Assessing the Costs and Benefits of Telelearning: A Case Study ...

Appendix A: Technology Background: WebCSILE
Madeleine Butscheler
General Notes on CSILE & WebSCILE Functions
This section includes: descriptions of functions, developer, and pedagogical
foundations; historical background; pedagogical evolutions; and ascribed benefits.
Descriptions of Functions, Developer, & Pedagogical Foundations. CSILE
software provides a communal database for asynchronous student and teacher exchanges.
Various "note" formats and supports are designed to enhance the potential of this
communal database for collaborative knowledge-building.
Use of the software commonly takes the form of teachers creating topics, themes,
or principles with students. These are entered into the database as the starting point for a
collaborative research project. Students can then create a new note, add to an entry, build
on, or start a new discussion. The software accommodates both text and graphics. On
the network, students using search and browse facilities are able to read and comment on
each other’s ideas. Authors are notified when comments have been made. They also
receive notification of changes to the database.
The software developers have identified the concept of creating, "Knowledge-
Building Communities", as pivotal to developing and enhancing the software. They
emphasize the significance of a non-competitive research model that creates an
environment in which groups both contribute their knowledge to a communal database
and pursue lines of inquiry through discussion notes or messages. The intention to create
a knowledge building community is reflected in the organization of notes. In addition to
being linked to a topic or theme, the student labels the note in terms of, "Thinking Type",
which includes several choices such as, "New Information", "Problem, I Need To
Understand", "My Theory", "What We Have Learned", and "Comments".
The software has been enhanced to allow for branching. This means students can
attach subdiscussions to "I Need to Understand" points in a main discussion. The
enhancement is intended to encourage follow ups to problems, questions, or elements,
which may have been raised, but not considered. For ease in reading and drafting
purposes, in addition to the full screen display, the user can opt for the "split screen"
view. This divides the screen in half with the reader being able to opt to view the notes in
the upper or lower screens.
Viewers can also opt to see the notes by "Thread", "Author", or "Date" and can
retrieve them by specifying the name of an author, a note topic, a note keyword, a
thinking type and several other variables. There are also security features that may be
attached requiring authorization to view entries.
A "Knowledge Map" utility has recently been created to allow teachers and
students to assess what research has been gathered, where there are gaps, and what
contributions the groups have made to their Knowledge-Building community. This
utility displays all the notes, allowing students to adjust the position of their notes and
thereby consider the relationship of information as the Map is being built. The software
authors have introduced a range of shapes to represent different kinds of notes and
colored lines to depict differing relationships among notes. This utility also permits
highlighting groups of notes for pattern identification and to keep up to date.
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