9454729 Pea The work in this proposal builds on the Learning Through Collaborative Visualization (CoVis) Project, an NSF-AAT testbed. CoVis has focused on three areas - project-enhanced science learning, collaboration, and scientific visualization - as a means for transforming science education. Its goal has been to use next- generation technologies to support the formation and work activities of learning communities with media-rich communication and scientific visualization tools in a highly interactive networked collaborative context. The NIE testbed will transform the small-scale working CoVis model with three hundred participants at the high school level into a large-scale Collaboratory, for thousands of users in diverse settings. In exploring networking infrastructures for education, it is essential to recognize that "infrastructure" consists of more than network connections and transport protocols. To be effective, support for networked learning communities requires three interdependent components: technology infrastructure, educational content infrastructure, and teacher support and development infrastructure. In order to characterize costs and outcomes, a testbed also requires an evaluation and dissemination infrastructure. The technology infrastructure will provide students and teachers with an environment to support collaborative learning that includes video teleconferencing, collaboration software, a video server, Internet tools, and software environments for open-ended science investigations. The educational resources infrastructure will take advantage of the technology infrastructure to allow students and teachers to look up and exchange a broad range of interactive multimedia learning materials and scientific datasets. These resources will be developed by teachers, students, atmospheric scientists at UIUC, specialists in hands-on learning at the Exploratorium Science Museum, and other collaborators. The teacher development and supp ort infrastructure will take the form of workshops for teachers conducted by project staff, materials to support project-oriented pedagogy, and an emerging networked community of teachers sharing their experiences as they transform their teaching practices. The testbed evaluation and dissemination infrastructure will consist of a substantial research framework combining cognitive science, survey methods, and case studies to help expose the challenges for deploying high-bandwidth networking infrastructures for education and clarify the ways in which these infrastructures can improve the effectiveness of science education. The results of this research will be disseminated through a variety of traditional and network-based mechanisms to reach an audience of school administrators, policy makers, corporations, and researchers.
