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G: Raul Zaritsky NCSA on Some NCSA Education Group Activities
G: 
G: For our purposes Education Technology should be defined as an enabling
G: technology for learning. Thus the Biology workbench, at present, is a
G: scientist's tool not an Educational Technology. However Tango, Habanero,
G: SimCalc, KIE, CISLE, are all examples of learning technologies.
G: 
G: 1. Project description (one or two sentence description)
G: To create a repository, and help develop specifications for learning 
G: technologies capable of improving the delivery of distance education systems.
G: This includes synchronous and asych situations to provide instruction on Alliance
G: tools being developed and transformed for the learner. Specifically: our
G: computational modeling, and simpler modeling tools, our bioinformatics tools
G: and essential programming languages such as JAVA.
G: 
G: 2. PACI relevance of the project (how it relates to PACI goals/strategies)
G: This solves an essential dissemination and instruction question for the PACI,
G: and would provide the research basis for developing across partner courseware
G: and experience, both with distance and in class learning technologies.
G: 
G: 3. Potential audience or user base
G: On the UIUC campus, Lisa and I are teaching a Modeling and Visualization Class
G: in the College of Education. Alai na is teaching a class to the MBA school.
G: Geoff is teaching a JAVA class, and this summer, the bioinformatics group,
G: BioWorkbench, will be teaching a series of workshops.
G: 
G: 4. Partnership links both internal (AT/ET/EOT) and external; can include
G: potential "targets of opportunity" for partnership 
G: Biology workbench teams with schools and othe PACI partners
G: In-service and pre-service teachers
G: Other PACI partners, such as Shodor & MVHS instructing in student-based
G: curriculum to other PACI partners who will be providing similar services.
G: 
G: 5. Diversity and universal access issues
G: An essential research focus would be to define the problems and solutions to
G: the diversity and universal access issues in this limited focused projects.
G: 
G: 6. Barriers (with technology or other areas)
G: All of the current distance education, collaboration and concept mapping
G: technologies have significant holes in their capabilities. Finding the overlaps
G: and focusing resources on developing solutions could effectively take us beyond
G: the trigger point of effectiveness. The fact that we have not reached this
G: trigger point, in sum, is a quick way of defining our barriers.
G: Further, cognitive and sociological barriers to learning will be even more
G: difficult to over-come than these technical barriers. However, we can't
G: approach solid research on these fronts until we have working technologies. 
G: In medicine it would be like doing antibiotic studies in surgeries where there
G: was still a major sepsis problem.
G: 
G: 7. Status of project (i.e. planning, development, production)
G: The courses are ongoing and planned throughout the next year.
G: 
G: 8. Dissemination avenues - contributions to the literature (i.e. reviewed
G: journals, conference presentations, etc.)
G: Only projects with sufficient scholarly research commitments should be
G: considered for PACI support.
G: