Defining the NCSA Superweb for Education

A new vision of the web for education, called the NCSA SuperWeb is defined at three different levels: at the pedagogical, at the human collaborative, and in terms of the enabling technology. At the pedagogical it is designed to support models of learning that engage the learner in powerful meaning construction, through a rich co-development of tools and resources. At the collaboration level, the SuperWeb facilitates a constellation of distributed resource groups and provides for two way interactions and opportunities for users to make substantive contributions that may change the groups’ knowledge and processes and thus is fundamentally generative. A SuperWeb is axiomatically a place for authentic work activities, processes, human relationships, and knowledge building that supports learning and collaboration. At the technology level, the SuperWeb uses a number of enabling technologies: server-side capabilities available mainly through standard browser-clients and open standards The result is that the SuperWeb can attempt to recover via the web some of the best functionalities developed for computer based training over the last two decades. Examples are given for the use of the SuperWeb: in instruction, curriculum development and professional development. Examples of ongoing tools include valuable computational and curriculum resources such as the NCSA Biology WorkBench, the NCSA Video Annotation Tool, and professional development templates and wizards designed for teacher’s use in curriculum construction, instructional scaffolding, and assessment