c/o BBN Systems and Technologies
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Suggested Citation:
Goldman, M., and Laserna, C. (1997). Building school community relationships: The role of higher education.
Journal of Higher Education, vol(num), pp. xxx-xxx.
Posted Sept. 19, 1997. [WWW Document]
URL http://nsn.bbn.com/dissemination/docs/Goldman_HiEd.html
Introduction
Many schools - like colleges and universities - are changing to accommodate the needs of our society. Businesses require that employees have the skills to work in an information- and technology-rich environment. With the advent of communications media and networks, people are able to communicate with ease across the world. But it takes considerable investment to bring about change in schools, to restructure education, and to build the necessary technical infrastructure. This is an investment that communities find difficult when there are so many competing demands for their limited funds. Since only a minority of adults in a community have school-aged children, it is essential that the school reach out to the greater community in a variety of ways, from projects to community service, to engage the community and to build understanding and support-- in short, to make the innovation legitimate. The only way communities will believe large-scale investment to support technical infrastructure is warranted is if the community participates in and benefits from that investment in the local information infrastructure.
Funding. Today's communities are struggling to keep up; they have limited funds and increasing populations. School districts have been a source of funds for the development of NSN schools' network facilities in more than 8 out of 10 of the affiliated schools. Special grants were mentioned by over one-half (53%) of the schools, while state funds were acknowledged by about 40%. Financial donations from businesses were mentioned by over one quarter of the schools (29%), (which is greater than the 22% indicated from federal funds). Donations of time and labor from parents and students were acknowledged in 25% of the schools as well. (Becker, 1995)
From our experience over the past year with the NSN community we have come to realize that community involvement, community organizing, partnerships with colleges and universities, and community projects can enrich both the curriculum and the community.
At least one quarter of the NSN schools are using technology to foster interactions between school and community, which is breaking down the walls between school and community. In the NSN project we have observed at least three ways in which the network played a unique role in fostering school - community involvement. First, NSN has become a means of communication from school to community and beyond; second, it is a medium for students to show what they can do for their community to gain the respect of adults; and finally, it is an avenue for community members to become involved with students. Below are descriptions and examples of six categories of school - community activities. Four of these types -- project-based learning, school-to-work, community service learning, and mentoring -- not only foster community involvement but also enrich student learning.
1. Project-Based Learning with the Community as an Audience. Students participate in a project, individually or in groups, that has academic content. Often these projects are in a traditional field like government or environmental science, and the goal of these studies is to change actual conditions or psychic well-being in the community.
Example: Students work with the Juvenile Justice System to develop information on the Web about what the justice system does and why. This can involve interviewing officials in the legal system as well as research on laws. The students apply technical skills in building home pages and learn the content that they communicate to the readers of their pages. The activity should result in a product that is intended to be seen and used by community members, and will also help other youths in the community gain an understanding of the justice system through the eyes of their peers.
2. School-to-Work Experience. Students work for a community enterprise -- a for-profit, non-profit, or governmental organization -- either for pay or for credit, which, in addition to helping their employer, assists their own learning as well. This is especially true when students participate in organized reflective and follow-up activities in the school setting related to their work experience.
Example: Students are paid to learn and conduct network troubleshooting in regular work settings in the community. In some schools, students are gaining credit for the work they do to support the network.
3. Tutoring and Mentoring. There is regular contact between students or classes and parents or community members who share their expertise, opinions, and information. Community members tutor (academic) or mentor (personal growth), individually or through organizations.
Example: An adult mentor periodically comments on a student's writing via electronic mail or the Web. Through this students learn to write for an audience besides the teacher, and receive more insight into their ideas and writing skills.
4. Community Service Learning. Students help government and non-profit organizations in their community in programs intended to promote their own learning as well as fostering growth in the service performed. The work can be required or voluntary, credit or non-credit, or done through a school program or independently.
For example, students work with their local town or city representatives to solve issues related to teenage drug and alcohol use. They correspond via electronic mail, by means of online discussions, and face-to-face workshops to establish priorities and design steps to address those priorities.
5. Community Volunteers. Parents and other community members regularly participate in volunteer activities in the school building, during the school day or at other times, supporting or directly dealing with the education of students.
Example: A local Tech Corps helps install and maintain a school's LAN and WAN connections.
6. Schools Take on a Leadership Role. This helps build awareness about the value of technology in restructuring education and/or developing the necessary local network infrastructure.
Examples: The school organization can influence the community in understanding and using network technology through presentations, activities, and town meeting discussions. Another instance of this is when a school organization builds the local information infrastructure and/or becomes the Internet access provider.
Colleges and universities can take an active role in promoting all six of these types of school-community involvement.
In the NSN project we have distilled a framework to allow others to understand the ways in which innovation is incorporated into an organization. This generic framework is intended to facilitate an analysis of the strategies and conditions under which technology has been adopted by various NSN members. The framework combines insights from the readings with NSN members' experiences. Our aim was to develop a framework to inform organizations interested in adopting technology.
This framework has seven components:
Visionary - one or more people who act as agents of change. If it is a single person, capacity to affect change is dependent on his/her position and role in the school or community. Influence is based on both formal and informal sources of status, power, and authority. Some formal sources that depend on position include: superintendent of schools, large property owner, controller of appropriations; informal ones include: educational expert or community organizer. Individual visionaries need to share their vision with others. Research suggests that having an influential visionary who can communicate to a core group of community members helps create a shared vision. The more people who can share the vision, the greater the community of support.
Sponsorship - finding those people and institutions with expertise, power, or influence who can speak up for the program, (allies, leaders, partnerships ) and can contribute symbolic and material resources. A partner or sponsor can help change the status of an effort by
* elevating its perceived value by endorsing the project or a particular
visionary
* moving key visionaries to more powerful roles (sponsors can help move the
visionary from an isolated role to one of acceptance, e.g., to "promote" the
visionary)
* helping to set such a person on some formal agenda
* providing access to other agents (networking the sponsored person to
relevant circles).
Legitimacy - getting the stamp of approval from community constituents for doing the right thing. Sources of legitimacy might build on existing traditions, follow charismatic leadership, and build rationality. Legitimacy needs to gained and maintained. Initial legitimacy can be built in several ways.
Building on Existing Institutions. One way is to demonstrate the effect of positive incremental changes to an existing institution. This is a way of "inheriting" legitimacy from a pre-existing organization. (This can be compared to the way a new baby receives legitimacy from its parents by inheriting a last name and becoming part of a family.)
Associating with Charismatic Leaders. Another way to achieve legitimacy is for someone to lead the change who is recognized as an opinion leader or has meaningful status or power. Advertisements often use symbolic opinion leaders to appeal to a particular market segment (sports stars wearing Nike athletic shoes). Legitimacy can be derived from having seniors or experts in a field use a methodology or acknowledge its value. In the Community of Explorers project, where high school physics teachers explored new methods for teaching, simulations became a legitimate way to teach physics when teachers realized that real scientists used simulations to do their job.
The process of gaining legitimacy means dealing with people's acceptance of new ideas and innovations.
Redefinition - After an innovation has gained some initial legitimacy, the reference group needs to take its traditional programs and redefine them around new goals and processes, just as the teachers in the Community of Explorers redefined what they saw as legitimate science based on seeing the work of their role models (senior scientists). Having accepted simulations as a legitimate way of doing science, they were confronted with the hard work of reorganizing the practices they had built around more traditional forms of doing classroom science.
Pedagogy - This includes changing the learning environment in schools as well as in the community. Technology can be used to amplify what currently happens in a school, e.g., using the Internet to gather research materials or to transform or restructure the learning environment. In a restructured setting, the curriculum engages students in interdisciplinary projects of compelling interest to students, teachers, and the community. Teachers work with students to create authentic products to encourage a wide range of communication patterns, structures, and activities aimed a constructing new knowledge and collaborative work patterns.
Funding - This involves identifying and obtaining money from a variety of sources, such as private grants, parent fund raising, and district resources for both capital operational budgets.
Infrastructure - Funding for an innovation is tied to the development of an infrastructure. This includes the technical issues involved in local and wide area networking infrastructure, the organization and management of information resources to support work in the instructional and administrative arenas, policy and finance issues, support and training, and building a culture of effective technology use. Our research has shown the need to organize tools, information, user interface, and services to support multiple functions that are fully integrated with the work of the school community and its goals of innovation and reform. Building an infrastructure means constructing an environment in which technology resources are organized to serve the purposes of the working environment.
The books, Diffusion of Innovations by Rogers (1995) and Crossing the Chasm by Moore (1991), describe the stages of technology adoption and willingness of people who accept or reject an innovation. Using the categories defined by the authors, it is often the "Early Adopters" who try to convince the "Early Majority" to invest in technology for schools. The strategy suggested by Rogers and Moore is to gain the confidence of an opinion leader or influential member(s) who can influence the rest of the group.
Cycles of Innovation. Whether it is the telephone, an ATM machine, a fax machine, or a school network, adoption of new technologies goes through a cycle. When telephones were first introduced, few people understood their value. Businesses were accustomed to using messengers, and most did not want to change their operations. They viewed technology as simply replacing people with some "newfangled device." People's attitudes toward technology adoption differ, and these attitudes often affected by how much the new technology requires them to change existing behavior and beliefs. Some people seek out new technology just for pleasure; others can envision the potential. Most people require proof that the new technology will do what it claims, and those who are most reluctant will prefer to wait until the technology is so established they have no choice but to accept it.
Over the past four years, the Poudre School District, part of Fort Collins, Colorado, has made inroads in building the technical infrastructure for its schools. What makes the Poudre School District's story noteworthy are the partnerships it has formed with higher education and business. These partnerships gave the schools a foundation, as well as strategies to involve parents and other community members. This case study describes these strategies, and concludes in February 1996, with a picture of the implementation of a pervasive information infrastructure and the integration of the technology into the curriculum.
Fort Collins, home to Colorado State University (CSU), the second largest university in the state, has a population of about 120,000 people and a school district with 22,000 K-12 students. Geographically, it is 1.5 as large as the state of Rhode Island, extending to the Wyoming border and across to the Continental Divide, but mountains and forests cover much of the area. According to District Educational Technologist Larry Buchanan, the community is similar in size to the suburbs around Denver but "isolated," not urban like Denver, which is about 55 miles away. The community perceives itself as hi-tech and well educated. To date, Fort Collins has a thriving community network called FortNet, which has its roots in the school district network, but because it grew so rapidly it now operates independent of the school system.
About four years ago, the key partnership with IBM, Colorado State University (in particular, one of the math professors), and Colorado SuperNet, the largest state Internet provider, was formed. As Buchanan pointed out:
Partnership created a revolution in the district. The district brought Internet into one high school; IBM provided some equipment; CSU provided hours and hours of expertise and training; the Poudre [school district] provided a core group of teachers who were crazy enough to not know what they were getting into. . . and of course, the core of people in the community who came in to help came in and did some training of teachers and met after school with groups of interested kids.
Colorado SuperNet, Colorado State University, and IBM provided material resources: IBM gave host machines and CSU hired a half-time UNIX technician who helped with technology and with people. The school district has a wonderful relationship with CSU: the university depends on the district to pursue grants and does all the work to get them. The money for the UNIX technician came through a grant program called Adventures in Networking, with money from Department of Energy and support from the supercomputing community.
When asked, "What surprised you about community relationships regarding networking?" Buchanan answered:
How willing the university has been to help us. I do understand they had several reasons for doing so: (1) they had some grant opportunities that they could tie into if they could find a way to show K-12 involvement, (2) their own kids are in our schools, and (3) our schools prepare their entering students. . . . I think it surprised them how successful working with us was and how much interest there was once they started.
Because Fort Collins is home to some high technology companies (Hewlett-Packard, for example), Buchanan was able to tap many of the technically literate in the community to build a core of support.
Parents who were Internet literate helped their children's school with network related support such as Web page construction.
In Fort Colllins it is this confluence of community involvement and outside sponsors that has persuaded the majority in the community to invest in the network technology. First, the initial infusion of funds, equipment, and support from outside organizations provided the opportunity to have a pilot program. This pilot was key in helping to dispel some of the uncertainty around technology and demonstrating success.
By volunteering in the schools, parents and community members gained a deeper understanding and appreciation for the demands and requirements of networking in the schools. They became "legitimate participants" in the cause to invest in networking and developed a shared vision for implementing technology in the schools to restructure education. This group was able to reach out to others in the community to explain the network's potential and allay some of the uncertainty about the technology.
Opening the libraries to allow community members and parents to explore the Internet makes it possible for those who are interested to learn more about the technology. It also says to the community that Internet connectivity is valued and the schools are willing to make it available to the public.
Beattie Elementary School produces Beattie News, a set of weekly notes written by the school and sent home through the office. The information is also posted on a Web page by a parent volunteer who works at Colorado State University. A recent issue of Beattie News, for example, contained PTO News and a note describing a literature assignment for January. The note detailed such things as the type of literature to be studied (poetry), the number of poems and authors to be read, the due date for the assignment, and the type of support expected from parents (in this case, encouraging the student to practice reciting the poem at home). By providing guidelines to parents about how they can assist with homework, the school is transforming the role they expect parents to play in their children's homework. Electronic news appears to open two-way communication between school and home.
Funding for individual schools comes from two sources, the district and the school's general budget. Each school manages the funds through a "School Improvement Team" and has a "Technology Committee." Parents and business people are involved on both committees, but the "School Improvement Team" makes the decisions about building a network, connecting to the district network, and providing training.
Because schools manage their own budgets, some have chosen not to invest in technology, which means that they are farther behind in their efforts. Still the district plans to have all 42 schools online in two years.
At the same time that Poudre Schools are working on their strategy to involve community members and enlist partners they are building their infrastructure and integrating the technology into the curriculum. What follows is a description of progress towards building a local information infrastructure and restructuring the curriculum as of February 1996.
The Poudre Schools have had four years of experience piloting and implementing technology, and although not all schools are networked, they have some understanding of how the Internet can be used and its benefits. Using the Internet is seen as an important skill that students will need in the future for business.
And the relationship between teacher and students has changed as well: students are allowed to take some leadership in exploring the telecommunications technology, and the teacher accepts their support. For example, as part of a science program for the gifted and talented, students have created a visualization project in cooperation with some of the university professors (at CSU). Students were paired with a scientist in the community, and they communicated back and forth through e-mail. They also did a project about what they had learned.[1]
The Battleground School District covers a wide area (365 square miles), including a logging community in the north, an area of "gentleman" farming in the middle, and a formerly rural, but growing and newly-suburbanized hi-tech community in the south -- all about 10 minutes from Vancouver, Washington. The school district is comprised of six primary and elementary schools, five middle schools, and two large high schools with about 1,600 students each. In addition, there is the Center for Agriculture, Science, and Environmental Education (C.A.S.E.E.) and an Alternative Learning Program for high school students who are considered at risk of dropping out.
Around 1990 a combination of factors -- the local economy and job market, emerging communities, and the new statewide guidelines -- created the conditions for the community's vision and resolve to invest in technology for the schools. These conditions included: 1) Environmentalists' concerns about the loss of forests and the survival of the spotted owl were limiting the lumber industry. Since lumber was a major source of revenue, many in the community shared a strong belief that people had to learn new skills and trades. 2) More recently, there has been an influx of new community members who work in high technology companies like Hewlett-Packard, and these people expect their children to be educated in the use of technology. This meant that many students have access to technology at home. 3) It was known that communities around Battleground were investing in technology. 4) Finally, state standards now include guidelines about educating students in technology and conceptual skills. The result has been that now every classroom in every school has wiring for voice, data, and video, funded primarily (90%) from community funds.
Creating a space for Mentorship. A unique aspect to the program is that area agencies such as the Soil Conservation Service, the Farmer's Home Administration, and Washington State University Cooperative Extension lease space on the site from the school district, and some of these agencies as well as a larger number of other agencies and individuals are heavily involved in the mentoring of students and guiding student projects associated with their agency's work. The projects are associated with local environmental and scientific issues such as fishbed nurturing and earthquakes.
The vision behind this project was to create a program and facility to develop student skills to prepare them for the work environment and at the same time provide an avenue for public agencies to improve the communities in which they exist. Students obtain credit for work they do for public agencies or a community enterprise, helping the agency and enriching their own learning. In addition, students participate in organized reflective and follow-up activities in the school setting related to their work experience.
Last spring, a pair of kids were doing a salmon release project. They wanted to know why salmon are depleting their numbers. So they started a study. This tied them into the water conservation agency, and the students also got interested in water pollution. We bounced all over the world trying to determine what caused water pollution and ways to fix the problem. All of a sudden these kids created a project which has now gone on to Salmon Creek to try and purify our water runoff.
Sponsorship for C.A.S.E.E: Recognizing the need for a vocational program that fit the communities agricultural and environmental concerns was only part of the picture. Partnerships were also needed to provide funds, support, and legitimacy. Ron Carlson recalls,
The impetus for C.A.S.E.E. came from Washington State University, which wanted a site to work with high school students interested in environmental science. The district used that idea to propose a plan for a vocational center where they would teach agriculture, horticulture, and even business law.
Quickly this proposal started to make sense to others:
First, we had a vision: a vocational environmental movement. As we started to create this, we got interested in government, forestry, county land management, environmental land management. We got very interested in what the community was asking in services from the county, and all of a sudden this partnership really grew.
Move towards Self-sustainability. All the agencies -- federal, county, and state, along with the school district -- contributed matching funds to get the facility started. Now it has become self-sustaining, as the clients' (agencies) rent for their space in the building paid off the initial bond. The rent is now used to cover operating expenses. C.A.S.E.E.'s success has made it the model everyone looks to, particularly now as the district adopts a new curriculum grades 5 - 12 that involves "applied learning and integration technologies."
From the perspective of the agencies, the program allowed them to fulfill the legitimate expectation that they were doing something for the community. Ron Carlson reflects,
Battleground is part of a consortium for all districts in Southwest Washington that has developed a new "applied learning curriculum." Two factors have influenced the restructuring: a) the school board and state standards that identify technology and tools that need to be learned, as well as a variety of conceptual skills; and b) the high school, which led the changes with a program called "Career Pathways," an interdisciplinary program focused on six career paths (technology, social and health services, arts and communication, science and related technology, business operations, marketing and management). The C.A.S.E.E. served as the model, and the district is now in the process of adapting the curriculum for grades 5 - 9.
The new focus on teachers has come from two vocal school board members who observed that faculty were being pressured to make technology part of their skills without provision for adequate training. They argued that this should be funded, and the district now has a professional development program to give teachers one hour of early release time every week for training in technology, as well as five full in-service days for this purpose. Ron Carlson commented, "Education has never been asked to refocus itself so quickly and drastically. It is like trying to get teachers through a knot hole -- a few get through but many cannot get through at once."
Carlson's comment sums up the reason behind the continuing evolution of the schools.
"Meeting each others' needs keeps the project[s] going and growing!"
Despite this, however, widespread use of electronic mail does not yet exist in the schools or the community. In fact, the relative inexperience of local businesses with using telecommunications, along with the paucity of telecommunications in the community, is holding the district back.
A district coordinator and two teachers from one of the regular high schools visited C.A.S.E.E. to help the aide teach the students how to make Web pages. In addition, seven teachers throughout the district are being trained to create pages and are "taking on students." So far, though, only seven C.A.S.E.E. students have made pages for their projects which are available on the server.
The district would like to offer a class next fall for students in developing Web pages to help them "see it as a real world market." The goal is to have students running the network. (One former student is already in charge of the district network.)
It has not been easy to integrate use of telecommunications into the C.A.S.E.E. curriculum, however. It has taken three years to begin using it as part of the curriculum, and our informants say that the predominant use is to develop Web pages, and there has not even been much of that. In 1993-1994 the Center offered seminars on the Internet to district teachers; in the fall of 1994 the Center obtained access to the World Wide Web; by the following spring (1995) students began putting up their own pages, mainly describing projects they were working on at the C.A.S.E.E. Center. This past fall (1996) they have been using the Web primarily to acquire information from other sites. Below are some examples of how they are using the Internet.
Next semester, the students who enroll in C.A.S.E.E. (70% to 80% are carry-overs from the first semester) will continue last spring's project about salmon, and will raise salmon on site. Each pair of students will take responsibility for a different aspect of the project and will produce a home page on a specified topic dealing with salmon.
Conclusions
Obtaining sponsors: Partnerships, particularly with business and higher educational institutions, are critically important and need to be cultivated. Both small and large businesses can play a role. The Poudre School District has cultivated business partnerships (IBM, HP, US West) to help with training and acquisition of equipment, university partnerships (Colorado State University) to help with training and integration into the curriculum, and volunteer programs for support, Web pages, and academic mentoring. In Battleground, the Washington State University Extension formed a partnership with the schools to provide students with curriculum in agriculture, science, and environmental education, related to the economic needs of the community.
Building legitimacy: It is important to understand the interactions of history, culture, power, and money when working with different constituencies in the community. Fostering interest and investment means showing the personal relevance of networking to all (teacher, administrator, board, parent, and community member). In Battleground, WA, many influences affected the economy as well as people personally across groups; appealing to everyone's interests helped build consensus and agreement about the need to invest in technology and restructuring.
Building a network requires collaboration across constituencies, forging new alliances, and understanding the needs of each. In Battleground the agencies got involved with building the C.A.S.E.E. facility because it was a way to get closer to the community. Previously the county agencies were viewed as somewhat remote; people did not come to them for services. By participating in the student facility, they were now visible, working right with the "kids". In Colorado, members of Colorado State University saw that it was advantageous to work with the schools because it both supported their research and potentially provided a better education for the students who would later enter the University.
There is a growing interrelationship between bringing technology into the schools and community and the economic health of the community. With society's growing dependence on technology, the schools are becoming more important as places where everyone learns. In our electronic society, students are being taught to be citizens, and citizens are being taught to be lifelong learning students (F. Odasz). Schools are taking the initiative by becoming leaders in bringing technology to the community and opening up school laboratories to train community members. For example, in the Poudre School District in Colorado, it is the schools that have set up Internet access for the community and have opened its school libraries to invite community members, parents, and students to come use the computers in the evening.
The introduction of communications technology into our schools and communities affords us an opportunity to reshape relationships. Several of our respondents mentioned that it was now time for businesses and communities to view schools not as beggars but as entities that can reciprocate. Schools can give something in return for what businesses contribute. In Poudre School District, students are creating Web pages and helping manage the technology for businesses.
Students can also play an important role in building legitimacy and supporting the network. They can engage community members with stories of how they use the network. Often a community member finds it easier to listen to a young person's experiences because adult expertise can seem threatening. Young people have energy, time, intelligence, charisma, and idealism that they can devote to the effort. They have a mindset and an enthusiasm that allows them to learn new things more quickly than adults (F. Odasz). Students at various sites are training adults as well as managing the network and providing user support.
Several people remarked that by engaging in school-community projects, business and community leaders can observe student competencies directly, and this often helps them develop respect for the students. In Battleground, the agency representatives were amazed at how productive the "kids" were and began to see "..the students as a valuable resource because the kids provide some fresh ideas in doing their research."
Community members as volunteers: Every site mentioned the contributions of volunteers such as parents, business owners, district administrators, school board members, executives, police, city council, mayors, state representatives, and others. This harkens to President Clinton's call to citizens and corporations to volunteer in the schools as a way to help students at risk and bring the schools into the 21st century. Those people who volunteer not only help the schools but also gain an understanding of the state of our school systems and become change agents themselves. People in positions to influence policy and financial decisions are critical in moving the process forward.
Building pedagogy: Current practices can be amplified through the use of technology. First, people use technology to replace existing tasks: they use the Web as a research resource, as a "giant library," much as students in the Battleground salmon project had done. As students and teachers become more familiar with what is available, the Web can also be used to construct knowledge. At many of the NSN sites, including Poudre Schools and Battleground, students are gathering and building knowledge that is valuable to the community. They are developing community histories on the Web and collecting land use and environmental data. In these projects the classroom extends into the community, and both are changed in the process. A slightly different example of how the Web is transforming boundaries between school and community is the online school newspaper in a Poudre elementary school that provides parents guidance on how to help their child do homework.
Learning by participation. Both the school and the community are transformed as school practices address community-based issues and the community participates in school practices. This creates an intersection between traditional school-based practices and involvement with the community. In their book, Situated learning Legitimate peripheral participation,, Lave and Wenger (1994) have argued that from a sociological perspective, it is important to understand learner changes as part of the social context of schooling, work, and community life. As practices such as schooling and economic production mesh, or project-based learning and campaigns for public awareness come together, students will start to play different roles in the community. For example, both the Poudre and Battleground schools view involvement with the Web as a way for students to apprentice and learn the skills they will need in the workplace.
1Becker, Hank, Baseline Survey of Testbed-Participating Schools, Wave One - Schools Included as of April, 1995, by Hank Becker , University of California, Irvine, 1995 (http://nsn.bbn.com/resources/research/basereport.html)
2 Rogers, Everett M., Diffusion of Innovations, The Free Press, New York, 1995.
3 Moore, Geoffrey A. Moore, Crossing the Chasm, Harper Business Press, US, 1991.
4 Lave, Jean and Wenger, Etienne, Situated Learning Legitimate Peripheral participation, Cambridge University Press, NY, 1994.
About the Authors:
Melanie Goldman is currently the Co-Principal Investigator for the National School Network, an National Science Foundation project which works with leaders in school networking and curriculum reform to assist schools and communities in building their own Local Information Infrastructures (LII). She received her B.A. magna cum laude with honors in Fine Arts from Brandeis University, an M.Ed. from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and an M.B.A. from the Harvard Business School. Prior to coming to BBN Educational Technologies Department, she worked at Harvard University, building an Internet support infrastructure - consulting, instructing, and facilitating many Internet -related activities. In the late 80s Ms. Goldman worked with others to pioneer the regional network, NEARNET; she served on the NEARNET Steering Committee, the NEARNET Advisory Committee, and chaired the NEARNET User Services Committee. She also represented NEARNET at the Federation of American Research Networks (FARNET), an organization that addresses national networking issues. In her efforts supporting the K-12 community, she has worked to plan, develop, and support the use of networks in schools to improve education, in particular assisting in efforts across Massachusetts to integrate telecommunications into the classroom and to build a state network.
Author's address:
BBN Corporation
70 Fawcett Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
617-873-4653
mgoldman@bbn.com
Catalina Laserna currently is directing international projects and working at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.