A Personal History of Educational Software Design
The thread that ties together my work prior to graduate school with my current research interests is a focus on the process of design -- particularly the design of technology-rich learning environments. This page outlines my design and development work over four distinct time periods:
- prior to graduate school, when I worked at Dartmouth Medical School as a programmer;
- graduate school at Northwestern;
- my post-graduate work at Berkeley;
- and my current work with Inquirium.
Dartmouth Era (1988-1993)
At Dartmouth Medical School, I helped build software to support undergraduate, medical student, and patient education. Most of this was built using HyperCard, which was fairly new; in fact, one of my first responsibilities at Dartmouth was to explore a beta version of HyperCard and document what it could do. We used a combination of HyperCard and C to develop a number of applications, including a prototype interactive medical record and a series of videodisc-based shared decision-making programs (description here) that allowed patients facing elective procedures to learn more about the risks and benefits, particularly in terms of quality of life, of the available options. Along the way, I contributed a couple of XCMDs to the Dartmouth XCMD collection and developed a generic glossary utility for use with HyperCard.
More on the shared decision-making programs:
Kasper, J. F., Mulley, A. G., Jr., & Wennberg, J. E. (1992). Developing shared decision-making programs to improve the quality of health care. QRB Qual Rev Bull, 18(6), 183-190.
Henderson, J., Baumgartner, E., Chesnut, S., Driscoll, B., Henderson, A., & Hurd, L. (1992). Camera informatica: Producing interactive media programs for patients facing difficult choices. Camera Obscura, 29, 233-240.
Lyon, H. C., Henderson, J. V., Beck, J. R., Mulley, A. G., Barry, M. J., Fowler, F. J., Wennberg, C. N., & Wennberg, J. E. (1989). A multipurpose interactive videodisc with ethical, legal, medical, educational, and research implications: The Informed Patient Decision-Making Procedure. Proceedings of the 13th Annual Symposium on Computer Applications in Medical Care (pp. 1043-1045). Washington, DC: Computer Society of the IEEE.
In addition to DMS work, I served on the advisory board for Sense of Place, a student-run environmental journal at Dartmouth. In 1990, when SoP began, its staff made a concerted effort to deliver the journal to the Dartmouth community in an environmentally friendly manner -- at the time, this meant a mass email through Dartmouth's proprietary email system, BlitzMail. I helped SoP move from producing a purely text-based journal to delivering a media-based, hyperlinked document using HyperCard (this was three years before the Web came along).
Northwestern Era (1993-1998)
At Northwestern, my graduate work centered on understanding underlying issues of teaching, learning, and cognition; software development was a secondary concern and was tightly coupled to particular research efforts.
I built the weather station design tool as a contribution to the Learning through Collaborative Visualization project, a large testbed project that explored how high-bandwidth network connectivity and customized software support could help high school students engage in science inquiry. The weather station design tool allowed students to create customized weather station symbols in a drawing program. Students used these symbols to represent their predictions or explanations for specific weather patterns.
The use of the weather station tool is described in the following paper.
Fishman, B. J., & D'Amico, L. M. (1994). Which way will the wind blow? Networked computer tools for studying the weather. In T. Ottmann & I. Tomek (Eds.), Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia, 1994: Proceedings of Ed-Media '94 (pp. 209-216). Charlottesville, VA: AACE.
I also designed a multimedia program to document and share data about teaching practice. Materials World Interactive was designed to be a companion CD-ROM for the Materials World Modules, a set of materials-science based design projects that were targeted for use in high school science classrooms. MWI drew on my dissertation research examining teachers' use of the modules, and was designed to support teachers who wanted to use design-based materials like MWM. It included video-based examples of classroom practice, including interviews of teachers discussing their practice, as well as background information about the pedagogical approach of the modules.
In addition to research-related development, I capped a long arc of HyperCard development by creating ABE, an improved script editor for HyperCard. ABE brought features that were standard in many other source code editing environments -- including function-based navigation via a popup menu, syntax coloring, and contextual help -- to HyperCard. ABE was released commercially through Royal Software.
Berkeley Era (1998-2001)
My postdoc at Berkeley has focused on the use of visualization and modeling tools to support student science learning, particular within web-based environments. This has led me to focus, from a technological perspective, on cross-platform development and web-based applications.
The causal mapping tool was designed to support student reasoning about causal systems, such as the network of factors that affect water quality. This applet was designed from the ground up to function within a cross-platform, browser-based environment, and has been incorporated into a variety of projects as part of the Web-based Integrated Science Environment (WISE).
In order to support network-based storage within the framework WISE, the causal mapping applet stores and retrieves student work from a central database server. This approach fits with the WISE model of allowing students to engage in learning from any net-enabled computer, without having to worry about storing files locally.
The causal mapping tool has since been adopted by Intel's Innovation in Education website and renamed Seeing Reason.
Figure shows a selected relation (in yellow) within a larger model of water quality. Text that briefly describes that relationship appears on the status line below the toolbar. More information about the causal mapping tool can be found here.
To help students make sense of environmental data, particularly a series of water quality tests within a local watershed, I built a customized data visualization applet that allows students to view geographically- and time-based data in different ways.
Figure shows sample data from Rocky Creek, a scenario that is part of a WISE project called Drink or Swim. Students can also view the data as a graph and compare different tests or compare one test over time. More information about the data visualization tool can be found here.
Inquirium (2001-)
One of the challenges facing research in the learning sciences is how we can move innovations from small, hothouse settings to widespread use. Inquirium was founded in part to explore ways to better support this migration process for innovative technology. Our goal is to work with researchers, teachers, and scientists to design and develop robust inquiry support tools and learning environments that can be used in a variety of settings.
For me, working for Inquirium providing a natural extension of my research interests in the process of design. In addition to client-based work, I have focused on created a core technical infrastructure that will allow Inquirium to build and support a variety of inquiry support tools fairly rapidly. I am also exploring the design of tools to support research using digital media, particularly digital video.
Examples of the work we do at Inquirium can be seen on our Portfolio pages.