This way, communication flows are insured and teacher’s remain in control over their own virtual presence and are therfore much more motivated.

7.5.           Selecting the right software for high school educational institution

In the absence of standards for active pedagogics and given the dominance of so called “e-learning platforms”, we suggest to adopt one of the following solutions:

1.      A technology-savvy teacher interested by modern server-side technology should try to install and to run his very own portal. Possibly on a Linux-based machine that is available for his school, else with a private provider

2.      A variant is to have it installed by someone in the organization or some Internet enthusiast that will do it for little money

3.      Ask around if the school system supports a community portal (for schools) and use this.

4.      Re-purpose the huge and heavy enterprise portal you may have access to (e.g. LAMS 2.0, PeU 2.0 etc.). However, this entails negotiation with some central informatics department.

5.      Re-purpose the functionalities of an e-learning platform

Currently, we repeat, there is no “off the shelf” platform for the kind of pedagogics we advocate and covers all your needs, e.g. so far, we do not know yet the full potential of BEST like PeU 2.0 [65]. One major limitation of using BEST portals seems to be the lack of provision for integration (and in particular data-flow) between applications which are required for more complex Computer Supported Ccollaborative Learning (CSLS) [52] scenarios. Another limitation concerns management of contents, activities and people over time: How can we efficiently enough “reset” or move some of it so that fresh activities of the same kind can start with an empty slate while keeping past student production avail-able to new students.? Some of these issues can be dealt with by careful planning of module use and naming, as well as differentiated write access permissions. In other words, handling these issues require the same sort of planning that a traditional user- driven educational site does. But certainly, things could be improved and automatized to some degree. We are also aware that BEST portals are not the answer for more complex CSCL workflow scenarios. However, we think that there is an important need to actively support educational scenarios requiring less complex technology and that can be used for other interesting purposes such as community building.

7.6.     Difficulties

While conducting our field experiments which are run according to collaborative design principles we ran into many difficulties. Some of these are major and we briefly shall discuss the ones encountered at primary to high school level in the official school system. Before going into details, we care to insist here that teachers are not particularly slow. The same kinds of difficulties we describe below are faced by all organizations that try to introduce new behavior patterns and new technology. We therefore feel that it is perfectly normal that ideas expressed in this research paper take about 2 or 3 years to “get across” to willing teachers and probably 10 times as much to the whole system. Let’s now examine the four major issues we identified:

(1) Few users (teachers and learners) have “portal literacy”. Spontaneously, most only use a fraction of the offered functionalities. Frequently they do not even have the technical know how, e.g. we were very perplexed that modern and very popular forums like Forum Plus can lead to near-disasters in Internet activities, since neither teachers nor students are used to “boxed model”. Some of these problems are clearly related to ergonomic issues, but the problem remains even with well defined interfaces. We therefore are facing a literacy problem, i.e. a new digital divide which is not just purely technical but very much conceptual. To put it more bluntly: the modern interactive Internet that makes use of complex “cockpits” is largely unknown to education.

Our first strategy is BEST to be installed and tested, even if the task does not require it. These way users get familiar with the typical layout of a portal, even if they only use a single tool like the forum. These portals had others tools configured for activities, like the news engine, a poem editor or a image gallery. Some were just passively consulted, but not actively used in class. However “looking-at” demonstrates what more experienced users can do, and after a year or so teachers are willing to promote more diverse interactions with the system and other users. As we said before, a related strategy is to help teachers to run teacher portals and we encourage them to syndicate news among them so that they can see what happens on other portals in other places. In the beginning, “our” teachers wished to work with very minimal configurations, but quite soon they started to experiment with additional tools, e.g. a links manager or a DFWiki. They also can be quite enthusiastic about “fun tools” like a random quotation engine, a shoutbox, or mini-surveys.

Finally, we offer technical help including hosting and training courses. According to our experience it takes a least an intensive training week to train a teacher to start thinking about pedagogical “article boarding” with ICT and to master the required technology. Even after such an initial training, few are actually doing anything “of scope” immediately after, but after a certain maturation period that can last up to two years they start experimenting and need assistance again. This is a well know pattern from innovation research.

(2) Pedagogical scenario planning (“article boarding”) is unusual and very few teachers can “spontaneously do it”. The BEST catalog and other resources that can be found on-line are useful, but they are by no means enough. Either formal training or open and patient support on a per-needed basis is quite essential. However, teaching ICT and new pedagogies to teachers in a classical way is fairly useless (it has been done not very successfully over the last decade). It is more about helping them to fix themselves innovative pedagogical goals and then to assist them. We do respect the central role of the teacher and let him decide. On the other hand we clearly try to convince them that they should listen to new ideas and not be afraid to experiment and re-experiment. New ICTsupported pedagogies also can be introduced gradually. Not surprisingly, after one or two experiences spaced over time, “things start rolling”. Again, peer-to-peer support is crucial and we therefore support teacher-run teacher-portals and teacher-led initiatives as much as we can.

(3) The worst negative factor is time. As we said before, teachers can be sensitized to new approaches rather quickly in less than a two year period (comprising maybe a training course and at least one or two participations in “Internet projects”). But the organization of school life into isolated lessons above primary school level and the absence of project-based teaching in the curricula make it very difficult to organize interesting and longer lasting activities. There is not much we can do about this as a research team, except to make life as easy as possible for teachers on the technical side and to provide some conceptual support and encouragement.

There are a few possibilities to “beat time”. One is to encourage cross-curricular activities, but this is not easy since teachers are used to work alone. Other strategy is to integrate extra-curricular project-based activities into main-stream activities like language teaching (Italian, German, English and etc.) and to “smuggle in” the traditional difficult and time-consuming activities like grammar and writing. Finally, after a recent pedagogical reform in upper secondary (high school), teachers can run more intensive specialization courses where they have quite a lot of freedom. The most creative experiments we have observed did happen in biology classes where complex DFWiki activities have successfully been conducted. The same reform also requires students to do a final “project” of their own choice which would be an ideal area to conduct experiments. The worst situation clearly concerns lower secondary school and we remain quite uncertain about what we could contribute.

We just add a short comment about the university level. We do not face the same issues here, since a professor can pretty much run a course like he pleases. The issues concern simply pedagogical training and resources. Changing a teaching strategy and running high quality project-based courses require a lot of investment that does “not pay” in career terms. While it is sort of required that teaching is “decent”, pedagogical excellence and deep involvement to tutoring is not recompensed at all. In addition, recent programs that sponsor ICT in university education with quite substantial grants require that funds are funneled into content production and accreditable distance teaching (main stream e-learning). It turns out, that almost none of the financed project actually will be sustainable. Therefore, there might be hope that decision makers in the future will rather invest money to improve the quality of teaching and to sponsor more interesting blended learning formats. Our target main should not be distance teaching universities, but internationally acclaimed graduate schools.