the students.
Kamloops: We were just wondering what Vancouver and Victoria are going to do, what you guys would do if you do not have our energy any more?
Victoria: Well, like Brenda said, we’ll probably start alternative things like solar power, wind mills, self-sufficient energy resources, but otherwise we are comfortable. [everybody laughs]
Moderator: What do you think of that? We are comfortable, so we do not have to look at alternative resources of energy.
Prince George: I have one more question. I was thinking about you guys building a nuclear power reactor for the power problems down south.
Moderator: What do you think?
Vancouver: No thank you to the nuclear reactor.
Victoria: No way.
Kamloops: Nuclear reactors have less bad effects on the environment than hydro dams.
Victoria: There are sure ways that they [nuclear reactors] are going to be safe.
Kamloops: But hydro dams can break too.
Victoria: But in case of a nuclear power breakdown you have to evacuate your place too and it takes hundreds and hundreds of years to repair the damage.
Prince George: You guys are taking our sacrifice for our environment, because you are taking our energy too.
Moderator: What kind of sacrifice, Prince George?
Prince George: They have electrified energy down there and they are depending on our dams and stuff up here. They should be thinking about sacrificing something of their environment down there too.
Prince George: What is going to happen when the population is so big up here that we use all the energy that is now available down there?
Victoria: Are you guys are saying that you don’t resent the fact that we have all this energy?
Prince George: We cannot do anything about it; that is what I am saying. In the future it is supposed to be very populated up here and we are going to use all the power down there from you.
Victoria: If you take all the energy from us, then we will resent you.
Moderator: I would like you to remember we are all part of the same province. [applause with laughter]
This excerpt illustrates the second stage of interaction, in which the moderator encouraged the expression of regional points of view among the students. The third stage of interaction, which begins with the statement, “I would like you to remember we are all part of the same province,” invites students to be more tolerant of disparate points of view, and to seek solutions that are mutually beneficial. This change in interaction is more apparent in the following excerpt taken from the second conference:
Moderator: What is the most important thing you take away from this exercise? Let’s begin with Vancouver . . . anybody who wants to answer this question.
Vancouver: We all agree that we need alternative answers, and we all need to work together. We have to do something about it. We have to change our attitude.
Moderator: All right. Okay. Let’s go to Victoria . . . same question.
Victoria: We learned how dependent we really are on the North . . . the urgency of becoming self-sufficient . . . and alternatives we need to look at . . . and our attitudes here in Victoria have to be examined if we look for a decent future.
Moderator: Thank you very much, Victoria. Prince George, same question to you now.
Prince George: Okay. One of the things we learned from this is that things really have to change. We have to have more of a balance of energy production and consumption between the North and South, and we learned that we have to definitely come up with new ways to produce energy because of the population increase.
Moderator: Thank you, Prince George. And let’s see, Kamloops . . .
Kamloops: I have learned that there are very many different ways of getting energy and that there is a very big problem we have to deal with. Okay, everyone in here and everyone over there, we know we have to conserve energy, but there is also another generation and they’ll have to do it too. We have to advertise and ask them to change their attitude. I have learned that we have to work together and we learned by doing this project and looking into ways of saving energy. We are running out of fossil fuels and we have to do something about it. There are not many reserves left.
Moderator: Terrific, thank you, Kamloops.
The three stages of interaction provide further ways for us to understand the nature of communication and moderation in interactive television environments. The Power Future Students Forum has been useful in helping us to realize the potential of structuring a conference around differing points of view, especially in terms of regional differences among participating sites.
The Excel project used interactive television to bring a BC Tel computer expert to a group of business managers. The moderator (the computer expert) was located in Vancouver, and the managers were in Edmonton. A local facilitator was present in Edmonton as well. The computer program “Excel” was taught through interactive television using a connection that allowed the managers at the remote site to see the computer screen. A switching device allowed the moderator to switch the view seen at the remote site. During the Excel project, participants were fairly passive at first-a reaction we believe to be associated with the passivity of normal television viewing. A good example of one approach to overcoming this passivity was revealed during this project. Part way through the first half hour, the moderator deliberately invited participants to interrupt and ask questions while he was presenting. The expression on the faces of the participants changed and immediately one individual asked a question. The strategy of deliberately inviting interruption may be a necessary tool for creating an environment of interaction and exchange rather than a one-way monologue. It is this kind of environment that begins to make full use of the interactive technology.
The World Population Project used interactive television to join a class of Grade 11 Social Studies students from Kamloops with a class of Grade 9/10 Mathematics students from Burnaby. The objective was to provide the two classes with an opportunity to discuss world population issues and experience interactive television. In addition, a third site observed the discussion from SFU. The participants at the third site included faculty of education professors, student teachers, and graduate students. After observing the students’ discussion, the SFU observers interacted directly with the students and teachers in a debriefing session.
This was the most recent of the Interactive Television projects (April, 1995). Whereas most of the previous projects involved a fairly structured preparation and were one-time “events,” this project involved a more casual, unstructured design in the effort to demonstrate that the technology at SFU was easily accessible and usable. Although the technical support for the project was arranged in advance, the structure of the discussion between two classrooms was not. Instead of having a central moderator, the teachers at each site played a minimal role as local facilitators, and the students carried the discussion largely on their own. Because of our casual approach, there were periods of time when it seemed like the discussion was going in circles, and the awkward pauses we referred to above were ever-present. Some moderation would have focused the discussion.
The students reported that they forgot about the presence of the technology and engaged in “conversation” with the other students. Both groups indicated that it was interesting to learn from the opinions of another group of students. They did not find the presence of the SFU site distracting, even though they could see it on the split screen.
The student teachers and faculty found it rewarding to participate in the project and to ask questions of both students and teachers. Since the teacher in Burnaby was an SFU professor teaching in the Burnaby high school for his sabbatical year, the project also provided a way for faculty members to see their colleague in action in his classroom.
A highly desirable component of any teaching-learning process is interaction between teacher and students and among students themselves. Currently, distance education lessons are predominantly delivered through print material as one-way video broadcasts with a return path via telephone or through electronic mail for questions and feedback. Although telephone call-ins from students at remote sites is better than no teacher-student interaction, the number of students who can give feedback or ask questions during a class is restricted, unless a discussion format is used similar to that of the Private Universe Project. Unless electronic mail is the medium used in traditional distance education coursework, there is typically no convenient way for students to send questions to the instructor, to share ideas among themselves after the scheduled broadcast time has ended, or to gain access to other relevant information. Furthermore, any follow-up learning activities allowing students to work collaboratively are difficult to manage in the conventional distance education format. What is needed are strategies and designs that allow for interactive communication and learning.
In examining the various pedagogical styles of interactive television conferences, we have raised a broader set of issues having to do with the way we view teaching and learning in our society. Conventional pedagogy has it that “Teaching is telling, knowledge is facts, and learning is recall” (Cohen, cited in Christensen, Garvin, & Sweet, 1991, p. xii). In conventional pedagogy, knowledge of the subject is what matters. Little attention is paid in some circles to how students learn through interacting with others, at least as a means of expressing what they currently know and understand in order to establish a purpose for building further knowledge and understanding. The common understanding of teaching is one in which a monologue is the principal method of transferring information (Christensen, Garvin, & Sweet, 1991) rather than the dialogical approach that we believe is most effective in interactive television conferences.
The nature of interactive television technology invites educators to think about teaching and learning in a different manner. This alternative view of teaching and learning has been called various names: discussion-based teaching, self-directed learning, humanistic education, and active learning, among others. In each case the main assumption is that students must be actively involved in learning processes. Although lecturing can be as engaging as any other method of teaching in a conventional classroom, we have found the most effective uses of interactive television to be those designed to sustain the interaction of participants in dialogue. Generally, this view of pedagogy suggests that “Teaching is enabling, knowledge is understanding and learning is the active construction of subject matter” (Christensen, Garvin, & Sweet, 1991, xii). When teaching becomes an exchange in which both students and teacher learn from each other, the general strategy shifts from dictation and recitation to creating environments where students engage in discourse.
We believe that interactive television supports learning in a number of different social contexts and types of interaction, from the “summit” style of the Gorbachev conference to the more active dialogue in the “Who Killed Roger Rabbit” conference or the “Power Futures Student Forum.” Yet, creating interactive television conferences that support meaningful interaction can be difficult and complex. For the teacher or moderator, the task requires focused concentration in order to move dialogue smoothly, perhaps even more than it does in the normal classroom situation. In loosely structured conferences, it can be very difficult to follow even the visual information and interaction portrayed on four quadrants of a single television screen, let alone on four separate monitors. Local moderators alleviate some of the difficulty by introducing participants at remote sites and providing visual cues to direct attention to upcoming speakers. Moderation in the more complex interactive television conferences is most effective when participants’ attention is focused and directed through a well-developed relationship between the central moderator and local facilitators, as was the case in the Interactive Ingenuity conference. Finally, we have found a central moderator is most effective when he or she is removed physically from all other sites and as presented full-screen to participants so that all moderation is conducted through the medium.
Teaching for interaction requires spontaneity and risk on the part of teachers and students alike. Moderators must be deliberate in inviting participants to interrupt speakers to ensure dialogue rather than monologue. The “Excel” conference represented an important step in shifting from monologue to dialogue through such a deliberate request. Further, we would argue that effective interaction among students requires the teacher or moderator to relinquish some control over the dialogue, as we illustrated with the “Who Killed Roger Rabbit” conference. One can relinquish too much control, however; the awkward pauses that occur in the course of normal dialogue seem to be magnified considerably on interactive television. The Power Futures Student Forum was particularly useful to us in seeing the variety of ways the moderator can spontaneously move in and out of the dialogue. At times it is useful to capitalize on regional differences to encourage disparate points of view among the participants, whereas at other times it is useful to encourage tolerance and cooperation among participants with differing opinions and needs in order that they work collaboratively in negotiating solutions to a problem.
Although we have not dealt extensively in this article with the technical decisions in interactive television conferences, they are crucial in facilitating dialogue. We have found that the type and position of microphones is an important consideration. In situations that require local consultation among students working in cooperative groups, a desk microphone seems to work best. In situations that require a “Donahue-style” of moderation, a hand-held microphone is effective in directing the attention of participants in remote sites to the various speakers. We have also found that the camera work is crucial in sustaining interaction among participants. Here, there is a need for balance between providing a sufficient visual context of the participating sites and zooming in on individual speakers so they do not appear at remote sites as small indistinguishable faces in a sea of heads. We have found that zooming in also provides a visual cue that serves to direct the attention of participants to the person who will be speaking next.
Finally, we would be remiss if we failed to acknowledge that interactive television technology is being developed within particular social, political, and economic contexts. For most practitioners, the task of teaching is a highly personal process. The use of interactive television to enhance teacher education processes challenges the longstanding norms of isolation in teachers’ classrooms. Exposing one’s teaching to colleagues and other professionals via interactive television can be a challenging endeavour. It is important that we recognize the risk involved and provide appropriate protocols that make the sharing of teaching through interactive television safe and constructive.
We are optimistic that interactive television will eventually provide easily accessible and affordable means of connecting classrooms with a faculty of education, promising to bring closer together educational theory, research, and practice. We offer this preliminary inventory of “pedagogical considerations” for interactive television to those who have similar concerns and interests in enhancing either general uses of distance education or specific developments in such areas as teacher education.
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the National Association for Research in Science Teaching, San Francisco, 1995. We gratefully acknowledge the support of BC Tel, especially John Dunn who joined our research meetings and helped to facilitate several of the interactive television conferences described in this paper. This research was funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Allan MacKinnon
Faculty of Education
Simon Fraser University
Burnaby, B.C. V5A 1S6
Canada
(604) 291-3432
(604) 291-3203 (Fax)
amackinn@sfu.ca (e-mail)
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1. We acknowledge the contribution and collaboration of Burnaby School District, Science World B.C., and B.C. Tel in their leadership in developing and experimenting with the technologies required for interactive television conferencing. We are especially grateful to John Dunn, "Alternative Communications Specialist" in the Education Department of BC Tel, for his assistance and insight during our research meetings.
2. Simon Fraser University is located at the top of Burnaby Mountain. Cariboo Hill Secondary School is at the base of the mountain, about three miles from SFU. The "Cariboo Connection" utilized a line-of-site microwave broadcast between the school and the university.
3. Throughout this paper we identify speakers either as moderator or as participants by their location. For our purposes, this helps to show the reader the nature of the interactive television conference from which excerpts of dialogue have been taken. This format also allows us to maintain the anonymity of the participants in these conferences.
4. We name this style of moderation after a television show called "Donahue," in which the host of the program moderates discussion between panelists and members of the audience by walking up and down aisles with a hand-held microphone. The "joint-Donahue" style of moderation refers to the same kind of arrangement, with a host or hostess at each site of an interactive television conference.
Allan MacKinnon is currently Assistant Professor at Simon Fraser University, where he teaches courses in science education. His research interests have been primarily in the area of teacher education, generally and science teacher development, in particular.
Bridget Walshe is a graduate student in education at Simon Fraser University. She has developed science curriculum materials for the Association for Promotion and Advancement of Science Education, some of which have been specifically designed for use with interactive television.
Michael Cummings is a graduate student in education at Simon Fraser University. His interests lie in the areas of music and science education. He is also a sessional instructor at SFU in courses on “Designs for Learning: Natural Sciences” for elementary school teachers.
Ursula Velonis is a graduate student in education at Simon Fraser University. Her interests lie in the area of “holistic education,” notably the work of Rudolph Steiner.