Case Studies: Meetings

Friday, January 31, 2003, Torgersen 3180 (1:30-3:05 pm)

• Next Meeting: Friday, February 14, Torgersen 3180 (1:30 pm)
  • Following Meeting: Friday, February 21, Torgersen 3180 (1:30 pm)
  • Following Meeting: Friday, March 14, Torgersen 3180 (1:30 pm)
• Attendees: Mary Beth, Jack, Con, Beth, Jonathan
• Case Study Contributors
  • Reasons for others to contribute case material to this project:
    • They can contribute to an educational endeavor
    • They can gain some visibility for their own work
    • They will gain a coherent account of their work
  • Contact may be sensitive to revealing some aspects of their work, in particular mistakes that may be embedded in current products
  • In most cases, initial contact should come from one of the PIs
  • We will attempt these contacts for now:
    • Neil Maiden (previously contacted Jack in an e-mail) [Action: Con, Result: No response]
    • Wofgang Prinz [Action: Mary Beth, Result: No response]
    • Tapped-In [Action: Jonathan, See 2003.02.25]
    • Larry Hodges (virutal envirionments) [Action: Jack, Result: No response]
• Educator Participants
  • Relationship planning with respect to educators
  • Sketch a letter of invitation to participate [Action: Con, Completed]
    • Different letters for those who are new vs. those who have already responded in some way
    • Present our study as an opportunity for them
    • Show enough leadership to encourage participation, but not so much that it appears stifling
    • We want to develop activities that use the case library and evaluate their effectiveness
  • We want 8-10 educators who are using/will use the textbook to
    1. Participate in a summer workshop (project pays for participation)
    2. Interact before summer to share course material, ideas, etc.
    3. Take activities developed in the summer workshop to their classes and facilitate assessments
  • Need location for the summer workshop that will faciliate Internet reachback for the participants
    • That way they can get and share artifacts that they may have forgotten to bring along
    • That way they can directly place workshop artifacts into their local environments
• Research Methodology
  • Need to formulate what we are trying to get out of this from a research point of view
  • Literature work
  • Intellectual foundation
    • Contact Mark Guzdial [Action: Mary Beth, Result: No response]
    • Contact others [Action: Jack, Closed]
• Taxonomy of Learning Activities
  • Look at Domain Theory for some usable abstractions [Action: Con, Closed: None found]
• Laboratory Studies
  • Discussed pros and cons, also options
  • Maybe a local replication of a case study experiment in the literature
    • In order to expand theory
    • In order to claim theory
  • Push collaborative use of case studies
• Use of this web site
  • Record information about contacts made and literature read on this site
  • Need a place to record our latest theory [Action: Con, Completed]
• Expanding Case Study Library
  • Discussed advanced vs basic cases and their use
  • Discussed Virtual Science Fair case
    • Considered discarding it
    • Decided it would be useful if reformated as a characature case that exemplifies structure--readers can get more detail from the text
• Learning Objectives
  • Discussed the need to base analysis on the learning objectives of the courses that use the case study library
  • A complete skill hierarchy will be difficult to obtain--most educators are less formal
  • We could search for a common set of learning objectives
    • Each educator to identify a few of their most important learning objectives
    • Can extract some from exam material
    • Some sort of voting process at the workshop could tune this down to a workable list
      • That was representative of the courses
      • That could be measured
      • That would be used
• Surveys
  • Survey for Homework #2 had 28 participants
  • Need to summarize survey content in some useful way [Action: Con, Revised: See 2003.02.14]