In 2008, Seely Brown and Adler wrote about a number of Learning 2.0 projects.
One of these was Digital Study Hall - a project in India that was originally set up to help teachers in remote places give better lessons. Lectures from model teachers were recorded on video for less-experienced teachers in rural or remote areas to watch and follow. Even in classrooms with no teachers, a diligent student could act as a local 'mediator' to prompt the other students with questions whilst the video was being watched, so as to stimulate interaction and the social construction of learning.
I chose to look at Digital Study Hall in a bit more detail because I've worked in some of these under-resourced schools in India and I'm really interested in ways to help teachers in these environments.
Is Digital Study Hall still running?
It seems to be - it has a website that shows a few postings each year, the last one being in October 2012. I get the sense from the web pages that the project has lost a lot of its original momentum, there certainly isn't a sense of a lot of up-to-date activity.
websites www.dsh.cs.washington.edu and www.digitalstudyhall.in
Have any more papers been written about the project since the Seely Brown and Adler paper was published?
In July 2008 there was an formal evaluation paper published by the American Educational Research Association, 'Using Digital Video in Rural Indian Schools' by Urvashi Sani et al.
Apart from that I could only find an article published in the Phi Delta Kappa International magazine in April 2011, 'Undeveloped World Taps Technology for Learning' by Monica Martinez. This mentions Digital Study Hall but did not cite anything more up-to-date than could be found on the DSH website.
Has Digital Study Hall been adopted by other users or institutions?
I could find no evidence of this, although from the DSH website I could see that the original concept (video) had evolved - so there seems to be more energy now around DSH's recorded voice forums.
For example, 'Digital Green' is a voice forum for people to discuss agricultural issues. 'Digital Polyclinic' is a voice forum for people working in healthcare to discuss issues. And Digital Study Hall itself has developed a voice bank of conversations about teaching issues.
Agriculture, healthcare, teaching - all targeted at people working in these areas in remote environments. They can take part in asynchronous voice conversations (voice is necessary as most of these people cannot read) where they post a question, and an expert elsewhere in India gives them an answer.
References
Martinez, M (2011) 'Undeveloped World Taps Technology for Learning', Phi Delta Kappan magazine, April 2011, pp. 70-72.
Sani, U. et al (2008) 'Using Digital Video in Rural Indian Schools', American Educational Research Association.
Seely Brown, J. and Adler, R. (2008) 'Minds on fire: open education, the long tail and learning 2.0', EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 43, no. 1, pp. 16-32.
Thanks for this, interesting to read that this appears to be quietening down. Do you think this is a function of the spotlight coming off the project once it was fully implemented and evaluated? Or has this innovation come to the natural end of its usefulness and been superceded by the newer initiatives you note? I wondered about this as the newer initiatives certainly use a similar approach but are addressing the needs of a different audience. Could a 'voice only' tool be useful in teaching, which is so visual?
ReplyDeleteThanks Paige,
ReplyDeleteI think that a lot of innovative projects get conceived as one thing, and then transform and evolve once people start interacting with the innovation.
I think there's also a natural decline in energy around new projects, especially if they require 'pushing' from the innovator and fail to build up critical mass. I think Conole pointed out re Cloudworks that they were struggling on this until take-up was boosted when they introduced functionality to link posts to academic articles.
I guess DSH may have faced some of these issues, and realised that the energy of the users was expressing their need for voice forums?
You're right about teaching being so visual, I don't know why the videos don't work better but suspect that may more be to do with the logistics/infrastructural constraints of showing videos in remote places with limited power. Voice forums may just be easier to access in these environments - users can dial in or access on an Internet link if they have one, the doesn't have to be the physical distribution of videos and the machines to play them on.