Common Knowledge: Pittsburgh
(CK:P)
Technical Advisory Committee
CK:P has monthly meetings with PPS personnel pertaining to the technical
project migration. The minutes of these meetings can be found on our WWW
server at the following URL:
/projects/ckp/publications/committees/tech/techadvisory.html
The committee is actively grappling with the many issues pertaining to migration. The following list of action items from the May advisory meeting demonstrates the variety and complexity of the discussion:
Educational Advisory Committee
This committee meets less frequently - twice a year. Minutes of the
meetings can be found at the following URL:
/projects/ckp/publications/committees/ed/edadvisory.html
The focus of this last meeting was internal dissemination of curriculum activities in CK:P schools. The committee was impressed with the amount and quality of the work generated by students and teachers at the sites. They felt that the next challenge was to get the message out to the rest of the District. The following discussion occurred:
Another suggestion made for publicizing CK:P was that the educational staff could do a presentation at the District's summer leadership institute for principals and support staff.
Another possibility mentioned was teacher in-service sessions at individual schools."
The message was clear, CK:P must reach out to a larger community within the school District. There is evidence that the project is making significant inroads with educators in the District - 1400 users. However, there is a need to be proactive in reach ing those people - support staff, principals and policy makers - that ultimately make the decisions that effect students and teachers.
Policy Discussions
Monthly meetings between CK:P staff and District policy makers - the
associate superintendent and CK:P PI, Bernie Manning, and the Director of
the PPS Division of Computer Services and Technology Support, Myron Lentz
- provide a forum for frank discussion s pertaining to migration
strategies.
Support for Year 1 and 2 Sites
Year 1 sites - McCleary E.S., Schenley H.S., Westinghouse H.S. and
Woolslair E.S. are technically completed. Educationally their Internet
projects are evolving. Each site has a user administrator that is
performing site based technical management. The two high schools are
beginning to provide information about their projects and schools on the
WWW:
http://sparta.schenley.pps.pgh.pa.us/
http://georgew.gw.pps.pgh.pa.us/gwhs/
CK:P continues to support these four sites through online help and onsite visits.
At Year 2 sites, installation of the hardware, networks and connectivity was completed at 4 of the 7 sites by the end of the school year. An indication of the beginnings of these schools' activities can be found at:
http://3rivers.phillips.pps.pgh.pa.us/
http://sparta.schenley.pps.pgh.pa.us/user/zinga/rivers/liberty/liberty.html
Three of the CK:P sites will be completed over the summer. The curriculum activities at these sites did not proceed this year. However, the teachers through limited access, were able to continue interacting with the project during this period.
CK:P continued to support Year 2 sites both online and onsite. There was more of a need for onsite visits because these sites are early in their evolutionary cycle. Onsite activities at Year 1 and Year 2 schools included workshops on html, local mailing lists, ftp, user administration and network topology.
Year 3 Sites
The RFP process chose 3 new CK:P sites - Allegheny Middle School,
Knoxville M.S. and Schiller M.S.. The wiring diagrams and narratives for
these three sites, were submitted to PPS facilities on June 16. The goal
is to have the buildings wired by December 31, 1995.
An inservice for teachers at Year 3 sites was conducted at the beta site. Thirty teachers came for 18 hours of inservice training (6 sessions for 3 hours). These teachers were not paid for this inservice. This continuing in-kind contribution from teachers at CK:P sites is a testimony to the power of the RFP process.
The action plans and proposals for all CK:P sites can be found at:
/projects/ckp/curriculum/curriculum.html#action
Project Dissemination
Online Activities
CK:P has updated its WWW homepage to better reflect the process and
products that the project is creating. It now has a page for general
project dissemination (/projects/ckp) and a local page for teachers
and students (/projects/ckp/local.html).
Conferences
Presentations were given at the following
conferences during the second quarter of this year:
Issues of Migration
As CK:P continues its migration to the PPS, a number of critical issues
are surfacing that effect CK:P's ability to institutionalize network
technologies in the school District.
During the second quarter of this year, CK:P's technical staff has been completing the development for the servers for Year 2 sites, deploying the remaining infrastructure and equipment, continuing the process of migration and consulting on infrastructure for Year 3 sites.
Site Deployment
We spent a significant time this quarter completing the network and
hardware installation at Year 2 sites. Once the school District completed
the wiring at a site, we would install the remaining network
infrastructure and hardware. Unfortunately, we wer e unable to deploy all
CK:P environment components at each site since not all the products were
completed in time. The paragraphs below describe the status of each
component of the environment.
Network Information Server
This past quarter we have finished the operating system for 2 of the
platforms, Ultrix and NetBSD and placed them into production. We have all
but the finishing touches on two more systems, Digital Unix (previously
referred to as OSF) and Solaris. We exp ect these systems to be placed in
production by the beginning of the next quarter. In addition, we have
decided not to build an AUX network information server. We determined that
since it was the fifth server platform to be added to our environment and
w as to be deployed at only 1 out of 11 sites, the effort to develop the
platform far outweighed the added benefit. This system was to be deployed
at Spring Hill: we plan to replace its functionality with a NetBSD based
server.
The table below lists the type of platform, the status of the platform, and the sites for deployment.
Type Date Status Sites -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ultrix 4/30/95 Production Westinghouse HS Central Site (2 Servers) Fulton NetBSD 4/30/95 Production Woolslair Schenley Phillips Liberty Spring Hill Digital Unix 6/30/95 In Testing Carrick East Hills Solaris 6/15/95 In Deployment McCleary Frick
User Devices
This past quarter we deployed the remaining user devices, both PC and MAC
based platforms to all Year 2 sites. For PC sites, we refreshed both the
new and existing PCÕs thereby placing the latest software packages on all
the machines. Documentation on the PC Remote Build package can be found
at:
/projects/ckp/tech/docs/install.html.
Printers
We purchased HP printers for all the Year 2 sites and ran into
difficulties supporting printing capabilities for the Unix, PC and MAC
platforms deployed at the various sites. By the end of the second quarter
we had either solved the printing problems for each platform or found a
viable work around. We were able to deploy all the printers to the sites
prior to the end of the school year. We also identified printing issues
to work on over the summer. These issues include: expand the number
printing platforms supported by PC-Remote-Build; support direct PC to
printer access; provide support for printing from miscellaneous (i.e.
Notepad) applications.
MAN
We are continuing to work with TCI on implementing ethernet over cable to
three of the Year 2 sites. We expect the connection to the central site,
the Mellon Institute Building (MIB) to be completed by the end of the
quarter. This will enable the current connected site, Carrick, to have
access to the Internet over this link. We then plan to work with TCI to
connect East Hills and George Westinghouse High School (GWHS) to the
network prior to the beginning of the next school year.
We have implemented LADs lines at 2 of the sites, Frick and Liberty.
We are in the process of completing the ISDN connection at Phillips.
Other
We have purchased and installed high end user devices, capable of
supporting multi-media access to the network, at all 11 CK:P sites. These
systems also include a scanner, allowing the sites to begin to develop
their own WWW pages.
We have also installed UPS, connected to the server and router, at all the sites. The UPS has already been of great help at GWHS which experiences frequent power outages.
We have ordered, tested and are in the process of deploying backup systems to all CK:P servers. We have developed and documented a procedure by which site administrators can backup their systems on a regular basis.
Migration to the Pittsburgh Public Schools
This past quarter we have continued our efforts to support migrating the
infrastructure and technical expertise to the school District. These
efforts include: weekly classes for the PPS technical staff; installation
of CK:P software packages on existing PPS PCÕs; and the establishment of
working groups to address PPS infrastructure issues.
The first working group to convene was the modem pool working group which was tasked with determining a plan for utilizing existing PPS infrastructure to support both dial up and SLIP Internet access for teachers and students. The past quarter the group agreed upon two demonstration projects, one for installing LAN based SLIP and the other for dial up access using existing modems and phone lines, at the PPS Administration building. The projects are scheduled to be completed by Sept 1, at which time we can finalize plans for modem access via PPS.
During the second quarter of the follow-on NSF grant, the CK:P Assessment group has continued to focus its efforts in three areas: tracking migration of the project from CK:P to PPS; assessing the educational effects of WAN; and disseminating initial find ings.
During the second quarter, the CK:P assessment group has tracked migration through two major activities: attending CK:P-related committee meetings and interviewing CK:P and PPS staff. Attending meetings has allowed us to track the key issues concerning migration as they have arisen. Annual interviews with PPS staff at various levels of the organization have been conducted during this quarter and will continue into the next quarter. These interviews focus on the experiences and perspectives of PPS staff at various levels (e.g., classroom teachers, administrators) in implementing K12 WAN technologies. By doing this, we learn the insider's perspective on migration that is essential for understanding political and cultural issues which facilitate and hinder implementation. Interviews with CK:P staff members have similarly focused on migration issues and the organizational opportunities and constraints that affect the institutionalization of CK:P.
Our activities in assessing the educational effects of WAN technologies on K12 occur in three areas: observing classroom Internet use; surveying and interviewing educators and students; and collecting educator and student "products". During this quarter we continued observations started during the original NSF grant, focusing on several "case analysis" sites. Observations of classroom uses of the Internet or planning for curriculum use took place from one to three times per week, involving approximately thirty educators and several hundred students. We conducted surveys of educators who attended CK:P-run inservices about basic Internet use and educational applications. Analyses of these data will allow us to provide formative evaluation to the CK:P educational staff as well as being useful for future summative evaluation of CK:P. Annual one-on-one interviews with educators have been completed in this quarter. We also interviewed approximately fifty students at two high school sites to understand their experiences with WAN. Planning has begun for the 1995-96 school year regarding the best use of our efforts in case study sites. While we will continue to gather data at a number of sites, we will also shift slightly more of our effort to analyzing the vast quantities of data we have already gathered. Because of the technical delays at some of the sites, the lengthy processing time required for qualitative data, and the evolutionary nature of WAN usage, we can not provide any definitive conclusions regarding the educational effects of WAN. However our observations suggest that student and educator enthusiasm and commitment remain high, even in situations where technical delays have made curriculum use difficult.
Two categories of K12 "products" are online publications and electronic mail. Several CK:P schools have begun to develop WWW home pages and other schools are planning to do the same. We have tracked the progress of these efforts from the earliest drafts to more sophisticated versions. In addition, the assessment group is a member of all school electronic "working groups"; hence, we receive routine mailings among the staff at CK:P schools. This has allowed us to observe the evolution in educatorsÕ attitudes and behaviors with regard to using the Internet educationally. Another "product" is account login information (day of week, time of day, and duration), which has been collected automatically on the central CK:P server and on site servers, and has then been analyzed to show monthly usage and event trends. These tables are published on the CK:P web server for anyone to access:
URL: /projects/ckp/ckp.html, in the directory Usage and Participation Reports
In addition, we track CK:P gopher and web accesses and publish these tables on the CK:P WWW server (in the directory Usage and Participation Reports).
Although it is yet too early to have disseminated information concerning the follow-on grant, we have begun to publish information regarding some of our findings to date on the original NSF grant (January 1, 1993 - June 30, 1995). The CK:P WWW server (URL as given above, under the directory Dissemination) contains several of the conference papers given to date as well as references to in press journal articles. We are in the process of writing a book chapter in a volume edited by Sara Kielser of Carnegie Mellon University to be published by Lawrence Erlbaum. In this chapter we will summarize some of the major lessons learned from the first two years of CK:P.
Online Usage Survey
In early spring, 1995 (circa March), the CK:P education project staff had
the idea of conducting an online usage survey of all CK:P account holders.
They envisioned a brief, 3-5 question survey whose responses would be
useful for a number of purposes including the June 7 Education Advisory
Committee meeting and the final report to NSF on the first two years of
the project. The Assessment group also had some questions they wanted
asked. The process of creating the survey began in earnest in early May
and, once the questions were finalized between the education staff and the
assessment group, Kevin Sullivan of the CK:P technical staff put the
survey online as of 5/24/95.
Included with this report is some preliminary feedback from the online survey.