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the Original Project The research project involved several stages of information collection and interpretation as I attempted to answer the following questions:
1. Does an interactive website improve student understanding of cultural material?
2. Which aspects of web interactivity are most effective?
3. Can students demonstrate a cogitative rather than regurgitative command of course material by the end of the course?
The interactive web site did help some students--but not all of them--to better understand cultural material.
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Most useful resources Bass, Randy. (1999). “The Scholarship of Teaching: What’s the Problem?” Inventio: Creative Thinking about Learning and Teaching, 1:1, February.
Batson, Trent and Randy Bass. (1996). “Primacy of Process: Teaching and Learning in the Computer Age.” Change. March/April, 28: 2, 42-47.
Bigge, Morris. (1999). Learning Theory for Teachers. 6th ed. NY: Longman.
Boettcher, Judith and G. Philip Cartwright. (1997). “Technology: Designing and Supporting Course on the Web.” Change. September/October, 29:5, 10 & 62-3.
Drucker, Peter F. (October 1999). “Beyond the Information Revolution.” Atlantic Monthly.
Graham, Helen and Jo Labanyi, Eds. (1995). Spanish Cultural Studies. London: Oxford University Press.
Green, Kenneth C. and Stephen W. Gilbert. (1998). “Content, Communications, Productivity, and the Role of Information Technology in Higher Education.” Change. April/Mar, 31:2.
Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. http://www.ilt.columbia.edu/ publications/locke_understanding.html
Wurman, Richard Saul. (2001). Information Anxiety 2. Indiannapolis IN: QUE Publishing.
----, and Peter Bradford, eds. (1996). Information Architects. Zurich, Switzerland: Graphis Press.
Brief Annotated Bibliography of Information Architecture Source Materials (Underlines are hyperlinks):
Information Architecture for the World Wide Web. Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville. (1998) The book introduces the user to the emerging field of information architecture. It teaches how to design web sites and intranets that support growth, management and ease of use.
Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. Scott McCloud. (1993) This book explains the details of how comics work: how they're composed, read and understood. More than just a book about comics, this gets to the heart of how we deal with visual languages in general.
A Visual Vocabulary for Describing Information Architecture and Interaction Design. Jesse James Garrett. (October 17, 2000) Diagrams are an essential tool for communicating information architecture and interaction design in web development teams. This document discusses the considerations in development of such diagrams, outlines a basic symbology for diagramming information architecture and interaction design concepts, and provides guidelines for the use of these elements.
Argus Center for Information Architecture (ACIA). The ACIA serves as a focal point for the theory and practice of information architecture, with its web site featuring industry events, book reviews, white papers, and interviews with leaders in the discipline.
Information Architecture and User Centered Design Reading List. Christina Wodtke. This document is a listing of books related to the field of information architecture and related fields.
Information Architecture for the World Wide Web. Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville. (1998) The book introduces the user to the emerging field of information architecture. It teaches how to design web sites and intranets that support growth, management and ease of use.
Information Architecture Glossary. Kat Hagedorn. (March 2000) This glossary is intended to foster development of a shared vocabulary within the new and rapidly evolving field of information architecture. It should serve as a valuable reference for anyone involved with or interested in the design of information architectures for web sites, intranets and other information systems.
Special Interest Group Information Architecture (SIGIA) Discussion List.
Sponsored by American Society for Information Science (ASIS), this discussion list grew out of the ASIS Summit 2000 conference, "Defining Information Architecture," held in Boston, April 8-9, 2000. The postings are often thought-provoking and instructive, and include theory, practical applications, job postings and tools and resources.
Seely Brown, John and Paul Duguid, The Social Life of Information Publisher: Harvard Business School Pr; ISBN: 0875847625; (February 2000) The gap between the hype of the Information Age and its reality is often wide and deep, and it's into this gap that John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid plunge. Not that these guys are Luddites--far from it. Brown, the chief scientist at Xerox and the director of its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), and Duguid, a historian and social theorist who also works with PARC, measure how information technology interacts and meshes with the social fabric. They write, "Technology design often takes aim at the surface of life. There it undoubtedly scores lots of worthwhile hits. But such successes can make designers blind to the difficulty of more serious challenges--primarily the resourcefulness that helps embed certain ways of doing things deep in our lives."
--Harry C. Edwards
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home page snap shot
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A Change in Direction Interviews with several students during the course of the semester revealed to me that I was on the wrong track. My original postulate had been that web interactivity would create an open self-guided environment for students to explore, discover and assimilate information about another culture. This was true for 80%. A correlate assumption on my part was that I would reach a broader range of students and that the overall percentage of my students who could produce a nuanced, informed reading of Spanish cultural artifacts would increase. This percentage increased to 80%, considerably short of my goal. Interviews indicated that the most effective aspect of my website for several students was my reorganization of material by artistic movement as opposed to just by chronology: “I hate dates and history and can’t remember them” said one student. “I can remember Renaissance and what happened related to that and I can remember the Surrealists and what happened related to them but I can’t remember what the Treaty of Utrecht is related to.”
In April 2002 I began to read about Information Architecture, the science of creating organizational and navigational structures that help people access information. The aspect of the course that had been most helpful to students was the reframing of information in different contexts that allowed my students to tie information to a structure of their choosing. Some of my students were more visual, some more conceptual, some more chronological, some more thematic, etc. in their ways of perceiving and organizing information. A new site was designed to fit the knowledge construction modes of these students.
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New Information Architecture
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A New Set of Questions 1. Do multiple organizational schema (provided in an on-line environment) enable students to more effectively shift cultural knowledge from short-term memory to long-term understanding?
2. Do the chosen schema best suit the needs of my students?
The course will be reorganized to support approaching the same information from five different but complimentary organizational schema. The readings, art, contemporary events, writing assignments and exams will be linked to 5 separate organizing principles: chronological, thematic, geographical, cultural and concepts in fine arts. The paper model for this experiment is the city guide which, with its color coding, makes it possible to drift in and out of contiguous topics/organizing principles as one wanders through a city. The readings are being reworked to support each of these approaches, as are the reference materials and the course assignments.
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Information Architecture and Apperception Information architecture is the design and implementation of a structure for the most effective organization, management, and access of information. The information architect is a person who creates the structure or map of information which allows others to find their personal paths to knowledge.
Through the exploration of the principles of information architecture I developed a design document for an instructional website which will allow students to approach the same material through five entirely different organizational schemes: chronological, thematic, geographic, cultural, and artistic.
The notion that an exclusively chronological approach to the structuring of information was not effective in reaching all of my students ties in with the operating definition of culture which I employ for the course: I choose to view “culture” not as the accumulation of individual works of art and watershed events, but rather as a process of identity-formation, as a network of forces and trends that might begin to explain the tensions and contradictions that characterize modern Spain. The elements critical to such an understanding comprise both “high” and “low” cultural forms. The course, then, is not about the memorization of facts and dates from a list which comprises “cultural literacy” but rather about making the facts and dates significant within the multiple frameworks which characterize different students’ ways of organizing knowledge.
Apperception, “a process where new ideas associate themselves with old ones that already constitute a mind,” (Bigge 147), is the process which I hope to generate more broadly through the new knowledge architecture of the Spanish 3200 web site. A natural evolution of the work of John Locke (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding), “apperception implies that the mind is like a framework on which ideas can be hung. Thus, teachers function like architects and builders of [students’] minds” (Wurman, 258). If facts are meaningful only when they can be attached to a learners’ experience and point of view, then a course might be designed to reach students with widely divergent experiences and ways of organizing knowledge. Richard Saul Wurman has observed that “students should not be stuffed with facts like sausages” but rather that “unless students are taught a system for learning or processing information, facts are of little use to them” (Wurman 239).
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