IU QuarkNet meetings

Thursday, March 8, 2001

Meeting Place-School of Education 4112

Meeting time 3:00

Attendance: Rick Van Kooten; Dave Blair; Rob Kling, School of Library and Information Science (SLIS), Rebecca Scheckler, Lisa Yamagata-Lynch, a graduate student in Instructional Systems Technology (IST) and Christina Courtright, a graduate student in SLIS.

[Background Note: Dave Blair has had conversations about QuarkNet with Rob Kling dating back about 3 years—especially the data stream from major experiments concept. He was also interviewed by Christina Courtright this fall concerning why for him, QuarkNet is a meaningful professional activity, but the Inquiry Learning Forum (ILF) has little appeal. Since both Rob and Christina are doing research on ILF, and were familiar with QuarkNet, they were interested in sitting in on the meeting]

The purpose of the meeting was to explore ways the School of Education and IST could support the QuarkNet project.

Rebecca and Rob began by introducing a Center for Research on Learning and Technology (CRLT) project called Inquiry Learning Forum (ILF)

http://ilf1.crlt.indiana.edu/

This project began about 3 years ago to provide support for Inquiry based instruction and as a research tool. The site has not grown as hoped, and they are interested in expanding their community. Since the QuarkNet project is an inquiry project, our goals fit with theirs, however the ILF site shows students in classrooms and there are strict human subjects issues that require the site to be carefully regulated. While our goal is to have our site open to all, the ILF site is a professional site that requires registration and careful screening for all visitors.

ILF offers some aspects of their site such as threaded forums, and they will discuss how to adapt to a project that has such a high level of student involvement. As of now, no students are allowed to register for ILF.

Some of the features may be useful, and ILF plans to prepare a proposal where QuarkNet would have some visibility on the ILF. This may be as little as a link, or as much as a separate forum that could possible include students as well as teachers and would be more content oriented than most of the things that they do. Where they plan to go with this is not clear at this point, but they plan to have a more complete response for our next meeting April 7.

Rick and Dave communicated the immediate needs of QuarkNet. The need for technical help for developing a data stream and data base for the web site was stated. Rob Kling agreed to talk with Prof. Javed Mostafa in IU's Information Science School (SLIS) to act as a consultant, and perhaps make our project a graduate student project.

The need for help with planning the site and organizing the construction was also expressed. Rebecca assured us that help would be available in the form of classes as well as consulting. How this help arrives is yet to be determined.

The meeting ended about 4:30 PM.