The Milken Educator Virtual Workspace (MEVW) is a free software application that provides a virtual meeting and learning facility. It's designed so that both the inexperienced and experienced computer user can instantly communicate, publish, share, manage, and plan virtual meetings and/or club related activities.
This article discusses the Milken Family Foundation's Milken Educator Virtual Workspace (MEVW) technology. We explain some of the differences between learning in physical and virtual meeting environments, describe how educators have used the MEVW, outline some of the benefits of learning online, and finally give instructions on how to apply for and freely use the MEVW.
Learning in Clubs that Meet in Physical Places
Educational psychologist Frank Smith made the observation that much-if not most-real learning happens in a "club." He pointed out that when people get interested in something for their own reasons they gravitate towards and meet regularly with groups of fellow enthusiasts. What better place to learn than in a environment where the focus is on what you are interested in, the people share your enthusiasm, and the community is diverse in age, ability, experience, and in most cases culture. Clubs are unintimidating forums where people of all ages and abilities can develop social networks and learn in communal environments.
Learning in Clubs that Meet in Virtual Places
In today's world, clubs no longer need to meet only in physical places at specific times. They can meet at any time in virtual environments from all corners of the earth. Learning in a virtual club is different from learning face-to-face because people meet through their computers, and meeting in cyberspace gives the impression that one is participating from both everywhere and nowhere. Virtual meeting places further lack the symbols and the physical architecture present in the world. Because virtual environments are missing many symbolic and physical context clues, people don't quite know how to act, what is expected of them, and in what capacity and how they should contribute.
With the virtual club's new conception of context and space comes a new conception of what it means to be a virtual club member. In a virtual club, members are not from one school, town, or city; they are from all and any schools, towns, and cities. In a virtual club members' status characteristics (academic, social, or economic), sex, age, and race, can remain a mystery. These unknown status characteristics change the way virtual club members communicate. For instance, one would behave and communicate differently in a meeting with the CEO than in one's home with one's spouse. In cyberspace, however, you don't know who the CEO, the accountant, the teacher, or the spouse is because personal background characteristics are difficult to verify.
Communication in virtual clubs also differs from communication in physical spaces. In a virtual club communication can be one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many all within the scope of a 2-minute time period. How virtual club members communicate is entirely their choice. They are in control, because they are the only one in front of their keyboard. Club members are not constrained by the ordered flow of verbal conversation and the status characteristics that dominate face-to-face discussion. Members can change the content and focus of a conversation on a whim. They can choose to respond to all aspects of the discussion or no aspects. They can answer or ask questions to everyone, or to no-one.
These differences scratch the surface of how virtual communities or clubs differ from physical ones. These differences are exciting. They are new and challenging. And yes, at first, they can be frustrating and take some getting used to.
Learning on the Milken Educator Virtual Workspace
In the summer of 1996 the Milken Family Foundation built the first version of Milken Educator Virtual Workspace (MEVW), a collaborative online technology to support virtual community learning in club-type environments. Using the MEVW, virtual clubs met regularly to communicate, publish and share work, and manage their club activities. Since 1996 over 45 online learning groups involving over 500 Milken Educator Award recipients from 38 states have participated in virtual learning communities. Below we profile how learning on the MEVW operates by taking as an example one club whose focus was developing creativity in their students' work.
Getting Involved. Milken Educators were invited to sign up online for a club dedicated to teaching creativity thinking strategies to students. This club was lead by Drs. Tom Ward and Mark Runco, two experts in the field. The focus was first to learn, and then to integrate and teach creative thinking techniques and strategies within one's day-to-day curriculum.
Registering. Educators pointed their Web Browsers to the Web site. Once there, they typed in registration information, read a description of what the Teaching For Creativity community would focus on, and enrolled.
What to Do. After logging on, educators wanted to see what the goals of the community were, what the schedule of events would be, and where they needed to go within the MEVW to contribute and participate. A section with the project description, goals, outcomes, and an online calendar shaped the activities of the community by stating the week-by-week schedule of events. These events, when posted in the calendar, were automatically emailed to community members a week before and the day of the event.
Who's Involved. Educators in the creativity club had a clear sense of its goals, the focus of the group, and initially what to do. They then wanted to acquaint themselves more personally with other members and leaders of the group. To do this, members accessed the contact information link that provided each community member's email, phone number, address, affiliation, state, and a biography of what each member's interests were.
How to Communicate. In the creativity group, educators had several ways to communicate. The group calendar instructed educators to discuss three creativity questions at their leisure using the Question and Answer forum. Educators and researchers posted questions and answers to questions regarding these topics. The calendar also stated several chat sessions that took place from 6-7 PST. By clicking on the chat link at 6 PST, all group members were online at the same time and were able to discuss through text various topics about creativity. Members in the creativity group also sent email messages to the entire group using the Group Email feature so that all community members would receive important updates and notices. Finally, participants were asked by the group leaders to post lists of both creative traits and ideal student traits and then compare and contrast them as a group using the Working Documents feature. The Working Documents feature afforded participants an opportunity to post their lists for all the members to read and also the ability for all members to comment directly within the text of their lists paragraph by paragraph.
How To Share, Research, Publish and Contribute. As the creativity community grew, project leaders published research reading materials online each week, participants published multimedia creativity lesson plans and activities, and other group members published links to informative Web sites and resources. Using the MEVW, group members needed to know no HTML to publish materials for others to read, comment on, and benefit from. Publishing simply involved copying text from a Word processor or any other application, and pasting that text on the MEVW. Reading these resources only required group members to click on the title of the resource.
Checking Progress. To help leaders and participants monitor, manage, and provide feedback to group members on their participation levels, the Milken Educator Virtual Workspace built an application called the Collaboration Quotient (CQ). A group member's CQ consisted of several online participation variables (e.g., "participated in a chat", "published a working document", "updated a To Do", "read a document in the library", etc.) which were logged to our database. These variables were counted and weighted daily based on their collaborative importance. The total weighted sum of these variables produced each participant's (CQ) score.
CQ data proved to be an invaluable resource. It provided a way for participants to know which members in the group were extremely active and experienced and which were not. It provided data for leaders to contact members who were not active and ask what in the community needed improvement. Finally, it provided a way for participants to monitor themselves to help them better understand where they were contributing to the community and where they were not.
What Makes the Milken Educator Virtual Workspace Unique?
Current Internet technologies designed to facilitate collaboration are varied, unconnected and rarely integrated. There are hundreds of online communities and clubs who use listservs, bulletin boards, chat and whiteboard technologies, but few if any have access to all these technologies within a single interface. Few online clubs manage their week-by-week business, and plan events and activities online because management technologies are rarely included in virtual community environments. Finally, no online community helps members keep track of who is actively sharing and contributing, who is not, and what the substance of members' contributions are.
The strength of the Milken Educator Virtual Workspace is that it has integrated all of these features within one interface and is accessible entirely over the Web. This strength provides a virtual community with the varied applications to help it succeed in seamlessly collaborating, publishing, and reviewing its body of knowledge.
What's Next for the Milken Educator Virtual Workspace?
Over the next 18 months (November 1998 - June 2000), the Milken Exchange on Education Technology will be using the MEVW to sponsor a series of open Forums on Education Technology: Conversations with Teachers and Researchers. These forums will provide educators with opportunities to join others in identifying and using the most effective classroom applications of education technology by communicating directly with leading researchers in the field.
