Previous Course Info:
Course Announcement – Spring Semester 2009
On-Line Learning and Communication Technologies
Instructor: Carolyn Penstein Rose
(LTI-HCII, cprose@cs.cmu.edu)
Course
Number: 05-899
Time: MW 10-30-11:50 (Location TBA)
Units: 12
Overview: Collaborative technologies featured in
the current day social web offer a snapshop vision of the next generation
of learning opportunities.
Environments such as Second Life, the Knowledge Forum, Wikipedia, and
the Virtual Math Teams environment offer a wide range of formal and informal
learning opportunities to individuals and groups worldwide. These social
web technologies hold the potential to greatly increase opportunities
for fostering advancement of underserved populations and leveraging the
large amount of out-of-school time that school age kids have for their intellectual
and social development. The field of Computer Supported Collaborative
Learning has as one of its foundational goals to work towards understanding
the pedagogical and technological features that make on-line education in
general, and collaborative learning in particular, effective. The purpose
of this class is to expose students to the foundational theoretical, technological,
and methodological issues underlying previous work in on-line learning,
to introduce students to the wide range of current on-line environments
for formal and informal interaction and learning on-line, and to explore
current research in improving the quality of experiences these environments
have to offer. The course is oriented around a hands-on project of the student's
own choosing and design that will offer the opportunity to gain experience
with available tool kits and work towards making their own contribution
to what the modern day web has to offer for on-line learning.
