Conference Summary

Networked computer technologies are rapidly becoming a fixture in many K-12 schools, but educators are just beginning to develop educational models that make effective use of networked computers in support of inquiry-based learning and teaching. One of the most promising models is Network Science - using the Internet to bring classes together in pursuit of collaborative science learning. These Network Science projects share many attributes: Common focus of study/research across classrooms, sharing of questions, sharing of data and representations of data, and teachers and students talking with each other and with online experts.

Most of us agreed that the principal goal of Network Science is to enhance the social and cognitive skills which collectively we refer to as inquiry. Although we didn't delve deeply into the nature of inquiry, several themes did surface. We recognized that although inquiry is not content specific (Vicki Golburgh asserted, "It doesn't matter what they learnÉ but that they develop the ability to learn.") neither is it entirely about process. Bob Coulter and Perry Samson each stated in different ways that inquiry involves the application of social and cognitive skills in the context of the study of specific phenomena. Indeed, we were often reminded that inquiry requires that students become engaged in phenomena that interest them. Out of this engagement develop issues for exploration that, in Carol Timms words, are both "important and difficult." However, in the break-out group on student inquiry Joe Walters pointed out that questions students explore shouldn't be so important that they produce anxiety or so difficult that they become frustrating.

The Internet already provides access to massive amounts of factual information, and we heard several accounts of how it is being used to engage students. Where else could we find up-to-the-minute data on the movement of an eagle or manatee? As the technology advances, the available information will become both broader and more immediately accessible to students. However, we also heard warnings about over-dependence on technology for either the content of, or motivation for, a project. Several participants reminded us to be sure that we continue to employ other than Internet resources not only because they are frequently more engaging and accessible, but also to insure that we are not left dangling in the wind when the Internet goes down, when the data won't download, when our collaborators don't come through, or when the novelty of new technologies wears off.

In the inquiry classroom the focus is no longer solely on teacher-student interactions. Student-student interactions, moderated by the teacher, come to play an essential role. Cliff Konold described some of the social and cognitive norms that underlie a culture of inquiry and how many of these are at odds with the norms that characterize traditional classrooms. Norms important to inquiry include "listening carefully to one another, advancing one's own view, assuming responsibility for understanding the basic arguments being put forward by one's classmates, asking not only the teacher but fellow students for clarification." Jimmy Karlan shared his sense that real change cannot be achieved until we acknowledge and address various aspects of our current educational system. For example, it is difficult to relinquish the control and security the current paradigm offers us as teachers, and doing so requires that we recognize and resolve various psychological fears and political barriers. Furthermore, he maintained that as teachers we must experience the process first-hand: We must learn how to engage in inquiry ourselves before we can facilitate those processes in our classrooms. Providing the support teachers need to make these changes is perhaps the most important, and yet currently under-funded, component of science-education reform.

All the projects represented at the conference rely to some extent on telecollaboration to achieve their educational objectives. It therefore came as a surprise to many of us that we so frequently heard warnings of the danger of over-reliance on technology. One of the worries expressed is that we forget that the focus of any good science instruction is on the phenomena of interest, not the means by which we access them. During a recent meeting of the advisory board of Classroom FeederWatch, Rick Bonney commented what a great job they were doing. One of the board members replied, "No Rick, it's not you. It's the birds." Joel Halvorson made a similar point when he suggested that "the critical challenge is getting students in touch with the phenomena." To him, the technology provides another point of entry into scientific inquiry, another way to develop interested in or to investigate some authentic, scientific question. But there are many other non-technical (and locally available) ways of engaging students, and it's important that in promoting the use of the Internet we not unwittingly call attention away from these. The challenge before us now, Halvorson suggested, was not one of building a network of telecollaborators, but a "network of individual instructional success stories."

Our telecollaboration projects can also go astray by overemphasizing the role of networked communities. The risk is that we ignore the importance of establishing in one's own classroom a community that supports inquiry. Cliff Konold suggested that "while the idea of having science-like conversations over the network is intriguing, until such conversations are already occurring within individual classrooms, they are unlikely to occur over the network between classrooms."

Good activities and curricula are centered around intrinsically interesting phenomena. We often, however, find ourselves looking for interesting cases to study after we have constrained ourselves by deciding exactly what scientific concepts we want to explore, or by committing ourselves to the use of a particular technology. The recommendation is that we begin instead with phenomena that kids find interesting and then determine what scientific concepts are involved that are within the reach of the students, and what technologies might allows us to enrich or enlarge these explorations. We should avoid, in the words of Bob Coulter, "taking abstract ideas and trying to retrofit them to kids' lives." He prefaced this statement by noting that Tom Snyder builds "relevant curricula" by first listening to children's conversations with one another, and then developing curricula that mesh with children's interests and capabilities.

This need to begin with real questions rather than abstractions or technological capabilities also applies to the data-collection component of Network Science projects. An idea echoed throughout the conference was that data need to be meaningful to students or they will not be motivated to analyze them. Joel Halvorson stated that if an activity lacks a clear purpose, the data we collect as part of that activity will have little meaning or impact. Cliff Konold noted that "what makes data analysis come alive are the underlying questions and thinking."

The importance of starting with thought-provoking and substantive phenomena may explain part of Joe Walters' uneasiness with a recent experience at the NECC conference. His sense was that participants there shared an interest in technology but not in any substantive issues. This raised for him the question, "How do we make technology importantÉ but at the same time not lose sight of the fact that it's not about technology, it's about something else?"

Finally, in considering how research might help us, Deborah Trumbull suggested that we need information about the day-to-day operation of successful projects that would allow us to answer such questions as, "Out of the rich array of possibilities, what kinds of things do youngsters in Arizona, California, and Minnesota find fascinating? Why do they find these things fascinating? How do teachers use these interests to build students' engagement with the Networked Science projects? How does this engagement develop? When we learn these things, how can we build on that?"

Local knowledge. Joel Halvorson pointed out that directing students too quickly onto the Internet in search of information may send the message that there is not relevant information in their own collective experience. He recommends that in the early phases of an investigation an inventory be taken of what students already know: "A good teacher first accesses the collective knowledge in the classroom." Susan Wheelwright provided an excellent example of this principle as she was explaining to us her students' use of online experts. She has them give careful thought to the questions they submit. Among other things, they must make sure that their questions are not answered in materials they already have. Relevant student knowledge is not restricted to content. Alan Feldman reminded us that half of the student-aged population now have computers at home, and many are quite familiar with Internet technology. This kind of technical knowledge is an important, and often underutilized, resource for teachers who are just coming online.

Local data. Joel Halvorson also encourages the use of "local" means of data analysis, such as having students use spreadsheets off-line or drawing graphs by hand. In fact, Journey North has recently de-emphasized the automation of maps on their server based on teachers' comments that they preferred their students updating their own classroom maps before seeing the maps online. Judy Vesel described how Leveraging Learning structures data explorations as progressions from small to large contexts. Rather than assuming that students will wait to analyze pooled data shared over the Internet, they are designing activities that involve students first reasoning about data they themselves collect. After this initial exploration, data are pooled within the classroom and analyzed again within this larger context. Only then, ideally, do students look to see how their classroom data fits with data collected by other classrooms. Another advantage of this design was suggested by Meredith Kusch's observation that it is while watching birds at local feeders that kids begin "to think about questions they could answer and what kinds of data they would need to collect to answer those questions." Interesting questions are probably more likely to occur while students are engaged more immediately with the phenomena, with the data they collect. These questions then provide the motivation for getting more data, including those collected by others and in different settings.

Local funding. Rick Bonney told of the excitement generated at a recent parents' night sponsored by Classroom FeederWatch. "If in the future we need birdseed or other supplies, we won't have any trouble getting financial support from these parents." He recounted this incident to stress the point that we should not overlook local sources of financial support for our projects. These efforts should include encouraging and preparing participating teachers to write small grants for professional development within their schools or districts. Elaborating on this idea, Tim Donahue described the "public workshops" that GREEN organizes in coordination with local hosts. Teacher registration costs for these public workshops are covered in most instances through a combination of local funding sources and larger grant-funded professional development projects of GREEN.

Bob Coulter talked about one of his students tracking a Swainson's hawk as part of the Prairie Partners project (a sister project to Highway to the Tropics). After traveling for several days in a southwest direction, it suddenly shifted its path to the southeast. This anomaly prompted his student to look at a map where they discovered that the bird was following the coastline around the Gulf of Mexico.

Vicki Golburgh provided a provocative illustration of the network's ability to enhance student understanding of diversity through her story of linking her high-achieving students, via email and chats, with adult males with muscular dystrophy. She reported that through this correspondence her students developed "a tolerance and appreciation of diversity and differences." Ultimately, her students visited these men and had the chance to experience feeding and caring for another person, "experiences fostered through using a telecommunications-based learning environment, which would not have been possible if I had just said 'today we're going to a hospital and we're going to meet people with muscular dystrophy.'"

Susan Wheelwright shared several examples of how the network component of Journey North had broadened the understanding of her third- and forth-grade students: the maps have stimulated an interest in geography; a photograph on the web of a Mexican child driving a truck prompted the students to write him (in Spanish) to learn how old one had to be to get a Mexican driver's license; the excitement that came with the responsibility of informing the rest of the nation's Journey North community of when Walden Pond melted; their fascination in reading an emailed account by other Journey North participants of a blizzard in Alaska - "It made a huge impression on my class. They and the Alaskan school were both Americans, both spoke English, but their lives were so incredibly different."

Topher Hagemeier pointed to the Internet's capacity to bring "the libraries of the world" to isolated classrooms and communities by telling of a small Californian town accessing the biology library at Harvard University to find out what type of spider Charlotte (of Charlotte's Web fame) was.

Judy Vesel noted that there are "juncture points where kids can do things on the Internet that they can't do with hands-on activities," enabling teachers to "explore a topic in a way that they can't in a classroom." Perry Samson provided a good example of such a computer-enabled, hands-on experience as part of his demonstration of software developed by the project One Sky, Many Voices. These include a simulation tool that allows students to fly a virtual airplane through a hurricane and continuously measure several variables including wind speed and direction.

Having acknowledged that the network can be used to place students in a broader, more global, context, Bob Coulter added an important caveat: it can only do this if an experiential "text" has already been established in the classroom. Given this initial experience, the information on the network becomes a "context" within which they can evaluate their own observations: "In Classroom FeederWatch I can see how my bird data compare to what is happening elsewhere; in One Sky, Many Voices, I can ask how my local weather relates to the weather in other parts of the country; in Journey North, I can see how our classroom data fits into the migration pattern over the whole country." Topher Hagemeier told of the excitement generated among students over the inch of snow that fell on their California town. This thrilling news, shared over the Internet, humored students in Minnesota who wrote back with descriptions of their typical snow falls. The invitation to students on both ends was to reinterpret their local experience within a broader context. But without the local experiences, the broader context would have held little interest.

The ultimate success of our efforts was frequently described as being dependent on the development of various networks of support - students becoming interested and involved with one another's learning, classrooms becoming part of some larger enterprise, teachers finding colleagues and collaborators. Several participants reminded us that community institutions (libraries, businesses, museums, universities), discipline-specific organizations (such as NSTA or NCTM), parents, and school administrators are all important sources of support for Network Science projects. However, because of the demands placed on teachers to change their teaching practices and to learn new content and technologies, professional development was seen as a high-priority concern, one that in our minds has yet to be adequately addressed.

Several models of professional development were discussed. Projects reported successes and limitations in models that ranged from attempts to address the needs of individual teachers (Journey North), to grassroots, community-based programs (GREEN), to programs that are intended to instigate change at a district, state or national (Singapore) level. Tham Yoke-Chun described their approach in Singapore as operating within the existing national standards, but at the same time giving principals autonomy and recognizing them as important agents of change. The consensus seemed to be, however, that all approaches require, in the words of the break-out group on professional development, "frequent and ongoing contacts."

Some participants voiced concern about whether professional development should emphasize pedagogy over content. Perry Samson, for example, cited a need for teachers to gain expertise in the content that is required by standards and standardized tests. Others observed, however, that content and pedagogical approaches aren't necessarily at odds. Karen Leichtweis believes that increased knowledge and confidence in subject matter results in teaching that is driven by passion.

Most of our projects have developed online communities for teacher support and have experienced varying degrees of teacher participation. Deborah Muscella asked us to consider how this technology could be used "to leverage teacher expertise so that teachers come to view themselves as experts and begin providing that expertise to other teachers." In developing these capabilities, we reminded ourselves that there needs to be a compelling reason for teachers to want to communicate. We shouldn't expect that simply by providing the capability, support networks will develop. Furthermore, in the experience of Carol Timms such online community support "doesn't work unless we've built first the one-on-one relationship." This idea was echoed in Charlie Hutchison's report for the break-out group exploring online communities. They developed the notion of "strong" and "weak" communities to explain why weak community links enabled by the network may not be enough to support learning and development in the absence of a more stable, and physically proximate, community as might be provided in a classroom or a family.

Ray Rose countered that he believed that online communities could be developed in the absence of face-to-face interactions. In the first week of the Virtual High School, some participating students reported that they knew their Virtual High-School teachers better than they knew the teachers in their own building. "The secret," he said, "is spending some time at the beginning on community building. The community must come first, and then you can move on to the other work." However, he also informed us that the professional development component for Virtual High School does include regular face-to-face meetings.

Alan Feldman argued for the need to view teachers and their development within the context of their school. "We sometimes think of there being one target person in the school - the teacher. We need to look at interrelationships, of how the projects we run interact with what's already happening in the school." Without administrative support, Carol Timms pointed out, "innovative projects are often doomed. A teacher cannot successfully implement innovative teaching techniques against the wishes, or without the support, of their principal."

We reminded ourselves repeatedly to be patient, that the visions of learning and instruction informing our projects require not only improvements in technology tools and infrastructures, but fundamental shifts in pedagogical thinking and institutional cultures. Change, at every level, requires not only adequate support and the financial means to deliver it, but time.

Student development. Many of our projects have been criticized by teachers as being too fast paced. This problem becomes particularly acute for teachers trying to honor a community commitment to deliver data for use by other classrooms. But the nature of inquiry requires flexible time at every phase of an investigation, and time for students to learn the set of expectations that come with this method. When moving into a new area of inquiry, Bob Coulter gives his students the time they need "to just mess around." And many of his students initially find this open-endedness quite unsettling. "I don't know what you want me to be interested in," one of his 3rd grade students complained in the early weeks of this year. Teon Edwards, reporting for the break-out group on data analysis, reminded us that there must be a clear purpose in collecting data, that if they are collected before students have thought about what questions they have, and what they expect to learn from the data, the activity will have little meaning. And there's no point in collecting data if little or no time is given to analyze and think about them afterwards.

Teacher development. Carol Timms described EnergyNet teachers as undergoing "a slow process of change," a change that involved not only their perspectives on pedagogy, but also their coming to regard other teachers and community members as fellow collaborators. Jimmy Karlan described working with teachers to develop their pedagogical philosophy. Even though at the end of a year they can "talk the talk, they still often default to traditional ways of teaching." While trying to figure out what he can do differently, he also reminds himself that results are not always immediately evident: "I can plant a seed." Candace Julyan echoed the same belief: "Change takes a long time. You could go into a lot of classrooms and not see anything remotely close to what you'd want to see in an inquiry classroom. But I think if you kept going back every year, you'd see a shift."

It's easy to forget how difficult it is for teachers with no prior exposure to computers and without local support to "connect up," at the same time they are experimenting with an innovative curriculum. Susan Wheelwright had already been doing many similar activities when she learned about Journey North from a parent of one of her students. Despite the fact that she was comfortable with the project's pedagogy and content, she gave herself three years to fully incorporate the project's technology components. "When I learned that first year that I could be doing all this on the web, I said, 'No way, I couldn't take that all in. I'll just do it through email,' which was also new to me." The second year, she accessed the web on the library computer where she could count on the support of nearby staff. It was only in the third year that she began using the web connection in her classroom.

Curriculum development. Judy Vesel reminded us that our projects are also "works in progress, and take a long time to develop." Bob Coulter, reporting for the break-out group on curriculum development, pointed out that "curriculum development in this network-science paradigm will never be finished, that we'll constantly need to be adding information, linking to new web sites, incorporating new areas of investigation."

Equity. Given that the level of access to our projects is dependent on the technology capabilities of a school, which in turn depend on funding levels, Ray Rose challenged us to think about how our Network Science projects might be widening rather than shrinking the gap between have's and have not's. In response, Candace Julyan told of her frustrations at the Arnold Arboretum in deciding to work with under-funded school systems in Boston. She wondered whether her efforts to interest and train these teachers in up-to-date applications in technology-rich education in the end might be futile in the absence of adequate technological support in the schools. But if her solution is to work only with schools who already have the requisite technology and infrastructure, then, she wondered, is she not acting to exacerbate existing differences? "It is an issue of equity, and not only of practicality," she concluded.

Assessment. On the first day of the conference, Abbey Koplovitz raised the question: "How do you figure out what kids are getting out of it?" In fact, to the extent we don't develop ways of assessing learning that are consistent with our program objectives, we ultimately undermine those objectives. As the curriculum break-out group concluded, "Assessment and curriculum need to be much more closely aligned for learning to take place. Difficulties are inevitable if teachers are teaching under one paradigm and students are being evaluated under another."

Later in the day, Jimmy Karlan framed the question more forcefully, challenging us to describe what good models of classroom practice look like and then compare what's happening in our classrooms to those models: "I don't know what it means for me to step into a classroom and see how this program actually gets enacted. What percentage of students are actively engaged in inquiry in authentic ways? What percentage of teachers are orchestrating inquiry in ways that are rich and productive?" These criteria make it clear that we can't judge success by looking at simple measures such as the number of "participating" classrooms, or hits on our web sites. Conversely, Alan Feldman told of a Global Lab school that never logged onto the web at all, but turned out to have had a fabulously successful local experience with the curriculum. The sorts of classroom descriptions and analyses that Karlan called for would accomplish more than informing us of project impacts - they could help produce them. As Deborah Trumbull pointed out, "in-depth and well-developed portrayals of projects and exemplars of student work are likely to be more helpful to teachers who are trying to adapt their classroom practices than are theoretical explications of our principles."