WEBNET 2000/AACE Conference

Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education. 

The Lewis and Clark Rediscovery Project

Abstract

The "Lewis & Clark Rediscovery Project" is a professional development program designed to help teachers restructure teaching and learning practices in the classroom through the infusion of Internet technologies, Geographic Information Systems, digital portfolio development and collaborative web-project development. This 5-year project, funded by the US Department of Education under its Technology Innovation Challenge Grant program, highlights the Lewis and Clark Trail and explores changes in communities across the country in the wake of that historic expedition. The project's focus is on technology professional development for teachers, networking K-12 schools in the US with each other and with schools along the Lewis-Clark trail, and infusing the use of computers and Internet in locally developed curricula.

Participating lead teacher teams (including 3 individuals each from 17 school districts in 9 states along the Lewis & Clark trail) assume the roles of Naturalist, Ethnographer/Historian and Geographerr in a Corps of Rediscovery which engages in local and regional exploration projects that will lead to the development of district, state and nationwide curricular materials. The first year of the program (to-date) has directly involved the 51 lead teachers in a kick-off mid-winter workshop and in a two-week intensive summer workshop. In addition, more than 200 additional consortium teachers from the 17 districts were involved in 2-day site-based local Rediscovery GLOBE© workshops. The GLOBE© Program (Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment) is an international environmental science data collection and education program and forms the core environmental science (Naturalist) framework for teacher and student activity development. In years 4 and 5 the project will be expanded to involve teachers and students in the over 6,000 schools in the national GLOBE© program.

A "backbone" CDROM being developed with participant input will provide a generalized narrative/multimedia overview of the Lewis & Clark expedition including text, image, multimedia, and map resources. Participants will use this resource to aid in their efforts to develop interdisciplinary curricular programs focussing on change in their local community over the past 200 years. An extensive online resource website and discussion forum will provide participants, project lead investigators and consultants, and the general public with access to the overall program as it continues to develop.

Technology components of the Lewis & Clark Rediscovery Project include: Use of Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers to locate field studies sites and field data collected, Geographic Information Systems (ArcView GIS) for map project development and presentation, HTML web page authoring for local and national project publishing, digital cameras, digital audio recorders, Quicktime™ VR (for interactive image panorama generation and display in web pages), Quicktime™ video/audio (for interview and narrative vignettes), and a whole host of GLOBE© Program online data collection, web-reporting and map/chart generation programs. Participant district teams will employ all these tools in the development of interdisciplinary and thematic curricular projects that will share a common focus of 200 years of change in communities situated along the Ohio, Missouri, and Columbia River Watersheds. The project aims to demonstrate appropriate and relevant use of interactive technologies as it strengthens the educational system through professional development of teachers.

Rediscovery Project Online Collaborative Learning

Four student-centered web-delivered courses (Earth Systems Science for Naturalists, American History for Ethnographers, GIS for Geographers, and a fourth course entitled "Corps of Rediscovery" an interdisciplinary forum for all three participant roles) are being developed in collaboration with the consortium lead teachers (alpha-testing complete in June 2000). These online courses will be made available to all teachers in the consortium districts in the Spring of 2001. Following each iteration of development and testing by the consortium teachers, these courses may be made available to all GLOBE Program teachers across the United States by year 3, and in year 4 open to any and all educators in the country. An extensive project web site is being developed in conjunction with the online courses. This web site will link all online coursework, threaded discussions and educator's forums to developing digital portfolios as well as providing a forum for participants to share, critique and co-develop curricular ideas. In years 4 and 5, this web site will be linked to locally developing district web sites that will host interactive activities designed by the teachers their students.

The project's initial online courses (alpha-level) Earth Systems Science, History and Cartography/GIS engaged participants in collaborative ideas sharing and discussions around these central themes and brought them together in tasks designed to establish a "sense of place" for their subsequent projects. The online experiences were designed to be student-centered, promoted the sharing of prior knowledge and co-construction of new knowledge. In each online course, participants met together in district groups and as in whole class threaded discussion forums to explore topics related to their respective roles. The naturalists in the earth systems course used their immediate community environment to gather data, narrative, imagery and interactive panoramas describing their local sense of place. The historians used the web to research historical implications of the Lewis & Clark expedition, researched their own communities and discussed cultural issues. The cartographers used the web to discuss the challenges in creating GIS projects and the results of their work on using ArcView to produce maps and databases. The goal here was to begin to tie teachers' experience of their local setting to learning opportunities that would serve to integrate science, social studies and the arts and humanities. Further work in the beta-version of these courses and especially in the 4th course "Corps of Rediscovery" their inquiry will expand to identifying city, county, and state, as well as non-profit and business partners who could assist them in building learning opportunities in their communities.

Pedagogical Issues

Immediately prior to, during, and following the summer workshop activities the project lead investigators gathered a variety of attitudinal, process-skills-related and technology competency information from each participant. Participants were introduced to and engaged in "constructivist" oriented teaching and learning situations that model a shift in teaching/learner-facilitation styles. Participants were asked for feedback on the extent to which they engage their students in constructivist lessons, the degree of "student/learner- centered" teaching that happens in their classrooms and in their districts in general. Further, each school was queried with respect to the extent and capacity of their networks, and computer hardware and software availability to teachers and students. This information is being used to aid in the continuing evolution of online course activities and workshop/seminar goals and objectives. Qualitative and quantitative assessment scenarios are being designed to track participant progress in their developing technology competencies as well as pedagogic issues and local curricular development strategies that will meet state and national K-12 teaching and learning standards for technology, science, social studies and language arts.

Online Dialog: formative discussions and online journals

All online coursework includes private journal spaces as well as public forums where threaded formative discussions among participants take place. These formative idea sharing spaces are where we brainstorm, trade "friendly critiques" and co-develop ideas regarding the topics of inquiry. In later stages of each course, participants draw upon their documented discussions, and journal entries to build summary ideas and conceptual understandings. In the Earth Systems Science and History courses a majority of threaded discussion entries are among the participants themselves with the course facilitator interjecting only guiding questions.

Online Portfolios

The project's first summer workshop is designed to model virtually all aspects of the program in miniature. During a 2-week period, participants meet in district groups and as a whole Corps of Rediscovery to map segments of a local (Moscow Idaho) watershed. Participants co-develop a model online portfolio project linking the results of 5 days of field work. The web page portfolios are all linked to an interactive map of the watershed. Individual linked portfolios include data, narrative, imagery and maps describing: water quality, soils, vegetation and human land-use, video/audio narrative vignettes of local personalities, historical contexts of community growth and development, and cultural issues related to indigenous populations and changes wrought on Indian tribal communities over the last 200 years. Further, the summer workshop modeled a process of engaging local, regional and state agencies, non-profit and business partners as data/information resources and partners in the development of teaching and learning situations. The goal here was to more closely tie city, county, state, and federal as well as non-profit and business partners to the learning opportunities in their communities.

Virtual Community for Life-long Learning

In an earlier "work-in-progress" short paper entitled "VRML in Education: a user’s perspective on potential for instruction and exploration", Graves and Davis (1999) describe a scenario where exploration of local landscapes (using Quicktime VR to help communicate "sense of place") in conjunction with shared web-portfolios could open new doors for innovative inclusion of technology in education. Those ideas are closely linked to the development of the Rediscovery Project strategies. Just as described in that earlier paper, the Rediscovery Project activities engage participants in appropriate and relevant use of VR-related technologies (Quicktime VR) for community building and sharing a sense of place through collaborative study of the history and the development of local cultures. Community mapping and narrative histories of changing human/environment interactions, resource use, ecosystem impacts, and cultural development also provide teachers and students opportunities to learn through the process of telling their local stories while providing real and valuable data to local, regional and global science and humanities researchers. Together with strategies for incorporating local detailed maps, GIS data layers, imagery, and narratives, Quicktime VR enhanced web portfolios provide an extremely relevant use of technology for developing a visual and spatially intuitive means of exploring/interfacing otherwise complex information sets among a community of learners. In describing and sharing each unique community's sense of place or view-from-here through VR infusion into collaborative learning environments, students and teachers can create a very dynamic and engaging virtual collaborative. When these strategies made available to all citizens and portfolio sites opened up for all to contribute to, the sense of community, a common forum for issues discussion, ideas sharing and cooperative problem solving would go a long way toward fostering a real "life-long learning" community.

When this project is concluded in 2004 the children in the districts along the trail (and elsewhere in the US) will be in a position to take a leadership role in national Lewis-Clark Bicentennial Commemoration activities. In addition, this project will demonstrate appropriate use of WWW-based collaborative teaching and learning and community service.

References