9705651 Carlitz The conference "Balancing Research and Practice" will bring together principal investigators in the NSF's Networking Infrastnucture for Education (NIE) program. The conference will take place from April 3-5, 1997, preceded by a six-week on-line discussion of issues that will be addressed in the conference. The overall conference theme will be the question of balancing research and practice. The NIE program provides many examples of research projects which have made substantial strides toward the incorporation of the lessons reamed from this research into the daily practice of the school districts involved in these projects. Another aspect of the NIE projects that will be emphasized in the conference is the idea of infusing research values into the classroom environment and thereby maintaining the freshness and dynamic inherent in the research phases of these NSF-sponsored activities. Here, too, the NIE program provides a number of good examples. These aspects of the NIE program will be significant in several new NSF initiatives including Research on Education Policy and Practice (REPP), Leaming and Intelligent Systems (LIS) and other efforts aimed at technology integration in education. In this sense the proposed conference will assist the Foundation in the launching of these new initiatives. Attendees at the conference will indude principal investigators and classroom prachboners from the various NIE projects, as well as the representatives of other federal programs which impact upon school networking programs. This group will interact on-line prior to the April 3-5 meeting. At the conference there will be break-out sessions which continue the on-line interactions and attempt to reach conclusions on the topics with which individual break-out groups will be charged. The emphasis here will be upon identifying problems and seeking to find solutions to these problems, rather than simply to catalog the many successes of the NIE program. On-line resources will be created in con junction with the conference, which will both highlight successes of the NIE program and summarize the on-line and face-to-face discussions which will take place as part of the conference. The conference itself will be held in Pittsburgh, PA, allowing attendees to visit some of the dozens of school and community sites involved in the Common Knowledge: Pittsburgh project and its various extensions to community and municipal networking. These site visits will provide a portion of the conference's focus upon issues of practice. The site visits will be followed by the break-out sessions, which will emphasize issues of research and the balance between research and practice. A plenary session will pull together the various threads that will have been explored in the break-out sessions and provide conference attendees with an overall summary of the issues addressed by the conference and an outlook for future activities in this area in the realms of research and practice. ***
