Partners
The University of Texas Partnership in the 4Directions Project
The University of Texas is cooperating with the numerous partners in the 4Directions Project to meet the challenge of making the goals of the 4Directions Project a reality for all participating schools. The following is a summary of the contributions and role of the 4Directions team at the University of Texas to the project.
Curriculum Development Support
One core feature of the 4Directions project is a curriculum approach that is sensitive to and responsive to the unique needs of the American Indian students in the participating schools. To a great extent those requirements must be met locally, with locally designed curriculum that involves the students and their communities. The project designers have identified a child-centered teaching and curriculum design approach called thematic cycles that will meet the requirements of the project. Dr. Nancy Allen has been giving workshops in this approach for the past year, and is now collaborating with Dr. Resta and other partners to deliver an on-line graduate level course in curriculum design to teachers in the project. The course is offered free of cost, and college credit is given for the course by the University of Texas.
The technologies that are being tapped by the by the 4Directions projects are those which have been identified as appropriate for implementing the curriculum component. These technologies include World Wide Web research and publishing on the Internet, computer media tools, multimedia development programs, and computer-supported collaborative learning applications. All of the 4Directions partners are collaborating in making these technologies and training in their use available to the participating schools.
4Directions BBS, a FirstClass Groupware Application for Collaboration
4Directions BBS is an Internet-accessible conferencing system implemented using FirstClass software, on of the top four groupware applications in business and education. The 4Directions BBS is designed as a tools for collaboration, ongoing technical support and professional development and on-line curriculum projects. Because it is administered by the 4Directions partners at the University of Texas, the 4Directions BBS may be customized to meet the growing needs of the project, adapting quickly to the educational explorations taken by the project schools.
Electronic Mentoring Project Mentors are elder, more experienced community members who help guide the learning and development of life skills of the young. The Electronic Mentoring Project will enable 4Directions classroom teachers and their students to collaborate with Native American on-line volunteers from various fields of expertise, interests, professional experience and tribal affiliations. The mentor, students, and teachers will engage in collaborative efforts to complete a learning project of mutual interest. In effect, the Electronic Mentoring project acts as a "matching service" that helps teachers locate Native American volunteers for purposes of setting-up curriculum-based, electronic exchanges between their students and on-line mentors.
The Virtual Museum Project
The Virtual Museum project is a response to the need of American Indian communities to preserve their culture in a multimedia format that can be shared with future generations and the world. The project may also offer a focus for community-based learning projects in which students use the latest media technologies to learn about an document their cultural learning. Using services provided by the University of Texas, finished products of the Virtual Museum project will be organized into a professionally produced CD-ROM that may be distributed in any way the community deems appropriate.
One exciting component of the Virtual Museum project is the use of a new form of electronic media called QuickTime Virtual Reality. This technology assembles digital and traditional film photographs into virtual spaces and objects that give the user a sense of being there. There are two forms of QTVR (QuickTime Virtual Reality), panoramas and objects. Panoramas are photographed by placing the camera on a special tripod head and taking multiple shots of a scene as the camera is turned by a certain degree of rotation for every shot in a 360 degree total rotation. The overlapping stills are then "stitched" together into a single, seamless picture of the whole panorama.
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