National School Network and collaboration
Melanie Goldman (mgoldman@bbn.com)
Mon, 31 Mar 1997 10:36:39 -0500
The use of the network is both the object of the National School Network
research and the medium for our collaboration. 1) As research the NSN is
looking at the role of school-community collaboration in implementing
school reform and use of the Internet. We have come up with 8 types of
school community collaborations - project-basedlLearning with the community
as an audience and resource, school to work experience, community service
learning, community members as volunteers, leadership roles for schools,
community education, family-school connection. A sampling of NSN member
projects is available at: http://nsn.bbn.com/community/projects.shtml 2)
We also are looking at how collaboration can be imbedded in a tool, having
created a web-base tool, NetPals, that structures the telementoring
process. 3) Lastly, the network has served to link us with the over 400
organizations participating in this project. Through the National School
Network's web-based "Exchange" partners and participants are both
contributors and consumers of each others' content, pedagogies,
technologies, and intellectual resources.
Examples of each of these:
School-community collaborations - Many sites which have been successful in
school reform and building information infrastructure have formed
partnerships with key community organizations. In Battleground WA, a key
school to work program, formed through a collaboration with the schools and
the Washington University State Extension program, served as the model upon
which their new "career pathways" curriculum is based. They describe their
curriculum as "applied learning" and "integrated technology".
Telementoring As an innovation, telementoring can individualize
instruction through one to one mentoring, and can serve as an important
vehicle toward helping teachers form collaborative relationships and
improve their practice. We have several pilot projects using the NSN
NetPals tool - a 6th grade class mentored in writing by lawyers from a
local firm; master teachers mentoring teachers who are working to become
Board Certified, preservice teachers mentoring high school students. A
brief summary of NetPals is available
at:(http://nsn.bbn.com/community/rs_telementor/netpal.shtml. Several
national projects have demonstrated that external mentors help
disadvantaged and underserved children. When telementoring is a one-to-one
relationship, it has the potential of providing caring relationships that
reaffirm a child's sense of self-worth and encourage development of
academic skills. The National School Network is working with several
national telementoring projects - Hewlett Packard, Telementoring Young
Women in Science, CoVis, the Electronic Emissary to investigate how to make
telementoring scale.
The NSN "Exchange", a national electronic meeting place, has pioneered
on-line events for students and
teachers.(http://nsn.bbn.com/community/index.shtml) The NSN "Exchange" has
served to catalyze teamwork among diverse stakeholders within a local
community (businesses, experts, informal institutions, prominent citizens)
around a special point in time related to the learning activity. For
example, the NSN Exchange in partnership with Cybersmith Cafes and White
Pine Software brought teachers and students together with experts using
CUSeeMe to talk about equality of access to technology for underserved
communities. Other online discussions included using chat to talk with a
black chemist about establishing scientific careers and students talking
with other students about their scientific projects.
For me personally, I am continually amazed at how the network can augment
our knowledge and faciliate collaboration. Just recently, I sent out a
request for information on how schools were dealing with appropriate use of
the network with students. I received many thoughtful replies which I
summarized and collected into an online archive available at
http://nsn.bbn.com/bin/cgi-bin/hn-testbed/get/nsn-aup.html. This summary
has been forwarded to many discussion lists and is serving as a reference
for others to build upon.
Melanie
Melanie Goldman
Co-Principal Investigator
National School Network
BBN, Corp.
70 Fawcett Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
617 873 4653
mgoldman@bbn.com
http://nsn.bbn.com