BUILDING ASSETS IN MIDDLE SCHOOL GIRLS: RESEARCH WITH WEB TECHNOLOGY

BUILDING ASSETS IN MIDDLE SCHOOL GIRLS:

RESEARCH WITH WEB TECHNOLOGY

Leonard Berkey and Ralph Houghton, Albion College

This paper describes an effort to use WebBoard technology to facilitate and manage a student/faculty research project in the local public schools. College students were paired with at-risk middle school girls as researcher/mentors, and were required to write detailed field notes covering all of their interactions. The Web Board allowed students to post these notes to a central data archive, accessible only with a password, where others in the project could read them and contrast their own experiences. This added real synergy to the research project, but it was not without difficulties. The advantages and disadvantages are summarized below.

Introduction

Last spring, two Albion College faculty members, Leonard Berkey in Sociology and Barbara Keyes in Psychology, received a large grant from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation to support a year long project in the Albion Middle School. They proposed to train a group of fourteen Albion College women students in ethnographic methodology, and to pair them as researcher/mentors with an equal number of middle school girls who had been identified as being "at-risk" of school failure based upon a history of fighting and intimidation of others and their deteriorating school performance.

Berkey and Keyes identified three central elements of the project that might be best addressed with technology. First, the Kellogg Foundation was interested in having information about this project disseminated as widely as possible for other researchers and practitioners to examine. This was accomplished through the creation of a web page that was linked to the Foundation’s home page. Second, they sought to organize a separate resource site describing books, articles, videos, and other materials useful to anyone interested in researching or understanding at-risk girls. An additional web page was added to provide this. Finally, they needed a way to organize and monitor student output from the research. Since the students were to be engaged in daily field work at the Middle School and were expected to write lengthy field- notes on all of their interactions there, the faculty needed to manage these notes somehow. They also wanted each student’s field notes to be available to others in the project without jeopardizing the confidentiality of the girls at the school. After reviewing several options, they chose to use a WebBoard for this purpose which provided students with easy access to the project material, even from their dormitory rooms or homes, but limited access to those who had a secret password. This paper summarizes their experiences with the WebBoard.

Selecting the Software to Address Instructional Goals

A central element of this project was the development of a year-long seminar, taught by Berkey and Keyes, that examined sociological and psychological perspectives on gender, adolescence, and racial identity, and trained students in the intricacies of ethnographic research. They selected a mixture of Albion College women students, some white and some African American, including sophomores, juniors, and seniors, for participation in the seminar. All of the middle school girls were African American. The goal was to understand the perspective of these middle school girls, and to learn why they frequently made choices, including the choice to fight, which got them into trouble. The instructors believed that by understanding more fully why these girls behaved as they did the college students could become effective mentors over time, and might encourage these girls to consider alternative methods for resolving their frustrations.

Each student in the seminar was expected to spend a minimum of eighty hours per semester with her mentee acting as a researcher/mentor. This might include eating lunch with mentees at the Middle School, tutoring them in some subjects, doing homework together, or attending school events together. The crucial outcome from the viewpoint of the research was that students write detailed fieldnotes on all of these interactions as soon as possible after the events. The instructors decided early on that it would be far easier to manage the project and would heighten the impact of the seminar if students could share one another’s fieldnotes by posting them in a central repository of some sort. While raw fieldnotes are not typically shared by ethnographers, the instructors felt that for this project they would lend an important synergy to the analytical discussions. As Emerson, Fretz and Shaw (1995, p. 44) note, "one common effect of writing with such readers in mind is to include more details of background and context to make field notes more accessible.

What they needed then was a software package that would allow students to have ready access to the data archive from any Internet site (at home or at school) and that would be easy to administer. It was important that the software be fairly simple to understand and that students could be quickly trained to use it. Most importantly, the data archive had to be accessible only to those with a secret password. The success of this project, and the credibility of those involved, rested on a guarantee of confidentiality for all of the participants.

During the early stages of planning, Berkey attended a week long New Technology, New Ways of Learning Workshop organized by the Great Lakes Colleges Association (GLCA). Held at Kalamazoo College in Kalamazoo, Michigan, the workshop paired faculty members with technology support staff. It was a week of exploring technology enhancements for teaching. Ralph Houghton, who was in the process of exploring discussion board software for other faculty on campus at the time, was selected from Academic Computing at Albion College to attend the workshop with Berkey. Among the specific topics included in the workshop were presentations on web authoring, digital imaging, digital video, software used for story plot generation, and basic Powerpoint Presentations.

The workshop also featured a particular discussion program called DISCUS that had been developed by Dr. William F. Polik and Kevin W. Paulisse at Hope College and is distributed free in both Unix and Windows NT formats. This program seemed to offer the breadth of instructional possibilities that both Berkey and Houghton had been seeking, and they agreed to adopt it for the Building Assets project.

Early Implementation Problems

Several meetings subsequent to the GLCA workshop were held in the months prior to the beginning of class. Preliminary plans were made for the discussion format that would be used in the context of this course. While discussions are typically of two sorts: instructor-centered and student-centered (Kozma, Belle, and Williams, 1978, pg 233), these traditional approaches had to be modified due to the nature of fieldwork and the goals specified in this course. The discussion conference had to provide organized entry to individual fieldnotes in such a way that they could be viewed, but not commented upon. This required setting expectations with the students at the time of orientation to the software rather than of configuring the software.

The DISCUS discussion software and the Sociology 402 conference area were set up under the umbrella of Albion’s Intranet to effect the security required. The early versions of DISCUS did not have the lock-down features within the program required to secure Berkey’s group from outside viewing. Several attempts were made to accomplish this by work-arounds, all of which failed. The discussion group for the class was set up and configured, but it subsequently crashed the server and DISCUS had to be reloaded losing all the discussion set up information. One alternative was to use the campus Dnews software which allowed for threaded discussions, but could not be secured. That option was rejected. Three attempts were made to get DISCUS running properly before Academic Computing gave up and moved to the less robust, but working O’Reilly WebBoard software. Peck and Scherf (1997, pg 69) described WebBoard private conferences as allowing moderator-selected participants to "communicate and collaborate freely, yet the subject is not open to unwelcome eyes." This, coupled with the location of the server within the firewall (Figure 1) on a local Intranet, permitted maximum security for the site. Even though WebBoard fell short of DISCUS in desirable capabilities, it offered the project a secure and accessible data archive that worked.

Houghton oriented Berkey to the software in the two weeks prior to the beginning of classes, particularly to tasks associated with the conference moderator and to options for adding, deleting, and editing messages that are posted to the conference. At one point after the class had begun, Berkey attempted to access the conference from his home computer dial-up connection through Michigan State University. When that connection failed, it became necessary to establish a SHIVA account on Albion’s campus which allowed access to the Intranet secured site, proving that outside access was indeed restricted.

WebBoard Student Orientation

Houghton prepared a one-hour orientation presentation and a thirty minute practice session for one of the early two-hour long class periods. This orientation was intended to introduce the concepts used in a web-based discussion board system. It was conducted in an enhanced classroom equipped with a lectern containing a networked PC with overhead projection. This had the advantage of permitting Houghton to use the live Internet connection in demonstrating actual message posting techniques, and to illustrate answers to faculty and student questions as they arose. Considerable time was required to log the fourteen students into the system, however, time that could have been better used to allow for more student practice. Once logged in students were encouraged to go to the computer lab and begin trying the system.

Early on, as students actually began using the WebBoard and posting fieldnotes, the software appeared to be rather cumbersome. There wasn’t a very clear device for organizing fieldnotes in chronological order. Berkey simply decided on "Week 1", "Week 2", and so on, but students were confused by that and began posting notes at random. Finally, Berkey entered four weeks at a time in a more standard form, "Notes for Nov 23-29" as an example. From that point, students had an easier time submitting their fieldnotes to the correct location. This left a number of fieldnotes in an incorrect week, and it was necessary to move misfiled notes to their proper location.

Multiple POST Meanings

More seriously, there were multiple posting keys (circled in Figure 2) for adding content to the conference. The POST option within the black bar at the top of the screen was intended only for adding general topics to the conference. At the sub-topic level (top right circle), students were offered a menu of choices for processing messages that contained a POST option. To add to the confusion, students would select REPLY or REPLY W/QUOTE options to enter a message and be faced with two additional commands to POST their message, one for the initial message and one for a Message Preview. The term POST meant "record or save your message" in this context.

In Figure 2, the circled POST options created a new topic at conference level. Those marked by arrows were REPLY options which put field notes within their proper topic. The upper boxed area shows mis-postings, while the lower boxed one is correct.

The POSTS circled in Figure 3 meant something different from those circled in Figure 2. They actually denoted that messages would be recorded underneath the topic where the REPLY option was selected. As students confused the two, field notes were misplaced at the conference level (upper box) instead of under the week they were due (lower box). In a few cases, students lost their notes entirely by clicking on the wrong key, and this created anxiety and some reluctance to use the WebBoard.

Additional Technical Difficulties

Students were given options during the WebBoard orientation for submitting their fieldnotes. They could use the word processor method shown in the left side of Figure 4 which provided a backup for their work, or they could post notes directly to the Web. In early October, one student prepared her notes in a word processing package on one of the campus computer lab machines, but her attempt to block copy the file contents to the text entry box in WebBoard failed. Several possible causes were examined and Houghton finally worked directly with the student on the machine she was using. He discovered that the amount of text that could be block copied at one time on computer lab machines was limited to three standard pages. In this case no fieldnotes were lost.

http://webboard.ora.com/