Jan Herrington has always been fascinated by technology, and has learned a lot about educational practice since she began teaching high school English in rural Victoria, Australia more than 25 years ago. But while eager to assess the potential of technical advances, she is adamant that “there is no point perpetuating bad teaching with new technologies.”

    “We have learned much in recent years about how people learn best, and I am keen to apply that knowledge to the use of technologies to promote deep and lifelong learning skills,” says Herrington, a senior lecturer in the School of Communications and Multimedia at Edith Cowan University in Perth. She will have a new opportunity to explore the question in depth when she spends four months this fall at the UGA College of Education under a 2002 Fulbright Professional Award.

    Herrington's Fulbright Scholar appointment in the department of instructional technology will allow her to complete her work with UGA professor Thomas C. Reeves, her co-researcher on a project to investigate the effectiveness of “authentic” activities in online university learning.

    Herrington points out that when institutions move to offering courses online, many “simply place large tracts of text on a website, where students work through the content week by week, then complete the assignments.” Web-based courses have captured the imagination of many administrators, who see them as a way to provide low-cost teaching at a time of cutbacks and reduced budgets.

    “There are problems with this information-based approach,” she says. “Information learnt simply to pass examinations and tests frequently remains ‘inert’ and cannot be called upon to solve a problem in hand. Universities are besieged by reports of student dissatisfaction with the quality of teaching, and corporations are often unhappy with the quality of university graduates.”

    The alternative approach which Herrington has been helping to develop depends on creating realistic activities which students complete collaboratively, working online.

    “Students use a purposeful activity to organize their study, give meaning to their acquisition of information and provide a framework for the creation of a realistic product,” she says.

    While the Fulbright award will allow Herrington to assess the effectiveness of this model and develop guidelines for teachers to use the “authentic activities” approach, it will also help her to fulfill a personal goal – “to be a mentor for young women who seek to advance in the field of technology, and to provide an example of how women from the most unlikely backgrounds can succeed in an area that even today is largely dominated by young men.”

    The Fulbright Program gives exceptional scholars and professionals a chance to study and enlarge their knowledge and experience overseas. In the past half-century, more than 250,000 awardees from 140 countries have taken part in the program, established to promote mutual understanding through cultural exchange between the United States and other countries.

Tuesday, August 13, 2002
Writer: Michael Childs, 706/542-5889, mchilds@coe.uga.edu
Contact: Thomas Reeves, 706/542-3849, treeves@coe.uga.edu