TECHNOS—Bob Davis, The Collaboratory Project Director, and Roxana Hadad, Instructional Designer and Support Specialist for The Collaboratory

July 27, 2008

Bob Davis, The Collaboratory Project Director, and Roxana Hadad, Instructional Designer and Support Specialist for The Collaboratory

The Collaboratory Project at Northwestern University was established in 1996 to develop and provide access to online resources and services, along with project consulting and support for teachers. Read more about The Collaboratory in our Featured Article.

Technos visited with Bob and Roxana in early May at their videoconferencing meeting room in the Northwestern University Library in Evanston, IL, to discuss The Collaboratory.

Technos: How did The Collaboratory Project come about?

Bob Davis: Originally we were founded by a roughly $2 Million grant from Ameritech over the course of three or four years. Then, we were funded by the State of Illinois. Recently, we have been able to use a series of smaller grants from various organizations like the Department of Natural Resources, I-VOTE, and others that are specific to those organizations’ interests.

I was surprised to learn that you’ve been around since 1996.

Bob: Yes, actually, we were on the cutting edge in the beginning—in the kind of community that we built and the kind of tools we developed, and the fact that we wrapped it all around the Illinois Learning Standards. In fact, we were one of the first groups that had the Standards online as a database that you could apply to your activities within a project in The Collaboratory.

We have had an extraordinary user base develop over the years. Right now, we have 9,600 teacher accounts, 900 technology coordinator accounts, and over 2,000 schools represented in The Collaboratory. You could multiply those teacher accounts by a typical class size of say, 30 students—and every year, there are more classes added in the mix. Most of these are in Illinois, but not all.

As I understand it, your outreach is to the City of Chicago, the State of Illinois, the United States, and on to other countries.

Bob: We’ve had participants from all over the world, which I think adds a little different flavor to it. Personally we’ve had some connections with an organization called KidLink that is involved with volunteers from all over the world and because of that, we’ve been able to play matchmaker a little bit for projects in Denmark, Sweden, and other countries. Those sorts of projects come through contacts such as someone who heard us speak at a conference.

Are these necessarily English speaking teachers and students?

Roxana Hadad: No. We’ve had French and Spanish classes and kids in Mexico and Canada who are bilingual who’ve participated in The Collaboratory. They can communicate with each other, as well as with us, with our internal messaging service.

Bob: Messaging allows the ability for teachers and students to communicate with others who have accounts with The Collaboratory. We don’t disseminate email addresses; it’s up to the teachers to establish that sort of communication, if they want to.

You recently sponsored a full-day seminar for teachers who use The Collaboratory. How did that go?

Bob: Very well, I think. We had 175 or so, mostly teachers, in attendance; plus one principal.

Roxana: We also had some people from grassroots organizations, who use The Collaboratory to create projects for students.

How much support do you perceive that those teachers get from their principals to use The Collaboratory?

Bob: We’ve been in existence now for 12 years, so we are fairly well known in Chicago Public Schools (CPS)—we’re widely known enough that a lot of people are aware of us, or have used us in the past, or have been part of one of our sponsored projects, or helped to develop curriculum within The Collaboratory. So, there are a lot of principals who are aware of us, and quite often it’s the case that a principal will tell a teacher that a project sounds great, let’s get a team together and use The Collaboratoy to get it done. Sometimes those principals will give their teachers a little extra stipend to develop curriculum over the summer, or we teach school in-services to get our story across. We generally do presentations to group such as Illinois Computing Educators (ICE), the group that was here [most recently], or to school technology coordinators, or the various annual end-of-year conferences on technology. So there are a lot of ways that principals hear about us, but I think we could do a better job of advertising our services and our community. That’s something we’ll continue to work at.

I should mention that I have a kind of dual role here. I’m the associate director for Academic Technologies at Northwestern, the group that helps faculty use technology in their teaching and research. I was here at the beginning of The Collaboratory and then moved into the associate director’s job in Academic Techologies for about six years, and now I’m doing both. Roxana has been on board for about six years. This is an instructional technology outreach and is part of IT at Northwestern, which is what I think makes The Collaboratory very unique—we’re not part of the School of Education.

How does that work for you?

Bob: We’ve been able to very carefully walk that line because we really leave it up to teachers to decide how they want to use the community and the tools that we have built. They determine the pedagogy; they determine the curriculum. So we provide the infrastructure, and we listen to them to find out what they want and need. We want to build the right community that will be helpful for teachers. We’ve been very successful so far in walking that line.

If I’m a teacher new to The Collaboratory, how do I get started?

Roxana: We maintain The Collaboratory as a completely secure and safe educational environment. A teacher applies for an account, which is free, and we call the school to verify that she’s a teacher there, and we approve the account. Then the teacher creates the students’ accounts.

[NOTE: For more information, check out the How to Participate section of The Collaboratory Project Web site.]

Let’s talk about some of your projects.

Roxana: Sure. Let’s start with our Communities page and first the Sponsored Projects— meaning that we’re the ones who developed them for the sponsoring organizations. They serve a variety of purposes. One is that they introduce teachers to what we mean when we talk about a Collaboratory Project—what the possibilities are, so if you’re new to The Collaboratory, these projects are built for you, and you don’t have to create it yourself. Then, you’re introduced to how to participate.

Kind of an online tutorial.

Roxana: Right.

Bob: It’s an actual project, though, too. One we’re expecting students to participate in.

Roxana: And that would be a way for everybody in The Collaboratory to get together and talk about the work they’re doing. An example would be the Rebecca Caudill Book Club, where kids can read the Caudill Award winners, write reviews of the books, and read the reviews by other kids. We archive the entire history of each book, so that whatever book the student reads, he can look it up and find out what other kids thought of it, going back to when it first won the award. Kids can also discuss with other kids the newest award winner, and find out what they’re thinking about the book right now.

iVOTE! is a major initiative going on now to get kids to connect civic engagement with democratic participation, so they understand that they do have a voice and that they can actually help to make changes, regardless of voting age. They can then get other people learning more about their issues that concern youth. Just because you’re not of voting age doesn’t mean that you don’t have an issue that might be of concern.

I see this project was conducted in relation the Illinois primary.

Roxana: Well, now we’re focusing on the national election as well.

What was the result for the March primary?

Roxana: The vote was huge for Barack Obama. I can show you the results on pie charts and graphs.

Bob: It’s a really good example of the types of tools that are built into the project.

Roxana: The idea of iVOTE! is that kids are already involved in community service or that there is something they really care about. We’re trying to move that private commitment to a public forum so kids can become political advocates for whatever issue it is, and from there make others socially aware of the issue—hopefully, that leads to people going to the polls. One of the tools is the survey studio, where teachers and students can build their own surveys to get information. What we’re really interested in is what the kids’ issues are and what issues inform their choices for President.

This is just taking place in Illinois. Are other states doing similar things?

Roxana: I don’t know. This grant was only for Illinois, so that’s what our focus is. We’re gathering information from the surveys that tells us what the kids are interested in and how they would vote in a Presidential election. We can restrict the data, so that we can select for age, gender, and issue. This is incredibly important for students to understand.

Bob: They can think about statistics and analysis. There’s a lot of power in their hands, if they think about it.

Roxana: We also use the Cybrary in the iVOTE! project. “Cybrary” means “cyber library,” which contains various categories. It has a twofold purpose: teachers can create a library without having their students going off with Google where they don’t know where the kids are going to do their research; the other thing is that students can submit links as well, so they can create a social bookmarking site.

How does that work, if The Collaboratory is supposed to be a secure and safe environment?

Roxana: The teacher or students submit the link to us, the teacher gets an alert (from us) that a student has submitted a link; the teacher then approves or denies it, and we determine whether it should go live.

Bob: There are checks and balances all through The Collaboratory, by the teacher, by us. Everything that is involved as part of the project is up to the teacher to manage—or whoever is working with the teacher on the project.

The science projects look really interesting, too!

Roxana: The Spider Study and the Frog and Toad Study are sponsored by the Illinois Department of Natural Resources. They’re both pretty much the same format. Scientists don’t know enough about either of these species, and there are lots of kids with free time, so they go out and collect the data and learn about research protocol. They learn how to collect and analyze data and create a monthly journal for scientific research. They also compare their data with that of other kids around the state. In the spider study, kids in one classroom participated in a videoconference with scientists at The Field Museum, and the kids were able to ask experts the questions they had about the spiders.

These two projects are also specific to Illinois, correct?

Roxana: Yes, these species are definitely from Illinois. We’ve included an interactive map that shows where the participants are located.

But, once the information is online at The Collaboratory, anyone who is part of your community and is interested in this topic can access it there, right?

Bob: Yes, they could even copy it and customize it for their own area, if they want to. There is no cost for that.

Roxana: We had someone from Morocco email us the other day, asking if they could use it. I told them they could, although I don’t know if those spiders are in that country.

Our other Sponsored Projects are:

Day in Our Neighborhood, which is just one day of the school year when kids all over the world take one picture and post the photographs and then post descriptions of those places in their communities. All of these postings are linked to a Google Map, so the kids can see the location of the places, too. They can then share their own communities with others.

Poetry Month is a very popular project. April is National Poetry Month, so the kids take a survey about poetry, read poems, and write their own poems and illustrate them.

And you do the technological “magic” so it all works for the teachers.

Bob: Yes, basically. We listen to the teachers, we listen to the students, and we see what it is that would really help them accomplish their activities. Then we develop that and make it available as a resource, so when a teacher creates projects online, she can pick if she wants to use the Cybraries or the Surveys or the Nexis communities—so they can have one or as many as make sense for their particular project.

It’s a lot of work—both for you and for the teacher, to do project-based lesssons.

Bob: Yes, we put a lot into it, and so do the teachers.

Roxana: You’re giving a lot of freedom to the students, and it’s work and a little scary, but that’s where a lot of exciting learning happens.

Bob: We’ve joked at how we develop these resources and sometimes we’re very surprised at how the teachers and students use them in innovative ways.

When you say you listen to the teachers, how do you solicit their opinions and ideas?

Bob: We hold symposia and conferences, and we do a lot of presentations to teachers. We also have a lot of teachers volunteering, especially around our sponsored projects. We have teachers who have been in The Collaboratory for quite a while and they give us really good feedback. Other times, we’ve had more formal groups for feedback, much like focus groups.

Roxana: Teachers aren’t shy about sharing their opinions!

Bob: We also provide a whole series of what we call eCourses, which really allow a teacher to go online to learn the mechanics of things at their own pace. We highly recommend that, especially for a school district that is interested in this. Generally, Roxana would go to the district and present an hour- or two-hour-long talk to introduce people to it. Then, sometimes we’ll do another session when we’ll sit everyone down in a computer lab and just walk everybody through how to do a project. Sometimes we’ll walk them through an eCourse as a group—and that works well, because they have their colleagues to help out and Roxana is there to answer questions. There is no cost for those sessions.

It sounds like you’re getting a lot of information and feedback through this process.

Roxana: Plus, if anyone has questions, they have my phone number and email address, and they can contact me any time.

Bob: I think the most effective method for us is when teachers are at a conference and hear other teachers talking about a project that they’ve done with us. That’s generally what we do: We’ll make presentations at conferences and then encourage those participants to talk to other teachers about it. We’re the second speakers, in a way; it’s the teachers who are showcasing their own work that interests people.

Roxana: It’s nice to have the face-to-face seminars, but I push the eCourses first, because you can do those at your own pace.

Bob: It doesn’t hurt for the teachers to do their own homework first, too.

Roxana: Teachers vary widely, in terms of tech-savviness, so doing the big workshops with a wide range of skills can be intimidating for some of them. That’s why I think their doing the eCourses first and then our coming in later to help out works best. But I do enjoy the one-on-one contact. There are some teachers who’ve been involved with us for so long that it’s always fun to keep up with what they and their students are doing now.

When you say “we,” who does that include? It seems like a lot of work for just the two of you.

Bob: Well, it’s Roxana and I; and we have a programmer (Paul Hertz) on staff and another person (Bonnie Thurber) who works on our professional development activities. We will supplement this staff with graduate students here at Northwestern, if we need the help. For instance, accounts need approval or content needs review—that sort of thing.

There’s no doubt that we’ve become a little more selective about the types of groups and the projects we get involved in, but anyone is welcome to use The Collaboratory at any time. They can pretty much use it without our help, because everything’s on line and available once they establish an account.

We’ve a big project in the works now with Chicago Public Schools that will develop five K–8 schools on the south side of Chicago, and each school will be a technology magnet for another five schools located around them—and they’ll all use The Collaboratory for collaboration. We’re working with the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy® (IMSA) who will be teaching them project-based learning techniques, and we’ll be doing some in-services this summer for them. Those are the kinds of groups we want to work with: there’s an organization that has a goal; they have some staffing; they can help us accomplish things, and we can piggyback on that.

What are your criteria for being more selective?

Bob: Most important: Is there somebody who’s willing to invest in it? We’re looking for groups that are committed to a project and have goals, and we can leverage them to coordinate things. We’re always looking for more grant opportunities. For instance, we’ve worked with astronomy groups and have received National Science Foundation (NSF) grants to continue funding for that.

Roxana: In the astronomy project, we’re linked to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, where the kids can look for objects in the sky through the telescope.

Bob: This is a partnership with the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, and we did get a small grant from them. There are all these remote-control telescopes around the world, so with a Web browser you can submit your request. There is curriculum designed around it and connections to large databases, and it all shows up as a Collaboratory project for the future.

How do teachers use this project-based information?

Bob: Anybody’s welcome to use it and copy it, but there is a disclaimer that says “This project was originally created by Roxana”—or a group of teachers—and the person or persons who created it gets a notice that it’s been copied and who it’s being used by, so they can touch base with that new person.

We’ve been developing an online community for 12 years and each year it’s been refined a little more to help enhance it.

Roxana: Here’s what a project looks like: You enter as a teacher or as a student, and those are two different views. The students only view what they need to do; the teacher gets the view of all the background material and the reasons for each activity. Even though we are not enforcing any kind of methodology, we are built on an engaged learning model, so we want students to know why they have to do this. The activities make up the meat of the project—these are units in a classroom, and they’re linked to available resources. The teacher can build a community in The Collaboratory any way he wants to … for instance, in the Nexus section, you can divide it into communities, sections, or classrooms stored online. The templates are stored online, so no teacher is required to program in html—and any kind of information, including graphics, video, and text, can be included. When the activity is completed, the kids can submit it to a gallery, where anyone can view it. The teacher approves this step first, though, through our alert system.

Are assessment tools built into these projects, too?

Roxana: Yes. The assessment happens in the activity, where the teacher decides what tool to use—some teachers use rubrics, others use other methods.

Bob: Each school and district requires different assessment, but all are correlated to the Illinois state academic standards.

Roxana: It’s all available online and can easily be included in every project and activity.

Bob: We haven’t done that for every state, however. That would be a huge undertaking. When we started The Collaboratory, it was right when the State of Illinois was developing its standards, and we were receiving the better part of our funding from the state, so that’s what we focused on.

Roxana: The Illinois standards are aligned with national standards, so it isn’t a major departure from what other states are doing.

How do you assess The Collaboratory? How do you determine the success of this project?

Bob: Well, for each grant, we have assessment requirements and must report to the granting entity. We also look at feedback and recommendations from our participants. I don’t know that we have a formal system of assessing The Collaboratory. But the annual Symposium is the culminating event for us, and we somewhat judge whether we’ve been successful by how well that event goes. Generally we get a good number of participants from existing schools, but we can also look at the number of new teachers who tell us that they’ve heard about The Collaboratory and want to learn more about it and begin to use it. About a third of our attendees each year are new; about a third are “old-timers” who come back every year; and a third are teachers who’ve been involved one or two years. We have a nice core set of teachers who are still using it and who are recommending it to others, as well as volunteering to show others how it works and are recruiting new participants. The community is supporting itself and is involved in its continuance.

If there is one improvement you could make, what would it be?

Bob: We’re rolling out a couple of new resources now…we’ll have a blog, and a wiki, and we’re enhancing our synchronous chat capability that will be tied more closely to a particular project. We’re also modifying our discussion boards so they’re tied to a particular activity. I think, if there was one thing we’d like to have is more long-term, continuing funding.

I asked the participants at the recent symposium if The Collaboratory is still relevant to them as teachers, to their students, to the goals of their schools and districts. I’m starting to get feedback that is overwhelmingly positive. They’re telling us yes, it’s still very relevant to us. We’ve been told that we need to market and advertise it more to get the word out. So, we’d love to get funding to help us with that effort. Right now, it’s mostly funded by Northwestern University and a number of small grants. For us to be able to maintain this credibility and build this community for 12 years, we’re really proud of it.

Roxana: Part of my mission at the symposium was to talk to the teachers and get their feedback, and overwhelmingly the response was that they see The Collaboratory as safe—again and again, the word safe was emphasized.

There are a lot of hazards out there to kids online, and it’s hard for teachers to monitor all the available Web sites, so we congratulate you on achieving that safety reputation.

NOTE: For more information about The Collaboratory Project’s 11th Annual Symposium, held on May 2, 2008, at Northwestern University, go to http://collaboratory.nunet.net/symposium2008/agenda2008.html. To join The Collaboratoy, establish a New Account online at http://collaboratory.nunet.net/cwebdocs/participate.html. There is no fee to join, but you will be asked to identify your organization before proceeding.