Better Learning through Electronics

How to Teach the Young?
Lynne Anderson-Inman, a UO associate professor of education, saw the glimmerings of a new answer to this oldest question in education during the early years of the personal computer's rocketing climb in popularity. By 1987 she was among a handful of pioneers researching how best to apply computers in education. Today, as director of the University of Oregon's Center for Electronic Studying (CES), Anderson-Inman continues to chart the territory and explore the uncharted regions of what she calls "the intersection of technology and literacy."
"Computers have created possibilities for learning that didn't exist before," she says. "At CES we're designing new strategies for learning from text, then testing and refining them. The knowledge we gain in these projects is helping us promote a kind of learning unlike anything we've seen previously."
The introduction of the portable laptop computer greatly expanded the usefulness of computers in education. Anderson-Inman seized on this innovation, launching a number of pilot studies using the laptop. The results: students--in local middle schools and high schools as well as at Lane Community College and the UO--showed impressive academic improvement after learning study skills such as outlining and note taking on laptops.
"For some of these students, the experience has been life changing," Anderson-Inman says. "Several that were on the verge of dropping out of high school are now working on college degrees."
In another pilot project, designed for students with learning disabilities, hearing impairment, or upper-body orthopedic impairment, a tutor accompanied each student to class to help with note taking and lecture comprehension. Student and tutor were equipped with laptops linked by infrared signals so that both of their notes appeared side-by-side on each computer screen. The tutor would model good note taking skills as well as make suggestions to the student and answer questions immediately through an on-screen chat box.

Then Came the Web

Even as Anderson-Inman was developing these laptop uses, another electronic technology was being born: the World Wide Web.
"The potential of the Web to totally change education is phenomenal," she says.
CES will soon be developing interactive Web pages to present the ideas and teach the skills that are the core of the laptop projects.
In another effort, the ElectroText project, CES researchers are enhancing reading materials with the creation of "supported text" for at-risk middle schoolers. The idea is that by using one of the Web's most powerful features, hypertext, students can click on a word or phrase they don't understand and get immediate access to something that will help. That something might be a glossary-type definition, a pronunciation, an explanation, a picture, or even a three-dimensional simulation.

Taking the next step

"As we began understanding the enormous value of supported text, we soon conceived of enhancing the text even more extensively," Anderson-Inman explains.
Thus was born the Anza Multimedia Project, a web-accessible group of interrelated and cross-linked documents on the Anza expeditions northward from Mexico to northern California in the late eighteenth century.
As with ElectroText, hypertext is the key. But instead of it being a single document enhanced with supported text, Anderson-Inman envisions it as a whole library of interconnected documents, supported by links to thousands of hypertext resources designed to promote extended interactive studying.
"In this kind of an elegant reading environment, learning is more a search for knowledge than an ingestion of predigested facts," Anderson-Inman notes.
"Our basic aim," she says, "is to stay on top of the technology and to help students use it to stay on top of their studies."

Back to INQUIRY, Spring 1997