Common Knowledge: Pittsburgh
(CK:P)The extension grant from NSF provides CK:P with the opportunity to begin a migration process that will ultimately institutionalize network technologies in the Pittsburgh Public Schools (PPS). This process begins to build, in the district, the expertise necessary to maintain networks for educational application in curriculum and instruction. From a technical perspective this migration process will develop the foundation to support LAN, MAN, and WAN infrastructures. CK:P, by working through the district's technology plan, is becoming part of the foundation that the district is putting in place.
During the first quarter of this year, CK:P's education staff has begun the process of migration, continued support for its first and second year schools, initiated a second RFP for new sites, and begun to share its experience with school districts around the country.
Project Migration to Pittsburgh Public Schools
The extension grant from NSF clearly indicated that the focus for the next 3 years was to migrate the project's components to the Pittsburgh Public Schools. This includes technical, educational and policy support.
We've begun to engage the technical staff of PPS through a variety of activities. These include: monthly meetings with the director of the PPS Division of Computer Services, ongoing Technical Advisory Meetings with PPS and CK:P Staff, weekly classes for PPS technical staff and training of user administrators at each of our school sites. In addition, we've begun to develop a parallel central infrastructure between CK:P and PPS. This includes a PPS Internet membership, purchase of high bandwidth access for the PPS central site, connectivity for PPS remote technical sites (such as computer repair and school support) and strategic planning for integrating existing administrative networks with WAN.
We are slowly beginning to make inroads with district educational support staff. These are the resource people who support curriculum, instruction and assessment centrally and at the local sites. Towards this effort we have done the following:
The education staff in conjunction with the assistant superintendent of schools, Dr. Bernie Manning, meets monthly to plan strategies for migration of the project and to articulate issues of district technology policy.
Support for Year 1 and 2 Sites
We have learned that sites need continued support as teachers and students discover ways of integrating WAN technology into the curriculum.
Year 1
Wiring completion, hardware installation, and high bandwidth connectivity are constant and complex issues. It has taken a full year to install the school LANs, deploy hardware and move beyond voice grade access. Even with these drawbacks, the seven Year 2 sites are actively pursuing their curriculum projects described in their proposals.
Extended Activities
The above activities all require ongoing technical and educational support in order to achieve success. The key to migration is the creation of a human infrastructure that supports this dynamic environment. There is a need for Common Knowledge to focus on these support issues as we migrate to the PPS.
RFP for Year 3
In order to select sites for year 3 of the grant, an RFP (gopher://gopher.pps.pgh.pa.us/11/ckp/ckp/ed/rfp94) was sent to the 18 district middle schools. CK:P wanted to extend its program to middle schools because they were underrepresented, of the 11 existing sites only one is a middle school.
Presentations were made at each middle school by CK:P staff. Of the 18 middle schools, ten submitted proposals. A committee of 24 (parents, teachers, administrators, CK:P staff, PPS board members, and representatives from local foundations) read all 10 proposals. On March 25th the committee met and chose 3 schools - Allegheny M.S., Knoxville M.S., and Schiller Classical Academy. CK:P will meet with these schools, develop technical and educational action plans, and begin staff development.
Project Dissemination
CK:P supports a gopher and a server and a menu interface that is configured specifically for the K12 environment. All project activities and reports are disseminated through this server. In addition, all conference presentations, proposals and papers are available in html .
Presentations were given at the following conferences during the first quarter of this year:
Over the past quarter, the technical staff has been focusing on hardening the network and system environment developed during the original Common Knowledge: Pittsburgh grant. We are addressing this issue from a number of perspectives, as summarized below.
Server Environment
By the end of the second quarter of 1995, CK:P will support roughly 11 remote sites along with over 1000 users. In order to do this effectively, CK:P needs to provide a production server platform for both the central site and a majority of the remote sites. To this end, we are working on productionizing two out of the five server platforms developed and supported by CK:P. The two platforms, Ultrix and NetBSD, were chosen since the majority of the sites are equipped with these platforms. We have developed a process to test and deploy the equipment which extensively utilizes the environment and expertise located at the CK:P Beta Test Site (Woolslair Elementary School). Once the platform has been developed and tested at the alpha site, it is deployed to the beta site for a defined test period. During this period, the Educational Staff utilizes the server, testing the different features as they would be used in an educational setting, reporting bugs and problems as they are discovered. The Educational staff also utilizes this time period to tailor the configuration and features to the educational environment. Once the test period is completed, the software and configuration is frozen and assigned a version number for future reference. We are in the process of testing the Spring 1995 software release for both the NetBSD and Ultrix platforms. We expect the production version of these platforms to be released by the beginning of the second quarter.
User Devices
CK:P currently deploys two types of user devices at the remote sites: PC based platforms and MAC based platforms. Technical support of these platforms has two components: the actual software configuration package which contains the system software and the application software necessary to support network access; and the software distribution package, which supports building the user device from a server over the network. During the past quarter, we have spend significant time developing and productionizing the PC platform. This platform was chosen since the majority of our year 2 sites had selected PC based platforms for their user devices. The status of the two platforms is described below.
PC Platform
The software configuration package is close to completion. We spent the end of the first quarter testing the software package at both the beta site, and Schenley, one of the first year sites. After correcting a number of problems discovered with some of the network applications, such as printing features from the mail client PC-Pine, we are ready to place this configuration into production. In conjunction with the PC software configuration package, we are also working on completing the PC software distribution package, referred to as PC-Remote- Build. This package allows for installing, rebuilding and upgrading the PC's remotely from a fileserver. This package will be placed into production once the documentation has been updated to reflect changes made when modifying the package for one of the first year sites. Once both the PC software configuration package and PC-Remote-Build have been placed in production, we will ask the site administrators to upgrade all the existing PC's to this version of software. Once this is accomplished, the majority of the remote sites will contain production quality user devices.
MAC Platform
During the past quarter we have developed and tested the software configuration for the MAC based user devices for the CK:P Year 2 sites. This package has been tested at the beta site and is ready to be deployed at Frick, one of the second year sites. After a brief hardening period at Frick, it will be deployed to the remaining MAC sites. During the second quarter, we will work on developing and testing the MAC distribution software package. We expect to have this package completed and in production by fall 1995.
Technical Training
An important component of the current Common Knowledge: Pittsburgh grant is providing a mechanism for migrating the management and support of the technical infrastructure from Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) to PPS. We are addressing this issue at a number of levels. First, we are holding regular meetings between the PPS and PSC technical staffs. These meetings, referred to as Technical Advisory Committee meetings provide a forum for discussing technical issues associated with deploying the existing infrastructure to the school sites along with identifying and discussing issues associated with migrating this infrastructure to the school district. During the past quarter, one of the issues we have addressed at these meetings includes designing and deploying adequate connectivity to the PPS central administration building. This site may serve as PPS's central site, thus it is a crucial first step towards migration. We hope to have the installation of the link completed by the beginning of the second quarter.
We have instituted weekly training classes for the PPS technical staff. Initially, these classes provided a hands on introduction to the server software configuration being developed for the project. They have evolved into a system administration class, providing information on not only how to build a system, but also how to provide ongoing system support for the server. Topics we plan to cover next quarter include: how to build and maintain the PC client, how to build and maintain the MAC clients, overview of the CK:P networking environment, and how to support and maintain the CK:P production networking environment.
During the first quarter of the follow-up NSF grant, the CK:P Assessment group has focused its efforts in three areas: tracking migration of the project from CK:P to PPS; assessing the educational effects of WAN; and disseminating findings.
The CK:P assessment group is tracking migration through three major activities: attending many CK:P-related committee meetings; observing at CK:P technical workshops; and interviewing CK:P and PPS staff. Attending meetings allows us to track the key issues concerning migration and the key players. Observations at technical training workshops help us to understand how knowledge is transferred from one organization to another, both at the level of the PPS technical staff (system administration training) and at the site level when teachers are trained to be user administrators for their schools' networks. Annual interviews with PPS staff at various levels of the organization will be conducted in the next quarter, focusing on their experiences and perspectives implementing K12 WAN networking. By doing this, we learn the insider's perspective on migration that is essential for understanding political and cultural issues which facilitate and hinder implementation.
Our activities in assessing the educational effects of WAN on K12 occurs in three areas: observing classroom Internet use; interviewing educators and students; and collecting educator and student "products". We continue observations started during the original NSF grant, focusing on several "case analysis" sites. Observations of classroom uses of the Internet or planning for curriculum use take place from one to three times per week, involving approximately thirty educators and several hundred students. Because of the technical delays at some of the sites, the lengthy processing time required for qualitative data, and the evolutionary nature of WAN usage, we can not provide any definitive conclusions regarding the educational effects of WAN. However our observations suggest that student and educator enthusiasm and commitment remain high, even in situations where technical delays have made curriculum use difficult. Annual one-on-one interviews with educators have begun and will continue throughout the spring. Interviews with a selected sampling of students will begin in April.
Two categories of K12 "products" are online publications and electronic mail. Several CK:P schools have begun to develop WWW home pages and other schools are planning to do the same. We track the progress of these efforts from the earliest drafts to more sophisticated versions. In addition, the assessment group is a member of all school electronic "working groups"; hence, we receive routine mailings among the staff at CK:P schools. This allows us to observe the evolution in educators' attitudes and behaviors with regard to using the Internet educationally. Another "product" is account login information (day of week, time of day, and duration), which is collected automatically on the central CK:P server and on site servers, and is then analyzed to show monthly usage and even trends. These tables are published on the CK:P web server for anyone to access , in the directory Usage and Participation Reports). Although it is yet too early to have disseminated information concerning the follow-up grant, we have begun to publish information regarding some of our findings to date on the original NSF grant (January 1, 1993 - June 30, 1995). We presented papers at several conferences in the fall, 1994 and spring, 1995, and have had two articles accepted for publication in a special K12 and Internet issue of Computers and Education, August, 1995. Several of the conference papers can be found on the CK:P WWW server (URL as given above, under the directory Dissemination). In addition, we track CK:P gopher and web accesses and publish these tables on the CK:P WWW server (in the directory Usage and Participation Reports).