In thinking about distance ed, and trying to solve some practical problems regarding communication and collaboration while using BlueJ at the UKC, we (Ian and I) realized that we had a reasonably interesting BlogTalk 2.0 presentation. So, we dropped a proposal into the email, and we’ll see what happens!
The goal of the work described in this paper is to improve the interaction between students, their peers and their instructors in the context of introductory programming education. It is a common misunderstanding among students that programming is about hacking code as a solitary activity; in professional practice, it is much more about communication of design ideas and potential solutions. While it might be too much to expect this kind of communication from a student at the very beginning of their studies, we can at least introduce them to tools like weblogs and the style of interaction that they foster and show them the value of using the tools in a context where they have a real, pressing, need for communication.
Initial programming courses at the University of Kent use the BlueJ integrated development environment; which is designed specifically to support beginners programming in Java. It is currently used in over 350 Universities worldwide, as well as in a number of distance-learning contexts, both academic and commercial. Recently, one of the authors has been involved in providing an extension framework for BlueJ to allow educators to tailor it for use in their own environments. One of the primary principles of this extensions work is not to duplicate existing tools, but to interface with them and then leverage their specific functionality.
An early product of this work is an extension which allows BlueJ users to submit the work they have been engaged in to teachers either for assessment or for help and advice. This submission extension uses email, FTP and HTTP POSTs to submit students’ work, rather than inventing a new, proprietary, protocol and submission handling system, which means that it can be used with Learning Management Systems like Blackboard and WebCT.
The extensions framework has also made possible an ongoing study of novice programmers learning Java using BlueJ. The goal of this work is both to inform instructional practice in the classroom and to help guide future development of the BlueJ programming environment. Initial results have already helped us understand the kinds of mistakes beginners make most often, and the ways in which they write their code.
As we look to use BlueJ in our own distance-delivered courses at the University of Kent, we need to provide ways to allow users who already use weblogs, wikis and the like a simple mechanism for incorporating material from BlueJ into their interactions with peers and teachers. This will support not only ad hoc interactions but facilitate our goal, in studying novice programmers, of automatically prompting them when such interactions might help them past a point where they are stuck or lost.
Our first step in facilitating this interaction is to provide students with a lightweight mechanism for communicating with teachers from inside BlueJ. We use the MetaWeblog API to send questions, code fragments and pleas for help to their peers and teachers, but do not attempt to duplicate the other functions of weblog systems. Weblog systems like Movable Type already provide mechanisms for archiving, search and syndication that both instructors and students can access using a web browser or third-party tools.