MIS Knowledge Base
Problem-based Learning Offers Students Real-World Experience
by Anne Kibbler
AS INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES BECOME MORE PERVASIVE in the workplace, students must prepare for careers in which they will spend much of their time solving information problems in networked organizations.
One way to ready students for the challenges of the wired workplace is to immerse them in real-world problems while they are still in school, says SLIS Assistant Professor Howard Rosenbaum.
Rosenbaum gave the concluding keynote address on "Information technology, pedagogy, and the education of information professionals" at WebdevShare 2001, held in Bloomington in October. WebdevShare is billed as the premier conference for higher education professionals in the development and delivery of effective web-based systems.
Rosenbaum contends that students learn best when they are working together on practical problems. Technology supports these learning experiences, he says, by enabling people to engage jointly in producing shared knowledge.
In the real world, information professionals learn to recognize typical problems and develop a repertoire of information behaviors to resolve them. One way to equip students to enter this world is to base their classroom experiences on a pedagogical approach called problem-based learning.
In this approach, students are given a complex problem with no clear-cut answers. They must develop plans and strategies to resolve the problem and must gather data to test their hypotheses or critically evaluate their ideas.
Rosenbaum has explored this approach in his virtual economy course. Students work in teams to create web-based e-businesses. Their work is evaluated against real-world benchmarks, such as sales and customer feedback.
The virtual economy operates as a collaboration technology, providing a shared workspace for teams to develop their businesses and enabling them to develop relationships with customers.
"This combination of pedagogy and technology is a useful way to prepare students for their careers in information technology," Rosenbaum says. "They learn that their implicit knowledge is legitimate and useful when facing apparently unfamiliar tasks. [They] generate their own solutions, which makes them creative members of a culture of problem-solving and community of practice."
In addition, students acquire cultural tools such as a shared vocabulary and the ability to collaborate with others.
"Successful problem resolution helps them learn about the many different roles needed for most cognitive tasks in the workplace," Rosenbaum says. "They can confront and discard ineffective strategies, they refine their collaborative work skills, they learn about project management -- and they learn that e-commerce is hard work!"
For more information on teaching virtual e-commerce, see
o http://www.slis.indiana.edu/hrosenba/www/L561/syll/syll6.html
Posted December 12, 2001