This page presents a sampling of stories featured in the IU Community News in 2003/2004. The IU News is published on the web the first Tuesday of each month (http://iu.berkeley.edu), and reports on the projects, partnerships, and Scholar's Box research and development that are the focus of IU efforts to make UC Berkeley's human and archived resources available to K-12 teachers and students, and to other interested communities.

This link takes you to an archive of all past issues of the IU News.

From the May 2004 IU News . . .

The IU continues development of the Scholar's Box: a collection of tools that enables users to gather resources from multiple digital repositories, and from them create personal and themed collections, and other reusable materials, that can be saved, shared, and accessed for teaching and research. When fully operational, the Scholar's Box will enable the easy integration of digital learning objects into curricula, and will interoperate with other common user tools.

In April IU team members traveled to the Spring 2004 Task Force Meeting of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), and to the Spring Forum of the Digital Library Federation (DLF), to present some of the latest Scholar's Box developments. While these two organizations are distinct, with separate missions and constituents, they share an interest in assessing and identifying standards and "best practices" for digital collections and network access, as well as a focus on initiatives and services that expand access to resources for scholars and to online collections for use in teaching, and, in general, the enhancement of teaching and learning through information and educational technologies.

These challenges and goals are central to Scholar's Box and IU work. The two meetings provided opportunities for the IU to explain the challenges and context of developing a Scholar's Box environment that connects digital libraries, educational technologies, personal information spaces, and social software, while showcasing progress in Scholar's Box development and related IU partnerships.

Read more . . .

From the July 2003 IU News . . .

The Interactive University Project is building a web-based suite of tools that will enable faculty, students, and the public to create, manipulate, annotate, and share personal collections of learning and cultural material. These digitized collections, comprised of objects gathered from multiple digital repositories, are intended for use in University and K-12 classrooms, as well as other more informal educational settings.

The working name for this developing suite of web tools is The Scholar's Box. Many teachers have a cardboard box that serves as their private repository of essential teaching materials, the Scholar's Box is intended to function similarly for an individual collection of digital materials and resources. It is conceived and designed to address important interoperability issues at the intersection of four key information technology domains: digital libraries and repositories; educational technologies and learning management systems; web syndication and portal technologies; and desktop applications and structured content authoring tools. 

The design and development of the Scholar's Box are based on research data and experience gathered from IU pilot projects during several years of work with K-12 teachers and scholars. The IU believes the functionality proposed in the Scholar's Box will be of value to faculty, students, and educators who increasingly want to use and share expanding archives of digitized resources available in libraries, research museums, and other important cultural repositories.

Read more . . .

From an Overview of the Scholar's Box . . .

There is much current interest in building new connections—organizationally and technically—between the domains of digital libraries and educational technologies. At present, a substantial gulf exists between these domains. The Interactive University's Scholar's Box project seeks to translate commonplace teacher practices to the digital realm so that teachers can more easily integrate into teaching the digital cultural objects available from museums and libraries. The IU seeks to do this not only for individual teachers but for groups of teachers and/or content and collection experts working together to create curriculum resources. Early versions of IU's Scholar's Box already demonstrate the promise for faculty, students, and the public to create, manipulate, annotate, and share personal collections of digital cultural objects gathered from multiple digital repositories. The IU is building both a Scholar's Box tool and an abstraction framework that defines functionality and APIs for other possible implementations.

Read more . . .

The City/Watershed Project, from the November 2003 IU News . . .

The Interactive University Project has been awarded a $650,000 grant from the Department of Commerce Technology Opportunities Program (TOP) to develop and administer the City Watershed Project. City Watershed is comprised of more than a dozen partner organizations in San Francisco and the East Bay. Led by the IU, with UC Berkeley’s College of Natural Resources as the key campus partner, Bay Area partners include community-based environmental organizations, local government, regional and federal resource agencies, and K-12 school districts.

“It’s an honor to win this award,” said IU Director David Greenbaum, who added, “We also think it will be a great project for the campus and the local community. It allows IU and UC to pursue the goal of using technology to share campus resources and make an impact in K-12 schools and communities. I believe one of the reasons TOP looked favorably on our application is the strength of our partners. These groups have already done great work, work that will evolve and expand when plugged in to the technology tools IU is developing for gathering, accessing and sharing data and information.”

City Watershed will bring innovative computer technologies to the established, successful watershed education and restoration programs of its partners. Utilizing the resources and expertise of UC Berkeley, the project will develop a Watershed Contribution Exchange System, an XML-based web environment in which end users may access information such as maps, specimen identification slides, and water quality data; and where they will be able to contribute observational information such as field data, photo documentation of neighborhood stream restoration, or policy recommendations developed for public presentations.

Read more . . .

The New Frontiers Project, from the December 2003 IU News . . .

The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation recently announced a one million dollar grant to the University of California for a project that develops online tools to permit broader access to the world's leading libraries and other cultural institutions. The Hewlett grant funds a proposal, New Frontiers in the Digital Library: Social and Ecological Diversity of the American West, submitted last summer by UC's California Digital Library (CDL). The Interactive University, which began a strategic partnership with the CDL in April 2003, will be one of 10 partners in the project.

The key priority of the Hewlett Foundation's program in support of educational technologies is, "to use information technology to help equalize the distribution of knowledge and educational opportunities for individuals, faculty, and institutions within the United States and throughout the world. Our focus is on creating exemplars of academic content that are free and accessible to all on the web."

The New Frontiers project provides funding for development of IU's Scholar's Box, and an opportunity to accelerate deployment and integration of its features and capabilities for a new collection in a targeted user community. New Frontiers partners will design, assemble, and evaluate the use of a large virtual collection of digital materials bearing on the social and ecological diversity of the American West. The collection will be developed and presented with a range of tools that support its extensive re-configuration, its integration with online learning environments, and its continued growth through the addition of relevant research and teaching materials that are produced over time in the course of use.

Read more . . .

IU/CDL Collaboration

Working together, the CDL and the IU will explore current and emerging educational technologies that mediate between and connect the CDL with its end-users. The project aims to serve current scholarly audiences, public audiences (K-12 teachers and students, specifically) and, ultimately, a broad end-user community, maximizing third party use of CDL services while minimizing costs to the CDL.

This project will leverage the work of other collaborations in which the IU is involved. For example, work on XML crosswalks, that the IU is carrying out with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, will relate directly to our proposed work with the CDL. Moreover, we expect to find substantial synergy between this project and our existing collaborations with faculty, research units, libraries, and museums on the Berkeley campus.

Read more . . .

Becoming American: an IU/OUSD Collaboration

Throughout the 2003/2004 academic year, the IU and Oakland Unified's Urban Dreams Project conducted a four-part professional development workshop as part of the continuing partnership between the IU and the Oakland Unified Schools. This series, led by UCB Professor Alex Saragoza, and managed under the aegis of Oakland's Urban Dreams Project, was reported on throughout the current academic year. Below is an excerpt from the final story, and links to the other three.

On March 16 in Oakland, OUSD Urban Dreams participants attended a workshop/presentation led by Ethnic Studies Professor Alex Saragoza. This was the fourth and final meeting in a series that began last October, and explored topics related to the assimilation and acculturation process facing Latino immigrants to the United States in the middle decades of the 20th Century.

For the duration of this series, Saragoza and staff from OUSD and the IU have conducted the sessions for a group of about 15 teachers and curriculum specialists, presenting materials and leading discussions focused on political, historical and economic developments taking place in the United States.

With the goal of understanding American cultural shifts and the challenges these presented to immigrants, the series offered teachers varied resources that can be incorporated into high school lessons.

The March 16 session focused on how individuals were able to assess and evaluate the emerging cultural and political definitions of what it meant to be American, as well as what it meant to be other-than-American, during the pivotal period of the 1940s and 1950s. Topics and ideas in the March session stemmed from the earlier presentations in the academic year, and continued to focus on Latino experiences in California.

Read the rest of this story . . .

Read the other IU News stories about the Becoming American workshops: March 2004, December 2003, October 2003.

Y-PLAN Students Present at Oakland City Hall, from the May 2004 IU News . . .

The Y-PLAN Project (Youth — Plan, Learn, Act, Now), has worked with high school students in West Oakland for the past five years, providing them with opportunities to participate in, and understand, urban planning and design. Each year the project's focus changes—responding to redevelopment needs within the community.

"The goal is to get local youth involved in the development of their own community," said Deborah McKoy, IU's Research Coordinator and Director of the Cities and Schools Project in UC Berkeley's Department of City and Regional Planning.

This year's students have worked in two areas: youth visions for the new commercial space on Seventh Street, and a cultural history project to identify West Oakland's social movements, identities and culture. They will present their proposals and plans before the Oakland City Council at City Hall on May 4th, from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m., in Hearing Room 3, 1 Frank Ogawa Plaza.

Read the Oakland Tribune's account of this year's Y-PLAN work here.

Read about past Y-PLAN work and awards here and here.

Chancellor Berdahl Honors EDGE Program, from the September 2003 IU News . . .

Earlier this summer EDGE—Eastmont Digital Griots En-route—an innovative new program to help high school students gain the skills and experience that will prepare them for college, completed its first year. Later this month, EDGE will be recognized and honored for its work as one of eight UCB/Community collaborations to receive commendation from Berkeley Chancellor Robert Berdahl at a reception on September 18.

EDGE is a writing project that teaches young people how to create a strong personal statement for college admissions applications. The program establishes a collaborative environment for written, oral, and ethnographic exploration, while appealing to students by offering hands-on experience with sound and video technologies.

The program motto is: "Access to college through access to stories". A student's life experiences, articulated and given context, can be shaped into compelling narratives that flesh out the personal history behind the grades and numbers on a high school transcript. The creators of EDGE saw, in digital storytelling, a unique opportunity for young people to participate in something as old as civilization-creating, recording and sharing stories of individual identity, family and community.

Read more . . .