West Portal Reflections #10, October 12, 1997
West Portal Director of the MSU Communication Technology Laboratory
West Portal Reflections document my experiences as I try to open a portal to Northern California for Michigan State University. They are targeted to my teams in the Comm Tech Lab and Virtual University, to my close colleagues and bosses throughout Michigan State University, and to close friends and family. These pages serve as ethnographic documentation of my participant-observation research on TeleRelating ("using technology to sustain and enhance close personal relationships"). The contents mix professional and personal life because I am reaching out 2500 miles to people I care about and work with. I hope my reflections help you to keep me in your hearts and make San Francisco a place that is yours. Thanks for journeying with me as I think, learn and experiment.
West Portal for DMAT students
Brian Winn and I have been updating the Digital Media Art and Technology web pages, reflecting the impact of the west portal on the DMAT program. We have added INTERNSHIPS, JOB BOARDS and INDUSTRY MENTORS sections.
INTERNSHIPS http://www.dmat.msu.edu/DMAT/opportunities/internships/index.html
(local and custom-created internship opportunities)
JOBS http://www.dmat.msu.edu/DMAT/opportunities/other/index.html
(18 DMAT - related job search sites and sample postings)
MENTORS http://www.dmat.msu.edu/DMAT/opportunities/mentors/index.html
(8 industry mentors so far, with four more already agreeing to participate but not posted yet. This page will expand continuously. MSU students interested in careers in DMAT will find these real world, MSU-friendly contacts invaluable as they prepare for and enter the job market.)
On a related note, Janet Blake, a TC DMAT masters student, may be the first pioneer student to complete part of her MSU degree in East Lansing and part in Northern California. Frank Biocca and I are discussing options with her.
Patrick Dickson delivered Andrew to Stanford (sitting tables away from Bill and Hillary at the new Stanford parents' dinner), and stopped by the West Portal. Together we met with Roy Pea at the Institute for Technology and Learning at SRI in Palo Alto. Spending a day with Patrick and Andrew and Roy reminded me of how far telerelating needs to come before it matches face to face interaction.
Started 50 years ago as Stanford Research Institute, SRI split off from Stanford in 1970 during antiwar protests. A nonprofit organization, SRI brings in $330,000,000/year in contracts has restructured to run more like a business under new CEO Bill Summers from Booze Allen.
Throughout his career, Roy Pea founded 3 fifty-person technology and teaching labs: Bank Street in New York, IRC and CoVis at Northwestern, all still in operation. Now he runs the Center for Technology and Learning (CTL) at SRI. Projects include:
1.) The Living Curriculum Project
A common observation about innovations in education is they are not scalable beyond 6-7 teachers -- the implementations cease to be recognizable. Roy's Community of Learners project brought this point home. They tried to co-implement CoVis from 6 to 100 teachers -- a scale not accomplishable through hand holding. Some implementations were recognizable, others were not. Conjecture : capacity to appropriate an innovation varies by TEACHER, SCHOOL and COMMUNITY.
Design Rationale/Design Space
CPS Europark (Xerox in Cambridge) posed the general theoretical notion that designers create an artifact. What gets published or created is a characteristic of the artifact. What does NOT get published is the DESIGN SPACE, the artifact itself. CTL tries to advance concept of Design Spaces and Design Document.
Interesting implications for CTL and VU designs. Our intellectual/creative output is not just the finished product, but the thinking and prototyping that went into its creation and the added tweaks we would have inserted had there been time.
Seymour Pappert and Marvin Minsky worked with LOGO in the MIT AI Lab. Not scalable. K-12 teachers got to try things, had the resources of the AI Lab to create or fix them overnight. It's brittle, not extensible. Teachers on their own do not understand the underlying grammar and cannot adapt it to local conditions different from the original environment.
2.) Center for Innovative Learning Technologies (CILT)
This project is a stunning example of thinking big to maximize impact on the world. Supported by a grant of $500,000 per year for four years from NSF, CILT begins with a stellar industry advisory board including the Lew Platt (head of Hewlitt Packard), Ray Lane (head of Sun), etc. Sixty companies are providing support and collaboration!
This center will address pressing issues in the integration of research and education, train postdoctoral scholars to work at the intersection of technology and instruction, support a community-wide dialogue about the future of educational technology, and develop or refine methodologies that enable this work.
Specifically, they have identified four core research themes:
Visualization and Modeling
Technology-Based Assessment
Enabling Tools for Virtual Learning Communities
Ubiquitous Computing
"Theme teams" are convening on each topic to hold agenda-setting workshops to develop abstracts of all work being done in the area. Leaders of the field together will determine the most imporant prototype projects and fund them -- new techniques, new methods, new technologies...
3.) Tapped In: Shared Window and Chat Space for Teacher/Professional Development
TAPPED IN is a real-world conference center. Teachers with diverse interests, backgrounds, and skills can share experiences, engage in mentoring and collaborative work, or simply meet their colleagues. TPD organizations can maintain their own agendas (e.g., institutes and workshops), while enabling their teachers to benefit from a range of expertise, ideas, and resources that no one organization could provide by itself. Membership is free for teachers, educators, and researchers.
TAPPED IN is a technology called a multi-user virtual environment (MUVE) that enables people anywhere to engage in real-time (synchronous) collaboration, send email, post to bulletin boards and listservs (asynchronously), and browse Websites collaboratively all in a single on-line venue. Members can download free software and help guides and log in to TAPPED IN via a range of user interface options on Mac and PC computers.
Most of all, TAPPED IN is a professional community of K-12 TPD providers, schools, teachers, and researchers committed to education reform. Although each organization has its own mission, all contribute to the sustenance and growth of the community by committing time and resources and by helping to underwrite the costs of teacher participation and TAPPED IN capabilities and services. Individual teachers contribute to the community by participating in activities, helping others, and volunteering.
4.) Collaboration Possibilities with the CTL
For now, Roy's CTL is in need of software developers. At is request, I am preparing a packet of materials to send to him showing off MSU CTL designs. Our Tools for Thought projects, my Telerelating research, and VU/Andy's WebTalk all relate to SRI's CTL projects.
Two additional meetings advanced our collaboration with David Skole's
BSRSI group on campus. On September 25, they presented an overview of
their program and people. My rough notes
from the meeting are posted on the web.
To summarize very briefly, BSRSI's major themes of study: land use and cover change from global to regional/local cross scale and cross disciplinary. They take a PATTERN PROCESS approach -- see the patterns but do not know cause or effect. Use simulation models to observe patterns and link to effects. Their emphasis (niche) uses high resolution ( 10 meters to 30 meters ) sensors (Landsat 7, SAR, commercial satellites). They take satellite data and link it to field based case studies and empirical data into diagnostic and prognostic process models.
More and more they are called upon to provide Integrative Assessment of environmental problems at local and global scales across range of components from economic to biophysical to social. Missions include:
1.) Measuring tropical deforestation
2.) Taking observations and understand effects through analysis and modeling
3.) Conducting census type activities
4.) Evaluting and developing new space born technologies
5.) Disseminating findings through info management systems and technologies.
We are beginning work on a joint project. Still determining whether we will start with the Rainforest Report Card, the training CD-ROM for Brasilian Rainforest Deforestation Measurement Training, or redesign of the BSRSI web site. Or all three.
At the second meeting, I presented a 23 page web slide show on how the Comm Tech Lab goes from nothing to something. Deriving from my abstract on Creativity Driven Design, the pages show early and final versions of many Comm Tech Lab designs. Technologically, the technique of delivering a presentation with visuals on the web controlled in East Lansing while I speak via speakerphone from San Francisco worked surprisingly well. Time between each of the 23 pages while the web page loaded provided a natural break for discussion, resulting in a highly interactive discussion/presentation even though I had no visual cues that people wanted to interrupt and say something. The talk lasted too long (2.5 hours!) but I remain amazed that it could go for that long.
Notes from Jason Good of BSRSI identify next steps on the project.
A sociologist by training, Peter served as assistant director for Computing and Technology at MSU years ago and used to stop by the Comm Tech Lab for weird technology fixes every month or so. He moved to UCLA and is now at Berkeley. When I met with him, he about to catch a plane to Virginia to give a speech about copyright and the Internet. He claimed to miss working closely with techies!
Peter introduced me to Howard Besser in the Information Management and Systems program, and urged me to contact a number of people to discuss telerelating:
Larry Rowe, Director of the Berkeley Multimedia Research Group
Charles Kearns, Stanford Library
Hal@SIMS.edu
BreaslerKahle@alexa.com of the Internet Archive project
Peter Smith, CSU
Peter also suggested the Presidio as a possible office space when the portal is ready to expand. A former military base looking over Golden Gate Bridge, they now rent to nonprofit organizations for comparativelt low cost. The Internet Archive operates from an office there. I researched the location on the web. (First site I found detailed the toxic waste areas left over from military days.) Although breathtakingly beautiful (see areal shot), the location is off the path from public transportation and not easy walking distance to downtown areas. The Internet Archives site describes in detail how to get there. Not a place I would feel safe going to or from alone at night. Still, a possibility to consider.
|
|
Sheila Goetzman, former Comm Tech Lab designer, works in San Francisco for CompuCOOK. Sheila's onscreen designs are featured in CompuCOOK kiosks around the U.S. -- some have been spotted in Kroger in East Lansing. She also exercises her print and sales skills from University Printing days, developing conference booths and sales talks. And she programs Macromedia Director for attractor mode sequences. The kiosk is authored in Hypercard (!) and runs Director 3.0 movies. A little frustrating when Director 6 is the current version. |
|
Sheila's colleagues at work include artist/designers, programmers, business people, and chefs. Recipes are cooked, photographed, and tasted at the office a few blocks from Market Street and a few blocks from ChinaTown, near the Bay harbor. |
|
This description of Mangoes shows how far kiosk printing has come from the days of noisy ugly usually broken dot matrix printers. The Mango page, nicely typeset on a colorful recipe card, sailed out silently in seconds after I touched PRINT on the touchscreen.
Now that she works among chefs, I was not surprised that Sheila took me to a delicious vegetarian Dim Sum restaurant, pointing out great bookstores and Francis Ford Copolla's office building on our way. She has agreed to serve as an Industry Mentor for DMAT students and says HELLO! to the Comm Tech Lab. She mentioned how weird it is that some people she meets have not even heard of virtual reality.
