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This March 2006 edition of the IU News presents top stories from 2005, and more. In June of 2005, as the Interactive University Project entered a period of planning and change, the IU News took a break from its regular monthly publication. As the IU reviews its communicaitons strategies, it expects to unveil a new web presence later in 2006. Visit the IU Main page for more about the new IU/MIP group. Reprised IU News stories featured in this issue are:
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Environmental Education: UC Berkeley Works with East Bay High Schools
From the May 2005 IU News . . .
During the current Spring Semester, 17 Berkeley graduate and undergraduate students are exploring ways to bring a social component to environmental education. Led by UC Berkeley instructor Mark Spencer, the ESPM 190 students are working with three East Bay high schools: Richmond High, Oakland High, and the Oasis Charter School in Oakland.
Supported by IU's City|Watershed Project and Berkeley's College of Natural Resources, the UC Berkeley students are working to develop and present an environmental science curriculum in which research, teaching, and outreach are all brought into a framework that examines and analyzes local ecosystems high school students can initially be introduced to in class and then observe first-hand in the field.
In order to make the concept work, Spencer's students spend as much time observing and teaching in the field — along East Bay creeks or tidal marshes, in local parklands or high school classrooms — as they do studying and developing curriculum components at Berkeley. The approach is designed to introduce and foster — for both the University and high school students — the practice of thinking across disciplines. In turn, a multi-disciplinary approach leads to a primary focus on inquiry and the learning process rather than on the mastery of content.
One of the goals for the undergraduates is to use this approach to develop a blueprint for creating "teaching portfolios". The key to creating these portfolios is to collect, identify and analyze the kinds of data and experience essential for an environmental educator. With access to and an understanding of this information, environmental educators might better serve the public with knowledge that will enable an informed citizenry to understand, enjoy and protect local environments.
One facet of this spring's fieldwork has been gathering data from observation for later entry into a Web-based Geographic Information System (GIS). GIS is a technology to manage, analyze, and disseminate geographic knowledge. Data gathered from ESPM classes — past, present and future — is expected to contribute to an expanding geographic and environmental database that will become an important technology feature in an environmental "teaching portfolio".
Observers in the field, teachers and students alike, will be able to access and view stored data to assist in fieldwork and observation, as well as to enter new data and information from current observations. The IU, through the work of its Scholar's Box Project, is working to support and assist in the development of tools that will make practices like these a reality.
Read the complete story here.
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UC Berkeley Speakers Talk Books With Oakland Teachers
From the April 2005 IU News . . .
On the first two Saturdays in March, Oakland High School English and History teachers attended presentations organized by Oakland's Urban Dreams Project and UC Berkeley's Interactive University. Four separate lecture/discussion sessions gave participating teachers an opportunity to learn in-depth about one of the required texts in this year's Language Arts curriculum for grades 9 through 12.
The half-day sessions — developed as part of Oakland's year six extension of Urban Dreams professional development work — were held at the Technology Learning Center in OUSD's Harper Building, where participants gathered for introductions and refreshments prior to the scheduled events.
On March 5, the designated texts were Fallen Angels, by Walter Dean Myers (grade 9), and Night, by Elie Wiesel (grade 10); the following Saturday, March 12, featured the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (grade 11), the first of three autobiographies Douglass wrote, and Shakespeare's Macbeth (grade 12).
Each program began with a prepared talk about the book, followed by a round-table discussion. The talks were delivered by UC Berkeley professors and other academics recruited by the IU. A short break followed the talk and discussion, each group then re-convened to explore and discuss online resources at a new website created for the sessions. This part of the program was led and facilitated by an OUSD staff member, who guided teachers through both paper and online resources that supplemented the lecture and discussion.
All four presentation and discussion sessions were video-taped by OUSD's KDOL staff, and each will be edited and available in the future. The website material will also be permanently archived by OUSD. Currently, the website is hosted by the IU; it was created by the IU in collaboration with OUSD curriculum staff, the lecturers, and teachers who participated in the Saturday sessions.
During each of the four Saturday sessions, time was provided for teachers to work online individually, or ad hoc in discussion and conversation. During this part of the program, all participants reviewed and discussed salient points and strategies mentioned or evolved from earlier in the program.
The day's events were designed to provide participating teachers with the opportunity to reflect on ideas and gather resources, to begin creating or outlining ways to incorporate the day's experience into classroom plans, and to have a place to share perceived challenges or obstacles identified as emerging from a book's themes or ideas.
Many teachers remarked that having a time for resource exploration, reflection, and face-to-face discussion with other teachers was especially valuable — particularly in conjunction with lectures that were uniformly characterized as enlightening and stimulating.
Since each of the four lecturers provided or suggested supplementary resource materials (most of these may be found at the website) a fruitful, creative interplay developed between the lecture, the resources, the discussion, and the ideas engendered and supported by this combination.
The teachers felt rewarded by an event where learning and knowledge were encouraged and supported. Some teachers noted that the atmosphere of cross-fertilization and collaboration was energizing and exciting.
Read the complete story here.
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IU Delivers Assessment of Teachers' Needs to California Digital Library
From the February 2005 IU News . . .
On January 20th the IU delivered findings from a recent user needs assessment it conducted for the California Digital Library. IU staff traveled to CDL offices in Oakland to make a presentation and lead a discussion with CDL staff. The IU assessment was undertaken in response to expressed needs of the California Digital Library's Social and Ecological Diversity of the American West project, in which the IU is a partner. A goal of the American West project is to "help scholars, teachers, and librarians implement solutions enabling users to better leverage digital content in an online learning environment."
The IU presentation provided an initial look at the ways in which high school Social Studies teachers use digital objects in their teaching practice. The primary research question of the IU assessment was: "How do K-12 teachers use digital materials in their teaching?" — where teaching was broadly interpreted to span a range of activities, including: information gathering; research about content; the use of materials in the creation of small and large supplementary curriculum resources; the creation of lessons and units; materials that students are guided to and independently use; and, materials that students seek and find to interpret or create something new, such as a paper or presentation.
To gather information for the assessment, IU interviewed teachers using an interview schedule designed to elicit "testimonial" narratives and provide the fullest expression of how teachers actually use digital materials. The intent of the IU assessment was to meet immediate CDL needs in the continued development of user tools and interfaces that will enable better exposure and use of digital resources for K-12 teachers.
Based on expressed teacher responses, and follow-up analysis, the IU presented a number of suggestions for consideration to inform CDL development of the American West project. A summary of the findings and suggestions:
- Teachers approach lesson planning by beginning with a focusing question, or set of questions.
- Though in-class teaching time may be improvised in response to variant situations day-to-day, teachers prepare for and find materials to support their teaching according to predictable and describable processes and habits.
- The overwhelming amount of information available on the Internet drives teachers to appreciate and return to sites and sources that contain reliable, trusted information that is presented in uncluttered, easy-to-navigate, and "elegant" sites.
- Teachers are more attracted to loosely aggregated, "modular" collections than to comprehensive curriculum packages; teachers like to "take apart" material and make it their own before they use it.
- Teachers print a lot of the information (text, images, etc.) they find on the Internet; formats that lend themselves to easy printing are desirable.
- There is little organized sharing of materials among teachers, where it does occur it is most often between friends or teachers who have a history of working together.
Following the IU presentation by Isaac Mankita and Chris Ashley, an informative and engaging discussion carried over into the lunch hour. There was a feeling in the room of exciting work to be done, and a general agreement to re-convene in the near future to further to pursue some of the issues raised by the IU report and the dialogue that followed.
Here is a link to a PDF file containing the IU report delivered to the CDL, and, as an appendix, the interview schedule used to collect information.
Read the complete story here.
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More Top News Stories From the IU News Archive
From the January 2005 IU News . . .
The year 2004 brought a number of important achievements, among the most significant, two major local school district projects, in which the IU was a vital contributing partner, came to a close. Beginning in 1999, UC Berkeley and the IU participated in school-district-wide projects in Oakland and San Francisco. The two distinct grants for systemic improvements in the Oakland and San Francisco Unified School districts were designed to improve teaching and learning in classrooms; from the beginning of each of these efforts, the IU played an important role in both projects by making UC resources available and relevant to expressed K-12 needs.
Concurrently, IU's technical and development staff continued to test, augment, and share the concepts and framework for the Scholar's Box suite of on-line tools and services--a suite conceived with the goal of supporting and enabling some of the activities implemented in projects similar to the two above; the concept of a Scholar's Box envisions allowing teachers and scholars to gather, create and share archived digital materials for use in classrooms and research. During 2004, IU's Scholar's Box developers continued to benefit from working partnerships with the UC Berkeley Library and the California Digital Library that are a cornerstone of Scholar's Box development, while also traveling throughout the year to make presentations at conferences, scholar's panels and universities.
During a year in which the University of California had to respond to shrinking financial support and smaller budget outlays from state and federal sources, the IU continued its trademark community and partnership work in projects on and off campus. IU's City|Watershed project, funded by the Department of Commerce, commenced its first summer of work in Bay Area Communities by tapping into the expertise and resources of UCB's College of Natural Resources. While work continued on varied efforts in the community (among them the award-winning Y-PLAN in Oakland), in October the IU won a new three year grant from the Fund for the Improvement of Post Secondary Education (FIPSE). The funded IU proposal, entitled The Scholar's Box: A K-12/University Project to Create a Better Learning Object, will receive approximately $600,000 over the three-year duration of the work which will begin in earnest early in 2005.
These are some of the highlights. Below you will find introductions and links to the full stories that appeared in last year's IU news and covered these and other stories as they emerged. Read on for a full review of the year.
Urban Dreams Professional Development Sessions
APRIL 2004 | On March 16, 2004 in Oakland, OUSD Urban Dreams participants attended a workshop/presentation led by Ethnic Studies Professor Alex Saragoza. This was the fourth and final meeting in a series that began last October, and explored topics related to the assimilation and acculturation process facing Latino immigrants to the United States in the middle decades of the 20th Century.
For the duration of this series, Saragoza and staff from OUSD and the IU have conducted the sessions for a group of about 15 teachers and curriculum specialists, presenting materials and leading discussions focused on political, historical and economic developments taking place in the United States.
With the goal of understanding American cultural shifts and the challenges these presented to immigrants, the series offered teachers varied resources that can be incorporated into high school lessons.
Read the rest of the story here. The full story in the April 2004 IU News contains links to earlier stories about Urban Dreams sessions in this series.
In May 2004, IU hosted an event on the Berkeley campus to mark the completion of Urban Dreams work, read about the participants and their work here.
IU Completes Work With Oakland and San Francisco School Districts
SEPTEMBER 2004 | In the second half of 1999 both the Oakland and San Francisco Unified School Districts received important five-year Federal grants to support programs for systemic improvement in teaching and learning throughout each district. Oakland received a Federal Technology Innovation Grant awarded by the U.S. Department of Education. San Francisco received an Urban Systemic Program Grant from the National Science Foundation. The IU and its campus partners have played significant roles from start to finish in each of these programs.
Now, the work of these two district-wide, multi-million dollar efforts is coming to a close—with a number of successes and achievements. In both districts the IU collaborated with teachers, curriculum and technology specialists, and administrators to implement and achieve Federal and school district program goals. Of equal significance, several IU Internet Learning Community Projects (ILCPs) teamed UC Berkeley faculty, students and staff with K-12 teachers and students. These partnerships harnessed Internet technologies to improve student outcomes and assist learners and educators. In September 2001, Chancellor Berdahl honored the IU and all campus and K-12 ILCP participants with UC Berkeley's University/Community Partner award.
Among the outcomes of each of these grants, UC/K-12 partnerships have resulted in: a wide range of teacher professional development activities; the creation of standards-based digital learning materials; and hands-on experience and guided opportunities to integrate into classroom pedagogy emerging strategies and practices, such as web-logging and digital storytelling.
Read the complete story here.
Scholar's Box Development & Presentations Throughout 2004
MAY 2004 | The IU continues development of the Scholar's Box: a collection of tools that enables users to gather resources from multiple digital repositories, and from them create personal and themed collections, and other reusable materials, that can be saved, shared, and accessed for teaching and research. When fully operational, the Scholar's Box will enable the easy integration of digital learning objects into curricula, and will interoperate with other common user tools.
In April IU team members traveled to the Spring 2004 Task Force Meeting of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), and to the Spring Forum of the Digital Library Federation (DLF), to present some of the latest Scholar's Box developments. While these two organizations are distinct, with separate missions and constituents, they share an interest in assessing and identifying standards and "best practices" for digital collections and network access, as well as a focus on initiatives and services that expand access to resources for scholars and to online collections for use in teaching, and, in general, the enhancement of teaching and learning through information and educational technologies.
These areas of interest are central to Scholar's Box and IU work as well. The two meetings provided opportunities for the IU to explain the challenge and context of developing a Scholar's Box environment that connects digital libraries, educational technologies, personal information spaces, and social software, while showcasing progress in Scholar's Box work and related IU partnerships.
Read the complete story here.
AUGUST 2004 | The Digital Library Federation (DLF) convened a scholars' advisory panel in Washington, D.C. in early June. The gathering, of more than a dozen humanities scholars from universities and archival institutions around the country, was co-chaired by the DLF's David Seaman, and the IU's David Greenbaum.
The meeting grew out of a desire to learn from working scholars what they value and what they need from digital library services; it was conceived and planned as a forum to assess the library and archival community's current understandings of how expectations of library users might differentiate from the expressed needs of scholars.
Each scholar who was part of the panel is actively engaged in creating and using digital library content, often in partnership with an academic library. Among the institutions represented were: Michigan State University; Johns Hopkins University; the Thomas Jefferson Papers; the University of Nebraska, Lincoln; the University of Rochester; the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; the University of Virginia; and George Mason University.
Among the fields of scholarship represented, there were professors of: Italian, French, English, American Studies, Middle East Studies, Sociology, New Media, Religious Studies, and several Historians.
Read the complete story here.
NOVEMBER 2004 | During the last week in October, the IU participated in three interesting events all held in the Washington, D.C. area. On Tuesday afternoon, October 26th, at the Digital Library Federation’s (DLF) Fall Forum in Baltimore, IU’s Raymond Yee gave a talk entitled: Interactions of Emerging Gather/Create/Share End-User Tools with Digital Libraries.
Earlier, IU Director David Greenbaum addressed the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences — a session convened in conjunction with the DLF Forum.
To complete the IU’s week of presentations and discussions, Greenbaum and Yee traveled to George Mason University, where Roy Rosenzweig, Director of GMU’s Center for History and New Media (CHNM) had invited them to share IU’s strategies and visions for how to make digital materials more readily available to scholars, students and public communities.
The presentations served to disseminate some of the IU’s work and thinking to academic and professional peers, and also to continue to identify projects, and potential partners, working in areas of research, development and implementation that overlap with IU projects and technical developments.
A theme common to the IU presentations, and one informing all aspects of IU work, is the democratization of knowledge: creating ways and means to increase the availability and usefulness of knowledge created and archived in university and research communities, making it readily accessible to all public learners.
Read the complete story here.
IU In The Community: City|Watershed and Y-PLAN
JULY 2004 | City|Watershed (C|W), a project led by the IU and UC Berkeley's College of Natural Resources (CNR), is beginning its first summer of work. Utilizing the resources and expertise of UC Berkeley, the project aims to increase community involvement in, and understanding of, the urban watershed—with the goal of enabling citizens (youth and their families, teachers and community leaders) to contribute solutions to the interrelated environmental and social problems affecting San Francisco Bay Area watersheds.
The College of Natural Resources has a long-established record of outreach and urban environmental education. Among its programs and course offerings is the Department of Environmental Science, Policy & Management (ESPM) 190 Seminar in Environmental Issues; for several years it has trained undergraduates to be urban environmental educators. ESPM 190 was conceived and developed by the late Professor Don Dahlsten. Professor Dahlsten, instrumental and inspirational in so many endeavors both on and off the Berkeley campus, was also an essential partner with IU in gaining support and funding for the City|Watershed Project.
As a first step toward realizing its goals, City|Watershed has identified ESPM 190 as a course it will support and enhance. Mark Spencer, who received his Ph.D. in Environmental Science and Policy Management from CNR, is C|W's East Bay Program Coordinator. Spencer anticipates several ways that C|W will contribute to CNR's ongoing urban environmental education work.
Read the complete story here.
MAY 2004 | The Y-PLAN Project (Youth — Plan, Learn, Act, Now), has worked with high school students in West Oakland for the past five years, providing them with opportunities to participate in, and understand, urban planning and design. Each year the project's focus changes—responding to redevelopment needs within the community.
"The goal is to get local youth involved in the development and vibrancy of their own community, sort of a living classroom," said Deborah McKoy, IU's Research Coordinator and Director of the Cities and Schools Project in UC Berkeley's Department of City and Regional Planning.
This year's students have worked in two areas: youth visions for the new commercial space on Seventh Street, and a cultural history project to identify West Oakland's social movements, identities and culture. They will present their proposals and plans before the Oakland City Council at City Hall on May 4th, from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m., in Hearing Room 3, 1 Frank Ogawa Plaza.
Read the Oakland Tribune's account of this year's Y-PLAN work here.
Read about past Y-PLAN work and awards here and here.
IU Receives Important New FIPSE Award
OCTOBER 2004 | In September 2004 the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Postsecondary Education announced that the UC Berkeley Interactive University Project will receive a major three-year grant from The Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE). The grant provides funding to support innovative reform projects that hold promise as models for the resolution of important issues and problems in the world of postsecondary education
The IU award comes as the result of a submission in early 2004 to FIPSE’s Comprehensive Program. The Comprehensive Program supports innovative postsecondary education reform projects. Applicants were asked to identify problems of national significance and to propose solutions that can be replicated in similar settings. FIPSE looked for new strategies that improve upon what others in the field are already doing. The funded IU proposal, entitled The Scholar’s Box: A K-12/University Project to Create a Better Learning Object, will receive approximately $600,000 over the three-year duration of the work.
FIPSE supports applicants who demonstrate an awareness of what others in the field are doing and then build on proven and emerging concepts; it strives to fund innovative project ideas that have not been tried before; and it takes a national perspective when thinking about innovation. But, innovation by itself is often not enough. FIPSE challenges applicants to conceive, design, and manage significant projects in ways that promote sustained operations and growth, increase impact in other settings, and achieve other lasting and widespread impacts.
These FIPSE goals for improving education correlate well with IU goals. In its past and current endeavors, IU has explored collaborations and technologies that share resources from various archives and repositories with a wide-range of learners and communities, and this work has shaped a vision well suited to FIPSE support.
Read the complete story here.
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