Bertram C. Bruce

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign | UIUC · Graduate School of Library and Information Science

Jane Addams's Democracy and Social Ethics is more than a historical artifact describing the work of a prominent social reformer. It is also a significant contribution to philosophy, especially in the area of social ethics. Moreover, though less widely acknowledged, Addams's work is essential for anyone who seeks an ethical vision for education. Her...

We tend to think of technology as a set of tools to perform a specific function. These tools are often portrayed as mechanistic, exterior, autonomous, and concrete devices that accomplish tasks and create products. We do not generally think of them as intimately entwined with social and biological lives. But literacy technologies, such as pen and p...

The development of critical scientific literacy in primary and secondary school classrooms (AAAS, 1993) requires authentic inquiry (NRC, 2000) with a basis in the real world. Pairing scientists with educators and employing informatics and visualization tools are two successful ways to achieve this. This paper is based on rich data collected over ei...

Special Issue. Hogan and Bruce, (Eds.)

Learning for underserved youth is integral to social progress. Yet, too often, young people experience disconnects between their educational experiences and both individual and community needs. Arts can help these youth recover a unity through collective action in the community. Drawing from the experiences of a 4-year interdisciplinary research pr...

Our embodied capacity for action and our dispositions towards goals define our perception of a situation and possible actions. Thus, situations are not constitutive of action, but they demand that we act. For Shane Ralston, the situations that call for action are historical, imagined, or projected debates involving John Dewey. When Dewey is portray...

This paper develops a philosophical basis for the concept of community inquiry. Community inquiry derives from pragmatist theory as articulated by Dewey, Peirce, Addams, and others. Following Brendel, we discuss pragmatism in terms of its emphasis on the practical dimensions of inquiry, the pluralistic nature of the tools that are used to study phe...

Developed by the Youth Community Informatics project http://yci.illinois.edu We would like to give special thanks to the youth and youth leaders who contributed to the develop - ­‐ ment of these activities and have implemented them in their communities. Creation , editing , and preparation of this guide was led by Lisa Bouillion Diaz , Chaebong Nam...

Two small enrollment engineering courses have been taught using the methodology of the Asynchronous Learning Environment, in which computer networking and conferencing capabilities are used to make student-instructor and student-student interaction more immediate. Included in the effort was the creation of all-electronic assignments, where homework...

This report summarizes the results of our study of the plans to create a Library/Learning Center (L/LC) at Baton Rouge Community College. It is based on the following: face-to-face, telephone, and online discussions with BRCC faculty and staff; review of documents such as The Baton Rouge Community College Millennium Plan, the BRCC web site, the Cou...

In this article the authors introduce the practice of inquiry and discuss the case for it as a signature pedagogy for digital literacy. The Inquiry Cycle is presented as a summary of important aspects of inquiry. Further, the Practice Profile of Inquiry provides a practical tool, which can be incorporated into everyday classroom practice. Examples...

Chicago, ILI remarked incidentally that the philosophy in question is, to paraphrase the saying of Lincoln about democracy, one of education of, by, and for experience. No one of these words, of, by, or for, names anything which is self-evident. Each of them is a challenge to discover and put into operation a principle of order and organization whi...

This article elaborates on the Inquiry Cycle as an appropriate model of learning for the digitally enhanced classroom. Its goal is to provide a useful link between theory and pedagogic practice. This involves taking a new look at the concept of digital literacy. The authors propose a conceptual framework connecting classroom practices and elements...

As governments and other agencies increasingly turn to the Internet to engage in public discourse and the exchange of ideas, relatively little attention has been paid to how older adults participate in this new and developing public sphere. This inattention will become even more of an issue in the future, as the sustained involvement of a significa...

Discourse is a pervasive tool of management; one might even say that discourse is what managers do. A widespread assumption among managers is that discourse is not only a pervasive tool, but an effective one for precise communication of information, for making decisions, and for enlisting action, essentially a transmission tool. This paper maintain...

Peirce's idea (1868) of a community of inquiry is more relevant today than notions of an invariant curriculum or conventional modes of instruction. In order to foster such a community, we have employed web-based communication and knowledge-building tools such as the Inquiry Page http://inquiry.uiuc.edu, through which users can create modifiable rep...

A special challenge for this chapter, therefore, is to carve out a useful terrain between two unproductive extremes. One is to consider any verbal interaction between teacher and student, or among students, a "dialogue," which would simply equate dialogue with communication. Building on Dewey’s (1916, p. 5) famous formulation that "Not only is soci...

This paper focuses on the process and activities supporting professional development for scientist-fellows and teachers in high school classroom environs. The GK-12 Program at UIUC has made it its goal to create a professional learning community where the fellows experience teaching roles from high school mentor/teacher experts; a teaming that ofte...

Three hundred and twelve teachers responded to a survey questionnaire based on the Reading Framework, a document that articulates the rationale for the 1992 National Assessment of Educational Progress in Reading. The survey responses indicate support for many aspects of the rationale. These teachers reactions to the major changes undertaken in asse...

A conceptual framework for volunteered geographic information (VGI) is proposed, drawing from research in several related fields including volunteering, leisure study, and social production of knowledge. Although these research areas have not been explored extensively within the field of geographic information science, they offer conceptual tools f...

This chapter introduces situated evaluation as an approach for evaluating socio-technical innovation and change. Many current evaluations simply identify the impacts of technology and deprecate alternate uses in their analysis. Situated evaluation instead calls for understanding how innovations emerge through use; this entails consideration of dive...

Inquiry-based teaching means engaging students in active learning based on their own experiences & questions. The inquiry cycle of asking, investigating, creating, discussing, & reflecting enables a deeper, more meaningful kind of learning. Inquiry teachers do best when they in turn can learn through a teaching community of practice. The Inquiry Pa...

unpublished not peer reviewed

Educators today are concerned with how to effectively implement whole school e-learning strategies, encompassing technical support, digital resources, and professional development. This paper reports the findings of a project, Technologies in Docklands Education (TIDE), in which we investigated the use of technology to support learning in 24 disadv...

This article explores the process of writing from three perspectives. The first sees writing as a communicative act. The observation that to write is to communicate, though commonplace, has major, and sometimes surprising, implications for a theory of writing. It forces us to focus on the active role of the reader and leads us to an emphasis on the...

Informed by Progressive education reforms of the nineteenth and twentieth century, progressive movements in librarianship, the social responsibility movement within the American Library Association (ALA), and recent collaborations of ALA’s youth-focused divisions, the authors link historical precedents with current examples, ideas, and practices...

A youth community informatics (YCI) research project intersected an inquiry learning model with the making of audiovisual podcasts to foster personal growth and community engagement in a group of Mexican American youth enrolled in an afterschool program. Specifically, the paper describes the cycle of inquiry together with the development of a proje...

Electronic communication networks are in wide use for college-level language and writing instruction and are being adopted for use in elementary and secondary school classes. Teachers use network-based approaches to literacy instruction to support authentic reading and writing, collaboration, student-centered learning, writing across the curriculum...

Digital literacy is an important and often misunderstood concept; it has implications for all aspects of primary schooling in Ireland. The purpose of this research is to establish a useful definition and conceptual framework through which the nature of digital literacy can be examined in terms of classroom practice and thereby related to the underp...

This chapter introduces situated evaluation as an approach for evaluating socio-technical innovation and change. Many current evaluations simply identify the impacts of technology and deprecate alternate uses in their analysis. Situated evaluation instead calls for understanding how innovations emerge through use; this entails consideration of dive...

This paper presents the integration of community informatics with the theory and practice of community inquiry, describing community-based projects in which people simultaneously learn about their community and the production and use of information and communication technologies (ICTs). published or submitted for publication is peer reviewed

Post-secondary education sees an increasing variety of instructional media and an increasing diversity among learners. The goal of this study was to ascertain whether students of different learning styles, majors, and genders benefited from particular instructional media. Students completed a learning styles inventory and a survey of perceived usef...

Information Spaces in the Community is a workshop frame designed to promote e-inclusion by helping participants understand the iSociety in which they live. An information space (IS) is defined as a place where people go to access information and technology for their personal or community development. Living and learning in a developed society we ar...

Ubiquitous learning implies a vision of learning which is connected across all the stages on which we play out our lives. Learning occurs not just in classrooms, but in the home, the workplace, the playground, the library, museum, and nature center, and in our daily interactions with others. Moreover, learning becomes part of doing; we don't learn...

Spatial data infrastructures, which are Internet-based mechanisms for the coordinated production, discovery, and use of geospatial information in the digital environment, have diffused worldwide in the last two decades. Currently, there are about one hundred spatial data infrastructures at the national level and many other at supra- and sub-nationa...

The four papers in this symposium address the transformative effects of new media on learning as they provide the underpinnng for a move to ubiquitous learning. The authors pay particular attention to what new technologies afford for learning, and how their widespread dissemination and use affects media literacy and relationships in who learns what...

Discusses community inquiry theory in relation to the work of Jane Addams, et al. at Hull House, and contemporary work at the Paseo Boricua community in Chicago. published or submitted for publication is peer reviewed

published or submitted for publication is peer reviewed

"Learning at the border" refers to the formal or informal practices of altering participant knowledge and selfhood that occur in borders between highly-structured school spaces and more diffuse realms, including afterschool programs, boys and girls clubs, libraries, museums, and community centers. “Learning at the border" also comes from the lived...

For many years, discussion of online learning, or e-learning, has been pre-occupied with the practice of teaching online and the debate about whether being online is 'as good as' being offline. The authors contributing to this paper see this past as an incubation period for the emergence of new teaching and learning practices. We see changes in tea...

Stories are how we make sense of experiences, thus providing the historical sense of life. To paraphrase Dewey, extracting at each present time the full meaning of each present experience enables us to do the same for our pasts. The continual reconstruction of the past in the light of the present is integral to full engagement with the present time...

After two decades of intense research on reading, a number of teachers and researchers are beginning to ask whether a narrow focus on reading distorts our view of leaning and whether a curriculum centred on reading constrains what can be done in the classroom. Because of these concerns, many have turned to literacy across the curriculum approaches....

This paper presents the integration of community informatics with the theory and practice of community inquiry, describing community-based projects in which people simultaneously learn about their community and the production and use of information and communication technologies (ICTs).

As private sector and government research increasingly depends on the use of distributed, interdisciplinary and collaborative teams, particularly in scientific endeavors, we are faced also with an increased need to understand how to work in and study such teams. While much attention has been paid to issues of knowledge transfer, the impact of many...

As private sector and government research increasingly depends on the use of distributed, interdisciplinary and collaborative teams, particularly in scientific endeavors, we are faced also with an increased need to understand how to work in and study such teams. While much attention has been paid to issues of knowledge transfer, the impact of many...

This essay--part of a special issue on the work of Gunther Kress--uses the idea of affordances and constraints to explore the (im)possibilities of new environments for engaging with literature written for children (see Kress, 2003). In particular, it examines a festival of children's literature from an Australian education context that occurs onlin...

Plante, Pathogens, and People is a Web site promoting agricultural awareness via multimedia lectures about plant diseases and online lab activities in which students investigate phenomena. The me of the site in large-enrollment classes for 6-plus years affords a well-documented case of Web-enhanced instruction. Qualitative and quantitative data on...

Plants, Pathogens, and People is a Web site promoting agricultural awareness via multimedia lectures about plant diseases and online lab activities in which students investigate phenomena. The use of the site in large-enrollment classes for 6-plus years affords a well-documented case of Web-enhanced instruction. Qualitative and quantitative data on...

Within the existing system of education, student work rarely has any value beyond the particular course that it is created for. The work is graded and then usually discarded. The authors describe in this article a way that student work can be systematically made available for use by others beyond the immediate learning context within which it is cr...

Today there are a number of fields that address the need to develop better means of employing information and communication technologies (ICTs) to help communities achieve their goals. Digital infrastructure and repositories are widely created to support the activities of educational, workplace, and scientific communities, as well as virtual commun...

Today there are a number of fields that address the need to develop better means of employing information and communication technologies (ICTs) to help communities achieve their goals. Digital infrastructure and repositories are widely created to support the activities of educational, workplace, and scientific communities, as well as virtual commun...

This paper is based on thick data collected over two years in science classrooms across the state of Illinois, with a focus on one high school biology educator and visiting scientist fellow team. Both were participants in a significant research project sponsored by the National Science Foundation that involved graduate teaching fellows in K-12 educ...

Twenty-first century technologies are enabling new kinds of collaboration between university-based scientists and K-12 science teachers, while also providing researchers with new windows on cross-institutional collaborative activity. This paper describes how innovative computer resources support a research project sponsored by the National Science...

The goal of the Distributed Knowledge project (DK) is to investigate distributed knowledge processes among multidisciplinary teams and the roles that technology and group context play in these processes. The initial inquiry of the project was focused on the six scientific Applications Technologies teams of the National Computational Science Allianc...

This book provides a collection of 32 Technology Departments from the "Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy" covering the 1998 to 2002 volume years, which examines critical aspects of literacy in the new information age and the complex issues surrounding the use of new technologies. Articles in the book build on specific examples from classroom...

Some may think of the unveiling a digital library (DL) as an end point. Yet, even though lesson plans may be provided with it, a DL only potentially affords meaningful learning opportunities. Unfortunately, the better a DL is, the greater the risk that it promotes an impoverished view of learning and of change‹one in which teachers and students are...

This paper will describe the lessons learned from a research project sponsored by NSF that involves graduate teaching fellows in K-12 education programs. Themes emerging from our sites will be shared that includes the role of collaborations and community building along with the integration of technology in the curriculum. Across these sites inquiry...

This session trains teachers and learners in the Inquiry Page, a free, web-based, knowledge-building tool that facilitates and fosters real-world application of inquiry-based learning across subject areas (www.inquiry.uiuc.edu). By creating "Inquiry Units", teachers and learners collaboratively engage in the inquiry path, building new knowledge as...

This essay questions the commonly-held view that computer technology is a tool that will in and of itself improve education, and ultimately ameliorate social ills. The common view stems from the belief that technology and social practices are separate, a belief articulated here as the Technology Independence Assumption. The invalidity of the assump...

crown gall and genetic modification of plants. Additional case studies will be added in the future. Why did we create the PPP site? Scientifically aware people use scientific knowledge and scientific ways of thinking to help them make decisions and to better understand many of the problems they deal with every day (Rutherford and Ahlgren, 1990). Si...

reference tools, such as encyclopedias, dictionaries, thesauri, and collections of quotes; libraries of poetry, short stories, images, and music; critical studies and research articles on every conceivable topic; information about authors and historical figures; government and public policy data; current events; interactive software; and much, much...

As one of the research university teams participating in the National Science Foundation (NSF) GK-12 Fellowship Program*, site educators and scientists are realizing collaborative, technology-rich learning environments that have implications for teacher development, administrative planning for technology and curriculum, and the professional growth...

Learn about participatory design by engaging in an examination of the Inquiry Page; learn how to use it and related tools to support teaching and learning in diverse communities--schools, universities, libraries, museums, workplaces, and community settings; participants will come away with Inquiry Units they can use in applications of interest to t...

Learn about participatory design by engaging in an examination of the Inquiry Page; learn how to use it and related tools to support teaching and learning in diverse communities--schools, universities, libraries, museums, workplaces, and community settings; participants will come away with Inquiry Units they can use in applications of interest to t...

Rapid technological change; social barriers breaking and re-forming; large scale immigration leading to a multicultural society; globalization of the economy; questions about the future of democracy; and major changes in literacy practices. Such a list comprises but a few of the touchstones for current discourse about the context of twenty-first ce...

TRODUCTION Little is known about the role of educational collaboratories as information systems for management of social (human) and technical (technology-related) factors in interdisciplinary contexts. Within a milieu of interdisciplinary issues in education, science, and technology, this paper takes a situated approach towards identification of c...

Digital library usability research often does little to develop the capacity of users or improve social outcomes associated with use. These research consequences, however, are important when users represent marginalized members of society, such as the poor and people of color. Drawing on the tenets of participatory action research and the notion of...

This paper analyzes the uses of the Inquiry Page (www.inquiry.uiuc.edu) in the National Science Foundation GK-12 Fellowship Program*, where scientist-fellows and K-12 teachers partner to integrate the use of computer-based modeling, scientific visualization, and informatics in science and mathematics education. The Inquiry Page is a web-based, know...

Inquiry-based learning strives to make learning more meaningful to the learner, however many classrooms provide little evidence of student inquiry. One reason for this is the lack of support for teachers interested in sustaining inquiry in their classrooms. The Inquiry Page, a cross-institutional and interdisciplinary web site, aims to support inqu...

The balance between learning and doing is impacted by new technologies for learning. In this paper, we explore a framework for expertise that emphasizes the power of multiple coordinated representations. We use a learner-centered taxonomy of technology uses for learning as a framework for systematically developing powerful environments for learning...

If we conceive literacy practices as a set of activities around texts, including understanding and composing, but also the whole complex of social relations and actions related to making and communicating meaning, then literacy becomes inextricable from community, and from the ways that members of a community address the problems that concern them....

Current research on distributed knowledge processes suggests a critical conflict between knowledge processes in groups and the technologies built to support them. The conflict centers on observations that authentic and efficient knowledge creation and sharing is deeply embedded in an interpersonal face to face context, but that technologies to supp...

Available at http://people.lis.illinois.edu/~chip/pubs/03LIA/33-003.pdf

This article chronicles the experiences of Dialogues in Methods of Education (DIME), a group of school and university faculty. Over the past 22 years, DIME members have studied together how to improve their own teaching practices through research, the sharing of ideas, and mutual support. They have also engaged in critical analysis of the disciplin...

this article. Although there would be enormous diVerences as we looked from person to person or across time, we would inevitably see an array of communication and information technologies in each case, including, perhaps, books, paper and pen, blackboards, overhead transparencies, filing cabinets, index cards, copy machines, scanners, word processo...

Project SEARCH (Science Education and Research for CHildren) is an outreach program designed to bring the science resources of a large research university to classrooms and community centers. University science students share activities, materials, and content expertise with local classrooms and after-school programs. Using observations, surveys, a...

The World Wide web is growing rapidly, unpredictably, unevenly, and without the familiar guideposts of established publishers and vetting procedures. As the web assumes ever greater importance in education, research, and daily life, these phenomena deserve more critical examination. Is the web a bountiful source of information and resources on ever...

Current research on distributed knowledge processes suggests a critical conflict between knowledge processes in groups and the technologies built to support them. The conflict centers on observations that authentic and efficient knowledge creation and sharing is deeply embedded in an interpersonal face to face context, but that technologies to supp...