The following text is the narrative portion of the proposal submitted to the National Science Foundation, on the basis of which the present conference has been funded.
Attendees at the conference will include principal investigators and classroom practitioners from the various NIE projects, as well as the representatives of other federal programs which impact upon school networking programs. This group will interact on-line prior to the April 3-5 meeting. At the conference there will be break-out sessions which continue the on-line interactions and attempt to reach conclusions on the topics with which individual break-out groups will be charged. The emphasis here will be upon identifying problems and seeking to find solutions to these problems, rather than simply to catalog the many successes of the NIE program. On-line resources will be created in conjunction with the conference, which will both highlight successes of the NIE program and summarize the on-line and face-to-face discussions which will take place as part of the conference.
The conference itself will be held in Pittsburgh, PA, allowing attendees to visit some of the dozens of school and community sites involved in the Common Knowledge: Pittsburgh project and its various extensions to community and municipal networking. These site visits will provide a portion of the conferences focus upon issues of practice. The site visits will be followed by the break-out sessions, which will emphasize issues of research and the balance between research and practice.
A plenary session will pull together the various threads that will have been explored in the break-out sessions and provide conference attendees with an overall summary of the issues addressed by the conference and an outlook for future activities in this area in the realms of research and practice.
The Networking Infrastructure for Education (NIE) program of the NSF has funded approximately 70 projects over a three-year period. This program has played an important role in the development of technological infrastructure, and particularly, the development of networking infrastructure, in our nations schools. As the development of networking infrastructure has accelerated in the business community and in government, it is particularly valuable to review the experience of the NIE program, to identify the lessons learned and the problems that have been confronted and that remain to confront. This information will help inform the NSF and other federal agencies seeking to develop technological infrastructure and to stimulate the development of new, productive collaborations among the people who have been involved in federally- sponsored programs in this area. A specific goal of the NSF that will be aided by the conference is the establishment of new programs which emphasize technology integration in education. The conference will provide a good opportunity to highlight best practice in this area as developed in the NIE program and to bring lessons from this experience to REPP, LIS and other new NSF initiatives.
The conference described in this proposal is one that will bring together principal investigators and classroom practitioners from projects funded in the NIE program. A two-day meeting in Pittsburgh (running from Thursday evening, April 3, 1997 until Saturday noon, April 5, 1997) will be preceded by on-line discussions on topics of common interest to the various projects. Break-out sessions during the conference will enable the people who have taken part in the on-line discussions to summarize the issues they have developed and the solutions proposed for problems encountered in the course of their work. Site visits to school and community locations involved in the work of Common Knowledge: Pittsburgh (CK:P) and its various extensions in the areas of school, community and municipal networking, will provide a focus on issues of practice which involve the application and use of networking technology.
Attendees will include principal investigators from NIE planning grants and smaller research projects and the principal investigator plus two practitioners from larger NIE projects. The total number of expected attendees from this group is about 140. Additionally, there will be invitees from the NSF, from federal agencies with programs in related areas, and from principal investigators and practitioners from projects funded by these agencies. The total number of expected attendees from this group is about 60, giving a total number of attendees of approximately 200.
The overall theme of the conference will be the balance between research and practice. This theme will provide appropriate emphasis upon the success of NIE projects in developing sustainable models of technology implementation and will highlight the unique problems encountered in trying to construct and implement such models. It will also provide a forum for discussing the way in which NSF-sponsored projects have successfully introduced research values into the classroom environment and used these values to maintain the currency and vitality of classroom activities initiated under NSF-sponsored projects.
The principal investigator for the present proposal, Robert D. Carlitz, has been involved in school and community networking efforts for a number of years. We will describe below the nature of these projects and their relation to the present proposal.
Carlitz has moderated the KIDSPHERE mailing list [1] since its inception seven years ago. This experience is relevant for the on-line portions of the present conference proposal. Carlitz is also the Project Director for Common Knowledge: Pittsburgh [2], an NSF testbed for school networking in the Pittsburgh Public Schools, and Bridging the Urban Landscape [3], a TIIAP-funded project on school and community networking. Sites associated with these projects will provide the venues for conference attendees to explore issues of practice in the present conference.
Common Knowledge: Pittsburgh is presently funded under NSF grant RED-9454715. The project seeks to develop a network architecture suitable for expansion to encompass all of the school district's approximately 50,000 students, teachers and staff. Presently there are 15 school sites with local area network infrastructure and connectivity to the Internet and dozens of active curricular projects. Over half of the district's staff are on-line; and a networking architecture is in place that can serve thousands of students. A portion of the infrastructure is already being managed by the school district's technical support staff, and expectations are that the entire infrastructure will be self-sustaining in another year or so.
The organization that is submitting this proposal is a new nonprofit corporation, formed to continue the work initiated by Common Knowledge: Pittsburgh and Bridging the Urban Landscape. This organization is known as Information Renaissance [4] and has been chartered to develop network activity in support of education and the community. It is associated with the University of Pittsburgh and is directed by the principal investigator for the present proposal.
One of the first projects undertaken by Information Renaissance has been an on-line seminar [5] entitled Universal Service/Network Democracy, which deals with provisions of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 affecting schools and libraries. Mechanisms developed to conduct this on-line activity will be valuable in implementing the on-line discussions proposed for the present conference.