Internet has become an integrated set of inter-networking resources and services based upon open, de facto standards and offered by an array of competing providers in a commercial environment now exhibiting the features of a commodity market. The World Wide Web ( Web ) and its attendant browsers, with their origins also in the research and academic communities, catapulted the Internet to its current revolutionary status both as a social and an economic phenomenon.
How can these modern information technologies best serve education? Aiming at preliminarily answering this key question, the UC Berkeley's Interactive University Project is a campus and community collaboration designed to identify how the University can best use information infrastructure (e.g. the Internet) to provide community educational service. Forty campus departments currently participate as Interactive University Partners. Community Partners include the Oakland, San Francisco, Berkeley, and West Contra Costa Unified School Districts, and community based organizations and public libraries in Oakland. The project serves as the technology partner of the Berkeley Pledge.
Interactive MESA pilot project is one of the 20 pilot projects supported by Interactive University project. It is an experiment designed to engage more of the UC Berkeley community in this important K-12 outreach activity. To achieve this goal, Interactive MESA project envisioned to utilize Internet and World Wide Web technologies to build an on-line learning environment for the MESA competitions, containing the MESA competition rules, related curricular material and examples of past designs along with a threaded discourse tool, called SpeakEasy, developed in collaboration with the School of Education. Additional curricular material from the NEEDS (National Engineering Delivery System) database developed by the Synthesis Coalition will also be linked to the WWW site and annotated for K-12 student use in understanding the mathematical, scientific and engineering principles behind the competitions. The WWW material and SpeakEasy will be designed to allow Berkeley faculty and students to mentor and advise MESA students from their offices, labs or homes.
MESANet is a prototype of realization of above design plan. It starts from a web site design and extends the scope of research to the design of on-line learning environment which supports both active and collaborative learning and augment the MESA filed design competition. This report is the summary of this research work.
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