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The Collaborative eNotebook: a Collaborative Learning and Knowledge Management Testbed

Abstract

We envision an eNotebook, a software system that enables students and instructors to manage their learning content across the software engineering curriculum, and to organize the content in multiple ways. We also envision this as a Collaborative eNotebook, which students and instructors use as they collaborate to create, share, and add to this content, and collaborate as they create, share, and add to ways to organize the content. This paper describes the features of a Collaborative eNotebook; it describes a design that integrates existing technologies from digital libraries, advanced search and retrieval, peer-to-peer file sharing, and distributed user identity authentication and access authorization; and it concludes with a description of experiments to assess the effectiveness of the Collaborative eNotebook in knowledge management and learning activities of an introduction to software engineering course.

“Our knowledge of the world comes from gathering around great things in a complex and interactive community of truth. But good teachers do more than deliver the news from that community to their students. Good teachers replicate the process of knowing by engaging students in the dynamics of the community of truth.” Parker J. Palmer, The Courage to Teach1

Problem: Capturing, Organizing, and Sharing Information Across the Curriculum

Science and engineering students face the daunting task of incrementally learning and applying a diversity of knowledge about their chosen discipline. In a collaborative learning experience, they must integrate knowledge and learning experiences across courses, within and across project teams, and from external sources such as libraries, professional societies, and standards bodies. In addition, since they are in the process of learning the discipline, they don’t yet know the various ways to organize and categorize their growing body of knowledge.

Today’s students and instructors use a diversity of technologies to capture, organize, and share information, including computer file systems, course web sites, learning management systems, electronic portfolios, shared project repositories, email, instant messages, blogs, and wikis. Yet, this fragments their information into isolated silos of content with poor, often hierarchical, organization. Typically, each course offering has its own space for content, each project has its own repository, each student and instructor has their own file system, and external sources are only available through web links.

Instead, students and instructors need their learning content to be integrated and organized across multiple aspects of personal and collaborative work, regardless of where the content is stored. A typical student in our ABET-accredited software engineering program must integrate knowledge and experiences from over 30 courses, 15 team projects, and two or more terms of cooperative

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Hawker, J. S. (2006, June), The Collaborative Enotebook: A Collaborative Learning And Knowledge Management Testbed Paper presented at 2006 Annual Conference & Exposition, Chicago, Illinois. 10.18260/1-2--1026