|
 Long considered an authority on the design and use of information in the classroom and workplace, Thomas Duffy will direct two substantial new grants to the School of Education. He also was recently named chief learning officer of UNext.com, and will guide the Internet education company's development of its on-line business education community, called "Cardean."
 http://www.unext.com/
Photo by Paul Riley, IU Photographic Services
|
The Center for Research on Learning and Technology (CRLT), led by director Thomas Duffy of the school's Department of Instructional Systems Technology (IST), has been awarded more than $1.8 million over three years by the National Science Foundation (NSF) for the project "Internet Learning Forum: Fostering and Sustaining Knowledge Networking to Support a Community of Science and Mathematics Teachers." The U.S. Department of Education (DOE) has granted the center more than $1.6 million over five years for the project, "Learning to Teach with Technology Studio."
Both grants were issued Sept. 1, with Duffy serving as project director. Duffy's co-principal investigators on the NSF grant are Sasha Barab and Don Cunningham of the IST department and Rob Kling, a professor at the IU School of Library and Information Science.
For the DOE grant, Duffy shares principal investigator duties with a colleague at the University of Colorado-Denver.
The newly established CRLT aims to promote and support a community of scholars dedicated to research on the design, use and implementation of technology to improve learning. Duffy sits at the center's helm, with IST faculty members Barab and Martin Siegel serving as associate directors.
Duffy characterized the CRLT as a "very collaborative community" whose two new research projects involve researchers from around the country.
The Internet Learning Forum project involves the design and evaluation of an electronic knowledge network, the Internet Learning Forum (ILF), to support an on-line community of math and science teachers. A professional development tool at heart, ILF will incorporate video streaming technology to allow teachers to "visit" other teachers' classrooms and engage in conversation about teaching practices with fellow teachers.
"The ILF design centers around the vision of a community in which teachers can virtually visit each other's classrooms to observe and discuss approaches to teaching mathematics and science topics," said Duffy. He said the research goal of the ILF project is to understand the principles for fostering, sustaining and scaling communities of practice, in which the value to participants of sharing their practice and entering the dialogue, outweighs their "costs," such as time, technology access or the concern of letting others view their teaching.
The second project, Learning to Teach With Technology (LTT) Studio, is funded through the DOE's Learning Anywhere Anytime Program. According to Duffy, many of today's teachers feel uncomfortable incorporating technology into their lessons.
"In 1999, the National Center for Education Statistics found that 80 percent of pre-K-12 teachers do not feel prepared to integrate technology into their curricula," he said. "One of the reasons for this ill-preparedness is a lack of relevant courseware for both pre-service and in-service teachers‹courseware that often focuses on learning about technology rather than learning to teach with technology."
The LTT studio, however, seeks to develop an Internet-based environment to support teachers in learning to use technology in their teaching. During the course of the project, the CRLT will lead a partnership consisting of EDUCAUSE (a higher education educational computing association), Western Governors University, University of Colorado-Denver and Phi Delta Kappa.
Participants will provide a range of learning modules that will support teachers in integrating technology into the curriculum consistent with local, state and national standards, in providing leadership in the use of technology at a building level, and in addressing the ethical issues involved in access to and use of technology.
"While the LTT studio will be broad in scope," said Duffy, "its focus will be on the use of technology to support student inquiry and problem solving."
Return to Table of Contents