The Bloomfield Bridge [1] connects the Oakland District, which is the site of several major universities, computer research laboratories, public museums and the Board of Education, with the working-class neighborhood of Bloomfield. The project offices and beta site for Common Knowledge: Pittsburgh are at Woolslair School, a block from the end of the Bloomfield Bridge.
Common Knowledge: Pittsburgh [2] (CK:P) is one of the National Science Foundation's testbeds for school networking. This project is helping the Pittsburgh Public Schools to use the technology of wide area networking in support of educational reform. The CK:P collaboration [3] includes the Pittsburgh Public Schools as its educational base, the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) as the foundation for its technical support, and the University of Pittsburgh for project management and assessment. Networking technology forms a bridge which links the resources of the collaborators.
In the same manner CK:P will also serve as a bridge for the present project. It will provide expertise in the areas of education, technology and assessment for all project sites and activities. The present proposal thus builds upon the infrastructure and experience developed by CK:P. It extends previous work in two important directions: one has to do with resources and the other with the community.
As the organization selected to carry out the present proposal, CK:P brings unique strengths. It represents the only school networking project in the country with an intensive focus on a major urban school district and an explicit goal of institutionalizing the use of networking technology through curriculum-focused projects. CK:P has already developed mechanisms for dealing with many of the major issues with which the current project will be confronted. These include the project's scalable technical architecture, system security and individual privacy, and user training protocols.
The present proposal will involve four of CK:P's eleven current school sites -- two elementary schools, a middle school and a high school -- with an emphasis on the study of foreign languages. These sites will be provided with high-speed connectivity and the tools necessary to create networked multi-media presentations online. This will provide a global audience for the work of students and teachers at these sites and will enable them to make use of the total set of educational resources currently accessible via the Internet.