This page summarizes the results of the SCALE Water Quality Workshop, held at Northwestern University on June 24 and 25, 2001.
The purpose of the workshop was to bring together a variety of researchers, curriculum developers, teachers, and scientists to share work related to water quality learning resources. In addition to allowing participants to meet each other and gain a richer understanding of each others' work, we hoped that the workshop would spark new collaborations across projects that would inform SCALE's core research interests in the process of customization. SCALE is interested and willing to support such efforts through staff support and SCALE's small grant program.
Participants representing nine different research groups attended the meeting, providing broader representation of groups developing water quality resources than were present at the CILT Synergy Summit.
The host SCALE project, based at the University of California at Berkeley, was represented by Marcia Linn, Eric Baumgartner, and Alan Li (as SCALE/WISE liaison).
Matthew Wlodarczyk, a graduate student of Michael Young and an active teacher, represented GEEWIS, a project out of the University of Connecticut that is making real-time water quality data from a local pond available for school use. GEEWIS is particularly interested in leveraging other groups' water quality curricula to help them integrate the use of real-time data into classroom practice.
Glenn Merrick, a biology professor from Lake Superior College, represented Water on the Web (WOW). WOW has also focused on provided real-time data from several lakes in Minnesota, and has a number of online tools for representing the data. WOW has been mostly focused on undergraduate education, but is interested in exploring ways that its resources might contribute to K-12 science education.
The Web-based Integrated Science Environment (WISE) was represented by Britte Cheng, Doug Kirkpatrick, and Ariel Owen. Each presented a different aspect of WISE, providing a range of research and teaching interests that resonated with the workshop participants. Ariel gave an overview of the Pine Creek project and described how it related to other Kids in Creeks activities that she and Jeff have done. Doug spoke about his interest in professional development, which developed into an important workshop theme. Britte discussed her interests in assessment research and exploring assessments that cut across multiple projects; she and Ken Rose spent substantial time during the workshop discussing potential assessment research ideas.
Barbara Hug and Amy Wefel represented the University of Michigan's Center for Highly Interactive Computing in Education (HI-CE) group and the Michigan half of the Center for Learning Technologies in Urban Settings (LeTUS). HI-CE has been developing technology-supported water quality curricula for several years and is beginning to think about integrating new Palm-based applications into their curriculum.
Jon Singer, currently an assistant professor at the University of South Carolina and formerly a postdoc at the University of Michigan, discussed his work with both HI-CE and WISE as it relates to his professional development research at USC, particularly with preservice teachers. Singer is a subcontractee of the SCALE project.
Ken Rose, a third year Learning Sciences student, represented the Chicago half of LeTUS and discussed Northwestern's efforts to use work circles to adapt water quality curriculum for the Chicago public schools. He also stood in to provide overviews of a range of Northwestern software, include WorldWatcher, BGuILE, and Progress Portfolio.
Alec Bodzin from Lehigh represented the Lehigh Earth Observatory, an ambitious effort to provide rich sets of geographical data, along with curricular resources, for students in Pennsylvania.
Mary Ellen Verona and David Curtis represented the RiverWeb project, a joint effort from UIUC and the Maryland Virtual High School to create a rich simulation environment to help students learn about a variety of issues surrounding water quality.
Yael Kali represented the Center for Innovative Learning Technologies (CILT) and contributed to the breakout group planning effort. She also represented work from Orit from Weismann, who has designed a unit on the water cycle called the Blue Planet.
The workshop was structured so that the first day, Sunday, was a "meet and greet" day, where participants each had about 10 minutes to share information about their project. These short presentations were often followed by a number of questions and animated discussions.
Following the individual presentations, participants spent two hours Sunday evening engaged in demos and sharing specific examples of their work. This session allowed all participants to get a much better sense of the available resources of other groups, and provided time to ask questions that went into depth about each project.
Monday morning we began to discuss a set of emergent themes or ideas from the workshop. In our brainstorming session, we generated several distinct ideas. These ideas formed the basis for the later synthesis efforts.
model-it & WISE teacher exchanges merging parts of curriculum student discussion across projects same unit/local customization (address cust. issues) how do assessments relate to customized materials open tools to new datasets explore integration of software -scope, sequence issues -support biological data connecting simulations to data collection connecting multiple representations of data mapping the space of available curricula (N-space) -grade level, inquiry, length, pedagogies… -assessments -support integrating math and science coherent patterns of customizations (less choices, more optimization of development efforts) how to keep everyone current? communication and community balancing tech. and other activities support issues for teachers for students professional development recruitment entry points support pre-service/in-service shared methodologies for... link and interconnected websites
As a next step, we copied each idea to a single giant post-it and placed the sheets around the room. Working together (most of the time) participants rearranged the ideas until we have four core clusters of ideas. These clusters focused on:
Integrating Math and Science, Mapping the Space of Available Curricula
Marcia, David, Al, Yael. Focus was a more abstract study of the characteristics of different curricula that could inform later customization. A product of such work might be sets of customization patterns, or 'features' of an innovation that tacitly travel with it to inform or constrain its use. (We had a hard time articulating what customization patterns would be – need examples.)
Assessment, Coherent Patterns of Customization, Shared Methods for Design/Teaching/Learning/Sharing
Ken, Britte, Glenn. Strong interest on assessment and putting together a longer term study (year +) to share and reflect on each others' assessment approach and instruments. Tied in to first group's efforts in that such work could draw on initial categories of customization and also inform (through a specific application of said categories) iterative revision of these ideas. Recognized need to stay aware of what the first group was doing.
Model-It & WISE, Explore Integration of Software, Open Tools to New Datasets, Connecting Simulations to Data Collection, Multiple Representations, Student Discussion Across Projects
Jon, Barbara, Amy, Eric, Matt, Ariel. Initial focus was on a specific collaboration between WISE and Michigan to bring teachers together to plan to use each others' stuff, with the larger goal of developing a library of curricular materials (packets) that could be used by teachers in different contexts. This would also include other projects, specifically Matt's project, and the interesting work would be the shaping of the materials around central “big ideas” in water quality. Also on the board was a more general analysis that would allow later development of other materials, particularly WISE AIDS and Michigan Communicable Diseases. Barbara raised a concern about how to actually support the phenomenal amount of work we're planning, since seed funding is so small. Eric replied that we need to do the plan to see what's reasonable, and identifying specific issues (such as funding) is an important part of what SCALE is trying to do.
Professional Development, How to Keep Everyone Current, Support Issues, Balancing Technology with Other Activities
Alan, Doug. Professional development started as a separate group but realized that they would not want to do this work divorced from the other efforts, so they joined the third group and contributed a focus on support and professional development issues.
It was a challenge to keep these groups separate, because many of the issues that each group worked on seemed to depend on other efforts of other groups. Eventually the first two groups and the last two groups merged and discussed their plans as separate, but related, efforts within a larger project.
The latter two groups formed one larger group as they realized that targeting professional development made sense only within the context of the larger curriculum design effort. That left three core efforts that may lead to SCALE collaboration grants. (These grants are similar to CILT seed grants.)
The three core efforts that emerged from the workshop -- developing an activity design framework around common water quality examples; pursuing common assessment strategies across enactments; and implementing a shared HI-CE/WISE curriculum -- will lead to grant proposals to SCALE within a week or two. SCALE will support these efforts by funding promising grants (primarily only to cover travel) and providing online resources that help participants to share resources with themselves and the larger SCALE community.
We also came out of the workshop energized that approaches like SCALE can work to spark remote collaboration among multiple groups. Because of the attendance and response of developers from "outside" the usual CILT community, we hope to continue to reach out to such developers through our website and other channels. Practically speaking, this suggests that next year, SCALE will have several customization studies to track, some of which will integrate assessment research that ties to Britte and Ken's proposed project. These sites will include Jon Singer in South Carolina, April Luehmann in Indiana, Ariel and others in California, and Barbara and Amy in Michigan. These efforts will provide a nice range of customizations and should inform SCALE's core research mission.
The workshop group agreed to work towards several milestones in the coming year and Eric is currently receiving proposals for the SCALE seed grants. The group will review existing curricula, collect assessment resources, and conduct a teacher seminar in the early fall. During late fall and winter, the group will develop new assessment resources, research protocols, and design frameworks as well as an integrated water quality curriculum. These resources will enable the implementation of the curriculum during the spring followed by a summer reflection session.
We are still working on the details of this ambitious plan with the various working groups. However, the workshop succeeded in its initial goals of sparking new collaborations and identifying potential sites for customization research. The challenge that lies ahead is supporting these fledgling partnerships and sustaining the momentum and enthusiasm for collaboration generated at the workshop.