Beverly Hunter
GTE Internetworking, Powered by BBN
70 Fawcett St.
Cambridge, MA 02143
bhunter@bbn.com
http://www.gse.uci.edu/Ravitz/Hunter_TelEd98.html
Suggested Citation: Hunter, B. (1998). Fostering Collaborative Knowledge-Building: Lessons Learned from the National School Network Testbed. Proceedings of the Annual Telecommunications in Education (TelEd) Conference. Austin, TX. November 14-15, 1997.
Abstract
Global, national, state, and local agencies, corporations, schools and partnerships are looking to take advantage of the World Wide Web to help foster collaboration and knowledge building among their constituent organizations. Such groups may benefit from some lessons learned about Web-based collaborations by the National School Network (NSN) over the past three years. These lessons concern the planning of an educationally sound series of activities to coincide with planned curriculum, the technical and educational challenges of implementing these events and ensuring their educational value, and specific applications that seem to be beneficial in school contexts.
In 1993, the National School Network, funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation posed the following research question for communities in the United States:
"Can we construct and manage communications networks and information services to support educational innovation on a local level in such a way that taxpayers, governments, and private industry will view their benefits as warranting the investment needed to support them on a large scale?" (Toward Universal Participation in the NII, 1994, p. C5)
Since 1994, over 450 communities and institutions in the NSN have been building local information infrastructure (Hunter, 1995; Newman, et al., 1992) while inventing new roles and educational services that take advantage of the technologies. Table 1 shows the kinds of organizations in the NSN.
Table 1. Kinds of Organizations in NSN
| Organization Type | 1995 Members | 1997 Members |
| Schools | 225 | 329 |
| Intermediary Institutions | 115 | 145 |
| * State Ed Agency or network | 6 | 5 |
| * Consortiums of schools/districts | 9 | 9 |
| * School districts | 24 | 37 |
| * Museums, Science centers | 8 | 8 |
| * Community organizations | 8 | |
| * Corporations/Businesses | 7 | 17 |
| * College/Universities | 21 | 17 |
| * R&D Organizations/Projects | 40 | 40 |
| * Professional Associations | 4 |
The NSN concept is that member institutions and communities assist each other in their pioneering efforts by exchanging the knowledge being gained about how to do this. In theory, every NSN member institution is both a consumer and a contributor -- through the networks -- of services, know-how, and content for the others. An NSN "Exchange" was set up on the World Wide Web to facilitate this sharing and collaborative knowledge building.
Members database (http://nsn.bbn.com/members/index.shtml)
The vision of the NSN Exchange was that of a highly distributed knowledge base. That is, the knowledge being built by each member organization on its servers would become a part of the larger community's resources. We wanted to make it easy for members of the NSN to become aware of each others' work and contact each other. We built an electronic database of all the members including the contact person and links to their institutions' Web sites. We encountered two major challenges in implementing this database. Our goal of replicability at member sites prevented us from using a powerful, expensive database engine. Instead, we used Filmmaker Pro which is inexpensive and easy to use locally but has been difficult to search via the Web and slow. Second, it is impossible to keep the database completely current, even though a form is provided for members to update their records. Despite its limitations, however, we regard an online member database as an essential component of any collaborative network as a tool for data collection, project management, and fostering collaboration.
The six "Exchange Desks" were originally conceived to be similar to traditional Internet newsgroups. Members, with the assistance of a Desk moderator, would exchange information and ideas on major topics of relevance to the purpose of the NSN. The discussions would create a Web-accessible archive of know-how and resources, with links to relevant member Web pages.
The six Desks are:
* Local Information Infrastructure (LII) Desk. The vision of the LII is the organization of tools, information, user interfaces, and services that support multiple functions fully integrated with the work of the school community and its goals of innovation and reform. The challenge of building LII is analogous at the local level to the development issues surrounding the notion of the National Information Infrastructure (NII). The LII Desk now provides extensive information on the meaning of "Local Information Infrastructure", Networking Technology, Planning, Roles and Responsibilities, Information Organization, Acceptable Use Policy, and Finance.
* School-Community Projects Desk. Schools are increasingly fostering interactions with their surrounding communities through the use of technology. Involvement in these School-Community projects promises to be a major factor in providing students with experiences that will effectively develop skills demanded by a 21st century global economy.
* Professional Development Desk. Teachers, administrators, curriculum experts, parents, and others in the educational community must be enabled to fully utilize these technologies. An investment in the support, training, and evaluation of professional development promises to yield valuable dividends as educators create optimal learning and teaching environments.
* Standards, Evaluation, and Assessment Desk. These resources are helpful in designing and conducting sound evaluations and assessments of student learning and knowledge that are critical for continual improvement and refinement of programs and projects.
* Curriculum and Instruction Desk. A wide range of curriculum resources are currently available to educators, and particularly innovative programs are highlighted.
* Reference and Dissemination Desk. This desk contains a broad range of information concerning the NSN Exchange, educational resources, K-12 Internet servers, and upcoming opportunities and events.
Two major challenges we encountered in implementing the Exchange Desks were (a) finding and implementing appropriate tools to support Web-based discussion, and (b) getting members to use these tools and make contributions to the Desks. Eventually, we compromised by having the Desk moderators build links to members' and other Web sites containing information relevant to each Desk topic. These Desks provide a rich array of online resources but are not interactive. Web-archived discussion groups are now formed only for current, specific, high-interest topics using HyperNews.
A monthly Newsletter contains articles by individual members, projects of the NSN, and news of general interest to members. The Newsletter is sent electronically via email to members and listservs, and is archived on the NSN Web page. A growing number of individuals and groups are requesting subscription to the NSN Newsletter or information on particular issues facing decision-makers, such as how leading-edge school communities have addressed issues about acceptable-use policies. There are currently 540 registered individuals on our email distribution list, and many more receive it through listservs. The NSN Newsletter is used by a range of people within the member organizations for purposes such as informing others in their own institution about the nature and importance of their innovations. The high quality and authoritative character of the NSN provides innovators within a member institution with legitimacy; thus, for example, some members use the NSN Newsletter to achieve local and national recognition for their work. They report receiving numerous contacts both locally and nationally based on their articles in the NSN Newsletter.
One way the NSN champions the work of a member organization is by putting a profile of its work at the top level of the NSN Web page. The purpose is to help members become aware of important work being done within the NSN that they may learn from or participate in. Profiles have included Co-Vis, a National Science Foundation network for visualization of scientific phenomena; The Science Learning Network, a collaborative of six science museums; Eisenhower National Clearinghouse offering an extensive online collection of science and math resources and curricula; Madison, Wisconsin's Metropolitan School District helps make history online; The Sharing Place, an early childhood collaborative; Earthwatch, a scientific research institute; and the Hewlett-Packard E-mail Mentor Program connecting school-age students to HP employees around the world.
The Partner Profiles have proven to be an easily implemented method for bringing important, leading-edge work to the attention of the NSN members. We have replicated this mechanism in other networked communities such as the Teacher Enhancement Electronic Communication Hall (TEECH).
Given the National School Network's focus on the link between schools and their communities, the NSN sought ways to exchange information among the communities concerning creative ways in which the schools and communities are working together, taking advantage of the evolving information infrastructure. Looking at the patterns that were developing across the NSN communities, a framework emerged and was used to organize the information. (Goldman & Laserna 1997; Becker 1996a) . Case studies and project vignettes are organized in the following categories:
* Project-Based Learning with the Community as an Audience and Resource: Where students are actively involved in developing a product that has an impact on the community. Students organize and disseminate local information, use local data for problem solving, or contribute to the solution of a local design problem.
* School to Work Experience: Students work for a local business or nonprofit enterprise.
* Tutoring and Mentoring including Telementoring: Regular contact between students or classes and parents, corporations, and community members to share information and expertise.
* Community Volunteers in Schools: Parents and community members regularly participate in activities that benefit the education of students.
* Community Service Learning for Students: Students help government or non-profit programs in their communities.
* Leadership Roles for Schools: Schools taking the lead in the community on technology issues.
* Community Education: Schools give back to the community by providing access to school resources and opportunities to use new technologies for community improvement.
* Family-School Connection: Schools help engage parents and families in their children's education through the use of telecommunications.
Community case studies and project profiles were obtained in a variety of ways, including an offer of a contest for winning stories contributed by members. One of the authors summed up the general theme of these community stories: "Between the need of the schools to give students real-life experiences and prepare them for the work world and the need of the community to receive help with projects when their budgets may not afford it, it is our belief that both will be more than willing to welcome a working school-community relationship." (Bias 1997) . The collection of school/community projects information on the NSN Exchange is probably one of the most extensive such collections to be found in any one place. Our hope is that communities will be inspired by these stories to initiate or strengthen their own community-based programs. In addition, the analyses we conducted of some of these cases enabled insight into the processes by which school/community programs get initiated and institutionalized.
To test interactive models of on-line teaching and learning, the NSN has organized over 35 live, on-line events, both text-based (Ichat,WWW chats) and video-based (CU-SeeMe computer video-conferencing), for schools in its network. (Crowder, 1997). One goal for these events has been to encourage students as communicators and producers of knowledge and opinions rather than only recipients of information. These events also served as a catalyst for teachers and administrators understanding that the Internet could be used to open the classroom walls and to develop new forms of pedagogy. Another goal is to foster and strengthen partnerships among schools, businesses, and other organizations in their local communities. The live events involve adults and children in addressing local, national, scientific and cultural issues. These events are then archived in the Exchange. Some examples include the following:
* Memphis Kids 'N Blues. Listen to student blues recording. Student musicians presented original jazz compositions and talked with classrooms around the country.
* A series of online science events--ranging from environmental issues to medical breakthroughs. NSN has also been hosting an online exhibit of original science projects from NSN schools, followed by online conversations led by the students themselves. Research scientists have offered additional commentary.
* Speaking of Public Service. Children's Express covered the Service Summit in Philadelphia and sampled NSN student opinion online.
* NetDay 1997: Now That You're Wired. National School Network celebrated NetDay nationwide, welcoming new classrooms to the Internet.
* Listen to "Mahler in Blue Light". This modern composition was broadcast from WGBH, an NSN partner. Music performance, appreciation, and curriculum merged as students listened and engaged in live conversation with composers and performers via the Internet.
* Black History Month. NSN celebrated Black History Month with a series of events highlighting the history, culture, and current issues of the African-American community.
* Children's Express Covers the Presidential Inauguration. NSN's schools chatted online with student reporters who covered the presidential inauguration.
* Children's Express Online Chat on Bangladesh. Children's Express presented an online chat and explored child labor conditions in Bangladesh.
* Election Project. Special offerings for the national and local elections.
* America Goes Back to School. For the week of September 9-13, 1996, NSN classrooms linked to actors, astronauts, athletes, authors, industry leaders and congressional members.
* Earthwatch Annual Meeting. Ground-breaking technology supported the "Virtual Expedition" project in Mexico, demonstrating the ability of teachers and students to communicate with researchers "in the field".
For some school communities, participation in live NSN events by notables such as President Clinton, various Senators and Congresspersons, children's authors, famous scientists and astronauts, and local experts, called the attention of the community to the potential of networking to enrich schooling, and the improvements in their local infrastructure needed to take advantage of networking. Net Day participants have been able to see educational events in action as part of NSN Events.
Through these Events, NSN has helped non-profit organizations such as museums and science centers find ways to organize and deliver their valuable content to schools, and has provided needed technical assistance to those organizations.
Businesses and corporations having tools and technology to offer have had opportunity to test educational applications of those tools and intellectual resources in schools. Their visibility in the NSN Exchange has in turn attracted the interest of other corporations to participate. The number of corporations joining the NSN grew by 10 in early 1997, and these have all been actively participating. Approximately 50 organizations have contributed or are preparing to contribute to the invention, delivery, and testing of new event-based and telementoring learning opportunities for students and teachers. Contributions are in the form of tools (for example, Ichat, RealAudio, White Pine videoconferencing, Yahoo, Newsmaker); content (such as that provided by WGBH, CNN, Turner, EarthWatch, Christian Science Monitor, Children's Express, Wall Street Journal, Democratic National Committee, Cybersmith, and Parents Paper); and experts' time (for example, Senators Edward Kennedy, Barbara Boxer, Lahey; NASA Astronauts).
Learnings
The NSN and its member communities have encountered technical and educational challenges in implementing these "Events" and in ensuring their educational value. Even schools in the NSN -- which presumably have a robust technical infrastructure with Internet access for all -- need a lot of technical assistance to enable classroom teachers to access and manage a real-time online event. Teachers need a long lead time for planning an educationally sound series of activities in preparation for such events, and in obtaining the support of their school's technical coordinator. Unless events coincide with planned curriculum, such activities are seen as supplemental, rather than integral to, the curriculum. Often the technical infrastructure is not adequate, for instance inadequate bandwidth or the machines in the particular classroom are not powerful enough for the application. BBN as the intermediary institution has had to supply a range of different kinds of technical, educational and management expertise to make these Events work. Events using the text-based Ichat for interaction have been technically more successful than those involving real time video and audio.
The NSN leadership in Telementoring grew out of a basic motivation for Internetworking of some of the members (Goldman 1997). They wanted their students to have opportunity to publish their work to audiences outside of school, and to get educationally useful feedback from those audiences. NSN hosted a conference for leaders of telementoring projects; organized extensive Web pages of information on existing telementoring programs; developed a Web-based tool called Mentor Center for managing telementoring relationships among a teacher, mentor, and mentee; and organized a number of telementoring projects.
Telementoring is emerging as one of the most educationally valuable and technically implementable models for collaboration at the current stage of telecommunications in schools and communities. Many schools are now at the point where they have a network infrastructure in place and are looking for significant ways to use it. Telementoring is a meaningful and practical way to demonstrate the value of this connectivity as it augments the resources available to the student, the classroom, and the teacher. Telementoring does not require as a prerequisite that major curriculum reforms have yet taken place, and it does not require a teacher to have advanced technical skills.
This is also a time when industry recognizes that young people must be exposed to the skills they will need to perform productively in the workplace. Telementoring is recognized as an important vehicle for exposing students to real-world experience and as a support for school-to-work programs. With telecommunications, mentors can be drawn from all segments of the community - local businesses, professionals, parents, and grandparents. Telementoring has low barriers to entry as it only requires an email account to get started and does not require a large investment of time by a mentor to make a contribution. It can be adapted to work in a variety of settings, peer-to-peer, one mentor to a team, one-to-one student to mentor. Professionals, business people, retirees, and parents can all serve as mentors. Some of the NSN-fostered telementoring projects include the following:
* Graduate music education students are mentoring middle- and high-school students.
* Accomplished teachers mentor novice teachers to see and analyze others' practice as a way to improve their own.
* Graduate education students mentor high-school students in writing.
* Lawyers in a local law firm mentor 6th graders in writing.
* Employees of BBN Corporation mentor 6th graders in writing.
* Employees of a bank are mentoring middle- and high-school students in a business-apprenticeship program.
* Employees of a cable television company are telementoring students in a community where the company is piloting cable Internet services.
In keeping with its goal of fostering local capacity-building through collaboration and knowledge-building nationally, the NSN chose to support a model for professional development that is aligned with the NSN philosophy. The Online Internet Institute focuses both on helping educators learn to use the Internet in shaping curriculum and connecting them with local and national colleagues. The OII grew from the vision of two classroom teachers, Ferdi Serim and Bonnie Bracey--who saw involvement with the Internet community as an important part of professional development. OII stresses knowledge building--from offering mentoring to teachers in the use of the Internet to helping them develop curriculum with the resources they find online. Their experiences also can carry over to having students in the classroom do similar work. Also important in OII's approach is community-building: teachers who learn Internet skills go on to mentor other teachers, offer constructive feedback on the projects they create, and share educational strategies online. The online component of OII occurs through a BBN server and the face-to-face meetings occur at sites around the country, and internationally.
The OII is a visionary model that will likely succeed in some form in the long run. However, it is so radically different from the "teacher training" models most schools and school districts are accustomed to, that it is at the present only implementable in some localities. A further challenge is the complexity of managing the overall enterprise. The OII obtained National Science Foundation funding in its first year and is currently seeking further funding.
From the outset of the NSN, it seemed obvious that a major benefit of Internetworking for schools would be the creation of new opportunities for professional development of teachers. At a time when major new curriculum standards are being established and implemented in schools, districts, and states, the networks could enable new possibilities for teachers to learn about the standards and how to implement them. What happened instead was that Internetworking itself posed a new, additional set of requirements for teachers' development. Teachers needed to learn not only how to use the tools of Internetworking, but also how to take advantage of these new information resources in their classrooms. This process is turning out to be much slower than we originally expected, with the consequence that in general the major curriculum reforms and standards implementations have yet to take advantage of Internetworking in NSN schools.
Some of the lessons from OII include the creation of a members database that provides both baseline data and opportunity for participants to learn about shared interests for collaboration. The evaluation report (Ravitz and Serim, 1997) points to a growing area of interest -- the creation of interactive teaching portfolios on the Web and the requirements for structuring the presentation of these for collaboration and evaluation by others. In order for teachers' Web pages to be useful in the professional development of others, substantial efforts must be paid to the process of their creation. (i.e., just throwing up web pages is clearly not enough). Similarly, syntheses of discussions and a focus on reflective dialogue (Spitzer, et al., 1994) is needed.
In addition to its support for the OII, the NSN provided the underpinning for another national initiative in professional development led by Al Rogers. The acclaimed and corporate-supported CyberFair (Global SchoolNet, 1997a) educational contest was an outgrowth of NSN research, as acknowledged in the CDROM "Harnessing the Power of the Web" (Global SchoolNet, 1997b). The author Al Rogers said, "This event could not have taken place without the research funding provided by the Testbed" (Personal Communication, August, 1996). Thus CyberFair is an example of how the NSN is being leveraged and amplified beyond the original scope.
This effort encountered numerous challenges. Even in NSN schools, which are more advanced than typical schools with regard to technical infrastructure, many teachers do not have ready access to the Internet in their classrooms. Even teachers who do have access need the support of a technical person on a regular basis if they are attempting to do something new. From a curriculum standpoint, we encountered a "chicken-and-egg" scenario in which the Internet resources are perceived by math coordinators and teachers as being external to their own local curriculum, and so were less than eager to invest the time needed to integrate those resources into their curriculum. Ironically, this was true even in a school where a new "investigations"-oriented math curriculum was being implemented. This experiment seems to indicate that there are more prerequisite "readiness" conditions to integral use of Internet-based resources in the curriculum than we originally anticipated. A current NSN survey effort in 1997 will help identify those conditions under which innovative curriculum uses of the Internet do take place.
* the activities are learner-centered
* they involve both classrooms and institutions outside of schools in the local community
* the activities do not require for their success that reforms in curriculum or teacher development have yet taken place within the participating schools.
Two most promising Internet-based educational/pedagogical models have emerged from the NSN experience thus far. They include: (a) "Exchange Events" and (b) Telementoring. "Events" catalyze many ingredients of reform: community-based development, all levels of infrastructure, representatives of all stakeholders, technology and tools, content, pedagogy. "Telementoring" supports a learner-centered approach to education and is emerging through several different implementations as a feasible, affordable way for communities and businesses to infuse intellectual and social resources into schools in ways that engage teachers, students, administrators, and community members.
* Keep the goals simple and clear, and do not have too many of them. The NSN established multiple goals which sometimes were in conflict with each other. The goal of replicability of all Exchange mechanisms by members proved to be counterproductive. It held the NSN back from implementing functions that were essential to its main purpose but were not technically achievable by member institutions at this early stage in the state of the art of Internetworking. Although the replicability principle was and is a worthy one, in retrospect it was too ambitious for its time.
* Sustain support for the social, technical, and content dimensions at all times. In the initial months of the NSN, the technical challenges of establishing Web-based collaboration tools took up too much of the staff's time and attention, to the detriment of building the social infrastructure and content depth.
* Stay mostly within a comfort zone in the technical state-of-the-art, seek out and depend upon the special expertise of partner organizations, and choose your technical challenges carefully. The Internet has been an extremely volatile place from a technical standpoint over the life of the NSN, and these conditions can be expected to prevail for the foreseeable future. Our visions of the kind of interaction we wanted to support on the Web were ahead of the technical tools available. NSN wanted to provide technical leadership for its member organizations, but there were too many such challenges to be addressed simultaneously and we underestimated the complexity and volatility of the situation. Eventually, we learned how to seek out leading edge organizations to partner with, such as Ichat and Cybersmith, and to focus our grant resources on developing unique contributions such as Mentor Center.
* Stay tuned to the evolving requirements and insights of the member organizations. The NSN's successful contributions to Telementoring resulted from in-depth discussions with members who were beginning to perceive a need for quality interactions between their students and outside experts. The importance of telementoring could not have been anticipated in advance of the working experience of these pioneering members of the NSN.
* Be proactive about engaging a wide range of stakeholders within the member organizations, such as curriculum coordinators, teachers, students, administrators, and parents. In the NSN member organizations, the primary point of contact was usually a visionary, pioneering person, often with a technical background. Often such persons become marginalized within their institutions and are not involved in mainstream curriculum and instruction reforms. If the substantive educational reforms desired from the use of Internetworking are to become a reality, a broader range of individuals within the institution need to be a part of the collaborative. While the NSN made some efforts to engage, for example, curriculum coordinators, principals, and superintendents, it did not establish formal mechanisms that would make it easy for these persons to play key roles in the Exchange.
* Establish ways of systematically monitoring the progress of individual member organizations and the overall collaborative. The NSN gathered systematic baseline data in 1995 on the infrastructure, costs, educational applications and their perceived benefits in 100 Testbed schools. (Becker 1996b) An expanded, more in-depth survey of 250 schools in 1997 , along with NSN case studies of school-community linkages and roles of intermediaries, will enable us in late 1997 to provide policy makers with in-depth analysis and some of the answers to our original question.
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Acknowledgments:
The author gratefully acknowledges the contributions made by Melanie Goldman and Jason Ravitz in preparation of this document.