Common Knowledge: Pittsburgh

Annual Report - 1996

Use of the Internet in Pittsburgh Public Schools (PPS) classrooms is becoming both powerful and pervasive. Teachers at Common Knowledge: Pittsburgh (CK:P) sites are using network resources in creative ways. Non-CK:P sites are beginning to spend discretionary funds on providing network resources to their schools. A majority of PPS staff is online in one form or another. This year's quarterly reports document some of the success stories.

Relevant Statistics

20 Sites 4677 Users

7 Elementary Schools Students (1403)

4 Middle Schools Teachers (1615)

9 High Schools Staff (548)

1 Beta Site School Support Staff (192)

Librarians (57)

Parents (30)

Administrators (48)

Other (784)

Our many educational components have been described in our previous quarterly reports.

Also, the Common Knowledge: Pittsburgh homepage provides a forum for the many curriculum initiatives that teachers and students of the PPS have created using the resources of the Internet.

This annual report will focus on CK:P efforts to institutionalize the project in the Pittsburgh Public Schools from a technical, staff development and support perspective. The goal of this effort is to leave in place, in the Pittsburgh Public Schools, a technology and support structure that will allow teachers and students to use the technology of the Internet for curriculum delivery long after the CK:P project is done.

Migration

Project efforts during 1996 were to migrate essential infrastructure and support mechanisms to the Pittsburgh Public Schools. In the spring of 1996, a migration timetable was devised. CK:P staff worked with the school District to create this timetable. The timetable is attached to this report as Appendix A. The migration was divided into four main categories: Connectivity, Servers, User Devices, and Training.

During the year, CK:P moved its location from the Woolslair Gifted Center to Peabody High School. Although the impetus for the move was a PPS redistricting effort, CK:P chose this as an opportunity to move to a larger, more modern space. This provides CK:P with space for District training, expansion, and a closer relationship with a high school population.

Connectivity

Migration of CK:P connectivity includes migrating the existing MAN infrastructure to the PPS, development and deployment of a PPS modem pool and expansion of MAN technologies to support the six new CK:P year four school sites.

MAN connectivity tasks which are complete, or nearly complete, include deploying infrastructure for asynchronous dial-up lines and migrating school sites dialing into the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) over to PPS. Pending work includes migrating ISDN and LADS connectivity from PSC to PPS. Both these tasks are challenging due to technical difficulties we have encountered along the way. Specifically, we have encountered poor interoperability between various ISDN vendors. We plan to address this issue by replacing existing ISDN school site routers with ones compatible with the routers at the PPS central site. Also, we have LADS technology at four school sites. The LADs lines, have been providing T1 connectivity to one site and quarter T1 to another at roughly $70 per site with solid operating performance. In migrating these two line to the PPS, we encountered installation problems with replacement lines ordered to transfer these sites to the PPS central site. We are still working with the phone company to resolve these problems. We plan to work closely with the PPS staff to make an informed decision on this technology.

For years, PPS has maintained a modem pool for its purchasing and finance departments. This modem pool with over 80 phone lines was used Monday through Friday 8 to 5 by these departments. The Director of Computer Services at the PPS, Myron Lentz, agreed that these lines could be used by PPS staff for home access. This group of lines along with those provided by NSF funding, became the PPS modem pool. This modem pool is available to PPS staff 24 hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week. We have spent significant time this year developing, implementing and deploying the PPS dialin modem pool. This modem pool, placed into production in Oct. 1996, replaces the facilities currently loaned to the CK:P project by the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie-Mellon University.

We are supporting 3,300 PPS staff accounts. The majority of these teachers and staff members accessed their accounts through the university modem pools. As of November 1, the university pools will no longer be available and access will be through the PPS modem pool. To get ready for this transition, we have put in place a support mechanism that should insure a smooth transition. The newsletter is one of the many steps we've taken to help our users move to the PPS modem pool. This newsletter is available as Appendix B.

Servers and User Devices

In early spring, the Pittsburgh Public Schools, with the help of Bob Carlitz, negotiated an agreement with BSD that allows the school district's CK:P sites to be considered a campus. BSD/OS was chosen because of the availability of commercial, high quality technical support, which was deemed useful for a production quality system and because of the company's willingness to collaborate with the CK:P project and the Pittsburgh Public Schools. The collaboration and its resulting designation, allowed us to re-engineer our server environment to provide a consistent server technology at all school sites - BSD/OS Unix, running on Pentium hardware. The existing systems designed and implemented to support the CK:P environment migrated to BSD/OS smoothly, and with little change. The PPS central site administrators seem comfortable with deploying and maintaining BSD/OS systems. Also, we have concentrated on duplicating the central server systems at PPS, both for purposes of education and training and for redundancy. These central servers are the next items to be fully migrated to the PPS.

The migration of support for user devices from PSC to PPS was completed early this year. In particular, the Education staff made the jump to Windows '95 on all new Intel-based user devices, and is comfortable and experienced enough with the interface to build all user devices without assistance from the technical staff. Similarly, the Education Staff is also providing support for all Mac based user devices.

Training - PPS Tech Staff

Training the PPS technical staff, and transferring know-how wherever and whenever possible is a unifying thread throughout our work. Weekly meetings between the PSC technical staff and the PPS administrators allow us to walk through common or not-so-common tasks and field questions as they come up. Our newest system administrators - one at PSC and one at PPS - have spent a substantial amount of time documenting our processes and techniques on the CK:P technical support web site and automating procedures for site administrators Technical training documents are included in Appendix C.

Training - CK:P Fall Institute

In the spirit of creating local experts and supporting teachers and classroom staff, we put in place a CK:P Fall Institute (/projects/ckp/workshop.html). All classes, workshops and courses are fully subscribed with waiting lists. There is a tremendous need for support and for examples of classroom use of the technology in the PPS as evidenced by the response to the CK:P Institute. The brochure is included with this report as Appendix D.

Outreach - Presentations

CK:P education staff made numerous presentations during the past year. These are included in Appendix E.

Titles include:

The Internet: Bringing the World to the Classroom

Presented to District Administrators

Issues of Implementation

Presented at Carnegie-Mellon University

Technology as a Tool for School Reform

Presented at the National Governors Conference

Using Instructional Technology as a Cattle Prod for School Reform

Presented at the Regional Mathematics/Science Collaborative

Insisting that the Writing Classroom Get Involved in School Reform

Presented at the Pennsylvania Council of Teachers of English Annual Meeting

Assessment

During 1996 the Common Knowledge: Pittsburgh assessment staff has been continuing its work in four areas: tracking migration and institutionalization of the project; studying the issues that arise in implementing Internet use at the classroom level; documenting the educational changes brought about by use of the Internet; and disseminating findings.

Our tracking of migration and institutionalization has involved four major activities. First, we have continued to track e-mail exchanges, many of which deal with the development of a modem pool within the PPS and the issues involved in migrating users from the University modem pools to the new PPS modem pool. Second, we have continued to attend meetings related to the migration to try to understand the issues that emerge here and the kinds of solutions that have been developed to deal with these issues. Third, we have conducted a set of interviews with a wide variety of personnel at various levels within the administration of the PPS. Finally, we have begun to attend relevant School Board meetings to get a better sense of institutional context issues, including budget issues, that will ultimately play a major role in determining whether and how Internet activities become institutionalized in the PPS.

Our efforts to study both implementation issues and the educational changes that occur as a result of Internet use have been varied. First, we have been gathering data on CK:P computer account holders' actual use of their accounts. So, for example, we are gathering data that will let us know how much use by teachers and students occurs both during and outside of school hours. Second, we are continuing our case studies of selected CK:P sites. Data gathering efforts vary from site to site, depending on factors such as the level of activity there. However, they include classroom observations, interviews with teachers and students, attendance at meetings of the CK:P teams at these sites, and collection of e-mail sent to the CK:P team distribution lists at these sites. We have also been working on a content analysis of the projects proposed in the documents submitted to the annual competition to help select CK:P sites in order to inform our understanding of the goals that teachers have for Internet use and the activities they plan to meet these goals.

One issue currently facing the assessment group is the appropriate balance between continued data-gathering and the time-consuming process of analyzing, before the end of the project's funding period, the massive data set we have already accumulated. On the one hand, it is important to make good use of the remarkably rich data set we have generated and to provide timely information. On the other hand, too much attention to data analysis will prevent us from devoting close attention to the further development of the project, including the evolution of the classroom-based Internet use that CK:P has stimulated. This would be a serious loss given the tremendous recent growth of the project, the fact that the amount and nature of Internet use are evolving markedly as teachers gain more expertise, and the fact that the institutionalization issue will be playing out most intensely as the project nears the end of its NSF funding. We are working hard to find an appropriate balance. This will inevitably entail some reduction in our data-gathering efforts at a time when the project activity level is the highest it has ever been.

Our dissemination efforts during the year have also been varied. In addition to the two papers published in 1995, we have two papers in press -- a book chapter focusing on the factors that influence teacher demand for Internet use and a journal article which provides a review of the literature on the impact of computer use on classroom social processes. In addition, we made a presentation at the American Education Research Association (AERA) in April 1996, and we have had a second very different paper which explores the ways in which elementary school students use the Internet to expand their horizons by interacting with members of social groups that they are not likely to interact with in their day-to-day lives (e.g., those with very different socioeconomic/racial background, those with disabilities, etc.) accepted for presentation at AERA in 1997. We have had yet another paper on the social and organizational factors that effect teachers' and students' ability to use the Internet to connect to the outside world accepted for presentation at the upcoming Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. Finally, we recently submitted another paper for presentation at the upcoming ED-MEDIA ED-TELECOM conference.