Acquiring Minds
Distance Learning and Collaboration
I reached a milestone at the conclusion of this semester. I have now spent more time as a teacher in education than as a researcher in industry. The event was commemorated with little more than a “hey, I’m getting old” — about as much significance as it deserves. Upon reflection, I realize I have changed my target audience. Whereas I used to be primarily concerned with communicating with instruments, I’m now concentrating on collaboration with twenty-year-olds. Analogous to Management Information Systems (MIS) for business managers, our program offers a concentration in Information and Knowledge Management (IKM) for future laboratory and production managers. IKM is comprised of courses on the broad topic of laboratory informatics, including instrument and database interfacing, intelligent automation algorithms, and data mining. Rather than adopt a course text and have me summarize my notes in chalk scribbles while the students sit in stunned rapture of my presentation abilities, the courses are run as if we were a team of professionals tasked with automating a laboratory in industry. In fact, we do have a research laboratory to automate — our research labs here at the school.
Much like the specialized research laboratories used by biology, chemistry, and physics in our science building, our IKM concentration has created a dedicated laboratory for the study of laboratory informatics called the Virtual Control Room (VCR). The VCR looks like a typical control room with clusters of networked computers and a digital projection system serving as a room-wide heads up display (HUD). The instructor station is connected to the HUD and outfitted with a touch screen allowing chalk and dry-erase markers to be replaced by a mouse for clicking through the environment and a stylus for drawing play-by-play diagrams. Even though we have used technology to modernize the chalkboard, passively watching me click through PowerPoint slides is as disastrous as listening to me read my lecture notes. Coaching the students while they actively interface a remote instrument or develop an analysis algorithm is infinitely more desirable by all parties involved.
The days of “do your own work” and “don’t look at your neighbor’s paper” are slowly fading along with the industrial revolution. Our information economy requires effective communication and collaboration among team members. While “Please turn off cell phone” placards are sprouting up around campus classrooms, I encourage my students to leave their cell phones and PDAs activated while sitting at the VCR computers with email and instant messaging apps minimized. Effective management of personal information streams should be taught in school before it is acquired by experience on the job. Instead of worrying that students will pass answers to multiple-choice exams through phones, PDAs or calculators, our courses utilize “multiple-component” exams, requiring groups of students to collaborate on the solution to more sophisticated problems.
Audio and video beamed by telepresence applications extend the range of team communication effectively, but we need human communication protocols optimized for problem solving, similar to the hand signals used in baseball. The VCR is currently using the Wiki protocol developed by the Mediawiki Foundation. As the foundational technology of Wikipedia.org, our students are already very familiar with its operation and it has supplanted Google in our classrooms. Wikipedia is not a better search engine than Google; it is a better vehicle for information. It returns hyperlinked articles written in a common protocol rather than collections of links to pages only related by a few search terms. We have installed the open source Mediawiki on our VCR server and it has quickly become the collaborative notebook for our courses.
Until recently, assignments were handed out in hardcopy and individual responses would appear in the inbox of my email. Now a project is created as an article on the Wiki, subtasks are defined and listed as links to empty new pages, and student names are attached to the subtasks. Students populate the pages with their literature searches, calculations, experimental findings, procedures, code, and additional questions. Every member of the team can view the status of any task and contribute if it travels into the realm of their expertise. The Wiki maintains a record of all modifications, including the content of the change, time, and author for auditing and tracking purposes. It also maintains a copy of all previous versions of each page so knowledge is not lost and the motivation behind changes can be reviewed. While the students are logging process values into a database to evaluate the performance of an experiment, I can review the Wiki logs to evaluate the performance of the team. I just have to keep our servers away from my Dean’s office so they don’t use them to evaluate me.
This material originally appeared as a Contributed Editorial in Scientific Computing 23:6 May 2006, pg. 10.
William L. Weaver is an Associate Professor in the Department of Integrated Science, Business, and Technology at La Salle University in Philadelphia, PA USA. He holds a B.S. Degree with Double Majors in Chemistry and Physics and earned his Ph.D. in Analytical Chemistry with expertise in Ultrafast LASER Spectroscopy. He teaches, writes, and speaks on the application of Systems Thinking to the development of New Products and Innovation.
