DLCUBA Workshop

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Context for Content

• M. Cristina Pattuelli
• School of Information Library Science
• University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• June 15, 2006

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Overview

• DocSouth user studies and their implications for
  the design of
• a collection of Learning Objects (LOs) and
• an ontology for the LOs collection

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Background

• Reexamining priorities for DocSouth
• Reengineering resources
• Customization by community (Lynch)
• A usability study conducted in 2003 involving
  educators at various levels indicated a clear
  need to make the collections more accessible for
  use in the classroom

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if we build it, they will come
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if we build it, they will may not come
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if we build it, they will may not come

• Understand what problems we are solving before
  applying a solution
• Understand teachers information seeking
  processes
• Understanding their instructional practices
• Understand the context of their work environment
• Drive design decisions from there

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Research Plan
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Three Dimensions of Context of Use

• Pedagogical
• Institutional
• Individual

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Pedagogical

• Today learning theories on history teaching
• Developing students historical thinking skills
• Construct meaning through the use of primary
  sources rather than listening to lectures
  (inquiry-based learning)
• Need to engage students in dynamic teaching
  activities

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Pedagogical

• Compare and contrast
• (e.g., Era 5, Standard 2B (5-12) of the National
  Standards for History Compare and contrast
  womens homefront and battlefront roles in the
  Union and the Confederacy)
• Personal and familial perspectives
• (role that biographies and personal narratives
  have in stimulating students interest in history
  by relating content from the past to their lives)
• Use of visuals
• Never walk into the classroom without a picture
  to move students outside of their own time and
  place (Madison)

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Pedagogical

• Lesson plans broken down by grade level were less
  important than subject or topical access to a
  collection
• Teachers asserted that they knew what their
  students were capable of handling. No educational
  materials are used off the shelf
• Instead, teachers customize whatever they find
  for the educational needs of their students

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Institutional

• Curricular standards
• Conflicting with school-based performance award
  programs
• i.e., end-of-year testing

NC Standard Course Of Study
National Center for History in the Schools (NCHS)
National Standards for History
National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS)
Curriculum Standards for Social Studies
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Context vs. Re-use

• Instructional contextualization vs. reusability
• If tied to the standards, it may become more
  difficult to reuse the materials outside the
  educational context originally envisioned

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Individual

• Time constraints
• Limited preparation time
• Materials must be customized for each individual
  class
• Too many large collections to sift through
• Limited class time
• Lengthy digitized texts

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Individual

• Search process
• Difficult to locate relevant materials
• long lists of unrelated documents (difficult to
  assess relevance for the task, difficult to
  relate them in a meaningful way) 17th Century
  Jamestown Slavery versus 19th Century Civil War
  Slavery
• Difficulty in constructing search queries
• No way of knowing if the resources they need are
  available in a particular digital library
• Limitations of subject access

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Design of the LOs

• media type and format photographs, images,
  audio (pedagogically effective)
• subject matter coverage curricular standards
  guidelines
• density of content small objects (key segments
  excerpts, images)

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Design of the LOs

• complexity of structure lightweight, from
  discrete free standings units of content (e.g.,
  excerpts of text documents or individual images)
  to more aggregated types of contents (e.g.,
  collections of images associated with a specific
  historical event)
• pedagogical requirements No learning objectives
  or pedagogical properties - Not prescriptive, but
  highly customizable

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Definition of DocSouth LO

• DocSouth learning objects reflects the
  interpretation offered by Polsani (2003)
• A Learning Object is an independent and
  self-standing unit of learning content that is
  predisposed to be reused in multiple
  instructional contexts.

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(No Transcript)
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Design of the Ontology

• ? curriculum standards as one of the main
  sources for knowledge acquisition
• e.g., upper-level ontology concepts from strands
  of themes from the standards
• Time, Continuity, and Change People, Places, and
  Environment Individual Development and Identity
  Individuals, Groups, and Institutions, etc.

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Design of the Ontology

• Semantic descriptions are a way to contextualize
  the objects
• ? by modeling relationships that allow
  aggregation by
• Time (prior-to/after)
• Space
• Piedmont part-of North Carolina
• Personal/familial relationships
  (brother-of,owner-of)

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Users Comment on Evaluation Formfrom 2005
DocSouth Summer Institute
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Design of the Ontology

• ? conceptual roadmap displayed to support the
  information seeking process (save the time of
  the teacher)
• query formulation/refinement (recognize better
  than come up with a term, Kwasnik)
• overview of the coverage and/or scope of the
  collection (what is and what is not there)
• suggest ideas for use of the objects in the
  classroom (e.g., unforeseen relationships )

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Design of the Ontology
? enhance the search functionality
(concept-based search instead of keyword
matching)
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Reminiscences of My Life in Camp with the 33d
United States Colored Troops Late 1st S. C.
VolunteersTaylor, Susie King, b. 1848
U.S.A.
South Carolina
War
Georgia
Narrative
Civil War
Writer
Army
Fulton County
Woman
Slavery
Regiment
Union
Slave
Freed Slave
Confederate
partOf
African American
Soldier
Colored
Black
Black soldiers in the Civil War
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Thank you Questions?