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This review has been accessed times since January 2, 2005

Holliman, Richard and Eileen Scanlon (2004). Mediating Science Learning through Information and Communications Techology. London and New York: Routledge Falmer Press.

Pp. xi + 211
$129.95 (hardback) $39.95 (paperback) ISBN 0-415-32832-2

Reviewed by John Rothfork
Northern Arizona University

January 2, 2005

The first thing to say is that the book is overpriced. Only a university library would pay $130 for this short collection. The book is one of two that provides readings for students in a course on “Contemporary Issues in Science Learning” <http://www3.open.ac.uk/courses/bin/p12.dll?C01SEH806>. This class is part of the curriculum required to earn a MSc degree at Britain’s Open University (p. xi); see the program description at <http://www3.open.ac.uk/courses/bin/p12.dll?Q01F12>. As a textbook, I give it a “B” grade. Several essays are helpful; a few are formulaic in citing study and after study that no one but the author is likely to read. I wonder what students learn from this? They do not learn how to better teach science and I doubt that they access online journals to read the works that the author cites. I fear that some will learn how to imitate such author-centered research pieces that mostly convince us that the author read a lot of journal articles. Such annotated bibliography pieces fail to be helpful because the author is typically more concerned to impress an editor or to live up to professional standards than to offer useful advice to classroom teachers.

Whoever is responsible for the book design at Routledge or at the Open University deserves a failing grade. The book is about Internet resources. It is used, for the most part, as a text for a class taught over the Internet. Why, then, does it avoid giving URLs for the Internet resources it discusses? I understand the concern about ephemeral Web sites, but most of the sites I looked up were government or university sites that are as stable as anything to be found on the Net. Moreover, the discussion of nearly all the examples in the book is necessarily tied to the Web sites that offer the resources. Doesn’t a book like this provide a creative publisher with the perfect opportunity to offer a parallel online edition with hyperlinks or to offer a Web site to support the text? The point of several essays is to acquaint teachers with science resources on the Internet, but the publisher and book designer were apparently too hidebound to make the book truly useful. The situation is almost medieval. Teachers read descriptions of science resources on the Internet but are never invited to go look at them! The tacit message of the book seems to be that the Internet is fine for kids but teachers and graduate students should read serious books that look like books. The author of one of the essays (see #3 below), Jerry Wellington, is a coauthor of Teaching and Learning with Multimedia (1997), which Routledge published as both a paperback and an MS Reader ebook <http://www.ebookstore.tandf.co.uk/html/moreinfo.asp?bookid=5368 85642>. So, we know that Routledge publishes parallel editions as both print media and ebooks. Is it the stodgy conventions of professional education research that dictated the traditional form of Mediating Science, which limits it to being just another collection of academic essays rarely picked from a library shelf?

Although the focus is on science education, the interests of the authors in educational methods and in Internet resources make the essays familiar material for teachers in almost any discipline. In addition to the obvious unities provided by the topics of science education and Internet resources for science education, the work is committed to a subtextual thesis, which might be described as a teacher centered understanding of education. Almost all the essays are addressed to teachers in the expectation of helping them develop curricula, participate in evaluation, and take ownership of every area of the science classes they teach. Despite efforts to mandate and test for uniform standards, American teachers will no doubt think this is obvious. Britain has a National Curriculum <http://www.nc.uk.net/about/values_aims_purposes.html>. Many will be quick to point out that the National Curriculum only sets standards, methods, and goals. It does not specify content or what is taught. See, for example, the “ICT Statutory Requirements” for Science at the National Curriculum in Action Web Site <http://www.ncaction.org.uk/subjects/science/ict-reqs.htm>. The editors and authors of Mediating Science take a distinctive stand in this context; one that focuses on the classroom teacher as curriculum developer for science classes using, in part, online resources accessed through the Internet.

The text comprises ten essays briefly described below.

1. Using ICT [Information and Communications Technology] to teach and learn science

Internet resources are less needed to teach new facts than to explain connections among facts and “previously held ideas” (p. 11). “‘Pivotal cases’ […] prompt students to reorganize their ideas in order to explain challenging phenomena” (p. 12). An example of using case study methods is provided by an NSF project at UC-Berkeley called WISE (The Web-based Inquiry Science Environment <http://wise.berkeley.edu/>. WISE offers a free, on-line science learning environment for students in grades 4-12. Students learn about scientific cases and arguments by designing, debating, and critiquing solutions with other students on the Web. After studying and discussing case data, “the WISE inquiry map guides students” in their effort to explain it (pp. 14-15). The WISE site also gives teachers or “new designers a head start in creating” their own pivotal cases.

The NSF also funded The Center for Innovative Learning Technologies (CILT) <http://www.cilt.org/>, which focuses on “scaffolded knowledge integration,” a fancy term that is concerned with how to get students from what they know to what we want them to know. Framework thinking is interested in making science accessible and in making the steps of thinking and analysis visible. It is also interested in collaborative projects, peer discussion, and autonomous learning (p. 16).

Another UC-Berkeley project, Thinker Tools <http://thinkertools.soe.berkeley.edu/>, offers materials and methods to support analysis that leads to an understanding of the underlying and causal principles illustrated by experimental data. That data might come from a simulated experiment offered by MIT’s StarLogo <http://education.mit.edu/starlogo>, which offers a modeling environment to study such complex and dynamic phenomena as bird flocks, traffic jams, ant colonies, and market economies (p. 18).

At the University of Michigan, Kids as Global Scientists <http://www.onesky.umich.edu/kgs01.html> assumes that the best way to learn science is to do science in discourse communities that resemble those of actual research science. Consequently, the site offers a kid-scale research community to study weather using observation, experiments, Internet data, and email.

At the secondary level, Constructing Physics Understanding “is aimed at creating laboratory and computer-based materials” for a high school class <http://cpuproject.sdsu.edu/>. The American Virtual High School <http://www.govhs.org/website.nsf> offers the rest of the secondary curricula by relying on a cooperative arrangement in which a secondary teacher at a traditional school volunteers to develop and teach an online course for VHS, which earns her school 25 seats in VHS classes. Theoretically, this might allow some students to enroll in esoteric or advanced courses unavailable at their traditional school. It doesn’t appear that VHS has grown to this level yet.

Such Internet projects as these “support far more customization” of traditional science classes to allow, for example, more sophisticated, “real science” study of “local lakes, current weather conditions, new science standards or new technologies” (p. 22). Internet material is often abstract enough to permit local customization to allow teachers to tailor material for their individual classroom needs: online “learning environments support the design of multiple projects, each tailored to a specific topic” (p. 24).

2. Rethinking the teaching of science

The author of this essay, Diana Laurillard, is the head of the e-Learning Strategy Unit for Britain’s Department of Education <http://www.des.gov.uk/>. Her essay features a half-dozen flow charts with as many as 16 arrows indicating different actions. The charts are too abstract to easily connect with specific classroom activities. Her thesis is obvious: teachers should adopt “technology with a clear sense of what we want to achieve for learners” (p. 26). She concludes that “interactive learning methods enable the student to do science,” and, if we ignore the government flow charts and education jargon, the essay is helpful in introducing the use of simulations, virtual environments, microworlds, and what she calls “tutorial programs” using computer aided instruction. I guess the editors couldn’t admonish the government official to drop the charts and her abstract concerns to help classroom teachers find, choose, and work with Internet resources to develop curricula (p. 49). I found the same problem at Laurillard’s government Web site (identified above). It promises “Curriculum Online” and I did find buried bits and pieces that took seven or eight clicks to uncover. Laurillard alludes to an interesting commercial resource that resulted from Seymour Papert’s work, which was inspired by his association with Jean Piaget. LCSI <http://www.microworlds.com/> provides software to allow students to build “their own runnable systems” in contrast to a simulation where they only control “a system that someone else” built (p. 46).

3. Using ICT in teaching and learning science

This is a well written piece that will help teachers develop science curricula. The author, Jerry Wellington, does a good job to make implicit values explicit. For example, he warns that “simulations give pupils the impression that variables in a physical process can be easily, equally and independently controlled.” The model can be controlled; nature is rarely so cooperative. Jerry has an acute awareness for rhetoric, warning that “every simulation is based on a certain model of reality” that is “hidden from the user” so that students “are neither encouraged nor able to question its validity” (p. 58). Finally, he warns teachers that Internet resources can twice distort the attempt to understand data because a simulation “uses a computer model of a scientific model or scientific theory, which itself is an idealization of reality” (p. 59). The author introduces us to the National Grid for Learning <http://www.ngfl.gov.uk/>, a British government portal for education. This includes the ScI-Journal that allows students to be involved in an appropriate scale science research journal community <http://www.sci-journal.org/> (p. 71). There is also a Russian edition translated into English, which provides a window to see science education projects there.

4. Designing and evaluating science teaching sequences

This is a rather unexpected essay that advocates a pragmatist understanding of learning to suggest that the role and action of the instructor is at least as important for learning as anything to be found on the Internet. It argues for a recognition of curricula as praxis (teacher centered) against those who think of curricula as a static or deliverable product developed by curriculum and instruction, and instructional technology specialists who hope to “teacher proof” their wares. This essay is all the more unexpected because Britain’s National Curriculum <http://www.nc.uk.net/index.html> is sometimes cited as an illustration of the effort to have “experts” design and produce curricula outside the classroom and even outside the school <http://www.infed.org/biblio/b-curric.htm>. Internet resources in general and learning objects in particular (see #5) suggest that the argument over who designs and produces the curricula need not be an “either or” choice.

The authors, John Leach and Phil Scott, say that in educational research, “the role of the teacher, as planned by the researchers at the design stage [in theory], and the role adopted as teaching progresses [praxis], should both be addressed explicitly in any methodological account” (p. 84). Not surprisingly, the authors find few such studies. When researchers or curriculum developers ignore the indispensable agency of the teacher in the learning process they produce information with no context. Instead of instruction, we have library information. Instead of students, we have readers. The subtext for most of the essays in the collection calls for classroom teachers to claim every area of instruction as their concern and responsibility from curriculum development to assessment.

The authors view science instruction as, in part, gaining a facility in the discourse community of science. Consequently, they are not impressed with science instruction “conceptualized in terms of activities, with no reference to the talk which surrounds them” (p. 88). Science is not simply puzzle solving. It is also a culture characterized by email, seminars, conferences, Web sites, and hundreds of journals. The authors alert teachers to the “differences between ‘real’ science, as carried out in various professional settings, and ‘school’ science” where the outcome is known and where the focus is on instruction instead of argument and theoretical explanation (p. 89).

5. Designing multimedia e-learning for science education

Tom Boyle echoes the concerns of Leach and Scott (#4) by asking who is responsible for the lesson plans and conduct of a class? Much of the hoopla surrounding ICT instruction casts the teacher in the role of a consumer who “selects a prefabricated multimedia learning environment” and passes it on to students by adopting the role of user consultant who knows the program but who had no hand in producing it (p. 116). In this way “support for learning rather than teaching becomes the focal issue” (p. 105). Especially in distance education, the instructor is admonished to become a facilitator. Boyle also talks about Papert’s work to create microworlds that kids can control so that learning becomes “an active constructive process” (p. 107). Extrapolating from that model, Boyle advocates building an Internet warehouse of learning objects so that teachers “will be able to retrieve” chunks or parts to plug into course lessons they develop (p. 114). The hope is to shift the emphasis from creating commercial “monolithic systems to creating repositories of learning objects” so that “users will no longer be locked into proprietary systems” they can facilitate but not alter or control (p. 112). Boyle directs us to the Learning Resource Center Project, but one must be affiliated with one of the 24 member Universitas 21 schools to access the material <http://www.lrc3.unsw.edu.au:8010/default.cfm>. Purdue hosts an open site <http://www.learning-objects.net/>, which illustrates that we are a long way from shopping through a catalog of software components that can be downloaded to easily assemble a custom course. You can find a list of emerging learning object repositories at <http://www.uwm.edu/Dept/CIE/AOP/LO_collections.html>. Boyle’s advice is for developers who should, he says, make discrete “chunks” that minimize dependence on other programs (p. 115). “We want learning objects that are not only cohesive, de-coupled and packaged, but also are pedagogically exciting” (p. 117).

6. Evaluation of ICT

Many of us groan at the mention of assessment feeling that our authority in the classroom is about to be interrupted while we meekly follow some bureaucrat’s notion of what we should be doing. Researchers often think of Institutional Review Boards (IRB) in a similar way, as obstacles to overcome on the way to doing a research project. Martin Oliver takes the interesting view of recognizing the rhetorical nature of assessment or IRB policy “as a political and social activity,” which is a polite way of saying that the contest is for institutional power and control (p. 123). He hopes to turn the tables on the presumed authority of objective studies and methods, and the tacit hierarchy in which administration is considered to be more important than instruction, by borrowing technical writing techniques to say that “few research studies appear to question who their audience might be” or to recognize that they are employed to give “an account written for a particular group” that, like every group, has implicit values and methods. Oliver doesn’t say that this is institutional propaganda and marketing, but the implication is obvious. We probably cannot use Oliver’s essay to confront assessment personnel, but his essay is very useful in suggesting methodological points that we could use to become more informed and interested in the process, and to feel less like we must relinquish control of our classes to simply follow administrative orders. He asks, “If evaluation enables action, whose actions will be supported? Whose agendas will be served?” (p. 134). He reminds us that “evaluation remains a contested practice, not a precisely definable skill to be acquired” (p. 136). The problem is that one must read enough of “their” literature to become informed enough to hold up “our” teacher end of the argument without becoming one of “them.”

7. Evaluating information and communications technology

Recognizing that few science teachers “have the skills required to carry out evaluations of ICT use and fewer still are aware of the range or scope of methodologies available to them,” this chapter offers a topical list of issues, such as:

• Authenticity to judge “how closely an evaluation captures the context of an existing course.”
• Exploration to ask if the study has “well-defined initial hypotheses or is […] tackling an open problem.”
• Scale to consider “the number of participants involved in the study” (pp. 141-2).

The subtext in this piece, co-authored by Martin Oliver, is to offer more ammunition to classroom teachers to constructively participate in assessment requirements without necessarily or immediately capitulating to passively do whatever the assessment office or government orders.

8. Extending access using ICT

This essay acquaints teachers with various ways that computer aided instruction can be adapted to overcome learning problems caused by physical and mental (e.g., dyslexia) handicaps. Martyn Cooper reminds developers not to do things that would prevent a user from making custom browser settings and to design Web pages that can be easily followed by screen-readers. The authority in this area is the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) <http://w3c.org/> and specifically the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) page <http://w3c.org/WAI/>. The principle guiding this essay is the recognition that “It is far easier and less costly to incorporate accessibility features at the beginning” of a project than to request “‘fixes’ once prototypes are in an advanced stage of development” (p. 165).

9. Redesigning practical work

Occasionally we run across news stories about a surgeon or radiologist using remote tools to treat patients and of course we know that scientists can remotely operate mechanisms such as the Mars Rovers <http://origin.mars5.jpl.nasa.gov/home/>. Internet resources can allow science students to remotely manipulate and “control traditional apparatus at a distance (as opposed to a graphic rendering of the apparatus)” (p. 171). The authors describe the PEARL (Practical Experimentation by Accessible Remote Learning) project, which allows students to use an electron microscope, to test digital circuits, and to examine printed circuit boards (p. 173) <http://iet.open.ac.uk/pp/m.cooper/PEARL/PEARL%20Project%20summa ry.htm>. These virtual laboratory experiences produced comparable educational results when compared with traditional undergraduate level lab experience. I have to smile at the PEARL Web site, which illustrates the puritanical and austere thread in the culture of science that is uninterested in frivolous things like document design, graphics, and usability. It reminds me of a conversation I had with a computer science graduate student years ago who told me that anyone who relied on MS Windows as an operating system shouldn’t be allowed to use a computer (or, apparently, to ask him questions)! Yet another UC-Berkeley agency, the Lawrence Hall of Science <http://www.lhs.berkeley.edu/>, provides related material at the Hands-On Universe <http://www.handsonuniverse.org/>.

10. ICT for science education: current prospects and trends

This is the fourth essay to stress that science instruction has “moved away from an acquisition or construction metaphor towards a culture or participation metaphor,” which implies that “students, like scientists” should participate “in a community where communication is enabled by ICT.” Eileen Scanlon says that “Much of the practice of science education is influenced by a view that what scientists do should be reflected for the students” (p. 191). The essay also ventures to make predictions about computers and computer aided science instruction. The predictions are obvious: computers will be increasingly important to:

• Interact with individual students.
• Offer simulations, models, and remote instruments.
• Access information.
• Allow students to communicate, consult, and network with peers, teachers, and scientists.
• Warehouse and retrieve learning objects.
• Assemble complex lessons using Internet resources.
• Develop and teach Web courses (pp. 189, 197).

Scanlon expects new teachers to have sophisticated ICT literacy skills. She quotes a 2000 study that says “only a minority of science teachers use ICT regularly in their teaching” (p. 192). Scanlon clearly expects that to change.

The collection of essays is above average, obviously useful for its intended audience of Open University students enrolled in “Contemporary Issues in Science Learning,” which, by the way, is unavailable to American students. The course objectives say that if we took the course we would learn to “critically assess literature on learning and teaching science” <http://www3.open.ac.uk/courses/bin/p12.dll?C01SEH806#souk>. Doesn’t this seem too entrenched in the university and in theory, and too far removed from the classroom and learning how to better teach science? I often found myself more engrossed in the Internet resources than in the gloss of them provided by the text. Of course, students enrolled in the course will have to buy the paperback edition of the book. Will I order the hardback copy for our university library? No.

About the Reviewer

John Rothfork
English Department
Northern Arizona University
Flagstaff, AZ 86011
John.Rothfork@nau.edu

John Rothfork teaches online courses in a graduate certificate program in professional and technical writing at Northern Arizona University. His Website is at http://oak.ucc.nau.edu/jgr6/.

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