A Community Learns On-Line: Planning Activities to Explore the Use of Interactive Cable for Education

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9454758 Zozma SRI International's proposal is for a 1-year planning grant, during which time SRI will work collaboratively with its partners - Viacom, the Castro Valley Unified School District, and the Castro Valley, community - to (1) identify needs that can be matched to educational products and services that can be delivered through Viacom's experimental interactive cable system, and (2) to specify product development, dissemination, and evaluation activities to be undertaken by the team in subsequent years. The study's planning focus will be on the use of Viacom's Castro Valley experimental cable system as a test bed for developing models for using interactive cable to support education reform, for developing products and tools, for evaluating the long-term impact of the system on home and classroom learning, and for assessing the sustainability of providing educational products and services through interactive cable. SRI proposes: To determine the current and future educational and learning needs of three sets of consumers in Castro Valley: students; school district teachers, principals, and administrators; and parents and other community users. To identify prospective matches between technological advances offered by the Viacom system and those educational and learning needs. Through systematic analyses, to specify educational products and services that (1) match the needs of the consumers, (2) are in accord with Viacom's overall mission to the community, and (3) are sustainable. To develop strategies for effective implementation of educational products and services over time, including preliminary recommendations on rate structure issues. These outcomes will be achieved through a series of activities including a needs assessment, a review of relevant literature, and a 2-day Innovation Search Workshop. During the w orkshop approximately 20 participants - including persons from Castro Valley schools, the community, and Viacom - will, through a series of workshop exercises, focus on the needs indicated by the needs assessment, and freely generate ideas. The set of ideas will then be converted by the group into a smaller set of usable and structured ideas and concepts and finally reduced to a small number of concrete ideas for viable, useful educational products and services. Products from the project will include the results of the literature search, the Innovation Search Workbook, the innovation search results, a summary report of project activities, and a detailed plan for the work to be undertaken in Phase 2 of the project. The plan will include a description on how SRI proposes to explore the role of the network in support of educational reform and innovation and to assess its impacts on classroom, home, and community learning patterns.