We have completed the fifth year of the CK:P project. During that period we have made outstanding progress towards meeting the original goals of the proposal:

In the spring of 1997, the Pittsburgh Public Schools Board of Directors approved a twenty-five million dollar technology plan. This plan marked the formal institutionalization of the research done in the CK:P activity. The plan has the following components:

These were key features of the original goals set in the CK:P proposal. Not only were we able to institutionalize many of the educational and technical components; we were also able to gain an endorsement of the specific personnel of the project. Richard Wertheimer, the education project manager on Common Knowledge: Pittsburgh, was named Coordinator of Instructional Technology and given the responsibility of implementing the plan. In this role, he reports to Dr. Bernie Manning, Deputy Superintendent and principal investigator on the CK:P grant.

The technology plan, by scaling up the activity to reach all schools and classrooms, will raise new challenges and new research questions. The plan will have to put in place four new courses that apply instructional technologies and LAN/MAN/WAN access across the curriculum. The plan also calls for training a teacher at each school to support technology use among staff and to teach the classes. The training and the course development for the first thirty schools will have to be completed by September, 1998, for the second thirty schools by September, 1999 and for the final thirty by September, 2000.

The nine new school sites, identified in the spring of 1997 through an RFP will be online by the end of January. LAN wiring and infrastructure is going in during the month of December. User devices will be in place by February. The CK:P education staff will work with these new school sites to get their education activity functional once all hardware is deployed.

With the passage of the technology plan, a portion of the CK:P education staff has been assigned to implementing the plan. This has led to a carry-over of staff funding which will be applied to program wrap up. We expect these funds to be fully expended by the end of 1998.

A key aspect of the institutionalization involved the migration of technical equipment and support from the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) to the Pittsburgh Public Schools. As of December 1997, all connectivity for CK:P school comes through the Pittsburgh Public Schools. And, the two central servers - accounts and services - have been migrated to the school district. For the last three months, CK:P project staff, PPS technical staff and Pittsburgh Supercomputing staff have worked to complete the technical migration. The migration time frame is included with this report. It is also available online. PPS staff now maintains connectivity and the central servers.

Migration of the technical components of the project have been so rapid that there are unexpended funds for technical support staff. These funds will be available for the PSC to provide emergency response for the PPS technical staff maintaining the servers and modem pool. These remaining funds will be spend by the end of 1998.

The assessment staff has engaged in three main kinds of activities this quarter. First, it has continued data-gathering -- including activities undertaken to track the institutionalization process, such as attending School Board meetings and gathering newspaper reports about events within the district, and activities designed to help us track the evolution of earlier CK:P sites. However, it should be noted that we have spent less time on data gathering this quarter than in the past years in order to allow more time for work in two other areas -- data analysis and dissemination of our findings. With regard to the former, we have made a lot of progress in analyzing the results of the online survey that was sent last spring to teachers and librarians with Internet accounts through CK:P. We expect to have analysis of this survey finished by the end of the next quarter. In addition, we have made a great deal of progress in coding the qualitative materials stemming from the observational work conducted over the last several years. Also, we have been working on analysis of the more than 100 interviews conducted late last spring. Some of this material has been coded as field notes. Other sections of it are being content analyzed. Finally, we have engaged in a wide variety of dissemination activities. This includes, but has not been limited to, the presentation of the paper on the project at the WebNet Conference in November, the submission of another paper for consideration for publication, and the submission of yet another paper to an upcoming international conference.

The carry-over of funds in the assessment budget reflects the need of the evaluation staff to finish coding, reviewing and interpreting the data collected. We expect to have all funds spent by the end of 1998.

As CK:P has developed, the project director=s activities have expanded to encompass a large scale community networking effort. The carry-over in the budget for the University of Pittsburgh, Department of Physics and Astronomy will be adequate to support Dr. Carlitz through the summer of 1998. This will allow him to complete the task of linking the community work to the original goals of the CK:P project.