By way of introduction and response to Harvey Barnett's posting:
>Like many staff development projects our challenge is how to support,
>sustain and increase their knowledge when they return to their
>classrooms. My interest is in making this support work better.
>Harvey
.... I'm Mark Schlager, a cognitive scientist in SRI's (Stanford Research
Institute) Center for Technology in Learning. My research focuses on
computer-mediated collaborative learning. We are working with school reform
groups and science professional development providers here in the Bay Area
including the Lawrence Hall of Science GSS program, Life Lab Science Program,
Calif Science Project, Science Education Academy of the Bay Area (SEABA), and
Bay Area School Reform Collaborative. We have found a common need among these
groups for something more than web pages and listserves to support the
professional development activities of their teacher communities (e.g.,
following face-to-face workshops and institutes as Harvey mentioned).
As part of an overall solution to filling this need, we have created the
on-line Teacher Professional Development Institute (TAPPED IN), a multi-user
virtual environment (MUVE) that integrates real-time and email communication,
shared Web access and viewing, and interaction with virtual objects in a
"place" patterned after a real-world conference center. Educators can log
into TAPPED IN to discuss issues, create and share resources, hold workshops
and seminars, engage in mentoring, and conduct collaborative inquiries with
the aid of familiar discourse-support artifacts, such as whiteboards, books,
copy machines, slide projectors, notepads, bulletin boards, and library
facilities. One of our partners, borrowing from Deborah Meier's concept,
used an analogy to describe TAPPED IN: "its the technological equivalent to
the "small school." Rather than being set free into cyberspace (although
teachers certainly have that option), TAPPED IN will enable BASRC to support a
personalized learning environment for educators."
Our collective vision is to coalesce these individual Bay Area professional
development groups groups into a self-sustaining teacher professional
development community, with links to local school reform efforts and shared
access to exemplary professional development resources. We also hope that the
technology and the lessons we learn about establishing and sustaining learning
communities will be used by others to replicate the model in their own areas.
For more information, see our WWW page:
http://www.soe.berkeley.edu/~schank/TappedIn.html
or send email to mark_schlager@qm.sri.com
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