Using
Developmental Research
To
Design, Develop, and Evaluate an Urban Education Portal
Lorraine Sherry, RMC Research Corporation,
Abstract: The
Teacher Education Network
(TEN) PT3 Catalyst Grant, in conjunction with its partner, the Urban Network to
Improve Teacher Education (UNITE), created an Urban Education Portal for its
members that provided interactive and personalized access to a variety of
digital resources and tools. The process used to create the portal and manage
the digital resources is presented, using Richey and Nelson’s (1996) Type I
developmental research as the conceptual framework. A general analysis of the design,
development, and evaluation process is followed by the results of three rounds
of usability testing by typical users.
Background
UNITE is an outgrowth and subset of the Holmes Partnership, a network of local universities and schools in collaboration with national professional associations and community agencies that has had a long history of addressing educational reform issues. The Holmes Partnership is committed to creating high quality professional development and significant school renewal. UNITE is formed of 31 urban teacher preparation programs in the United States that are committed to preparing future teachers for urban schools and that focus explicitly on fostering equity and social justice in urban teacher preparation. As a national initiative of urban education partnerships, UNITE is engaged in a thoughtful redesign of teacher preparation and induction that begins with an understanding of and commitment to urban communities and that is responsive to these communities. UNITE’s members are informed and dedicated urban teaching professionals who provide research and resources to support education practitioners in the unique and dynamic urban environment.
The Teacher Education Network (TEN) is a Preparing Tomorrow’s Teachers to Use Technology (PT3) Catalyst Grant. Awarded in 2000, this grant has six goals: to develop, strengthen, and disseminate Web-based tools for personal learning planning and digital portfolios for preservice teachers; to develop and nationally disseminate to preservice programs instructional materials and strategies for technology-enhanced contextual learning; to create online graduate programs in urban teacher preparation, for preservice teachers and non-licensed or under-prepared practicing educators nationally; to develop a national Web-based Clearinghouse on PT3 strategies and materials; to revise National Staff Development Standards to address quality in distance-based teacher development; and to institutionalise TEN as a growing national collaboration on technology-facilitated preservice reform and technology in preservice preparation.
Members of the TEN partnership include the Holmes Partnership; UNITE; the National Education Association (NEA); the National Staff Development Council (NSDC); the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE); the Great Cities Universities Urban Educator Corps, a national consortium of 19 large urban universities with teacher preparation programs; the Association of Teacher Educators (ATE); the Quality of Life project at New England College, a group that uses the Contextual Teaching and Learning (CT&L) model to help current and future teachers design and engage in standards-based community learning projects; the Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education (SITE); and the National Institute on Community Innovations (NICI), a nine state network of 30 Professional Development Schools (PDSs) committed to infusing technology into K-12 education. NICI also provided programming and technical support for the UNITE/TEN team.
Over the past three years, TEN actively engaged
its various partners in nominating and reviewing high quality online resources
that were customized to their particular audiences. TEN created a set of
interoperable Educational Reform Portals at http://edreform.net, and is currently working to establish strong
partnerships for each portal effort to ensure that the contents are highly
valued and effective. NICI’s collaboration with UNITE
and the Holmes Partnership focuses on supporting the efforts of post-secondary
educators to use technologies effectively for teaching, learning, and
collaboration, and to infuse equity resources and strategies into all aspects of
their practice. The Urban Education Portal project grew out of the need to make
available exemplary curricular materials and information on effective strategies
for transforming teacher preparation, produced or reviewed by UNITE members. The
design goal of the portal was to create a set of resources that changed over
time, engaged the professional community that makes and uses the resources, and
customizes itself to the user.
Conceptual Framework
The conceptual framework that describes the process of creating the Urban Education Portal and managing the digital resources is based on developmental research, as identified by Richey and Nelson (1996). Developmental research is “the systematic study of designing, developing and evaluating instructional programs, processes, and products that must meet the criteria of internal consistency and effectiveness” (Seels & Richey, 1994, p. 127). In our case, we will be describing the development of the urban education portal and simultaneously analysing the process.
Richey and Nelson (1996) recognize two types of developmental research. Type 1 developmental research “involves situations in which the product development process used in a particular situation is described and analysed, and the final product is evaluated” (p. 1216), whereas Type 2 developmental research requires a general analysis of the design, development, or evaluation processes either as a whole or as a single component. For the purpose of our research we followed the Type 1 developmental research methodology. Type 1 developmental research helped us structure the different components of our project by identifying our product focus, process focus, use context, tools and techniques, research methods, and nature of our conclusions. The outcomes of our ongoing study will be lessons learned from developing the Urban Education Portal and an analysis of the conditions that facilitate their use.
Product Focus
The Urban Education Portal, located at http://urban.edreform.net, is an online environment that provides organized information and offers resources and tools to users on the topics of preservice teacher preparation, teacher induction, community-based urban education, equity and social justice, and research and policy. The Urban Education Portal is more than a Web site that archives information on the four topics related to UNITE’s mission; it organizes and personalizes the resources for easy search and retrieval. Once resources are entered into any of the portal categories, UNITE/TEN reviewers then assess their validity using a set of standards. These standards include relevancy to urban teacher education, high quality, research-based, and significance to the field.
Process Focus
The process focus of the portal involved the research phase, development phase, resource review, and pilot test.
Research Phase
During the research phase, a group of TEN PT3
Grant consultants explored the Dublin Core (DC) project and other global
metatagging projects (Stephens, 2001). That led the group to build a catalogue
or metatagging vocabulary that was
interoperable with other global databases that are using similar standards.
These projects exist mostly in
A portal that uses Semantic Web technology is different from a standard server-based database in several ways. One important difference is that the portal can “poll” the WWW for new updates of any records in any other metatagged set, and can allow a constant two-way communication to occur. One example of this is when users customize a page on CNN (http://www.cnn.com) or Excite (http://www.excite.com/), and then every time the user logs in, the site tells them the weather in their region. Programs such as these use Semantic Web technology to go to the WWW and get the latest weather update. The program also selects the weather topics to be displayed on the user’s screen.
A second important
difference is that Semantic Web technology allows applications to develop "web
services" that share data sources, even if they were built independently and
remotely from one another. For example, an instruction and assessment
application in
Development
Phase
The product development phase
consisted of programming, metatagging, and research review procedure
identification.
Programming
The programming component of the development phase was
accomplished by the TEN programming team. As part of their National Web-Based
Clearinghouse activities, the team began developing the system architecture by
building a Digital Equity Portal for the PT3 Program Office, located at http://digitalequity.edreform.net. The Digital Equity
Portal presents a collection of educational resources addressing inequitable
access to technology tools, computers, and the Internet. Once the underlying
tool for cataloguing portal resources had been created, it was then a natural
step to begin to apply the tool to new content areas. Some early usability
issues involved respecting privacy and considering appropriateness when
representing people as resources, and the problem of people’s familiarity with
keyword searching getting in the way of seeing the resource collection in a new
way. The TEN programming team is still working on solutions for these two
issues, even after several revisions of the portal architecture. A record of the
architecture development can be found at http://sourceforge.net/projects/liber/
with the latest version at http://leeber.sourceforge.net/.
The issue of people as resources comes up because
when portal users are looking for resources, they usually search for information
texts, Web sites, articles, and other online documents. When the TEN programming
team presented portal users with people who had tagged themselves as being able
to help, facilitate, offer services, or advise others, our users said, “Don't
give us those.” The team is now
working on a way to allow the user to decide whether or not to mix “people
resources” with text and multimedia resources.
The familiarity of a keyword search is a
well-ingrained search habit for users of the Web, online libraries, search
engines like Google and Yahoo, and even commercial
sites with catalog stores. The Urban Education Portal offered a keyword search
as a touchstone of familiarity, but the portal had been more powerfully
organized around a different searching metaphor. A selected resource could be
used to find similar documents, where
groups of documents were already bound together into collections in which a
portal editor (or editorial board) made a professional judgment to select works
and tag them into certain categories. This makes the NICI collection more of a
hybrid between a “browsing” collection where a user should roam around and look,
sample, and select items as relevant and appropriate for their specific needs
and a "searchable" collection that only uses keywords. The TEN programming team
is still working on how best to allow both types of search processes to be
supported in one environment.
The portal will eventually
contain data gathering tools that are employed by both the user and the site. An
example of a user-selected tool might
be a self-assessment, the results of which are analyzed and displayed
immediately, and which form a user profile. The profile acts as an agent on
behalf of the user to go into the resource collection and build a customized set
of those resources that fit the assessment profile. It enables the user to
describe his or her interests and expertise, search the tagged resources, and
have the portal display a ranked list of relevant online resources. An example
of a portal selected tool is the user
model. A user model might evolve over time as the user visits the portal to
select resources or add new resources. That updated profile can then act as an
agent for the user, going into the collection to build a customized set of
resources in response to the actions taken and articles already
ordered.
The TEN programming team is
also working on a hierarchical representation system, which will allow a more
sophisticated cross-relationship of resources and provide an essential boundary
feature needed for evolution of the portal’s resource set. The boundary function
brings up the possibility of self-organized portals and feedback loops relating
one level of a portal to another, or displaying several portals inside of
another portal. These possibilities allow a level of complexity that the team
members are just beginning to grasp.
Metatagging
Metadata can be thought of as data about data. Collections organized by metatags share but go beyond the features of traditional library indexing and referencing systems. Digital references using metadata are put together using a basic semantic structure that relates a resource to a structured vocabulary system called an ontology (Berners-Lee, Hendler, & Lassila, 2001). The vocabulary or metadata ontology is, in a sense, the evolving structure of digitally represented knowledge as developed by the World Wide Web Commission (W3C). The W3C has been working for years to develop agreements about the structure and parts of the ontology as well as protocols for its further development and use. The metadata ontology of the DC (see http://dublincore.org/) global project contains the notions that all resources will have an “author,” “date of creation,” and so forth. Metadata are applied to resources in triplets. That is, a resource acts like the subject of a sentence, a metadata element (e.g., “author”) acts as a predicate, and the specific information exemplifying that element for that resource acts as the object. This fundamental schema is the foundation for the Semantic Web.
The predicates or metadata
elements are also called metatags, and they come in two types: (1) those
with open text fields, and (2) those with controlled vocabularies. An example of
an open text field is the field for the tag “author,” where we need a number of
different, essentially innumerable answers to the question of who authored a
resource. An example of a controlled vocabulary is the field for “resource
type,” since there is a much smaller number of types of digital resources,
including film, books, articles, videos, audio files, graphics, and the like.
Alternative conceptions of controlled vocabularies can co-exist without harming
the basic semantic relationships. For example, one community might want
“resource type” to include more or fewer words than in the DC list of elements.
The “subject area” is another example, for which one might use both or either
the Library of Congress or Dewey Decimal system subject
headings.
The identification and development of the metatag
structure for the Urban Education
Portal were carried out by the UNITE/TEN team. The team
identified four primary threads: preservice curriculum, recruitment, induction,
and continuing professional growth. Within each thread, other hierarchical metatagging structures were
included, such as learning and development, teaching, assessing, planning, field
experience, advocacy and equity, partnerships, mentoring/coaching, communities
of practice, and the like. These threads are not static because the more users
navigate through the portal searching and sharing resources, the more they will be engaged in creating their
own customized channel for accessing the online resources in the
portal.
Resource Review Procedure Identification
The UNITE/TEN team
identified the procedure for review of nominated resources for the Urban
Education Portal. After a resource has been submitted, the portal editor accepts
or rejects the resource. If the resource is accepted, then it is automatically
sent to one of five technology liaisons, representing each of the five UNITE
work groups. The technology liaisons then select three people from their list of
review volunteers to review the resource using the following UNITE/TEN
evaluation standards:
·
Is the
article relevant to urban teacher education?
·
Has it
been peer reviewed by a trusted source?
·
Does it
inform practice, policy, and/or program?
·
Is it
grounded in practice, theory, and/or research?
·
Is it
current/timely?
The reviewer has one month
to complete the review. The technology liaisons have the ability to check the
status of the evaluation via the portal. It should be noted that a resource
becomes available through the portal after its acceptance by the portal editor.
However, for it to receive the UNITE recommendation, it must first go through
the review process. Resources to be evaluated by reviewers may fall into the
following three categories: research study, article, or paper; documents from a
teacher preparation program; or book review.
Pilot
Test
During the weekend of
The following day, the
UNITE/TEN team, with representatives from the Holmes Partnership, met to review
and update its members on the development of the portal and the other online
tools, and to discuss the submission and a possible refereeing process for
materials to be placed on the Urban Education Portal. Prior to the meeting in
The original metatagging
scheme was based on twelve interrelated strategies for urban education used by
Great Cities Universities/Urban Educator Corps and described at http://www.gcu-uec.org/home.html. But during the meeting in
Once the review process was
approved, the TEN programming team then designed and tested an application to
formalize and automate the editorial review process using criteria of relevance,
quality, and usefulness. The
metatagging procedure and the resource review procedures were both tested and
worked as planned.
Testing the Metatagging Procedure
In a follow-up activity,
one of the UNITE/TEN team members e-mailed 10 sample documents to the entire
UNITE/TEN team and asked them to read and evaluate one article from each of the
three categories: research study, article, or paper; documents from a teacher
preparation program; and book review. One of the reviewers sent a message to the
team the next day, suggesting that the set of criteria be applied while
reviewing the documents. Two
members of the team reviewed all of these resources.
Testing the Resource Review Procedure
The following week, one of
the UNITE/TEN team members sent an e-mail message to the entire UNITE/TEN team
with directions for submitting a resource to the Urban Education Portal. She
requested that each member submit one resource to test the directions for
uploading resources, as well as the functionality of the portal, and to let her
know by the end of the week if anything was unclear or not working. The
directions were clear and explicit, and the uploading process worked as planned.
Once the uploading process was tested, the
director of UNITE sent a message to the entire UNITE membership,
describing the portal and encouraging each member to contribute one online
resource to the portal before the next semi-annual meeting, scheduled for
February 2003 in Washington D.C.
Use Context
Portal materials were catalogued with the purpose of allowing teachers,
teacher union members, teacher educators, administrators, and students to
access, use, and share effective resources. UNITE members nominated seven resources via the
paper suggestion forms during the
Tools and Techniques
The
UNITE/TEN team used a variety of tools and techniques to accomplish our
developmental research, including face-to-face meetings, e-mail discussions,
conference calls, interviews, surveys, and artifact analysis.
Research Methods
The
two members of the TEN PT3 Grant who served on the UNITE/TEN team were asked a
set of structured questions via e-mail and provided extensive information about
their progress to date. Their
responses provided a major contribution to this paper.
Members of RMC Research
Corporation, serving as the external evaluation team for the TEN PT3 Grant,
acted as participant observers at all UNITE/TEN meetings and participated in
conference calls with team members to assess progress on the programming,
metatagging, and resource review procedure development.
During the fall 2002 and spring 2003 UNITE
meetings, UNITE members were asked to complete a survey about their familiarity,
use, and perceptions of appropriate audiences for each of the TEN online tools,
including the portal. They were also asked to provide any suggestions for
improvement of the online tools.
Usability testing was then carried out on the portal, and the results
were used for continuous improvement and portal development.
Results to Date
Familiarity and Use
At the semi-annual meeting of UNITE in October 2002, 100 UNITE members were surveyed regarding their perceptions of the portal and all of the tools developed by NICI for the TEN project. Twenty-six members who completed the survey (26%) were generally in the “emergent awareness” stage, having just learned about the newly developed Urban Education Portal at the October meeting. The only four members who reported that they “examined but haven’t used it” were members of the UNITE/TEN team who were advising the programming team about the metatagging process and the document review process. The survey was repeated at the following UNITE meeting in February 2003, using the same instrument. Eleven UNITE members (11%) completed the follow up survey. The results indicated that the respondents were beginning to move from the “emergent awareness” to the “early exploration” phase. Survey results also indicated that usability was an issue that needed to be addressed; therefore, user feedback was used for continuous improvement by the programming team. Because of the low response rate and the large number of items in the survey instrument, it was not possible to carry out a sophisticated data analysis of the initial and follow up survey results.
Respondents felt that the portal audience could comprise preservice teachers in a four-year teacher preparation program, preservice teachers in a fifth year teacher preparation program, preservice teachers at a Professional Development School, preservice teachers in an alternative certification program, inservice teachers in a post-baccalaureate program, inservice teachers seeking professional development, teacher educators at a college or university, supervisors of field placement and/or student teaching, and faculty in other academic departments where aspiring teachers take courses.
Usability
Testing
In
fall 2002, the TEN programming team hired an external usability consultant to
test the portal interface.
Her suggestions were
implemented, and all of the Education Reform Portals were redesigned by April
2003.
UNITE then performed
two rounds of usability testing: a pilot test in April 2003 with a group of 16
typical users in the course entitled, “Using Technology with Adult Learners,” at
the
Figure 1. Initial Usability Test Results
|
Usability
Criterion |
Pilot Test
(N=16) |
Field Test
(N=18) |
|
Relevance of
Resources |
4.2 |
4.0 |
|
Clarity of
Resources |
4.1 |
3.9 |
|
Timeliness of
Resources |
4.5 |
3.9 |
|
Usefulness of
Resources |
4.4 |
3.7 |
|
Appropriateness of
Resources |
4.4 |
4.1 |
|
Ease of Use of
Portal |
4.3 |
4.3 |
|
Portal
Navigation |
4.3 |
4.1 |
|
Portal
Interface |
4.0 |
4.2 |
Suggestions for
improving the ease of use of the portal included requesting e-mail announcements
of new, interesting, or relevant resources; suggesting ways of translating what
works in one venue to another; requesting specific guidance for using the
portal; and being sure that documents were useful to teacher educators. One respondent wished to view the main
information categories on each page.
When asked what types of resources they would want to look for on the
portal, respondents requested research studies, articles, papers, documents from
a teacher preparation program, and book reviews. Some ways in which respondents reported
they utilized the information they accessed included:
Using Data
for Continuous Improvement
In early November 2003,
the portal interface was redesigned, using feedback from the pilot testers and
field testers. Users were now
presented with a set of four dimensions of educational reform, thereby enabling
them to “browse the shelves” of the portal’s collection of online resources
using the metatag searching scheme.
However, they could still choose to “search the catalog” using a standard
keyword search scheme, if they so desired. Additional online resources were
nominated, reviewed, and catalogued.
A “my collection” button was also added in order to begin the next phase
of portal evolution by asking new users to register and fill out a
self-assessment survey regarding their needs, interests, and level of knowledge
about urban teacher preparation. The portal is also ready and able to connect an
online survey or assessment information and use the results to configure a
person’s unique collection at a portal site. As far as UNITE is concerned, NICI
can implement a survey for them at any time if UNITE surveys on the very
dimensions that they use to catalog their materials. For example, if a survey question’s
answer amounted to someone saying “I want to learn more about best practices
concerning communities of practice,” then the survey would perform that search
and return the resources marked that way.
In December 2003, a letter
was sent out to all UNITE members requesting that they respond to another
usability survey for the redesigned portal. The same survey instrument was
used. Fifteen UNITE members from
thirteen institutions completed the online survey. All but three of the
respondents were from institutions that had not participated in the initial
field test and were not involved in the initial portal design
conversations. The results of the
third round of usability testing were compared with the results from the initial
pilot and field tests and are presented in Figure 2.
Figure 2. Usability Test Results for Initial and Redesigned Portals
|
Usability
Criterion |
Pilot Test
(N=16) |
Field Test
(N=18) |
Field Test
with Typical Users (N=15) |
|
Relevance of
Resources |
4.2 |
4.0 |
4.3 |
|
Clarity of
Resources |
4.1 |
3.9 |
4.3 |
|
Timeliness of
Resources |
4.5 |
3.9 |
4.5 |
|
Usefulness of
Resources |
4.4 |
3.7 |
4.2 |
|
Appropriateness of
Resources |
4.4 |
4.1 |
4.3 |
|
Ease of Use of
Portal |
4.3 |
4.3 |
4.1 |
|
Portal
Navigation |
4.3 |
4.1 |
3.9 |
|
Portal
Interface |
4.0 |
4.2 |
4.1 |
An interesting pattern
emerged from the second field test.
The changes in these ratings were probably not great enough to be
considered significant, as supported by the responses to the open-ended
questions. The feedback regarding
the portal’s design and navigation was generally positive and
included:
·
Very professional and
quick;
·
It was easy to get
into;
·
Very text-based – graphics
are nice;
·
A little too busy, lists
of beneficiaries too long, and
·
I feel this is improved
over past offerings.
Nearly all respondents
indicated that they would like to look for research studies (100%) or articles
(93%), while about half of the respondents wished to see more papers (47%),
documents (53%) and book reviews (40%).
Respondents were also interested in seeing bibliographies of urban
education articles, video demonstrations of strategies to use in urban
classrooms, newsletters with current information. Suggestions for further improvement
included adding a description of the criteria for resource selection and “how
to” offer additions; implementing the user-specific collections feature; a way
to search for a particular need; making navigation possible within each
subcategory without having to use the back button; speeding up the loading time
for the site; adding blank lines between items in a long list of resources;
subdividing lists of resources by type such as article, Web site, or
bibliography; and indicating which resources the user had already looked
at.
Some ways in which
respondents reported they utilized the information they accessed
included:
Current
Status
The Urban Education Portal
is up and running, and it empowers users to do complex
searches using a simple interface. The interface has undergone usability testing
and has evolved from a programmer-friendly to a more user-friendly appearance.
Clear directions orient the user to the difference between typical keyword
searching and the more powerful metatag-based searching used in the portal.
The automatic review process has
been implemented, and new digital resources are being added. Site statistics, presented in Figure 3,
indicate that usage of the portal has increased continuously since its initial
redesign in April 2003.
Figure 3. Site Statistics for Urban Education Portal
|
Month |
Number of
Visits |
|
April |
71 |
|
May |
130 |
|
June |
733 |
|
July |
1370 |
|
August |
1168 |
|
September |
2138 |
|
October |
2930 |
|
November |
2982 |
However, at this time,
keyword searching produces more resources than browsing the catalog, unless the
user wishes to perform a fairly broad search. For example, when someone visits the catalog page, this person
is presented with several lists, each one representing a specific kind of
categorization scheme (e.g., “subject” or “author”). To perform a simple search,
the user selects one item from a list and then clicks the “Find Resources” button at the bottom of the page. To
find resources about administration, the user goes to the catalog page,
scrolls down until seeing the list labelled “Subject,” and clicks on
“Administration.” After hitting the button at the bottom of the page, the user
is presented with a list of resources addressing administration.
Significance of the Study
The
“portal story” is just part of a larger picture that comprises all of the
technology-based tools and supports that the TEN PT3 Grant has been attempting
to offer to UNITE. For example, http://edreform.net/ is actually an umbrella
mega-portal that houses an integrated, interoperable array of Web portals, each
providing digital contents showcasing best practice in a single critical
educational reform dimension rather than a single clearinghouse of educational
resources. Likewise, TEN customized
and provided responsive technical support, training, dissemination, and system
improvement for each organization that pilot tested their portal with its own
unique audience and requested additional features, such as a customized
self-assessment survey to create a user profile for the Great Cities
Universities-Urban Educator Corps’ (GCU-UEC) Preservice Technology Infusion
Portal, which is located at http://preservicetech.edreform.net/. Like UNITE, GCU-UEC is vitally
interested in issues of recruitment, preparation, retention, and professional
development for urban educators, and TEN is a partner in GCU-UEC’s own PT3
Catalyst grant. Currently, GCU-UEC
and the TEN programming team are working with ISTE to redesign the Preservice
Technology Infusion Portal’s user assessment survey and to align it with the
ISTE NETS Essential Conditions for Teacher Preparation.
The ability to
create new portals for other educational and professional organizations, based
on the programming efforts and the developmental research carried out by the
UNITE/TEN team will greatly facilitate sustainability of the entire array of
portals, should user interest continue to grow. NICI is also beginning to use
the portal application to construct new digital collections within the graduate
programs. This effort is quite
young, but the goal is to have masters and doctoral students build online
collections in content such as critical theory, best practices, learning theory,
etc., and to have them make regular contributions across the existing portals.
One of the members of UNITE
worked closely with TEN in presenting the TEN PT3 Grant’s resources to each of
the five UNITE work groups, training the technology liaisons from each work
group, customizing resources for them, and asking for feedback. These activities
were crucial to the success of the portal activities, although they progressed
more slowly than the UNITE/TEN team would have liked. One reason for this is the
fact that national networks may operate differently from traditional
organizations in their ability and speed of technology infusion. Another reason
is that developing a hierarchical metatagging structure is not a well-defined
process, which thus leads to complex, sometimes tangled relationships among
resources, people who can help others use the resources, and the highly variable
contexts of usefulness of the resources. Clearly, the development of such
collections as the Urban Education Portal requires an iterative process. The
process
started with phases of teacher preparation and then
went deeper into the elements important at each stage. The Urban Education
Portal has been through three phases. At each TEN meeting more people become
interested in what was being done and provided more input. The Urban Education
Portal will be fine-tuned at least one or two more times. The hierarchical
metatagging structure has never been done before by anyone in the world of
education. The NICI programmers are creating something that is new. That is one
reason the portals are so special.
The UNITE/TEN effort is part of a larger effort to create a rich and complex evolving hierarchy that can allow for multiple contexts for a resource to be found and used. For example suppose there is an electronic resource about the Civil War. It might be useful in a history class, a class about social justice, or a class about literature and media. Each of these contexts will have a specialized vocabulary and purpose for that resource, with a host of different ancillary pieces of information to enhance the resource's use in that context. Such a resource might appear in more than one portal, with different surrounding materials and in different parts of the ontology or hierarchy of each portal. That is part of the challenge of envisioning and building a cataloging structure like http://www.edreform.net, within which the UNITE/TEN portal has been created.
Conclusion
The
UNITE/TEN example illustrates an approach taken by NICI to developing a
collection of online resources. The approach starts by working with a
professional community that understands the needs of its clients and audience as
well as the resources (print, media, and human) needed to address those needs.
The professional vocabulary specific to an area of expertise such as educational
reform sits in contrast to the vocabulary of professional librarians who catalog
resources for general audiences, making the resources more relevant to the
current and changing needs of the professional community. The professionals also
organize online resources in a way that promotes their values and perspectives,
in contrast with general cataloging approaches that employ a structural approach
such as using an ontological standard like the Dewey Decimal system. The goal of
engaging user audiences in addition to professional catalogers in the work of
building collections and forming metatagging terms and relationships is,
therefore, to create more interactive and personalized access that is relevant and
timely for the profession while honouring time-tested structures of
knowledge.
Acknowledgment
This developmental research project
was supported by a 2000 Preparing Tomorrow’s Teachers to Use Technology (PT3)
Catalyst Grant to the Teacher Education Network.
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