Author: Cheryl Cottle
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto.
Computer-Supported Intentional Learning Environments (CSILE) 3502F/L0101 is a technology course offered at Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the doctoral level. As a student in the doctoral program in Curriculum and Computer-Application program, I had the opportunity to take this course in the Fall semester. CSILE as a teaching and learning medium supports individual and collaborative knowledge building with the emphasis on the creation of knowledge through shared involvement and participation of participants, with the goal of enhancing the individual as well as the whole group s understanding.
CSILE is a networked system, built around a hypermedia database constructed by participants through collaborative knowledge construction. CSILE is used as a medium of knowledge diffusion in which students interact with communities of learners as experts in knowledge building. It is a knowledge medium created to realize the educational possibilities of education that extend beyond the traditional and child-centered model of teaching and learning. It affords the learner with the opportunity to control and direct his or her cognitive needs and engineer the attaining of them.
The technology and the supporting scaffolds that CSILE affords, offers the learner the opportunity to navigate the database, contribute through text notes, discussion notes, comments, graphic notes as well as create a portfolio to demonstrate the cognitive process that he or she has taken to arrive at his or her own understanding. Further, the interfacing capabilities with other programs including graphic and word processing programs make contribution more accessible and polished.
Research in the use of CSILE is well documented and illustrates that the implications of CSILE as a teaching and learning medium has great potential at the school level, organization, service industries, small business and government. The degree at which it has been used at the school level, shows that it has been used extensively from grades K to 12 with great success. The research also shows that it has been able to successfully support the teaching of several disciplines across various levels, and at the post graduate level at OISE.
The focus of my presentation will be to examine the portfolio that I have developed in this course that provides a summative accumulation of the knowledge that I have attained from interacting within the communal database. In addition, I will demonstrate the features of CSILE that provide the interactivity and constituted to the creation of knowledge-building. The use of peer evaluation which was used in this course will also be reviewed to further emphasize the approaches used in the teaching of CSILE as a learning medium.