Title: Bridging the Disconnect: Connecting values to the Internet
PI's: Janine Boire, Princeton University; Melodee Landis, University of Nebraska at Omaha
Other collaborating institutions: Oracle; Teachers College, Columbia University; Center for Children and Technology (CCT); Bricolage Interactive Design
There is great concern that the Internet will become yet another medium to miss its opportunity as a pervasive, positive, educational tool. At a time when the Internet's growth is driven by high expectations for personal wealth and public good, it is the materialistic and destructive uses that seem to persist and receive media attention. We propose a forum to counteract this trend and to connect values to the Internet.
The culprit most often cited in these missed opportunities is the 'disconnect' between public and private sectors, and researchers and educators. If we are to improve and sustain the educational value of the Internet, collaboration and commitment from each of these stakeholders is essential. It is our mission to help provide a forum for 1) the education community (practitioners and researchers), 2) the private sector, and 3) the public sector (both grassroots and national leadership) to develop a shared vision for the ethical, equitable, and constructive uses of the Internet.
Once the appropriate research has been completed, a planning meeting will be convened to 1) discuss current educational uses of the Internet and envision more constructive scenarios for development, 2) create an action plan that moves the visioning process forward and 3) develop the boilerplate materials for funding proposals to create the infrastructure required to implement the forum on a national scale.
The E-Learning Manifesto is posted here: http://www.ideasconsulting.com/manifesto/
Title: Making a Market for Education Technology: A business plan for an educational entrepreneurship greenhouse
PI: Rob Pannoni, Rapport Systems
Other collaborating institutions: McGill University; Stanford University; WestEd; University of British Columbia; University of Michigan; RITSEC; Talaria, Inc.; Hewlett-Packard; CCT; Intel; TeleLearning; Syracuse University; SRI International
One of the great frustrations of both educational researchers and the agencies that fund them is the difficulty in getting innovative educational technology out of the lab and into the hands of educators. There are a number of barriers that must be overcome to achieve this goal, but one lesson that emerged from CILT99 is the tremendous culture and knowledge gap between researchers and entrepreneurs. With their focus on educational outcomes, researchers are often not prepared to address the technical, operational, and business issues required for successful dissemination of educational technology. On the other hand, entrepreneurs don't always understand what makes a technology effective from an educational standpoint or the values that drive the educational research community. And because the market for educational technology is in its infancy, potential technology users don't have the information and tools necessary to find, evaluate, and purchase appropriate technologies.
This proposal brings together a diverse group of researchers, educators, and industry representatives to create a business plan for a greenhouse to support educational entrepreneurship, providing entrepreneurial training and other resources for new educational businesses. The project will be divided into two phases: a research phase and a business plan development phase. Deliverables are a business plan for the organization and a website to support the planning process and to disseminate the information collected. At the conclusion of the project, we expect to secure additional funding from other sources to actually create the new organization that this seed grant will help define.
Seed Grant Products:Title: Defining the Next Generation of Online Teacher Learning
PI: Raymond Rose, Concord Consortium
Other collaborating institutions: TERC; Kern County Schools, Bakersfield, CA; University of Maryland; Capistrano Unified School District; Universite Laval; University of Toronto; Fremond Unified School District, Fremont, CA; SRI International; Bricolage Interactive Design
Technology is being broadly used to deliver teacher learning experiences over a distance. Our analysis of current practices found activities and pedagogy based on face-to-face learning situations. This project will create an opportunity for reflection on the current state of online learning as well as creative and knowledgeable thought to the pedagogy of the future which will take advantage of the ability of technology to reach large numbers of participants, and to enhance learning opportunities in yet unknown ways. The team that makes up this project represents public schools, universities engaged in teacher education, and educational research and development organizations with extensive technology experience. This team will engage in a reflective data gathering process to look at the current state of online teacher education, then meet to create what will hopefully become the protocol for the next generation of online teacher learning. The ideas will be presented in a session at the Computer Support for Collaborative Learning '99 conference to get early feedback and then refined in a white paper. The white paper, Defining The Next Generation Of Online Teacher Learning, will be the major product and deliverable for this project.
Seed Grant Products:Title: Interoperability among Knowledge-Building Environments
PI: Gerry Stahl, University of Colorado
Other collaborating institutions: Georgia Institute of Technology; Stanford University; SRI International; Swarthmore College; University of California, Berkeley; McGill University; WestEd; University of Hawaii; Buena Vista University; University of Toronto; University of Washington; Georgia Institute of Technology; Open University; University of British Columbia
A number of software environments have been developed to support collaborative knowledge building, typically incorporating a persistent discussion forum. Despite striking similarities and interesting differences among these community learning tools, there has been little direct interchange of ideas, designs, experiences and data among the developers. A first step toward increasing collaboration in this research community is to define a mark-up language to represent, archive and translate the data captured in these systems. This will help us to understand the design space of such knowledge building environments, to share software tools and to archive data for analysis. This project brings together representatives of research groups building related tools and evaluating the learning supported by those tools.