OII's Entry for the NII Awards

OII in 25 words...

OII is a grassroots national telecollaboration effort to help people place themselves at the center of their own learning, within a vibrant online community.

Summary Description

The Online Internet Institute (OII) is an emerging paradigm for ongoing collaborative  professional growth. Created by classroom educators and supported by proponents of education reform, the Online Internet Institute demonstrates the network's power to help change the way people teach and learn. The OII is an  expanding virtual community of practioners and others who care about reinventing teaching and learning, by reflecting on our teaching practices, supporting our peers, and fostering a knowledge-building learning environment. Since  our beginning in June of 1995, OII has helped 1130 participants invest more than 18,800 hours in their own professional growth.
 

Background

OII started from a conversation between Ferdi  Serim and Bonnie Bracey, who were reflecting on the difficulty educators face in learning to use the Internet. They thought that creating a "place" on the Internet where the Internet ethos (share what you know, help who you can as others have helped you) could nurture anyone who wanted to discover how the Internet could support lifelong learning would be very powerful and effective. On January 18, 1995, a single message was sent to 20 luminaries  in the field of educational networking asking if they'd serve as advisors as we developed the project. Every single person said "No! We don't want to advise, we want to *do* the project!". Most of these folks were usually  competitors on big grants, and rarely had the opportunity to collaborate. We had no money, no organization, we were just two teachers with an idea.

During the six weeks that followed, intensive exchanges of email produced a  proposal to the National Science Foundation to fund a summer program that would help educators discover how to harness the potentials of the Internet in their classrooms. Although the NSF funding was not slated begin until the fall, this band of innovators proceeded to implement the ideas on a shoestring budget. With most of the planning accomplished online, the partners of OII met for the first time in June in Baltimore, to devise implementation strategy based on available resources.

We decided to persevere, and the next week, the first of 400 teachers began participating in our summer projects in New Mexico, Texas, Oregon, and New Jersey. The following week, NSF notified us that we'd be funded for a year long planning grant. We decided to do a first year implementation with these funds, as the need of educators was too great to wait. Participants tell us they're now years beyond where they'd dreamed of being.
 

Highlights

(What aspects of our project we hope judges pay closest attention to)

We put technology to work for people, helping them meet local, personal  goals using globally shared resources. We apply the Internet ethos (share what you know, help who you can as others have helped you) so that everyone becomes a teacher, learner and contributor within the OII community. We are not a traditional organization, transplanted to cyberspace; we more closely resemble the Iroquois Confederation, where different groups collaborate, yet retain their identity, achieving far beyond what would be possible in isolation.  We're discovering new types of roles and relationships that allow us to work together at "netspeed".
 

Objectives

The Online Internet Institute exists to provide both a place and a process which enables people to apply the vast resources of the Internet for lifelong learning. This place is being built online, so that teachers and other learners may gather, independent of limits imposed by time or location. Our process is designed so that all participants may grow, through opportunities for sharing, reflection and collaboration. These activities link online "virtual" potentials with effective practice in "real life", independent of limits of personal or locally available expertise, enhancing the necessary and vital face-to-face activities people will organize locally.
 

Benefits to Users:

OII participants have developed courses, researched materials, but more importantly are reinventing themselves, and their profession. The pioneering efforts of the OII participants will ensure that their students will have access  to the tools without which they will be unable to function in the 21st century.

"I've come from a place where I felt a little out of place, a place where my vision of education was painfully different than what I saw  taking place around me. I knew that there were others out there like me, but contact was shortlived and intermittant. It was a place where technology was recognized as a force, but an unfocused one. It was place were technology was something to be purchased with surplus funds at the end of the year, a place where lip service was given to training."

"I'm not quite sure how, when, or why it happened, but somewhere things started coming together  in our district. A major investment in technology was made, our district participated in OII, and one of the biggest training efforts to date took place."

"Through OII I made contact with those out there who shared  some of my visions and that lifted my spirits. The events in our district have opened the eyes of many others to similar visions. I see the path clearer now, and I'm not walking the road alone." - Art Wolinsky (NJ)

Through telecollaboration, we have leveraged the experience, talents and energy of hundreds of previously isolated individuals. Examples? People who needed to teach the Internet in High School have created a continuously updated,  downloadable course, available for free to everyone. Anyone who wonders about how to reliably find information on the Internet can learn to do so at the Searching the 'Net site created by OII participants.

 

Measurement

OII activity has been captured in email and WWW contributions, comprising more than 4,500 messages representing 10 megabytes of data. This archival record reflects both the local/regional nature  of communications to solve infrastructure problems (such as the creation of Regional Educational Technology Assistance in New Mexico) as well as collaborations between sites (such as Team-Web, Search-Info and Technology Based  Emergent Literacy participant inquiry groups). Our posting of OII projects, including the New Jersey Core Curriculum Standards, has resulted in 13,000 visits to the OII web site per month over the course of the project.
 

Innovation

Although learning is a birthright, current conceptions of education can limit people's opportunities in ways that reinforce local inequities. We wish to liberate learning from locality.  Preparing educators to serve such an expanded role is a non-trivial task.

Educators must experience the power of inquiry-based, technology-enhanced collaborative learning in order to effectively support this type of learning  for their students. The Online Internet Institute nurtures collaborative professional development in cyberspace and community by providing an online workspace to support local educational reform through the enhancement of teachers'  professional skills.

Professional development specialists have long recognized that workshops led by outside "experts" are ineffective to produce change in classroom practices. Reformers recognize that moving from  teacher-centered classrooms to student-centered collaborative experiences positively affects learning. We use telecollaboration to help educators grow in this direction.

However, merely offering an online workspace is  insufficient, as so many laudable experiments in distance learning over the network have clearly demonstrated. The OII design is distinctive because it combines local professional development activities with a national online support structure. The strengths of each format reinforce each other to produce an integrated whole which is greater than the sum of its parts.
 

Success Factors

The Internet provides  experiences that forever change the way we teach and learn. We have found thousands of peers dedicated to extending these benefits to everyone. The tenor of these interactions between what would pass in the "real" world as "complete strangers" is one that has no parallel in "real life" other than Potlatch of the the Northwest Native Americans. In Potlatch, the entire community gathers to assemble, celebrate and redistribute the  riches that have been generated individually; in OII, ideas for insight and actions have replaced material wealth as a medium of exchange. These values guide the OII community.
 

Future Plans

A number of important national efforts have been and will increase their presence as collaborators with OII in support of their respective professional development missions. These partners include Educational Testing Service (ETS), BBN's National School Networking Testbed, TERC, The Math Forum, Kennedy Center for the Arts, etc. ETS and OII have been partners in devising a model of professional development that represents an intersection of OII mentoring and collaborative approaches with the content of professional development that is grounded in standards of highly accomplished teaching that have been developed by the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards  (NBPTS).

 

Real-Time Telecollaboration

Real-Time collaboration happens on our WWW site, using Co-Motion conferencing software, hypermail threaded WWW discussions, and CU-SeeMe  videoconferencing. We have linked participant teams in New Jersey, New Mexico and New York simultaneously, along with individuals across the country. This capacity has proven very effective for productive collaboration, both within  individual OII working groups, the OII mentor community, and as a means of organizing conversations between face-to-face and online course participants. For example, during one session, 25 participants generated 371 "real  time" contributions in 6 different activity areas, which provide models for everyone's growth in understanding.
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© 2006 Online Internet Institute.
Last updated 3/21/06