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The top news item in our February edition is a message from IU Director David Greenbaum announcing the formation of a new IST group that joins the Interactive University Project and the Museum Informatics Project into a single integrated unit. This new IST group is expected to enlist the experience, energies and working partnerships of both projects to better serve UC, K-12, and public communities and make digitally archived materials more readily and usefully available to a broad range of learners. Visit the IU Main page where the lead story begins. Stories featured in this issue are:
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Museum Informatics Project Joins with Interactive University
FROM IU DIRECTOR DAVID A. GREENBAUM:
I am pleased and honored to announce that UC Berkeley's Associate Vice Chancellor for Information Systems and Technology, Jack McCredie, has asked me to assume leadership of the Museum Informatics Project (MIP), and to create a new group that brings together the Interactive University and MIP.
In his announcement of this change Jack previewed the direction of this nascent group: "The focus of the integrated organization will be innovative services and strategies that enable members of our community to share, in more effective ways, campus digital collections and content in support of research, teaching, and public service."
Jack went on to describe the context in which this new organization is being created: "We face exciting future opportunities to discover new ways to make it much easier for faculty, students, staff, and colleagues such as K-12 teachers to use and share the campus's extraordinary digital resources. To reach our potential in this area will require close partnerships among IST and campus and systemwide academic, library, museum, and technology departments. David will be working with MIP and IU partners and customers in the next six months to gather broad input as he develops a strategic vision for the combined MIP and IU group."
I am excited to be taking on this important challenge for the campus, as well as for the school and community partners we hope to work with in the future. I appreciate Jack giving me this opportunity to develop new services in what I see as a critical area for the Berkeley campus and our partnerships with the public. I'm very pleased to have the MIP team join with the IU and to get to know the valuable campus partners MIP works with. In the next six months, I will be spending considerable time speaking with campus and community partners, learning about MIP's work, and defining the steps to create an integrated and enhanced organization. I welcome your input, and encourage interested campus and community partners to contact me to discuss ideas about this new organization. My hope is to create a new group that will help Berkeley to be a national leader in the use of information technology to share the campus's knowledge and content with higher education and the public.
Future issues of the IU Community News will report on developments about emerging directions for the IU/MIP group.
Here's a bit of introductory background about the Museum Informatics Project for the IU News Community.
MIP is an academic department within UC Berkeley's Information Systems and Technology, and works as a collaborative effort on campus to coordinate the application of information technology in museums and other organized, non-book collections.
MIP staff work with faculty, collections managers, and curators to develop data models, system architectures, and demonstration and production systems as bases for coordinated and integrated approaches to the application of information technology in museums and archives.
Berkeley has many valuable collections of non-book artifacts and objects housed in campus libraries, museums, and archives. Managing, conserving, and providing access to these collections is an important contribution to the fulfillment of the University's research, teaching, and public service mission.
These collections document the cultural, biological and physical diversity of California, as well as other regions and cultures of the world. The collections support research and teaching in many disciplines including anthropology, architecture, art practice, art history, botany, engineering, entomology, film history, geology, history, linguistics, paleontology, physics, and zoology.
The collections are large and diverse in content and many are among the premier examples of their kind in the world. In the past, MIP has developed applications for collection management support services. In addition, MIP has also developed component-based architectures that provide scalable, flexible, and modular environments to speed development time, facilitate maintenance and modification, and minimize deployment problems.
MIP has a history of working closely and productively with many campus units, including: the Berkeley Natural History Museums, College of Environmental Design Architecture Resource Library, Art History Department, Pacific Film Archive, and the Berkeley Language Center.
A few of the digital imaging projects MIP staff have developed include:
- SMASCH: is the Specimen Management System for California Herbaria is a database of text data and images of plant specimens found in California. Funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the completed database documents the distribution and classification of the plants of California. The project began in 1992. Information from over 300,000 specimens has been entered.
- SPIRO: is the visual online public access catalog to the 35mm slide collection of the Architecture Visual Resources Library (AVRL) at UC Berkeley. The collection numbers over 250,000 slides and 20,000 photographs. SPIRO content is the responsibility of AVRL, while programming and system support are provided by the Museum Informatics Project. SPIRO was named in honor of the late architectural historian Professor Emeritus Spiro Kostof, and stands for Slide and Photograph Image Retrieval Online. SPIRO is freely available on the Internet.
- Cinefiles: CineFiles is a database of reviews, press kits, festival and showcase program notes, newspaper articles, and other documents from the PFA Library's collection, and contains a broad range of sources covering world cinema, past and present. New titles and document images are added daily. When complete, the CineFiles database will hold over 200,000 documents.
Visit the Museum Informatics Project site for more information.
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IU Delivers Assessment of Teachers' Needs to California Digital Library
On January 20th the IU delivered findings from a recent user needs assessment it conducted for the California Digital Library. IU staff traveled to CDL offices in Oakland to make a presentation and lead a discussion with CDL staff. The IU assessment was undertaken in response to expressed needs of the California Digital Library's Social and Ecological Diversity of the American West project, in which the IU is a partner. A goal of the American West project is to "help scholars, teachers, and librarians implement solutions enabling users to better leverage digital content in an online learning environment."
The IU presentation provided an initial look at the ways in which high school Social Studies teachers use digital objects in their teaching practice. The primary research question of the IU assessment was: "How do K-12 teachers use digital materials in their teaching?" — where teaching was broadly interpreted to span a range of activities, including: information gathering; research about content; the use of materials in the creation of small and large supplementary curriculum resources; the creation of lessons and units; materials that students are guided to and independently use; and, materials that students seek and find to interpret or create something new, such as a paper or presentation.
To gather information for the assessment, IU interviewed teachers using an interview schedule designed to elicit "testimonial" narratives and provide the fullest expression of how teachers actually use digital materials. The intent of the IU assessment was to meet immediate CDL needs in the continued development of user tools and interfaces that will enable better exposure and use of digital resources for K-12 teachers.
Based on expressed teacher responses, and follow-up analysis, the IU presented a number of suggestions for consideration to inform CDL development of the American West project. A summary of the findings and suggestions:
- Teachers approach lesson planning by beginning with a focusing question, or set of questions.
- Though in-class teaching time may be improvised in response to variant situations day-to-day, teachers prepare for and find materials to support their teaching according to predictable and describable processes and habits.
- The overwhelming amount of information available on the Internet drives teachers to appreciate and return to sites and sources that contain reliable, trusted information that is presented in uncluttered, easy-to-navigate, and "elegant" sites.
- Teachers are more attracted to loosely aggregated, "modular" collections than to comprehensive curriculum packages; teachers like to "take apart" material and make it their own before they use it.
- Teachers print a lot of the information (text, images, etc.) they find on the Internet; formats that lend themselves to easy printing are desirable.
- There is little organized sharing of materials among teachers, where it does occur it is most often between friends or teachers who have a history of working together.
Following the IU presentation by Isaac Mankita and Chris Ashley, an informative and engaging discussion carried over into the lunch hour. There was a feeling in the room of exciting work to be done, and a general agreement to re-convene in the near future to further to pursue some of the issues raised by the IU report and the dialogue that followed.
Here is a link to a PDF file containing the IU report delivered to the CDL, and, as an appendix, the interview schedule used to collect information.
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UC Financial Aid Picture Grows Stormier
The 2005-06 state budget proposal issued January 10th by Gov. Schwarzenegger offers an increase in state funding for the University of California after four years of substantial cuts. The proposed increase includes funding for student enrollment growth, faculty and staff compensation, and the opening of UC Merced, among other things.
However, The governor’s budget for 2005-06 also withdraws $17 million in state support that was provided to UC at the end of the 2004-05 budget process, and asks UC to take the cut in either enrollments or K-12 academic preparation programs, formerly known as “outreach.”
UC President Robert C. Dynes said, “The withdrawal of $17 million, intended to be targeted to either enrollment or academic preparation, is a concern to us. While we understand that the state’s fiscal condition is still serious, we intend to work with the governor and Legislature over the course of the budget process to demonstrate the importance of these programs and to seek restoration of this funding. Strong academic preparation programs and broad access to a college education are both important to California’s continued leadership in the global economy.”
Read the entire UCOP press release about the 2005-06 budget here.
In other news concerning student financial aid and next year's budget, the governor proposed increased funding for Cal Grants in an amount that matches proposed increases in student fees. Cal Grants are state-funded awards of up to $8,300 that low-income students can use for college expenses.
This good news is tempered by the loss of Pell Grant money for the coming year. Pell Grants are the federal government's single largest source of grant aid for post-secondary education, with more than 5 million U.S. low-income students relying on them to defray tuition and other expenses.
As explained in an article at the Berkeley NewsCenter by Bonnie Azab Powell, "On Dec. 23, the U.S. Department of Education announced it was changing its eligibility formula for Pell Grants, which are awards — not loans — ranging from $400 to $4,050 that low-income undergraduate students can use for college costs. The change will result in as many as 89,000 students nationwide losing their 2005-06 Pell Grant funding, according to American Council on Education (ACE) estimates."
Read the entire NewsCenter article here.
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February is Black History Month
More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this 'hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.
Martin Luther King, Jr., letter to fellow clergy from the Birmingham, Alabama jail, April 16, 1963
Dr. King, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. The roots of Black History Month go back to the early 20th Century. On the 115th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's birth, February 12, 1926, American historian Carter G. Woodson celebrated and founded Black History Week. Woodson wanted a week-long holiday to commemorate contributions that African Americans have made throughout the history of the United States. In 1976, as part of American Bicentennial celebrations, Black History Week was expanded to include the entire month of February.
Black History Month serves as both a time of celebration and a period for focused awareness and education about black heritage. Below are a few links that point to some local events, as well as some sources for informational or learning materials about Black Americans.
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Measuring Literacy in a World Gone Digital
By Tom Zeller Jr., NEW YORK TIMES, January 17, 2005 | There was a time when researching a high school or college term paper was a far simpler thing. A student writing about, say, Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, might have checked out a book on the history of aviation from the local library or tucked into the family's dog-eared Britannica. An ambitious college freshman might have augmented the research by looking up some old newspaper clips on microfilm or picking up a monograph in the stacks.
Today, in a matter of minutes, students can identify these and thousands of other potential resources on the Internet - and, as any teacher will attest, they are not always adept at sorting the wheat from the chaff.
Now the Educational Testing Service, the nonprofit group behind the SAT, Graduate Record Examination and other college tests, has developed a new test that it says can assess students' ability to make good critical evaluations of the vast amount of material available to them.
The Information and Communications Technology literacy assessment, which will be introduced at about two dozen colleges and universities later this month, is intended to measure students' ability to manage exercises like sorting e-mail messages or manipulating tables and charts, and to assess how well they organize and interpret information from many sources and in myriad forms. About 10,000 undergraduates at schools from the University of California, Los Angeles to Bronx Community College are expected to take the test during the first offering period, which ends March 31.
Read the complete New York Times story here.
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Battle Lessons: War by Website
In the January 10, 2005 issue of the New Yorker Magazine, Dan Baum writes about two Army officers, West Point graduates, who have combined experience and insight shared in casual conversation, with innovation and Internet savvy to create websites that help other officers respond more quickly and with better knowledge to situations in war and peace, in the field and in the barracks. Through the process, and via the websites, they have filled gaps in training and experience, gaps which some critics fault current Pentagon civilian leaders for ignoring or overlooking, and given U.S. Army officers a tool for knowledge that is being used today in Iraq and elsewhere. Excerpts from Baum's article:
Majors Nate Allen and Tony Burges became friends at West Point in the nineteen-eighties, and at the end of the nineties they found themselves commanding companies in separate battalions in the same Hawaii-based brigade. Commanding a company is often described as the best job in the Army; a company is big enough to be powerful and small enough to be intimate. But the daily puzzles a company commander faces, even in peacetime, are dizzying, and both Allen and Burgess felt isolated. "If I had a good idea about how to do something there was no natural way to share it," Allen said. "I'd have to pass it up, and it would have to be blessed two levels above me, and then passed down to Tony." Luckily, they lived next door to each other and spent many evenings sitting on Allen's front porch comparing notes. "How are things going with your first sergeant?" one would ask. Or "How are you dealing with the wives?" "At some point, we realized this conversation was having a positive impact on our units, and we wanted to pass it along," Allen told me. They wrote a book about commanding a company, "Taking the Guidon," which they posted on a Web site. Because of the Internet, what had started as a one-way transfer of information — a book — quickly became a conversation. . .
"Once you start a project, amazing people start to join," Allen said. Among them was a captain based at West Point who was familiar with a Web site called Alloutdoors.com, which lets sportsmen post questions and solicit advice about everything from how to skin a squirrel by yanking on its tail to how to call a turkey by blowing on a wing bone. Burgess and Allen liked the Alloutdoors model, which allows for lots of unmediated, real-time cross-chat and debate. They figured that such a site for company commanders would replicate, in cyberspace, their front porch. . .
In March of 2000, with the help of a Web-savvy West Point classmate and their own savings, they put up a site on the civilian Internet called Companycommand.com. It didn't occur to them to ask the Army for permission or support. Companycommand was an affront to protocol. The Army way was to monitor and vet every posting to prevent secrets from being revealed, but Allen and Burgess figured that captains were smart enough to police themselves and not compromise security. Soon after the site went up, a lieutenant colonel phoned one of the Web site's operators and advised them to get a lawyer, because he didn't want to see "good officers crash and burn." A year later, Allen and Burgess started a second Web site, for lieutenants, Platoonleader.org. . .
Read the complete New Yorker article by Dan Baum here.
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Testing Teachers
California State Senator George C. Runner has introduced a constitutional amendment, SCA 1X — Rewarding Teachers for Performance Not Seniority. The fact sheet at Runner's website states: "New employees hired by the school district after the date this constitutional amendment goes into effect will be granted tenure after 10 years of annual performance assessments by a school district have been satisfactory as determined by the criteria established by the school board."
SCA 1X follows the lead of California's governor in calling for the testing of teachers and a more rigorous standard to become a permanent employee. A press release at Runner's website explains: "For new teachers, tenure will only be granted after ten years if the teacher has consistently met the school district’s standards for performance and improvement of test scores."
In a January 31 editorial, the San Francisco Chronicle calls the amendment a "a poorly thought-out idea, on several levels." The Chronicle's editors write:
With all the critical issues facing the state, it's hard to understand why Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has embarked on a campaign to make it unreasonably difficult for teachers to keep their jobs.
Under the law, teachers are able to get "permanent status" — loosely referred to by some as "tenure" — after two years. That may be too short a period, and could arguably be extended a year or two.
But Schwarzenegger wants teachers to teach for 10 years before they earn "permanent status." Under his plan, embodied in a constitutional amendment introduced by Sen. George Runner Jr., a first-term Republican from Antelope Valley near Los Angeles, teachers would have to be evaluated each year for 10 years before they'll have any real assurance they'll be hired the following year. . .
Reasonable reforms of the way teachers earn job security may be in order. But Schwarzenegger's proposal — which he thinks is so vital that he wants to enshrine it in the state Constitution — is not reasonable. It's also tangential to fixing far more dire problems facing the state — such as the budget deficit and our dysfunctional state government. When he ran for office, those were the priorities he pledged would be his focus — not challenging job security for teachers.
Read the complete San Francisco Chronicle editorial here.
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IU Moves to New Site: 2195 Hearst
During the first two weeks of January, the offices of the Chief Information Officer (CIO) and Information Systems and Technology (IST), which is the home of IU and MIP, moved to a new location. The new campus address for IU and MIP staff is now: 2195 Hearst Avenue; campus mail codes will remain the same for IU staff, but have changed for MIP staff.
2195 Hearst is located near the northwest corner campus at Hearst Avenue and Oxford Street. Public access hours are from 7:00 AM to 6:00 PM, Monday through Friday. Visitors can contact staff by using the house phone in the lobby.
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Upcoming Events
BAWP's Saturday Seminar Series will resume on March 19 and May 7, 2005. Check the BAWP site in the near future for workshop details. If you would like to receive workshop details via email a few weeks prior to each Saturday Seminar, visit this site and request to be added to the BAWP email distribution list for program information.
Visit the BAWP site for details about upcoming programs. You will also find a link at the site to the Bay Area Science Project (BASP) which shares dates and locations with BAWP for Saturday Seminars. The BASP site has a list of offerings for the March and May dates.
The Office of Resources for International and Area Studies (ORIAS) will offer the ORIAS working group for 2004/05. A series of Saturday morning seminars at U. C. Berkeley for K-14 teachers. Funded slots are full, but you may attend as a guest for individual sessions. There will be a $20 charge per session.
This year's theme is: Constructing Identities: Comparative Short Fiction From the Arab World, East Asia and Western Europe. The 2004/2005 working group continues on February 5 at 10:00 AM. The discussion topic is Arabic Short Stories, with Margaret Larkin, from Berkeley's Department of Near Eastern Studies.
Identity will be explored in fiction across the Arabic world. Professor Larkin will use the theme of identity to introduce a selection of modern short stories including Ghassan Kanafani's "The Death of Bed Number 12" and Emile Habibi's "At Last the Almond Blossomed."
This year's working group is further described: "Authors, like history teachers, often ask their audience/students to imagine the lives of people outside their own experience - to construct an identity for the other. This year's ORIAS working group looks at comparative short fiction from Europe, the Arab world and East Asia with a focus on constructing identities. How do we construct identity? Is it flexible? In what ways is it pre-determined? How does our community define and test our identity? Readers, coffee and lunch provided. Readings will be provided in advance."
For more information visit this link, which offers a summary of the scheduled presentations. In addition, at the ORIAS online news, find out what's available for teachers on campus and in the Bay Area.
EarthTeam, is an environmental network for teens, teachers and youth leaders. The EarthTeam Restoration Initiative (ETRI) creates restoration projects for SF Bay Area teens throughout the year at different sites around the Bay area. Ongoing ETRI restoration events offer students a chance to do hands-on environmental work locally, support teachers who want to promote environmental learning and stewardship, and help local habitat restoration efforts of government, nonprofit, and private organizations.
For more information about EarthTeam check out their website.
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