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Session #616
Instructional Technology Connections: A Learner Support System
CU-Denver's IT Connections is a learner support system with online helpdesk. It enables students to access educational resources and connections, and to share their research with others, both locally and globally.
The presentation was the last session on Saturday, just before the close of the conference. It was also my first experience as lead presenter. I was responsible for setting up the equipment, producing a PowerPoint overview of IT Connections and my own home page, introducing Brent Wilson as my co-presenter, and then demonstrating both online products. I downloaded all files and ran them from my hard drive, using Netscape.
Agenda:
The session was open, and all 27 participants felt free to interrupt and ask questions at any time. All stayed for the entire session; several spoke to us at length afterwards, with specific questions and comments. The TIE conference leaders kept the evaluation forms. However, based on the fact that I was invited back by the TIE coordinator to give a presentation the following year, I feel that the presentation was successful.
Session #816
Rocky Mountain Lesson Exchange
This session demonstrates the Rocky Mountain Lesson Exchange, available on CEO, designed for the sharing of teacher-developed, standards-based curriculum units and lessons, based on the proposal that Brent Wilson and I submitted to U.S. West in December, 1994.
Though CEO had a template for the Rocky Mountain Lesson Exchange, teachers were reluctant to post lessons there. Hence, participants at TIE would not be able to find what they came for-an actual bank of lesson plans on CEO. For this reason, I had explored and downloaded many standards-based lesson plans, graphical resources, inquiry learning units, critical thinking units, and projects that involved constructivist learning environments, and linked them to my home page. I also included a direct link to the Colorado State Standards. Together with the CEO template, this filled out the entire scenario.
It was the last session of the conference. We ran into some technical difficulties setting up the equipment, but by presentation time (1:30), everything was working properly. I presented some exemplary sites in a PowerPoint slide show, gave the URL for each one, and also explained how participants could link to my home page, using the same handout as for the previous session.
Agenda:
There were ten participants, all but one of whom was familiar with the WWW and some K-12 Internet resources, but were hard pressed to access the state standards and find lesson plans that addressed them. Since the audience was small, we conducted our session as an open dialog between the presenters and the attendees. No one left early, and all expressed their particular interests and concerns with the system. Several stayed afterwards to discuss individual questions with each of us.
As with the previous session, the TIE conference leaders kept the evaluation forms. But considering that this was the last session of the conference, and that everyone participated fully and stayed till the end, I feel the presentation was successful.
This case study examines the relationship between our local UCD learning culture and the Internet. Brent and Martin wrote the paper, Julie did the interviews with the instructors, and I did the e-mail survey of the TSS division. Each of us handled our individual piece of the AECT presentation. I also tied my research on the BVIP in to the content of the presentation, since it appeared that different variables and factors were appearing among the early adopters as contrasted with the late adopters.
Next February in Albuquerque, we intend to present our follow-up work in a panel to be chaired by Daniel Surry and Brent Wilson. That panel has been accepted, so we are on!
Session #31
Creating Connections: An Internet Training Program for Rural K-12
Teachers
This ACM-sponsored conference took place in Jacksonville in March 1996. I gathered all the data and analyzed it, then wrote the report on which we based our presentation. I also designed the one-page handout and the PowerPoint slides.
We were scheduled as the second half-hour presentation in a one-hour slot, to be shared with another group of presenters. However, when the other group canceled their presentation at the last minute, we took advantage of the entire hour by treating our presentation like a seminar. We also decided to use our overheads (created from the PowerPoint presentation) and present them in random order, as the discussion progressed naturally. The discussion was completely interactive, both between us as presenters, and with members of the audience.
Agenda:
We started by introducing ourselves and all members of the audience (15 participants in all) and asked them why they were interested in our presentation and in the one which had been canceled. Attendees wanted to know what problems we had encountered in getting partners to agree on agendas for large scale technology projects, such as creating school-wide Web pages. They also wanted to learn how to evaluate large-scale training projects. Since this content spanned both our presentation and the canceled one, we spent the first half hour discussing managing technology projects, and the second hour on evaluating them, with full audience participation throughout the session.
Evaluation forms were furnished by the conference leaders. The audience filled them out and handed them in at the end of the session. We do not have access to the evaluation forms.
Some of the participants were involved in a 30 million dollar program for wiring up the State of Mississippi and training rural teachers, so they were vitally interested in the evaluation aspect of the program. We met again with this group during lunch, and will remain in contact with them by telephone and e-mail from our office at RMC Research. We feel we have made a very important contact, and hope that we can involve RMC in the Mississippi program evaluation.
Karen Myers and I carried out a Type I developmental research activity as we and our team developed the School of Education home page. We developed the cognitive model which is shown in the handout. Our results were presented at three conferences, under three different titles:
Audience:
The audience in each case consists of people who are familiar with the
Internet and the World Wide Web, and who are interested in the group
dynamics of a team that is attempting to produce a Web page as a
collaborative venture.
Objective:
To describe the model of collaborative learning/design which emerged from
our developmental research while creating the School of Education Web
Page. I found that the audience at the Seventh National Conference on
College Teaching and Learning was also interested in this same topic. On
the basis of this interest, I also included this presentation in the
Colorado School of Mines workshop, where it was well-received.
Materials:
We began by handing out the one-page synopsis of the paper, announcing
that the full research paper can be found online at the URL cited in the
second paragraph of the handout. For STC, it was also included in the
Proceedings. We also handed out a graph illustrating our cognitive
processing model, together with the three data sources that we used for
triangulation. The PowerPoint presentation is included here.
Agenda:
In the AERA roundtable, Steve Sanford conducted three 15-minute
presentations of our paper, because neither Karen nor I could attend. At
the other two conferences, I presented the PowerPoint slide show and
involved the audience in an interactive discussion. We had half an hour
for STC and half an hour for ED-TELECOM. Karen was at STC, so she was
able to speak about the categorization of the data into emerging
categories; I primarily spoke on the development of the model.
Evaluation:
Conference presentations are usually evaluated using Scantron forms
distributed and retained by conference coordinators. However, only STC
provided the feedback from the crunched data to us - it was mixed. We
did note, however, that nobody left our presentations until they were
over, which was a good sign.
The Boulder Valley Internet Project: Teachers Mentoring Teachers
Lorraine Sherry
Paper session
This presentation is one of the deliverables that we promised the BVIP Project Leader, Libby Black, once our case study research was completed. Originally, Dianna and I submitted two separate proposals: one for the research results and one for the development of the integrated technology adoption/diffusion model. Only one was accepted: my proposal to present the research results. However, in the interim between proposal acceptance and the actual presentation, two things changed:
Thus, I was able to present the gist of both reports, including both the model and the results. I was on the same panel as Luis Gomez from CoVis, and was therefore able to draw parallels between the evaluation of his project and the BVIP, which made my presentation that much stronger. The moderator made no negative comments and said I had given a good presentation.
Panel on Internet Adoption/Diffusion
Daniel Surry, Brent Wilson, Lorraine Sherry, and May Lowry
In this panel, I gave a short presentation on the results of the BVIP, from a systems point of view, showing where it did and did not fit the Rogers model. In particular, the organization was decentralized, the innovation was evolving rather than stable, and the trainer of trainers model capitalized on client/peer homophily but limited diffusion horizontally to teachers, rather than percolating upwards to reach the administration and the school board.
We have noted that the barriers to adoption/diffusion are not necessarily technological in nature, but encompass individual, organizational, and teaching/learning factors as well. Moreover, efforts have to be targeted at the entire socio-cultural system, not just teachers, if future programs of this sort are to succeed.
Panel on Online Publishing
Brent Wilson, Lorraine Sherry, Jason Ravitz, Steve Ross, Larry Lipsitz,
Martin Ryder, Lloyd Rieber, Lisa Bennett and Saada Al-Ghafry
This panel also involved a short presentation of my Intercom article on electronic publishing, Raising the Prestige of Online Journal Articles, recently published in the STC Intercom magazine. The discussion with the audience was very interactive, and was well-received. Unfortunately, neither Steve Ross nor Larry Lipsitz were able to attend, so I was able to get my point across: that online publishing has come of age for scholarly researchers and presents a viable alternative to paper publishing.
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Lorraine Sherry