January's IU News reviews the most significant work of the 2004 calendar year. The past year was one of continued work toward long-range goals, of the beginning of new projects and the completion of previous work, and of the receipt of a major new IU grant. To read more about the IU's milestones and work in 2004, visit the IU Main page where the lead story begins. Stories featured in this issue are:
Read archived issues of the IU News
The IU Community News is emailed and published the first Tuesday of each month. Read about how to subscribe or unsubscribe
2004: The Year In Review
Happy New Year. This edition of the IU News looks back on some of the work done in the last 12 months, and contains a selection of representative and significant stories that provide a précis of IU work in 2004, while also providing a representation of the scope of activities and breadth of communities in which the IU continues to be involved. During 2004, IU staff and partners worked to complete, to consolidate, and to create projects on the Berkeley campus, in local school districts, and in surrounding Bay Area communities.
The year 2004 brought a number of important achievements, among the most significant, two major local school district projects, in which the IU was a vital contributing partner, came to a close. Beginning in 1999, UC Berkeley and the IU participated in school-district-wide projects in Oakland and San Francisco. The two distinct grants for systemic improvements in the Oakland and San Francisco Unified School districts were designed to improve teaching and learning in classrooms; from the beginning of each of these efforts, the IU played an important role in both projects by making UC resources available and relevant to expressed K-12 needs.
Concurrently, IU's technical and development staff continued to test, augment, and share the concepts and framework for the Scholar's Box suite of on-line tools and services--a suite conceived with the goal of supporting and enabling some of the activities implemented in projects similar to the two above; the concept of a Scholar's Box envisions allowing teachers and scholars to gather, create and share archived digital materials for use in classrooms and research. During 2004, IU's Scholar's Box developers continued to benefit from working partnerships with the UC Berkeley Library and the California Digital Library that are a cornerstone of Scholar's Box development, while also traveling throughout the year to make presentations at conferences, scholar's panels and universities.
During a year in which the University of California had to respond to shrinking financial support and smaller budget outlays from state and federal sources, the IU continued its trademark community and partnership work in projects on and off campus. IU's City|Watershed project, funded by the Department of Commerce, commenced its first summer of work in Bay Area Communities by tapping into the expertise and resources of UCB's College of Natural Resources. While work continued on varied efforts in the community (among them the award-winning Y-PLAN in Oakland), in October the IU won a new three year grant from the Fund for the Improvement of Post Secondary Education (FIPSE). The funded IU proposal, entitled The Scholar's Box: A K-12/University Project to Create a Better Learning Object, will receive approximately $600,000 over the three-year duration of the work which will begin in earnest early in 2005.
These are some of the highlights. Below you will find introductions and links to the full stories that appeared in last year's IU news and covered these and other stories as they emerged. Read on for a full review of the year.
Top
Urban Dreams Professional Development Sessions
APRIL 2004 | On March 16, 2004 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.
Read the rest of the story here. The full story in the April 2004 IU News contains links to earlier stories about Urban Dreams sessions in this series.
In May 2004, IU hosted an event on the Berkeley campus to mark the completion of Urban Dreams work, read about the participants and their work here.
Top
IU Completes Work With Oakland and San Francisco School Districts
SEPTEMBER 2004 | In the second half of 1999 both the Oakland and San Francisco Unified School Districts received important five-year Federal grants to support programs for systemic improvement in teaching and learning throughout each district. Oakland received a Federal Technology Innovation Grant awarded by the U.S. Department of Education. San Francisco received an Urban Systemic Program Grant from the National Science Foundation. The IU and its campus partners have played significant roles from start to finish in each of these programs.
Now, the work of these two district-wide, multi-million dollar efforts is coming to a close—with a number of successes and achievements. In both districts the IU collaborated with teachers, curriculum and technology specialists, and administrators to implement and achieve Federal and school district program goals. Of equal significance, several IU Internet Learning Community Projects (ILCPs) teamed UC Berkeley faculty, students and staff with K-12 teachers and students. These partnerships harnessed Internet technologies to improve student outcomes and assist learners and educators. In September 2001, Chancellor Berdahl honored the IU and all campus and K-12 ILCP participants with UC Berkeley's University/Community Partner award.
Among the outcomes of each of these grants, UC/K-12 partnerships have resulted in: a wide range of teacher professional development activities; the creation of standards-based digital learning materials; and hands-on experience and guided opportunities to integrate into classroom pedagogy emerging strategies and practices, such as web-logging and digital storytelling.
Read the complete story here.
Top
Scholar's Box Development & Presentations Throughout 2004
MAY 2004 | 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 areas of interest are central to Scholar's Box and IU work as well. The two meetings provided opportunities for the IU to explain the challenge 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 work and related IU partnerships.
Read the complete story here.
AUGUST 2004 | The Digital Library Federation (DLF) convened a scholars' advisory panel in Washington, D.C. in early June. The gathering, of more than a dozen humanities scholars from universities and archival institutions around the country, was co-chaired by the DLF's David Seaman, and the IU's David Greenbaum.
The meeting grew out of a desire to learn from working scholars what they value and what they need from digital library services; it was conceived and planned as a forum to assess the library and archival community's current understandings of how expectations of library users might differentiate from the expressed needs of scholars.
Each scholar who was part of the panel is actively engaged in creating and using digital library content, often in partnership with an academic library. Among the institutions represented were: Michigan State University; Johns Hopkins University; the Thomas Jefferson Papers; the University of Nebraska, Lincoln; the University of Rochester; the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; the University of Virginia; and George Mason University.
Among the fields of scholarship represented, there were professors of: Italian, French, English, American Studies, Middle East Studies, Sociology, New Media, Religious Studies, and several Historians.
Read the complete story here.
NOVEMBER 2004 | During the last week in October, the IU participated in three interesting events all held in the Washington, D.C. area. On Tuesday afternoon, October 26th, at the Digital Library Federation’s (DLF) Fall Forum in Baltimore, IU’s Raymond Yee gave a talk entitled: Interactions of Emerging Gather/Create/Share End-User Tools with Digital Libraries.
Earlier, IU Director David Greenbaum addressed the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences — a session convened in conjunction with the DLF Forum.
To complete the IU’s week of presentations and discussions, Greenbaum and Yee traveled to George Mason University, where Roy Rosenzweig, Director of GMU’s Center for History and New Media (CHNM) had invited them to share IU’s strategies and visions for how to make digital materials more readily available to scholars, students and public communities.
The presentations served to disseminate some of the IU’s work and thinking to academic and professional peers, and also to continue to identify projects, and potential partners, working in areas of research, development and implementation that overlap with IU projects and technical developments.
A theme common to the IU presentations, and one informing all aspects of IU work, is the democratization of knowledge: creating ways and means to increase the availability and usefulness of knowledge created and archived in university and research communities, making it readily accessible to all public learners.
Read the complete story here.
Top
IU In The Community: City|Watershed and Y-PLAN
JULY 2004 | City|Watershed (C|W), a project led by the IU and UC Berkeley's College of Natural Resources (CNR), is beginning its first summer of work. Utilizing the resources and expertise of UC Berkeley, the project aims to increase community involvement in, and understanding of, the urban watershed—with the goal of enabling citizens (youth and their families, teachers and community leaders) to contribute solutions to the interrelated environmental and social problems affecting San Francisco Bay Area watersheds.
The College of Natural Resources has a long-established record of outreach and urban environmental education. Among its programs and course offerings is the Department of Environmental Science, Policy & Management (ESPM) 190 Seminar in Environmental Issues; for several years it has trained undergraduates to be urban environmental educators. ESPM 190 was conceived and developed by the late Professor Don Dahlsten. Professor Dahlsten, instrumental and inspirational in so many endeavors both on and off the Berkeley campus, was also an essential partner with IU in gaining support and funding for the City|Watershed Project.
As a first step toward realizing its goals, City|Watershed has identified ESPM 190 as a course it will support and enhance. Mark Spencer, who received his Ph.D. in Environmental Science and Policy Management from CNR, is C|W's East Bay Program Coordinator. Spencer anticipates several ways that C|W will contribute to CNR's ongoing urban environmental education work.
Read the complete story here.
MAY 2004 | 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 and vibrancy of their own community, sort of a living classroom," 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.
Top
IU Receives Important New FIPSE Award
OCTOBER 2004 | In September 2004 the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Postsecondary Education announced that the UC Berkeley Interactive University Project will receive a major three-year grant from The Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE). The grant provides funding to support innovative reform projects that hold promise as models for the resolution of important issues and problems in the world of postsecondary education
The IU award comes as the result of a submission in early 2004 to FIPSE’s Comprehensive Program. The Comprehensive Program supports innovative postsecondary education reform projects. Applicants were asked to identify problems of national significance and to propose solutions that can be replicated in similar settings. FIPSE looked for new strategies that improve upon what others in the field are already doing. The funded IU proposal, entitled The Scholar’s Box: A K-12/University Project to Create a Better Learning Object, will receive approximately $600,000 over the three-year duration of the work.
FIPSE supports applicants who demonstrate an awareness of what others in the field are doing and then build on proven and emerging concepts; it strives to fund innovative project ideas that have not been tried before; and it takes a national perspective when thinking about innovation. But, innovation by itself is often not enough. FIPSE challenges applicants to conceive, design, and manage significant projects in ways that promote sustained operations and growth, increase impact in other settings, and achieve other lasting and widespread impacts.
These FIPSE goals for improving education correlate well with IU goals. In its past and current endeavors, IU has explored collaborations and technologies that share resources from various archives and repositories with a wide-range of learners and communities, and this work has shaped a vision well suited to FIPSE support.
Read the complete story here.
Top
Upcoming Events
On Saturday, January 22, the Bay Area Writing Project (BAWP) continues its tradition of conducting Saturday Seminars for Teachers during the school year. In addition to the usual slate of writing workshops and math and science workshops, the January Seminar will feature keynote speaker Tommie Lindsey. As described at the BAWP site:
Tommie Lindsey, MacArthur Fellow 2004 and exemplary teacher of competitive forensics at James Logan High School in Union City, California. For over 16 years, Tommie Lindsey has been helping Logan High School students compete intellectually at the highest levels in national debate competitions and forensic championships. Through competitive forensics, Lindsey is changing the lives of hundreds of young men and women, teaching them the importance and power of persuasion, based on clear communication, reasoning and mastery of facts, skills they can use throughout their lives.
For more details about Tommie Lindsey, click here.
After the keynote speech, choose from four BAWP writing workshops or eight math and science workshops hosted by our partners the Bay Area Science and Mathematics Projects. Visit the BAWP site for details of the January program and information about registration and location.
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.
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 January 15, with a discussion of The Return of Martin Guerre. As the ORIAS announcement states: "This 16th century case of identity theft in France has inspired plays, fiction, films and legal commentaries for over 500 years. In a special session co-sponsored by the Robbins Library Collection ORIAS will have a chance to see an original manuscript of legal commentary from the trial and view one of the modern film versions. Our text will be Natalie Zemon Davis' historical reconstruction, The Return of Martin Guerre."
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."
The working group is open to all educators but space is limited. Funded slots are full. You may be a guest in for individual sessions. There will be a $20 charge per session for additional teacher enrollment and guests.
For more information visit this link, which offers more information and a summary of the scheduled presentations.
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.
In January Earth Team's Youth Coalition will meet Sunday, January 9 and feature a Water Scarcity Expert from Ghana, plus the documentary film "Thirst". For details about this event click here.
Also in January, ETRI's Restoration Project will hold its annual Martin Luther King, Jr. celebration and restoration event on Monday, January 17th from 10:00am - 3:00pm in Oakland. This event includes a morning rally, free lunch, and afternoon restoration. This year's rally will feature keynote speaker The Honorable Barbara Lee, youth speakers, poets, choirs, and dancers from the Oakland community. The afternoon restoration will take place at Arrowhead Marsh in the MLK, Jr. Regional Shoreline Park. See details here.
For more information about EarthTeam check out their website.
Top
