Main Ideas
The article suggests that by restructuring schools to become environments where knowledge-building communities exist and help each other in the learning process, education in America can improve. CSILE work by reversing the present system of education in which teachers lecture, students respond, and teachers evaluate and change it to a system where students constantly work together to compile data and constantly strive to reach an understanding about a concept. Each member of the knowledge-building community is responsible to input their own data to the whole community. Students can use graphics, software simulations, music, drawings, and innumerable other methods to communicate their ideas to their peers. This can be done in whatever manner that each individual child is comfortable. Each studentís communications are saved on a data base where other students have the ability to view their peersí thoughts on specific topics. Through peer evaluation, students can interact with each other in non-threatening and non-competitive ways to gain better understanding on a topic. Thus, CSILE allows students to work together to create specific knowledge for their community.
Gut Reaction
This article discussed the need in Americaís education system to implement a teaching style that would increase student participation in learning. Following the constructivist paradigm, the writers argue that the implementation of computer supported intentional learning environments (CSILE) have proven to be effective means by which students can facilitate and create their own learning experiences. With the CSILE method, all students must have access to computers. These computers can be networked via software or via the Internet to allow each student to communicate their ideas and views on topics to their classmates. This effectively eliminates the teacher as the only giver of knowledge in a classroom and makes the students themselves contributors to their own knowledge about particular subjects. As the article mentions, CSILE are able to increase the amount of intentional learning in which a student involves himself/herself by restructuring schools to become "knowledge-building communities." The idea of a school as a knowledge-building community intrigues me because with the passage of each year, students who enter a certain grade level should understand more concepts than the students in that grade level the previous year. This is because students would leave behind for their underclassmen information about concepts that they gained throughout the year. Thus, students would receive information rather than "dig it out" for themselves, and this would open up more time for the concepts to be explored in greater depth or for new concepts to be introduced.
For CSILE to enjoy success in American classrooms, teachers would have to be willing to accept the idea that the product of learning is knowledge rather than performance on current evaluative techniques like group reports or standardized tests. Students would also have to accept much more responsibility for their own education than they do now. For the good of the group, students would have to keep up with their assignments and learn the material they are supposed to learn. Otherwise, the group as a whole would suffer. Another implication for schooling in general would be that the learning process would become much more like it is in laboratories where careful observations are made, hypotheses about the observations are set forth, and experimentation based on the hypotheses helps draw out relevant information concerning the initial observation. Students, in effect, would become problem solving scientists, and teachers would become coaches that help guide them in the right directions. Because of the amount of reading and writing that is involved with the use of CSILE, students would become more effective communicators, and they would be able to use different media to do this. So, CSILE has many positive implications for both teachers and students.
Questions