A Virtual IMC Unifying Professional Development and School Reform
This paper provides an in-depth description of K12IRC.org, as presented in a paper on June, 1997 by Dr. Bonnie Tenenbaum, the K12IRC Librarian.
A VIRTUAL INSTRUCTIONAL MEDIA CENTER UNIFYING PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT AND SCHOOL REFORM
A central tenet of professional development and school reform is the
creation of an enabling participant-driven environment for students and teachers
alike. Web technology shares and promotes this same imperative. The key dynamics
of the World-wide Web and school reform are exactly the same.
Our Virtual Library Instructional Media Center provides a comprehensive
environment -- chockfull of the requisite resources -- for unifying professional
development and school reform [1]. The site is designed as an immersive
environment, supporting collaborative reform activities at key systemic levels:
in the classroom with interactive telecommunications activities; within and
among schools via multiple conferencing capabilities; and in concert with
professional networks and stakeholders such as parents, business and community
groups. Teachers not only can collaborate across sites, but can share and
receive recognition for their contributions by co-publishing them through the
Media Center.
Here, we offer an overview of the site and examples of its use in five key
streams of professional development and school reform.
OVERVIEW OF THE SITE
Here is a view of the original Lobby in the Instructional Media Center,
a view of the original VPL-IMC lobby home page from 1999, including the large Virtual Public Library banner behind Alice's desk.
and of the current lobby [as it looked in 2005].
the revised lobby home page, with Alice at a blue desk in front of a large bulletin board with icons and text links.
The rooms, sections and shelves of the resource center are arranged
hierarchically and stocked with carefully selected electronic learning resources
and activities. Over 1000 listings of remote sites propel visitors into the
center of networked science on the Web. This seed collection focuses broadly on
environmental studies. Each entry is accompanied by descriptions and
annotations. The sampling was assembled from many regions in the US, diverse
agencies, varied dimensions of telecommunications and integrated subject topics
for a wide range in student age, interests and capability. Valuable offline
references are cited, too.
The Media Center is an open ended, participatory. and collaborative
environment, encouraging teachers at remote sites to cooperatively develop and
publish joint network science projects. Visitors start at the librarian's desk
where they will find a rich selection of Web tools, technology, and policy
guidelines that empower them to develop and customize their own sites. There is
also a Plan Book that provides samples of curriculum and assessment frameworks
for telecommunications activities in schools. The Cool Projects Room showcases
classroom project investigations at national centers, museums, and at field
sites and on treks around the world. The Multimedia Room features simulation
and authoring software for creating educational products for schools and the
workplace. The Student Stuff Room contains basic reference material,
collaborative notebooks, and sites where students can participate in contests or
exhibit and publish their work. The Professional Development Room includes tips
for school reform, as well as tools and resources for professional publishing
and networking -- listservs, moos, bboards, Internet training courses, and
conferences (both on- and offline). In the Community Center are case studies of
school-community telecommunications networks and programs linking schools
with homes, businesses and local agencies. A Conference Room facilitates
cooperative work among remote colleagues. through various real-time and
asynchronous communications tools including a shared whiteboard, video
conferencing and multimedia mail. Finally, the Printer's Press provides
templates for publishing completed projects through the resource center,
expanding the seed collection.
A key decision in the design of this site was the selection of a natural
computer-human interface. Computer-human interface researchers have explored
many metaphors for virtual, community-building environments. CD's aside, the
current crop of educational environments ranges from Web pages with generic
button icons (news, links, chat, search, directories, parent sites,) and A-Z
laundry lists (lessons, libraries, or listservs) to roadmaps (Hillside, NCREL)
to villages (Computertown) to venues within a cityspace(cafes, left and right
banks in Paris (Serim)) to universities (Women in Technology International),
and libraries with reference rooms (DOEd) and multiple-subject collections
(Soloway's includes a MOO,too) to a student's world (Frazier, Kurshan, and
Armstrong), to name a few [2].
We selected the Instructional Media Center as a computer-human interface
metaphor, because such an environment is often the first stop for teachers
undertaking innovative projects. We support familiar resources and work
practices, and extend them with new telecommunications powers [3].
APPLICATIONS TO PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT AND SCHOOL REFORM
Five streams of professional development have been identified in the service
of reform by Little [4]. For each stream, we cite a few examples of how the
library can help educators pursue reform.
1. Reforms in Subject Matter Teaching: Curriculum and Pedagogy
Most technology curriculum specialists are well-versed in online,
constructivist projects and exhibits and have participated in or viewed email
exchanges of data and information (See Cool Projects Room). Recently, some new
projects have emerged that subtly yet powerfully alter pedagogy through
telecollaboration. For example, by amassing data from online observers around
the world, an individual classroom can conduct scientific investigations based
on detailed
population statistics rather than small data samples or oversimplified
estimates (GLOBE, Mendelian studies.) Younger students can explore previously
inaccessible nanoworlds by consulting online with university researchers, and
accessing costly equipment such as electron microscopes and MRI scanners.
Our site emphasizes projects like the above in which telecollaboration is an
essential ingredient. Other examples:, one school in the Colorado mountains
sought another school at sea level to partner in biology studies. Schools in
Texas and around the Great Lakes cooperated to meticulously plot the
microecologies of their regions, which appear as undifferentiated blobs in a
traditional CD atlas. The San Francisco Exploratorium moderated the building of
a virtual city from design modules, submitted from around the world. None of
these projects could have been tackled at all without collaboration. Their
content is authentic and rich (see Means [5])and the outcomes unknown [6].
2. Equity
Suffused throughout every library room are resources to facilitate the
special needs of diverse student groups (eg.physically disabled, limited
English-speaking, young women seeking careers in science). With a few
exceptions, such as the DOEd online library, most of these needs are absent in
general, online collections and require searches in special databases.
Practioners and policy-makers usually focus on the importance of affordable
costs and universal access to establish equity in telecommunications. The
implications of equity for education are profound: for the first time, de facto
segregation in education can be virtually eliminated. Any teacher and student
can visit museums, conduct research at university libraries, view up to the
minute news feeds, participate in space, undersea and other farflung
expeditions. Moreover, learning communities can easily regulate and adapt their
own environments (see Thornberg [7]). Systems analysts regard such self
regulation as critical to any reform effort.
3. Nature, Extent and Uses of Standards and Assessment
The commitment of many teachers to integrating traditional and alternative
assessment often exceeds the power of the tools available to them--not a good
portent for reform. The Plan Book and Student Stuff spaces contain subject
matter benchmarks and software for preparating project portfolios. Three
resources merit special attention for telecommunications-oriented learning
projects: (1) self-assessing student notebooks for online project-based
learning; (2) references to materials for assessing student groupwork, a
necessity for collaborative projects; and (3) tools for transferring offline
student projects to online files so that they can be remotely shared.
4. Professionalization of Teaching
Until now, most professional development opportunities have been outside the
teacher's workplace, away from the desktop, classroom and school. Time and
funding constraints have limited participation and dampened the sense of
immediacy. This is compounded for development approaches that involve
collaboration with colleagues. Some of these barriers can be surmounted in
virtual environments.
The Professional Development Room assembles direct links to professional
networks, associations and affinity groups for teachers and librarians/media
specialists. This room also contains digests of successful results-driven
strategies for school reform. The Web Tools space includes comprehensive
resources and tools for Internet/Web training and site management, and together
with the Conferencing Center, tools for doing collaborative research using the
Web. Our philosophy is that technology and school reform must be intertwined
from the getgo. Integrating both resources on one site should help new
teaching professionals enter the world of telecommunications and thus accelerate
the pace of change in schooling to better match the breathtaking speed of the
evolution of new technologies.
Like other professionals, teachers need opportunities to publish their work.
A quick glance through past NECC proceedings will confirm that in recent years
teachers have become increasingly aware of opportunities for publishing their
own work directly on the Web (eg. Serim, Hillside, Armadillo and commercial
hosting services). Mostly, these opportunities involve posting URL's and
soliciting viewer feedback. Our site's capabilities advance this dimension
of professionalization by including techniques for remote, collaborative
authoring and publishing, tips for getting one's work picked up by search
engines and listservs, as well as "follow-me" tools for sharing
projects with colleagues [8].
5. Organization of Schooling
The Community Center Room includes resources for involving the larger
community in teacher-led school reform. These include case studies of successful
shared networks linking schools with homes, businesses (school to work
programs), universities and other community activities. The potential impact of
these school-community partnerships is unbounded. Wouldn't it be exciting if a
whole
community could "follow" students during their virtual trek to the
Amazon? The BBN Testbed2 project is compiling a typology and catalog of such
school-community partnerships [9].
At long last, the business community is providing the fuel for educational
reform while acknowledging that educational professionals belong in the driver's
seat. In a letter of support to LEA's for a 1995 DOE Challenge grant, for
example, Ed McCracken, Chairman and CEO of Silicon Graphics and Chairman of the
NIIA Advisory Council, wrote, "Silicon Valley companies are contributing
$20 million (for equipment and connectivity) but we are not taking the
leadership of or responsibility for these programs away from educators or the
community...No one is better qualified to develop this educational content than
the teachers...themselves". [10]
CONCLUSION
Our virtual library and instructional media center empowers teachers to play
a leadership role at ALL systemic levels of school reform. Traditionally,
professional development has been geared toward "outmuscling" the
system--more money, more training, more technology. More is important, surely,
but the real source of strength in effecting change lies in identifying and
applying pressure at critical points of control within the professionalization
streams. Then, our professional community can be transformed into the lighthouse
of this fable, transmitted from the electronic frontier in Puget Sound:
Station #1: Please divert your course 15 degrees to the North to avoid a
collision.
Station #2: Recommend you divert YOUR course 15 degrees to the South to
avoid a collision.
Station #1: This is the Captain of a US Navy ship. I say again, divert YOUR
course.
Station #2: No. I say again, you divert YOUR course.
Station #1: THIS IS THE AIRCRAFT CARRIER ENTERPRISE. WE ARE A LARGE WARSHIP
OF THE US NAVY. DIVERT YOUR COURSE NOW!
Station #2: This is the Puget Sound lighthouse. It's your call.
FOOTNOTES
[1] http://www.k12irc.org/ - This library
was developed as a prototype of the Instructional Media Center of the 21st
Century under the auspices of the National Science Foundation through a contract
to TERC, Cambridge MA (617-547-0430) and a subcontract to Enterprise Integration
Technologies, Menlo Park CA (415-851-8608).
[2] URL's: hillside.coled.umn.edu;
www.ncrel.org; computertown.com; (Serim)oii.org or prism.prs.k12.nj.us;
(Women)witi.org; www.ed.gov; (Soloway)ipl.umich.edu. Deneen Frazier with Dr.
Barbara Kurshan and Dr. Sara Armstrong, INTERNET FOR KIDS, Sybex, 1995.
[3] Technical Note: This configuration was also chosen to satisfy technical
constraints, such as the use of multiple windows and display of multimedia. For
instance, K-12 educators have not fully exploited the Web's capability for
displaying multiple windows at once. A project might display an information
source (e.g., museum exhibit, CD atlas or software demo, TV transmission or MRI
image) in one window, while at the same time providing collaborative media such
as a MOO, chat with a mentor, a shared white board or a student notebook in
other windows. Another advantage of this site is its potential for
scaleability, such as easy integration with distributed "branch"
libraries.Other pertinent technical issues were presented during the Teaching
and Learning workshop at the World Wide Web conference in Paris in May 1996.
[4] Judith Warren Little, "Teacher's Professional Development in a
Climate of Educational Reform," EDUCATIONAL EVALUATION AND POLICY ANALYSIS,
Vol.15,#2, 1993, 129-153.
[5] Barbara Means and Kerry Olson, TECHNOLOGY'S ROLE IN EDUCATION REFORM,
SRI International, 1995.
[6] Yet, these projects, even as a set, are one-up exemplars; a taxonomy for
collaboration would link a spectrum of activities with expected learning
outcomes.
[7] David Thornberg in Sara Armstrong, TELECOMMUNICATIONS IN THE CLASSROOM,
Computer Learning Foundation and ISTE, 1995, p.69ff. Bonnie Bracey, teacher
representative on the NIIAC, also underscores the connection between these
capacities and equity.
[8] The chaotic state of naming and structural organization of site
resources gobbles precious learning time. This issue merits attention by
relevant professional associations.
[9] //nsn.bbn.com/resources/research/buildsch_com.html/. From their
collection of case studies one tidbit for promoting reform stands out; encourage
school folk to use technology to meet a specific community need, such as
conducting a survey. We would add: select a need which can BEST met via
telecommunications.
[10] Silicon Valley Challenge 2000: Improving Learning and Strengthening
Communities with New Technologies, Submitted to the Department of Education,
1995. This author is a consultant on technology and student assessment for this
project.