Update: A draft agenda is now available.
We would like to invite you to attend a Synergy Communities workshop on the use of innovative technologies to support learning about water quality. The workshop will be held in Evanston, Illinois on June 24 and 25, 2001.
The purpose of the workshop is to bring together researchers, scientists, curriculum developers, and educators who are actively working on innovative approaches to supporting learning about water quality and who are particularly interested in the potential for collaboration with other groups engaged in similar work.
We hope that you will be able to attend this exciting workshop. Detailed information about the workshop follows, and you can register online. Please let us know if you have any questions or if you know others who would be interested in this event.
Marcia Linn, PI, Synergy Communities
Eric Baumgartner, Director, Synergy Communities
We expect participants to be interested in the process of designing innovative science education materials that relate to water quality, interested in learning about others' work, and open to new collaborations. Participants will include teachers, educational researchers, environmental scientists, software developers, and others; we encourage a broad range of perspectives and believe that partnerships are more successful when they include a diverse set of participants.
At the workshop itself, participants will have the opportunity to make a brief (5 min), informal presentation of their work, focusing on what they would contribute to a collaboration and what they hope to learn from others. These "firehose" talks are meant to provide a quick way for everyone to learn a bit about what everyone else does, and serve as a prelude to more informal, in depth conversations. (Think of it as a personals ad for your project.) We encourage participants to bring materials with them to share and/or demo for others; there will be an extended period of time for informal sharing and we have found that one of the benefits of this workshop format is the opportunity to learn about each others' work in depth.
Finally, an important workshop goal for us is the development of new partnerships among participants, so we would encourage you to come to the workshop with an open mind and an interest in exploring potential collaborations with others who share your interests, who face similar challenges, or who offer complementary skills or resources.
Rather than focus on formal presentations of completed work, the workshop will allow participants to share work in progress, including ideas, curricular materials, technological innovations, research methods, and assessment instruments. Workshop activities will include hands-on demos and breakout groups that pursue topics of common interest, including (but not limited to):
Please note that the specific activities of the workshop will be designed to reflect the interests of its participants. Feel free to contact us if you would like to learn more about these activities or if you would like to suggest a particular idea.
The workshop is hosted by the Synergy Communities: Aggregating Learning About Education project (http://scale.soe.berkeley.edu). This project, located at the University of California at Berkeley, is a National Science Foundation-sponsored grant that seeks to explore ways to better support cumulative research within learning technologies. We use a shared subject matter domain -- water quality -- as an anchor for exploring collaboration and comparison across research efforts.
The Synergy Communities project is particularly interested in supporting collaborations across research or curriculum development groups that focus on integrating ideas, materials, assessments, or technology into new contexts and practices. Funding will be available to support a small number of collaborative efforts that emerge from the workshop.
Please note that while this is an open-invitation event, participation is limited; we want to ensure that the workshop stays small enough to allow productive face to face interactions among workshop participants.
To RSVP, please register for the workshop online. To find out more about the Synergy Communities workshop, contact Eric Baumgartner (ebaum@socrates.berkeley.edu, 510/643-3228).
