Are teachers required
to design their own assessment criteria to assess the final product
from the students?
The answer to this is that we will be following MOE’s project work
indicator to assess the product, so there is no need for teachers
to design their own criteria.
Are the teachers
required to carry out their crafted projects just like the students?
The teachers are involved in 2 levels: crafting of project task
collaboratively & implementing their crafted project tasks in classroom.
How long is the
teachers’ involvement in this project?
Two years. The online crafting takes place in year 2003 but the
teachers are required to implement their crafted projects in their
secondary 2 classrooms in 2004.
Are students required
to make the product from their project?
In this project, we emphasise on the process and the product. The
documentation of the processes (e.g. joint decision making on the
type of product) leading to the product is more important than just
the product itself. Within the collaborative group, the students
from the different schools can still make the same type of product
for each of their school but what’s important is the joint decision
made by the members of the group.
Are students given
budget for the making of products?
What is the computer
system requirement that I need to have to access Knowledge Community?
You only need a rather simple computer system set-up in order to
access Knowledge Community. KC was designed to run well on computers
that meets at least the following requirement:
Intel CPU Pentium
2 or equivalent
64 MB RAM
An internet connection.
This can be a dial-up modem (the device that connects a phone
line to your PC) or a broadband connection. Wireless network
works equally well with KC.
An internet browser
program. If you are using Internet Explorer, we recommend that
you upgrade it to Internet Explorer 6.0. If you do not have
this version yet, you can download it for free here.
At least 30MB of
free hard disk space.
As a community
user, can we add topics to the forum? Or is it controlled by the
facilitator of the community only?
A word on nomenclature:
"Community"
a group of facilitators
and users. Only admins (not facilitators) can create a new
community and assign facilitators to it.
"Forum"
a "topic" within
a community. Please note that the scope of a forum is very
wide, and it is not likely that users (i.e. students) will
need to create new ones.
"Thread"
a tree structure
within a forum containing one or more notes.
Community users cannot
add new forum topics as such. However, when a user creates a new
note (instead of replying to another user's note), it is displayed
as a separate thread (you will notice that each thread is separated
from the others by the use of horizontal
spacers). This is one way in which users can open up new
topics of discussion (within the broad framework of the forum).
Please bear in mind that the current phase of the project requires
the teachers to play the role of students - this is why they/you
are given user access. When the teachers receive facilitator access
in the next phase, they will be able to create new forums.
Why is the loading
speed of the every page so slow when I try logging in to KC using
school computers?
The slowness in accessing KC is mainly due to the bottlenecks in
internet traffic. To minimize this problem, you should do the following:
Close other browser
windows on your computer
If the situation
does not improve, contact your school TA or project office.
The school network might simply be having very heavy traffic
at that point of time; in this case it might be advisable to
log-in at another time. The TA and our Project
Officer will be able to advice you.
Record the time
and date of the occurrence of this problem and send these information
via e-mail to our Project
Officer.
Also, the design
of KC is rather different from the popular search engines like
Yahoo or MSN, which loads up small amount of data each time
you click on a search page. In fact, each time when you try
to access a forum in KC, all the data in that forum is extracted
from the KC server (located in Hong Kong) to form the forum
web page which you see in the browser. Therefore sometimes it
takes longer for each KC forum to complete loading, especially
if the forum that you want to view has 100 or more notes (Typically
such a forum will take about 8 seconds to load up).
Is it acceptable
to use instant messengers such as MSN or ICQ to carry out project
discussion?
We would advise against using MSN and ICQ to carry out project discussion.
To explain our rationale, let us look at why Knowledge Community
was chosen to be the preferred platform for this project:
While some of us
might prefer the spontaneity, convenience and user-friendliness
of MSN or ICQ, the design of Knowledge Community encourages
users to think more deeply and write more structured notes.
Thinking Skills
and Scaffolds are incorporated into Knowledge Community to provided
structured thinking and building of ideas.
The conversation
/ interactions among community members are recorded in a hierarchical
format to allow facilitators to better understand the flow of
discussions.
Knowledge Community
allows the facilitators to analyse and document the processes
and the product of students’ final project presentation in there.
Why is the access
speed of KC so slow when I try logging on to KC using my house
computer?
Check whether your house has a broadband connection. If your house
is not using broadband, you can expect the speed of accessing KC
to be significantly slower than that in school.
I am using broadband
internet connection at home, why is KC still so slow to access?
Check whether you are also downloading any large files (eg. Movies,
songs etc.) while you are trying to access KC. Internet traffic
is usually higher during times like 8pm to 2am, since most computer
users will be back at home and be probably logged on to internet.
We would recommend logging on to KC outside these times.
I wanted to respond
to a note in KC, but when I click on "Build on this note" I find
that I cannot type anything in the textbox which appears.
This is an unresolved peculiarity in KC. To fix this problem, do
the following:
Jot down a reminder
(e.g. Which forum this note is in, title of the note etc. )
which note you wanted to respond to.
Close the window
with the textbox.
Go back to the forum,
click on "add new note to forum".
Close the window
once it appears.
Refer to the reminder
that you have jotted down. Go to the note that you wanted to
respond to.
Click on "build
on this note".
The textbox should
load up fine.
I spent a long
time typing a note, but when I click the “Save” button my note
disappeared and was nowhere to be found. What happened?
When a user takes more than 15 minutes to compose a note, problem
like this might appear. We pity the lost content of the notes that
you have typed, we hope that you can re-type it while the memory
is still fresh. In the future if you are going to type very long
notes, we recommend typing using MS Word or just Notepad, and then
simply cut and paste the contents into the KC notes that you have
just created.
My teammates and
I were logged on to KC at the same time from our respective homes.
When my team mates posted their notes, I could not see these notes
in KC in my browser. What happened and how can I solve this problem?
This problem might be due to the settings problem in your browser.
To ensure that the PCs you used to access KC are properly configured
to display the latest version of every page during each visit to
the page, users should follow the simple steps below before they
start using any PC (especially in public computers) to access KC.
This is to prevent the users from getting old pages on their screens
and (for example) perceive newly created notes to be missing. More
important will be that their confidential notes (e.g. reflection
logs) will not be stored in the cache (temp memory) of that particular
computer and later being viewed by the next user.
Run Internet Explorer
(Note: If you are using any other browser, please send an email
to clgquek@nie.edu.sg for separate instructions)
On the Tools menu,
select Internet Options -> Temporary Internet Files – Settings
Go back to the forum,
click on "add new note to forum".
