NSF QUARTERLY REPORT
March 29, 1996

The goal of the Common Knowledge: Pittsburgh (CK:P) extension grant (1995 - 1997) is to migrate project activities to the Pittsburgh Public Schools (PPS). This entails:

1- migrating technical support to the appropriate PPS personnel,
2- making permanent the education and curriculum support,
3- participating in policy discussions to sustain the activity.

This process will allow the District to scale-up CK:P activities to any and all District schools. This in effect would institutionalize the activity in the (PPS). This document reports on these three aspects of the institutionalization process.

Migrating Technical Support

Technically, the CK:P network is close to production quality. Servers, clients, printers, and networks are installed and running at 14 PPS schools. The next step is to move the support of this activity to personnel within the school District. This process of migrating the technical support to PPS has begun in earnest. Meetings between Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) project managers, PPS project staff, and the PPS Director of Computer Services produced a timeline (Appendix A or /projects/ckp/process/migration.html) for the technical migration. This timeline articulates the migration path, deadlines and responsibilities for servers, user devices, modem pools, and LAN/MAN/WAN support. Subsequent reports to NSF will detail the progress of this effort.
Hiring of staff to help in the migration is proceeding. CK:P has hired one system administrator to work on migration of servers. Another position remains to be filled. Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center has had some turnover on the project. Two of PSC's tech staff have moved to other positions within the PSC. The vacant positions are in the process of being filled. Our experience indicates that hiring technical positions for network design and support and/or system design and support has been a difficult task. There are many openings in this growing field and not enough people to fill them. Positions for both PSC and PPS have been posted both at Carnegie Mellon, the Westinghouse Corporation, and in the local newspaper.
A mailing list has been created to facilitate and record the migration process (wg-migration@pps.pgh.pa.us). We will archive email to this list and share it through our WWW page. Production meetings, occurring on a bi-monthly basis now include participation from PPS technical staff. We are encouraged at the progress being made at technical migration.

Migrating Educational Support

Presently, there are over 3,100 CK:P Internet users in the school District. This breaks down to approximately 2,200 staff members and 900 students. Activity among the general PPS staff is growing at a rapid pace. CK:P receives approximately 5 online trouble messages (trouble@pps.pgh.pa.us) and 20 phone calls per day asking for help. Much of the support pertains to at-home use, SLIP/PPP setup, printing problems, and software support. (CK:P through its collaboration with Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh offers any PPS staff home access. This access is part of the technical migration. Our hope is to offer these users home access through a modem pool at the PPS.)
In addition, CK:P staff produces newsletters (/projects/ckp/publications/publications.html#newsletters) which act as starting points for learning about Internet use in the classroom. These newsletters are disseminated in hard copy to all schools in the District. CK:P staff provides ongoing support at its 14 sites via email, workshops and individual training sessions. We have learned a tremendous amount about our end-users and the skills necessary to support such an activity. Presently we have four staff members who work with site teachers on technical, curricular and support issues. The support person must be knowledgeable about educational issues and school dynamics, as well as operating systems, TCP/IP protocol, Internet clients, html, and Internet resources. Many of our existing sites have purchased additional equipment with local funds and CK:P is being asked to put the equipment on the LANs. This extended support is vital to the ongoing success of school-based projects.
Finally, the CK:P education staff is managing a Request for Proposal process (RFP) for its fourth year sites, (/projects/ckp/curriculum/curriculum.html). This RFP is being offered only to the District's high schools. High schools were chosen because they are slated to be the first schools to receive technology in the District's proposed technology plan. (There is more information about the District's technology plan and CK:P's participation in the process later in the report.) CK:P staff are working with high schools that are developing proposals. We're finding that the high schools are more in need of help with writing the proposal text than with locating Internet resources. That is because many of these high school teachers have been regular users of the resources CK:P has made available. Seventy-five percent of our high schools wrote proposals. The fourth year schools will be announced April 22, 1996.
Unlike the technical migration, we are finding migration of educational support to be less clear. The question, "Who will support the activity after NSF funding is over?" is still to be answered. At CK:P sites, we find that teachers (useradmins) are willing to support the activity to the best of their ability. However, many are overwhelmed with the amount of time they have to spend on this activity. Creating accounts, learning html, hardware maintenance, and software support takes a great deal of time. These teachers do not receive additional time or compensation to do this.
On a District level, we have not succeeded at getting a commitment from District support staff to become involved in this activity. Although most use email and the WWW for their personal and professional use, they don't seem to have the time, or interest in taking on the support responsibility. This may cause a problem for future support of this activity. We will be raising this issue with the District and will continue to try and find ways to migrate support for staff and students. Possibly the District's technology plan will address this need or add positions to allow the CK:P staff to continue this activity after the grant period.

District Policy

CK:P believes that it has insight into technology implementation and the issues it raises. The CK:P education staff has worked hard during the past year to inform the District's technology planning process on the lessons learned in the project. A great deal of time and effort has gone into working with District policy makers on developing a technology plan.

The following is a list of District and CK:P activities around institutionalization and the technology plan.

Fall 1993 - PPS Technology Planning Begins
Committees Created - CK:P is represented on Steering,
Curriculum and Staff Development Committees

Spring 1994 - PPS Technology Plan presented to Board

Spring 1994 - CK:P grant proposal submitted to TIAAP
CK:P extension grant proposal submitted to NSF

Spring 1994 - Spring 1995 PPS Technology Plan is tabled

Fall 1994 - CK:P awarded both NSF and TIAAP grants

December 1994 - CK:P Education Advisory Committee meets
/projects/ckp/publications/committees/ed/edadvisory.html

Spring 1995 - CK:P Education Advisory Committee meets

Spring 1995 - DOE Challenge Grant proposal written by CK:P staff
District chooses not to submit

Fall 1995 - CK:P meets with School Support Directors to find people
interested in migrating the support of this activity. No
interest is forthcoming.

Fall 1995 - 2nd Tech Committee is created
CK:P has 4 members on this 14 member committee
CK:P helps to author the plan and create the budget

Fall 1995 - CK:P presents to Board Plan for 4th Year Sites
Board advises to wait until Tech Plan is passed

Winter 1996 - CK:P Hosts Technology Dinner and Visit by
State Representatives, School Board, Superintendent and
Cabinet

January 1996 CK:P Creates presentation of the Tech Plan for the Board
CK:P meets with District Board Members
Tech Plan presented to the Board

Spring 1996 Technology Plan tabled
CK:P puts out District RFP to high schools

CK:P believes that if the District is going to learn from this project and scale up the effort to include all schools and students, it must become committed to the idea of instructional technology. This would include the necessary Board commitments - personnel, money, priorities - for it to succeed.

Assessment
The assessment staff has also been actively involved in documenting both the migration process and the technology planning in the PPS. Its efforts have mirrored those of the education staff. The assessment staff attended meetings and tracked email exchanges in which migration was discussed. During spring and summer, interviews with CK:P and PPS personnel involved with the migration process, will be conducted.
This quarter, the assessment staff's efforts at disseminating its findings have been concentrated in two areas. First, work has been completed on a paper regarding the issues of collaboration between educational and technical professionals. This paper will be presented at the annual meetings of the American Educational Research Association in New York City in April. Second, an outline for a book that will be a substantial product of the assessment staff's involvement in CK:P has been developed. This outline will help them focus the efforts, over the next year, of data-gathering and analysis.

Final Notes - PPS Contribution and Expenditure of Funds

The school District has consistently provided CK:P with the matching funds that were described in the original proposal to NSF. This is an indication that they value this activity. However, much will have to occur if the project is to move from that of a demonstration project.

The 1995 budget was not fully spent by the end of the calendar year. NSF gave the project permission to carry over the funds to 1996. In all areas - education, technical, and assessment - we find that there is a need for large amounts of human support. The carryover allows the staffing levels to be maintained at a level commensurate with the work to be accomplished.

Unless we have difficulty hiring and replacing staff, we believe that the 1995 carry-over and 1996 budget will be used during this calendar year. We will report further on this during our next quarterly report.