Welcometo the March 2004 issue of the IU News. In this issue we feature recent and ongoing work from IU projects—present and past. The lead story highlights a recently debuted web site from UC Berkeley's Museum of Paleontology: Understanding Evolution. The site presents K-12 teachers with a multi-faceted look at the science of evolution, with information about how to teach evolution in the face of anti-scientific pressures. The UCMP was a key initial partner in the IU's ISTAT project. In addition there are short reports about work at the Oakland and San Francisco Unified School districts that's taking place in current IU projects. And as usual, we include campus updates, and links to off-campus education and technology stories of interest, this month pointing to, among other articles, a couple of magazine pieces that explore the day-to-day lives of a New York teacher, and in a second piece, of students, as recorded in journals and weblogs. The lead story is introduced on the IU Main page and printed in full below. Stories featured in this issue are:
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New UC Museum of Paleontology Evolution Website
Recently the UC Museum of Paleontology debuted a long-awaited web site, Understanding Evolution, which provides in-depth resources for K-12 teachers challenged to meet scientific standards for the teaching of evolution in their classrooms.
"Many K-12 teachers don't have a strong science background, so there is some discomfort in teaching evolution, which is perceived by some as controversial," said Judy Scotchmoor, director of education and public programs at the UC Museum of Paleontology, and a 25-year veteran of 7th and 8th grade science classrooms. "We provide a comfort zone. Teachers can use this Web site to increase their confidence level so they can teach evolution enthusiastically in the classroom."
As explained in a recent UC news release, "Scotchmoor and UC Berkeley integrative biology professors David Lindberg and Roy Caldwell worked closely with six teachers and numerous graduate students to assemble a site that would be 'a one-stop shop' for teachers, and eventually students and the general public, on the theory of evolution."
UCMP has long been a leader in making material from museum repositories, as well as lesson plans developed by staff and faculty, available digitally. During the first two phases of IU work, the ISTAT project (Integrating Science, Teaching and Technology) was led by David Lindberg, and spearheaded by Judy Scotchmoor; IU and UCMP continue to collaborate to share lessons learned while developing technologies and programs to offer Berkeley resources and expertise to a wider community of learners.
The new site was created with funding support from National Science Foundation and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI); the Museum of Paleontology and the National Center for Science Education worked together to create the site and bring it on-line.
The site is divided into two primary sections that encompass "Learning Evolution" and "Teaching Evolution". These functional areas contain eleven sections that address most of the major questions or content areas related to teaching evolution in the context of teaching and understanding core principals of scientific inquiry and research.
For example, an interesting and inter-dependent suite of web pages is devoted to tracing The History of Evolutionary Thought. Introduced by a visually compelling topo map in the form of a thriving vine, the section explores four disciplinary areas that have contributed to the current understanding of evolution: Earth’s history, life’s history, mechanisms of evolution, and genetics. These four disciplines begin with discussions of important individuals whose observations of fossils and comparative anatomies laid the foundation upon which to build the research and inquiry that followed in the modern scientific era.
The rich trove of presentations in these pages devoted to the history of evolutionary thought (biographical information about scientists, explanations of the developing lines of inquiry, technological advances that made new experiments possible, descriptions of experiments and discoveries, and lists of references for further reading), chronicle the history of evolutionary thought from its beginning to the present.
This type of comprehensive presentation and exploration of all issues and controversies clustered around any single subject of inquiry, is repeated in other sections of the new web site.
For more information, and a very good additional introduction to the UCMP site, check out the UC Media Relations article by Robert Sanders that was quoted from above.
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Urban Dreams at Oakland Unified's Tech Learning Center: Being and Becoming American
On Wednesday, February 25, eleven returning participants attended the third in a series of four workshop presentations led by UCB Ethnic Studies Professor Alex Saragoza. Wednesday's workshop, held at the Oakland Unified School District's Technology Learning Center, explored the experience of Latinos in California and the Bay Area during the 1940s and 1950s. The series is part of a continuing collaboration between the IU and OUSD’s Urban Dreams Technology Innovation Challenge Grant.
Professor Saragoza's presentation was titled: Being and Becoming American in the WWII and Cold War Eras: Latinos in the U.S. During the morning session, Saragoza discussed the problems for Latinos in establishing an "American" identity against the background of some of the social xenophopias and ideological changes that took place during and after World War II.
For Latinos, especially those of Mexican origin, this question needed to be answered differently for those born in the United States ("Mexican Americans") and those born in Mexico (immigrants, such as braceros). In earlier sessions in this series, Saragoza presented, and the participants discussed, examples of how WWII and the Cold War forced a redefinition of "America," and of what constituted an "American" identity.
In the third session, the focus was on the questions of patriotism, national unity, and loyalty; Latinos—both native- and foreign-born—explored these questions as they struggled to shape an identity in the evolving meanings and manifestations of "America" and "American." In the period being studied, the issues of difference, such as ethnicity and race, ideology and culture, provoked heated and difficult debates. For Latinos, among other dilemmas, these issues were complicated by generational differences, migration, civil rights struggles, and the unsettling effects of the war for gender relations.
Following Professor Saragoza's presentaton, Emily Filloy, an English Language Specialist and Teacher on Special Assignment, led a Pre-Reading Exercise, in which teachers explored tools and strategies to access students' prior knowledge, and to develop categories as a way to scaffold the reading and increase student comprehension.
There was also a presentation by Lynn Jones, from the UC Berkeley Teaching Library, and IU's Isaac Mankita, to demonstrate a new resource web site that is in development by Lynn Jones and is being produced concurrently with this workshop series.
During ensuing participant discussions, teachers reflected on the contents of Saragoza's oral and video presentation, and on how his material and knowledge might integrate into the new web site Jones previewed; they brainstormed about ways in which parts of what they had seen and heard could be "de-constructed" and re-integrated as "learning objects" for use via the Internet, in the classroom and in lesson plans.
One of the areas of interest and research for the IU is to work with teachers and curriculum specialists to find the appropriate level of granularity for complex materials, and to further determine how to make complex materials usable for teachers and students on-line and in useful, building-block component parts.
At the end many of the teachers in the room saw the usefulness of the smaller pieces, such as 25-40 seconds of video, to jump-start conversations. Other teachers preferred longer pieces, 1.5 to 2 minutes, that might incorporate several ideas about a specific theme. Many teachers also expressed a desire to have lectures on audio that might be played in various settings. The next, and final, session in this series will be March 16, 2004.
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Urban Schools and Community at San Francisco Unified
In partnership with the San Francisco Unified School District's School-to-Career Office, Berkeley graduate students have been working with four San Francisco high schools: Lincoln, Mission, Burton and Galileo. Their goal has been to develop community profiles and preliminary strategic recommendations to foster school/community collaborations.
This work, by the Communities & Schools Research Project, is part of an ongoing partnership between SFUSD and UC Berkeley. More specifically, this work is a collaboration between SFUSD's federally funded Urban Systemic Program (USP), its School-to-Career Office, and UC Berkeley's Department of City and Regional Planning and the Interactive University Project.
As one step in this process, SFUSD partnered four public high schools with a graduate seminar at UC Berkeley and looked in detail at the communities around the school sites. The goal was to begin a broad-based dialogue about school and community partnerships, while also thinking about specific ways community resources might support school-to-career programs at the four high schools.
School-to-Career (STC) strives to prepare students not just for particular careers, but to help students make informed decisions about their future and be prepared to function in "real life" settings after high school, whether these involve college, a few years of work before college, or vocational work. STC relies on work-based learning activities that make the connection for students between work and school, and provide a context to make learning meaningful.
In Fall 2003 IU's Deborah McKoy taught a course at Berkeley that was comprised of a multidisciplinary group of graduate students; they were trained in the fields of urban planning, education, public policy, journalism and business. The seminar presented a theoretical foundation on work addressing cities and schools, with a particular focus on the urban environment and challenges facing urban schools and neighborhoods. The class asked about the role of local communities within education, and about how schools might connect with their communities.
The cornerstone of this seminar was a community-based research project in partnership with the SFUSD School-to-Career Office and the four public high schools mentioned above. Graduate student teams conducted community-based research in four school neighborhoods to explore how the community can better support local school reform efforts. As part of this larger question, the team posed several sub-questions to guide the research.
- What are the community supports available around school sites to support STC activities
- What are the communication pathways that exist and what is possible? What are the barriers?
- What is the community perception of the school and what do they want to see? Who makes up the community?
Each school team spent about eight weeks working with teachers, students, principals and other administrative staff at the schools, as well as working in the surrounding neighborhoods. The teams developed strategic recommendations derived from their field work, their research, and analysis of the community profiles which had been developed by the site work. Teams then drafted final reports and held a public presentation in November 2003 to receive feedback from the school communities about their recommendations.
The public event took place on November 20th at the San Francisco USD Board Room. The audience included teachers, principals and high school students, a Board of Education representative, a business person, community and non-profit representatives, the SF Foundation, and a San Francisco City Supervisor, among others.
This spring, as the five year USP program draws to a close, SFUSD and UC Berkeley are working to implement and support the findings and recommendations of these reports to make sure community resources might best be used to support school-to-career programs and better outcomes for all students in San Francisco schools.
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New PACE Report Explores Policy Impacts on Educators
By Kathleen Maclay
BERKELEY – California's educators appreciate state efforts to improve student achievement and low-performing schools, but are frustrated by a lack of support and teaching resources for addressing achievement gaps, according to a new report and joint policy brief.
Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE), a policy research center at the University of California, Berkeley, UC Davis and Stanford University, presented its research findings about the impacts of public school accountability policies on Thursday, Feb. 26 at a news conference in Sacramento.
Joining PACE to present additional data on school accountability reform in California will be the American Institutes for Research and the Consortium for Policy Research in Education. These three independent research organizations will release a joint policy brief, discussing overlapping findings and recommendations.
. . . PACE, the American Institutes for Research, and the Consortium for Policy Research in Education are among the first research organizations in California to look at how accountability reforms affect classroom teaching, educators' sense of professionalism, and the shifting role of the district in navigating new mandates.
Read the entire UCB Media Relations press release here.
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The Rise of Google and the Rise in Internet Credibility
In a New York Times editorial page piece published February 27, 2004, Verlyn Klinkenbor argues that despite a continuing plethora of bad, useless, raunchy, or deceitful (choose your adjective) information, the Internet has also become an important archive for all kinds of documents. Klinkenbor also argues that Google has played no small part in making the Internet a fruitful place for the good researcher (meaning the skeptical researcher) to go in search of information. Below is a substantial excerpt from Klinkenbor's essay. Here's a link to the entire piece as it appears in the Times.
The Web is still a place where you find every kind of fraud, deceit, obscenity and insanity — more of it than ever, in fact. But the Internet has also turned into a stunningly important archive of documents of all kinds, partly because it is now so easily searchable. The Web has moved from the periphery of a good researcher's awareness in 1998 to the very center of it in 2004. In doing so, it confirmed what has always been true, that a good researcher is also a skeptical researcher.
Had the Web grown to be the farrago of nonsense it once seemed to be, a haystack with only a few needles, no one would have bothered to create a search engine, much less use it. But the Web is now a haystack full of needles. Once Google's motto might have been "Seek and ye shall find." Now it's really "Find and ye shall seek again."
What Google also reflects is our changing sense of the dynamism of the Web. Nothing captures how statically we used to see the Internet as well as "information highway," an old phrase that embodies pure linearity and the smell of asphalt. That stasis is also captured in the increasingly outmoded notion of an Internet portal like AOL, much of whose dynamism comes from offering a Google search bar. The fact is that many of us have grown comfortable within the amorphousness of the Web. We no longer need a breakwater like AOL when a good search engine promises to make the sea itself our home.
Sometimes the best metaphor for the Internet seems to be the population of earth itself, in which every human is a Web page related by kinship and conversation to all the other Web pages on earth. Sometimes the metaphor is a globe papered over with hyperlinked Web pages from which, more and more, tiny beacons arise, beaming updates to our computers like the old RKO tower. Whatever the metaphor, the only certainty is that we're going to need help finding anything for a long time yet to come.
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Slate Magazine's Teacher Journal
The Slate Diary is a weeklong electronic journal. The premise is that Slate's editors choose an interesting person who then records, online, their diaristic thoughts for five days, from Monday to Friday. The definition of "interest" is eclectic and far-flung, recent diarists have been an organic farmer in Idaho, two medical interns in Boston, an Army officer's wife at West Point, and San Francisco music critic and poet August Kleinzahler. The similarities to weblogging are evident—though the premises are different and this is not weblogging. Nevertheless, the form still captures the quickness and nuance that come through in daily writing that's not particularly over-wrought nor convoluted (nor polished or fine-tuned) by ample time for revision.
For the week of February 23, 2004, Slate asked Tom Moore, who teaches sixth grade in the Morrissania area of the South Bronx, to write down his observations on his days as a teacher. The entries are wide-ranging and at times raw, but over the course of the week a lot of emotion, information and insight accumulate.
To begin with Tom Moore's Monday, February 23rd entry, go here.
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A Fleet of Juvenile Marcel Prousts?
"According to figures released last October by Perseus Development Corporation, a company that designs software for online surveys, there are expected to be 10 million blogs by the end of 2004. In the news media, the blog explosion has been portrayed as a transformation of the industry, a thousand minipundits blooming. But the vast majority of bloggers are teens and young adults. Ninety percent of those with blogs are between 13 and 29 years old; a full 51 percent are between 13 and 19, according to Perseus. Many teen blogs are short-lived experiments. But for a significant number, they become a way of life, a daily record of a community's private thoughts."
This information comes from Emily Nussbaum's New York Times Magazine article of January 14, 2004, My So-Called Blog. Nussbaum explores the phenomenon of weblogging high-schoolers, and the willingness many feel to share things online which they would never disclose face-to-face. Indeed, there's a cultural change that Nussbaum chronicles in this piece as she conveys both the cliched notion of lonely teenaged angst, and examples of emotional revelation and connection that some high school students find in the electronic web—a medium that connects while it also offers anonymity and the privacy of physical distance. Nussbaum befriends high school webloggers and identifies and discusses an axis of technology and adolescence.
The kids she describes as "a fleet of juvenile Marcel Prousts gone wild" are adapting to the cultural shifting and stripping and sharing that technology has accelerated. She says,
"For many in the generation that has grown up online, the solution is not to fight this technological loss of privacy, but to give in and embrace it: to stop worrying and learn to love the Web. It's a generational shift that has multiple roots, from Ricki Lake to the memoir boom to the A.A. confessional, not to mention 13 seasons of ''The Real World.'' The teenagers who post journals have (depending on your perspective) a degraded or a relaxed sense of privacy; their experiences may be personal, but there's no shame in sharing. As the reality-television stars put it, exposure may be painful at times, but it's all part of the process of ''putting it out there,'' risking judgment and letting people in. If teen bloggers give something up by sloughing off a self-protective layer, they get something back too -- a new kind of intimacy, a sense that they are known and listened to. This is their life, for anyone to read. As long as their parents don't find out."
Some of the stories Nussbaum tells can be disturbing. And some of the implications of what's gone missing from high schooler's worlds (or psyches) that they are desperately seeking in an online connection or revelation, are more depressing than uplifting. In the end Nussbaum sees evidence that some of the kids she's befriended while writing this piece are in fact feeling, to quote one of them, "more included and such."
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Upcoming Events
The Bay Area Writing Project’s (BAWP) Youth Writing Camps offer students, elementary through high school, the time and opportunity to explore their writing interests, discover their strengths and learn more about the craft of writing. The camps provide in-depth writing instruction, structured writing workshop time, flexibility in writing assignments, and daily opportunities to share writing with peers.
Through the camps, students discover the conditions and habits needed to write their best and grow in their confidence and skill. Students are encouraged to continue as writers independently and apply these skills and habits to carve out time to write in and out of school.
For more information and to get a registration form, visit the Bay Area Writing Project site or click here.
The next meeting of the Berkeley Learning Technologies Group (BLT) will take place on March 19 in 3401 Dwinelle Hall. The IU gave a well received presentation of current Scholars' Box developments at the February meeting. As yet there's no agenda at the newly located BLT site. Follow the link above, where a posting should appear soon, as well as notes on last month's IU presentation.
The BLT is an informal organization that meets the third Friday of each month to discuss and evolve a shared vision for learning technologies at UC Berkeley.
The spring 2004 World Poetry working group has several sessions remaining. In fact, due to cancellation of the February session, makeup meetings have been scheduled that will continue this group into May. You may check with the Office of Resources for International and Area Studies (ORIAS) to find out about openings or audits to the working group for teachers: World Poetry. See the January 2004 IU News for details. Also visit the ORIAS site and mark your calendars for upcoming information about the 2004 SUMMER TEACHER'S INSTITUTE: Law and Human Rights in World History, July 26 - 30.
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