US/ND-1: my first four bars

my first four bars

Ferdi Serim (ferdi@tigger.jvnc.net)
Sat, 31 Aug 1996 10:50:18 -0400 

HI all,
This is some group to keep up with (Coltrane's debut of "Giant Steps" comes
to mind)! Before I respond to issues of professional development and
educational use, some intro...I teach in the Princeton Regional Schools. I
have 600 students who are kids, and 300 students who are teachers. My goal
is to help all of them harness technology for lifelong learning. We have a
high level of connectivity in every classroom district-wide, as well as in
homework centers in the "affordable housing" sections of town, that I'd
wager we'd be proud of as a result, should our efforts on this list produce
this kind of access for every classroom.

Now, entering a third year of work in seeing both "what this sucker will
do, flat out" (meaning what are the possibilities and effects on learning)
as well as "what does it take to keep this flying" (meaning what
interventions are scalable and sustainable to make ever larger numbers of
people confident and capable), I hope to provide some "first hand" reports
to this discussion, as appropriate. This work has grown out of my prior
experiences as: a Jazz Artist in Residence for the National Endowment of
the Arts; an early champion of classroom Internet use; a systems analyst
for a couple engineering companies, and most recently as co-author of
"NetLearning: Why Teachers Use the Internet".

In response to the great need educators face in learning to apply the
potentials of the Internet to their work, I helped found the Online
Internet Institute (OII). The OII represents a distributed educational
model for ongoing collaborative professional growth created by classroom
educators (see http://oii.org).

Thanks to Bob Carlitz' reminder about homework, I'm off to do mine! But
before doing so, a guiding principle might be: givers can be subsidized by
takers.
Those who contribute to the efforts needed to prepare users,
verify/organize content of educator generated materials, or in other
measurable ways give value to the scale up effort ought to get access from
wherever they are in return. Access can be used for anything (I've had
teachers in my workshops enthusiastically master html, only to produce web
pages for their "side" businesses!) but when it is purposefully used to
advance the opportunities for learning, it is appropriate for such access
to be subsidized.

Now, some responses to topics discussed thus far:

1 Who should provide professional development?

On the basis of my experiences in Princeton, and working with hundreds of
educators around the country, I can tell you that the challenges require
more deep, sustained human involvement than most planners have the courage
to quantify. OII also provides an alternative paradigm to the "let the
existing educational establishment do it/let business do it" debate. Mario
Zinga and Currie Morrison are right on the mark: educational value doesn't
automatically follow introduction of connectivity, and both the growing
body of knowledge about how people learn (which isn't necessarily how they
are currently taught!) as well as the growing body of examples of
successful Internet use for learning must be integrated within any
"training plan" (BTW, many of us have developed an "aversion reaction" to
"training" as it's proper context is for pets and circus animals)

2 Access

The biggest obstacle we've faced in our national work is the great
disparity between the connectivity our participants face when they return
to their classrooms and homes following our onsite sessions. Providing
access to classrooms without providing educators access from home simply
won't work.

3. Communication vs Education

Proper care is required in establishing context, but educational uses of
the Internet *demand* communication, and professional uses of the Internet
require skills that students ought to learn during their school years.
Don't isolate these into an "either/or" situation.

4. Tracking the Keepers and the Chaff

Discussion about what's relevant and what's not is highly subjective, but
will ultimately and necessarily narrow the focus. Certain key ideas may not
become part of the Universal Service recommendations, but ought to be
captured for other efforts (like the project George Brett and Libby Black
are working on for a National Coalition for Technical Training). Bob, can
the archives of this and subsequent discussion be indexed for searching on
phrases, and tagged for themes?

Off to do my homework!

Ferdi




______________________________________________________
Ferdi Serim                        phone: 609 921-8549
Princeton Regional Schools         fax:   609 924-7347
Computer Teacher/ District Computer Coordinator
Online Internet Institute, Principal Investigator
http://oii.org
ferdi_serim@monet.prs.k12.nj.us (school)
http://prism.prs.k12.nj.us/WWW/Ferdi.html

"We are more than the sum of our knowledge,
   we are the products of our imagination." - Ferdi