ICS 667: Advanced Human Computer Interaction Design Methods
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General Info Course Management
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disCourse |
We will be using an online collaboration environment being constructed in my lab, available at: http://hnlc2.ics.hawaii.edu/discourse/ics/ The online environment, disCourse 2.0, provides collaboration workspaces for the entire class and for group projects. All assignments will also be posted in this online environment. Why are we using an online environment to support a face-to-face course? Because there is not enough time in class to do everything we want to do, and the online medium affords certain kinds of interactions that are more difficult in class. (For example, online you can examine another student's work carefully and take the time to compose reflective commentary.) Why are we building our own online learning software when commercial systems such as Blackboard and WebCT are available? Because I have used both Blackboard and WebCT and found them to be deficient with respect to pedagogical approach taken in ICS 667 and many of our other ICS courses. We are focusing on project-based learning, where students create and iteratively refine designed artifacts (programs, interfaces, etc.), as well as pointing out other examples and resources. To learn effectively we need to be able to share and discuss these artifacts, and that is what our software is designed to do. Also, by using software that is under development, ICS 667 students get to experience user participation in design (at least the late stages) from the users' perspective. The very system in which we conduct the course is itself a case study we can critique and improve. I hope that you will agree that this case study will provide a valuable opportunity to experience as a group the iterative design of a real system for a real world application. DisCourse 2.0 is the third in a series of software used for this purpose in my courses. The original system, Kukakuka, consisted simply of a web based discussion tool that associated discussions and messages with web pages. This software was an ICS student project written as Java servlets. The second system, disCourse 1.x, was developed by Viil Lid and friends in PHP/MySQL to be a full functionality course support system. There were some limitations to its code design, and in order to keep us focused on one code base we eventually abandoned it in favor of a third code base, hnlc.org, that had been developed at the same time as part of the HNLC project. The HNLC software for online community support had already benefited from 3 years of development by many of our most talented graduate students, and offered the basic tools we needed for a collaborative approach to learning. |