Baltimore Learning Community BLC Maryland Electronic Learning MELC www.learn.umd.edu

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Baltimore Learning Community (BLC)Maryland
Electronic Learning (MELC)www.learn.umd.edu

• A learning community of middle school teachers in
  the Baltimore City Public School System (BCPSS)
• Use information technology to build the learning
  community.
• Develop a library of multimedia learning
  resources
• Facilitate interaction among teachers

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MELC Partners and Participants

• Senior Personnel (Present and Past)
• Bob Allen
• Kathleen Fulton
• Willis Hawley (PI)
• G. Marchionini
• Mike Pitroff
• Victor Nolet
• Anne Rose
• Bert Ross

• U.S. Dept of Education Technology Challenge
  Grant to Baltimore City Public School System
• Partners
• Apple Computer
• Discovery Communications
• Maryland Public Television
• NARA

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Maryland Electronic Learning Community

• 5 middle schools in Baltimore City Public School
  System
• 35 teachers
• Being expanded across BCPSS high schools

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A Multimedia Digital Library

• 5000 total resources, including about 2000 2-3
  minute clips (50 hours) of Discovery
  Communications video
• Extensive metadata
• Teachers build lesson plans
• Limited network infrastructure

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Cataloging and Accessing Multimedia Content

• Organized by topic and MSPAP learning outcomes
• Teachers need a detailed preview to determine
  suitability

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Turning Video into Hypermedia Structured Video
Browser

• Adding a Table of Contents to the digitized
  videos (IBrowse)
• Capturing conceptual content
• Expository multimedia
• Narrative structures

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Multiple Channels of Electronic Communication

• In traditional teaching environments, teachers
  often have little professional interaction.
  Electronic communication media can help to
  improve that.
• We provided a variety of communication
  modalities
• Email
• Video conferencing
• Threaded discussion group
• Annotations on items in library
• The diversity of modalities seemed to effectively
  support different tasks and individual
  communication styles.

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Towards a Community Digital LibraryQuick
Indexing Tool

• New types of services.
• Allow teachers to add their own materials into
  library like a bulletin board.
• Popular, but allows a mixture of quality into the
  collection.

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Importance of Locally Relevant Content

• Teachers and students like to include local
  content such as the OpSail2000 visit to Baltimore
  Harbor

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Recommendations

• Teachers had bookshelves for content they felt
  was interesting.
• The bookshelves were public and could be searched
  to provide recommendations
• Problems Privacy and possible positive feedback

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Evaluation

• Finding the balance between the library as an
  authoritative source and as a bulletin board.
• The community requires constant nurturing.
• Students love the Web, but it is difficult to
  identify direct positive outcomes.
• Teachers dont always want to develop their own
  lesson plans.
• Overall, a success in helping teachers to
  integrate Web into teaching.

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Next Steps

• Providing content directly to students in
  classroom and even in their homes.
• Managing bulletin-board use of library
• Defining metrics for quality.
• Searching interface to show levels of content
  quality.
• Local/Global strategy
• Continue to support local learning community.
• Develop an Open Archive architecture for video
  delivery.
• Self-describing collections
• Especially how to characterize multimedia
• Rights management policy for each collection