ITSRG

Paving Your Way with Journals and Conferences and Web 2.0

The ITEST Learning Resource Center (LRC) is hosting a webinar event today that focuses on eliciting lessons learned related to disseminating ITEST project outcomes. I will share my thoughts about this based on my experience as PI of the BITS Program, ITSRG's ITEST funded initiative. Other presenters for the event are:

Len Annetta, Principal Investigator of the Highly Interactive, Fun Internet Virtual Environments in Science (HI-FIVES) project, a Cohort 3 grant; and

Leslie Goodyear, Research Scientist, ITEST LRC. Leslie will share conference and journal opportunities from her recent attendance at The Tenth National Technology Leadership Summit hosted by the Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education (SITE).

Stay posted here for updates beginning at 2:00 pm.

Michele Masucci
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1:10 pm Preliminary Thoughts

The BITS publication strategy has from the onset sought to affect the geographic discourse on community geographic information systems by investigating the degree to which participatory models can be adapted to shift the locus of the development and uses of GIS from technical experts acting as community advocates to communities themselves. Our program involves high school students to learn and use GIS technologies and their experiences are drawn upon to inform our contributions to theoretical and technical developments in community GIS research.

We employed three strategies as an explicit attempt to connect research goals and activities, BITS participant experiences and learning outcomes, and our community collaborative activities with contributions to academic scholarship.

1. We invited faculty and graduate students to embed their research in our project and provided workshops to train them how to connect their research foci with the BITS project scopes of work. This resulted in the creation of thematic content that has served to connect the BITS program experiences to a broader base of geographers.

2. We broke the publication pathway down into manageable  components so that we could broaden the base of participation in disseminating project outcomes. This resulted in our sponsorship of a large number of graduate student and faculty presentations about the project at conferences, extending the discussion of outcomes in interdisciplinary directions we had not originally anticipated, and reaching new audiences through adding university faculty partners in other institutions.

3. We eventually worked to identify an external evaluation specialist who is also trained formally trained in Geography; this means that as we approach the end point of the project time line we have the potential to publish in both educational research and geographic fields of study.
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1:30 pm Our emphasis on using Web 2.0 to build our audience

Our external evaluator, Lorena Munoz, recommended that we explicitly develop a web 2.0 strategy to disseminate our project outcomes on the web in addition to our conventional publication strategy. This past year - our no cost extension year - we have rolled out a series of web interactive tools aimed to accomplish the following tasks:

1. Connect threads of content developed across our program activities, including through participation of high school students, HCC mentor staff members, graduate researchers and project researchers. This has resulted in more cohesive connections between student digital footprints and learning outcomes, curriculum development and implementation and dissemination.

2. Create a social network among program participants. One of the most significant challenges we had was how to create meaningful dissemination points for all of our participant audiences - including parents and students, community collaborators, student volunteers and mentors, colleagues and scholars. Our use of social media has enabled us to both get the word about what we are involved in on a timely basis as well as to elicit information just in time for publication and conference events.

3. Use our web activities as a strategic hub for managing and tracking the long term sustainability of our program. Our web dissemination strategy purposefully coincides with our no-cost year. Our aim was to assess the degree to which we could use the web to continue the program but in a new, no cost and long term fashion. The key to this strategy has been to foster participation among BITS alumni as staff members at ITSRG who are now deeply involved in creating and publishing maps, assisting us with the use of web technologies across all of our programs, and linking their skills to the pursuit of their own educational pathways. We have showcased some of the maps and field exercises they created in our posts on Citizen Cartographers in this blog throughout the month of June.

4. We implemented Write Now, a month long initiative in May to generate new publication directions and include as many people in our network of program participants as possible. The result was a massive lift of generating abstracts for conferences and publications, manuscripts in working paper form, blog posts, and the underpinnings of journal articles. The first article to appear in publication since our effort began in May 2008 will be published by the Community Literacy Journal, showcasing the application of our community mapping strategy developed by BITS for consideration of the relationship between literacy and geographic elasticity among ethnic chinese immigrants living in Philadelphia's Chinatown. Michael Rovito, the first author, was a graduate research assistant in BITS working with students to develop the mapping approach used in the article. Other manuscripts have been posted on ITSRG's working paper series and are forthcoming in book and guide format.
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2:00 pm Webinar begins
The ITEST LRC's sponsorship of events like these has been invaluable for our program. We would never have been able to connect with other programs and assess what among best practices might apply to us if we had to investigate that on our own.
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2:05 Random Thoughts while waiting to get Started
We note our love of the use of Google Docs for collaboration around writing projects. Writeboard works great too. We prefer to use free, open source web 2.0 tools - those are most accessible to the broadest base of participation.
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2:15 Opening Comments by Sarita Nair of the ITEST LRC
This is a follow on discussion from last year's similar event; Len speaks first about successes and challenges for disseminating project outcomes. The ITEST LRC has a list of journals and outlets to consider for dissemination as well as conference events that may be of interest.  Check out http://www2.edc.org/ITESTLRC/ for that info.
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Len starts, from the Hi Fives project.
Len comments in the Hi Fives marketing and dissemination plan, which was the last push of project during the no cost extension phase. He also discusses how that will come together at the end of the project to meet the larger project dissemination goals. Hi Fives looks at how students create video games. The project supported students to created a modified game using Half Life 2, a first person shooter game. When you buy the game you get access to the source code. With computer scientists at NC State, the project team took out the violent aspects of the game and created their own game built on the software's game development engine; it features tools that permits users to drag and drop 3D environments, enabling middle school kids in their program to learn how to do game development.

Original plans called for the use of conventional publication and conference presentation pathways. The external evaluator was also supposed to publish learning outcomes. Science teaching and SITE conferences were targeted arenas for dissemination originally. Plans changed through hiring a different outside evaluator. The new evaluator picked up publication themes around new research questions that arose from his interests. Creating a commercial game was not necessarily the best approach; lessons learned from that has opened new areas for dissemination. There was also a project need to go beyond the data gathering, research and publication efforts of project Co-PIs due to the large number of questions to be asked and the high volume of data to assess related to the program. Graduate assistants worked together as a teams to address that need. Through working in teams, individual interests were coupled with enough critical mass of personnel to move forward with conference proposals and journal publications. By using working group methods, large numbers of publications and conference presentations were generated, and Len attributes the ITEST renewal they received in part to this effort.
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2:20 Questions for Len
What is your best paper?
Len: I am most proud of the edited book volume we published called Serious Educational Games. That volume markets areas of creating educational games. Students and collaborators in our project all wrote chapters. Each told their story and how their involvement in research unfolded.
How did you identify journals?
Len: Science Education journals are directed towards science learning from k-20 levels. Reviewers come from old school and dont understand technology, so even though science journals were targeted, only a few resulted in publications. AACE journals are now the focus of publication directions; ISTE journals too.
Did you publish in any online journals?
Innovate - is one of the online journals we used.
We are planning to implement game development that involves participants to create their own journeys and interact with other participants to help advance education and collaboration. What was your underlying subtext for game development? Did you feel you needed bells and whistles to compete with War Craft for instance?
Len: Yes and no. My prior experience using multi user collaborative platforms, we used active worlds. It predated Second Life. It was stable and a good environment for collaborative use from multi-sites. But, using with high school students meant that the lack of game elements of competition resulted in rapid disengagement of students.
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2:48 Leslie's talk begins
The National Technology Leadership Summit is a meta conference that brings leaders from memberships organizations related to educational technology, teacher education and educational research together. Examples of organizations that are represented are at the summit are SITE and Educational Technology and SIG leaders of AERA organizations. One outcome of note for those interested in enhancing their ITEST project dissemination efforts was that this group likes to have coordinated topics that can be thematic across all of the respective conferences sponsored by their organizations. The coordination effort highlights issues they want to emphasize.

The upcoming SITE conference and NET/ISTE conferences will include themes on the role of participatory media and the use of web 2.0 technologies for classroom instruction addressing the question: How can educators use web 2.0 and other media in their classrooms? They are interested in those lines of thinking; in addition they are looking at how formal and informal learning interact.

Also, there are publication opportunities related to journals of these organizations; discussions continued a theme that was introduced at the 2008 ITEST PI Summit related to the interest among ITEST projects and the ITEST LRC to tell a larger story about the impact of the ITEST initiative on education in a broad way. There will be a call for papers organized by some of the journals of these education organizations that elicits manuscripts connecting youth based focus areas for outcomes that can inform better how formal and informal learning experiences can be mutually reinforcing and improve student learning, as well as to shape the development of new pedagocial approaches for technology instruction.  The ITEST LRC will share information about those opportunities; in addition the LRC is organizing interest in specific conferences to create theme oriented presentations by ITEST projects, continuing an important role they have played throughout the past six years within the ITEST community.
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3:20 Michele's final comments
Thanks to Sarita Nair and the entire ITEST LRC team for organizing this event. Thanks also to Caroline Guigar for live Tweeting our involvement from the ITSRG direction. Please stay posted for more on our dissemination activities.

ITSRG sponsored a month-long writing workshop involving faculty, graduate student and community fellows aimed at sharing outcomes of our programs, projects and research activites. Fellows have been writing about issues such as digital inclusion, literacy and place, cyber safety for kids, web 2.0 and communities, fair information practices, BITS Program Lessons Learned and e-health.

Write Now in May involved a series of weekly meetings among the writers, developing shared tools for collaborating around specific journal article manuscripts, blog posts, presentations, and responses to abstracts and calls for papers.

We were able to draft 10 manuscripts, create tools for sharing literature reviews and searches, and increase the numbers of fellows with writing projects underway. We are especially pleased that three graduate fellows participated in the event.

We want to extend a special thank you to all of the fellows who participated in the event. One outcome from Write Now in May is that we have created a new ITSRG Working Papers series. You can preview ITSRG Working Papers here. Originally posted 6/4/08.

Michele Masucci and Caroline Guigar
Temple University

ITSRG Student Fellow and Geography and Urban Studies Graduate Fatima Abbas was recently featured in Temple University's Meet the 2008 Graduates article. 

Her summer research for ITSRG was with the BITS program through the Graduate School's Summer Research  Opportunities program.

Her summer research focused on promoting technological and community empowerment for underrepresented minorities in the context of geography education, blogs, and the creation of a community GIS. Her analysis was presented as "The Blog: A Tool in Youth Technology Instruction and GIS Development" on November 1, 2006, at the Race, Ethnicity and Place Conference of the Association of American Geographers held at Texas State University in San Marcos, TX.

You can read more about Abbas HERE.
Originally posted 5/23/08.

Caroline Guigar
Temple University

ITSRG hosts a panel session at the AAG  meeting in Boston on the intersection of informal science education and geography - Lessons learned from the BITS Program  Wednesday, from 10:10 AM - 11:50 AM

Panelist(s):
Michele Masucci - Temple University
Lorena Munoz - University Of Southern California
Michael L. Dorn - Temple University
Langston Clement, Temple University
Melody Grewell - Indiana University
Jeffrey Carroll, Temple University
David J. Organ - Clark Atlanta University

Session Description: BITS is a three-year, youth-based ITEST program funded by the National Science Foundation. BITS used an informal science education model for engaging youth to learn information technology skills through hands on, interactive and non-traditional approaches. The program evaluation emphasized implementing an instructional approach that was culturally relevant with regard to participants, staffing, and content themes.

The research model aimed to assess the viability of a collaborative model for creating a community geographic information system that engaged high school students and provided a context for them to acquire an understanding of basic geographic concepts. This session will provide an overview about the outcomes and challenges involved in translating geographic knowledge and information technology skills into meaningful, age appropriate experiences for students in the program. We will also discuss possible new directions and opportunities for collaboration around new initiatives of the program. Originally posted on 4/16/08.

Caroline Guigar
Temple University

Graduate Fellow Langston Clement will present  Access to Admissions, a short film that visualizes enabled spaces from the perspectives of high school students in North Philadelphia.

This presentation will showcase a film  (See Below) created by high school students enrolled in the BITS Program at Temple University. The BITS program provides participants with experiences that build geographic information technology skills. The film depicts the perspectives of students on the meanings of accessibility for persons with disabilities on Temple's main campus.

The film illustrates the highly nuanced ways in which students connected with the literal challenges that are faced by persons with physical disabilities.

This paper will consider the challenges associated with representing the concerns of persons with disabilities. It also addresses the main focus of the enabling spaces project - to find constructive ways of engaging youth to envision their urban spaces in inclusive ways as a means to create new urban geographies. Originally posted on 4/15/08.

Caroline Guigar
Temple University

PHILADELPHIA--Resume pitfalls, interview faux pas, and using one’s myspace page to land a job were the topics of conversation for 33 juniors from Carver High School of Engineering and Science, Philadelphia, who recently spent the day honing their job seeking skills as of the part of the “Inside with Intel” job workshop sponsored by the Information Technology and Society Research Group (ITSRG) at Temple University with additional volunteer support  from graduate students from the Geography and Urban Studies program at Temple.

The “Inside with Intel” workshop is one of a series of job-skills workshops created by ITSRG in conjunction with Philadelphia-area Intel employees. These workshops are designed to give students the opportunity to learn from and network with local IT industry executives and to ask questions in a small, informal, group atmosphere.

The event is part of ITSRG's larger mission to provide avenues for local high school students to  explore and enter careers in Science, Technology, Engineering and Medicine fields (or “STEM”) fields.

ITSRG sponsors an ongoing National Science Foundation-funded after-school program and a summer intensive experience for Philadelphia-area high-school students to encourage women and minority students to purse degrees and careers in STEM fields, which traditionally have remained close to women and minority students.

Currently, the Philadelphia region lags behind the nation in training its high-school students to enter college in careers in science and technology despite the growing need for science and technology workers.

Intel provided a team of eight employees through a company- sponsored community-volunteer program, which provides company time for its employees to volunteer in their communities throughout the year.

Intel was a natural fit to lead the workshop.  The company has made significant investments to grow its own workforce diversity program and had been consistently listed among Fortune Magazine's 100 Best Companies to Work For.

The day long event was attended by juniors from Carver High School, a magnet school focused on science and technology. The juniors will use the skills and tips from the workshop and apply them to their own upcoming internship experiences.  "I liked how these workshops gave me a feel of what I need to prepare for a job," noted a student at the end of the day.

The Intel participants spent the day running small workshops for students on topics such as how to create competitive resume; how to build personal networks to find a job; and what employers are looking for in an employee. Students also spent time learning how to use social-networking sites such as Myspace and Facebook to increase their chances of finding a job and providing a positive face to potential employers. "Employers look at Myspace and Facebook pages to see what kind of an employee you would be, noted one presenter. Show them a positive face. Make these pages work for you and not against you."

Students also spent time practicing their interview skills with real industry leaders and gaining valuable feedback as to what to say and how to interact in a corporate environment. "We learned from real workers rather than someone who just read us resources,” reported one participating student. “I appreciated that workshop more because it was a life skill," added another.

Carver students got the chance to offer their own feedback to the Intel presenters during one workshop designed to showcase Intel's innovation. As part of the workshop, the students provided product feedback on some of Intel's products that are currently in development. "I enjoyed how we got to interact with the workers from Intel and test some of their products," said a student.

Two other workshops focused on acquainting students with the Intel technology and the paths that the various employees at have taken over the years. Several presenters shared how they started their careers as engineers and have moved onto jobs as trainers or sales persons for Intel highlighting the variety of opportunities open to students who pursue STEM careers. "I really enjoyed myself and I learned a lot about Intel that I didn't know before," said one student.

For more information on upcoming workshops, industry volunteer opportunities, or more information about ITSRG please contact Caroline Guigar, ITSRG Program Coordinator at makati@temple.edu. Originally posted on 3/26/08.

Caroline Guigar
Temple University