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Workshop Agenda

Perspective on Telementoring and Mentor Center^TM

Introduction:
We live at a time where knowledge and technology are changing quickly. Powerful new technology, as represented by the computer and the Internet, are fundamentally reorganizing the infrastructure of our material world, eliminating alternatives, but creating new possibilities. (Zuboff 1988) Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich said that the most rapidly growing job categories are knowledge-intensive and utilize technology for problem solving. A "re-invention" of U.S. secondary schools will be necessary in order to create an educational program that directly addresses competencies [for tomorrow's workplace] in an appropriate way [The Department of Labor's report, What Work Requires of Schools (Secretary's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills, 1991)]. To prepare our children for the future, schools must give students the opportunity to experience real world situations and to learn from those actually involved in business and other productive enterprises. Now with many schools acquiring the technology and access to the World Wide Web, telecommunications can serve as a link to real world expertise. BBN's National School Network has created an easy to use Web-base tool that supports linking students and classes with outside mentors.

Background:
In this age of the Internet, innovative educators are combining the concept of mentoring with the reach and convenience of new telecommunications technology. Mentoring involves an experienced person giving guidance, knowledge, and encouragement to someone who is learning. Mentors can act as advocates, supporters, guides, teachers, role models, and informal helpers in an ongoing relationship. The benefit to mentors can be the fulfillment of the desire “to make a difference,” and to make a personal connection in their communities. Mentoring brings real world expertise into the classroom and augments the teacher student ratio.

With the advent of telecommunications, more students can become involved in a positive relationship with a caring adult, who can provide attention, academic assistance, validation, advice, and support. Mentors who may not have time for face to face meetings find telecommunications affords them the opportunity to still participate and share their expertise with young people.

Many schools are now at the point where they have network infrastructure in place are looking for significant ways to use it. Telementoring is a meaningful and practical way to demonstrate the value of this connectivity as it augments the resources available to the student, the classroom, and the teacher. This is also a time when industry recognizes that young people must be exposed to the skills they will need to perform productively in the workplace. Telementoring is recognized as an important vehicle for exposing students to real world experience and as a support for school-to-work programs. With telecommunications, mentors can be drawn from all segments of the community - local businesses, professionals, parents, and grandparents.

Telementoring is an activity where, if many people contribute just a small amount of effort, it can make a big difference in the education of a group of students. Telementoring has low barriers to entry as it only requires an email account to get started and does not require a large investment of time by a mentor to make a contribution. It can be adapted to work in a variety of settings, peer to peer, one mentor to a team, one to one student to mentor. Professionals, business people, retirees, and parents can all serve as mentors.

Examples of telementoring:
Telementoring is used in a variety of ways to support both academic and social growth. In Cambridge, MA 6th grade students at the Rosa Parks School submit their writing assignments electronically to adult mentors from corporations like Lotus Development, BBN, Corporation, and Harvard University. Their teacher states, "What makes the project so compelling is that my students now understand the social context of writing. At the level that I teach, getting kids to be more conscientious about writing for someone else was actually a gigantic step. "

Telementoring Young Women in Science, Engineering, and Computing, grew out of research which found significant gender issues in pre-engineering and science classes. Not many girls attended these classes, and those that did started out motivated but ended up loosing interest. This telementoring project was a way to use telecommunications to help young women get a window on the world of advanced academic and professional science, especially as experienced by women.

The Learning Through Collaborative Visualization (CoVis) project believes that a good way for students to learn about science is to be put into a context in which they explore problems of interest to the larger scientific community using methods and tools similar to (or where possible, the same as) professional scientists. This context should include not only authentic tools and techniques, but when possible, members of the scientific community who can serve as a helpful and critical audience for the students' work.

The Hewlett Packard E-mail Mentor Program has over 1500 HP employees who are matched to mentor students from all over the world, both at-risk and gifted.

There are a whole host of other ways telementoring is being used:

• to augment and scale up school-to-work programs;
• to give preservice teachers the experience of working with K-12 students before their actual student teaching;
• to provide an on-line expert to a whole class;
• to have teachers work with teacher experts to improve practice;
• to help at-risk students realize they can go to college; and
• to help kids in housing projects get out of that vicious cycle of poverty and depression.

BBN's Mentor Center^TM Telementoring Application:
The National School Network project funded by the NSF, within BBN Corporation's Educational Technologies Department, has developed an application to support telementoring through the use of the Web. Working with a 6th grade teacher, we initially designed Mentor Center^TM as a way to have community members serve as mentors in an ongoing, constructive relationship with students to help them with their writing. Mentor Center^TM has evolved to where any type of work available through the Web, text, graphics, sound, can be shared through the tool. Underlying the development of the Mentor Center^TM tool is the hypothesis - telementoring could become more scalable if there were tools that tailor feedback to the learners' requirements.

Setting up:
For setting up the project, teachers enter mentors and students into respective "pools" of names/addresses and then match mentors and students. Mentor Center^TM allows for several variations of relationships - one student to work with one mentor, one student to work with several mentors, or several students to work with one mentor.

Exchanging work:
Once assigned a mentor the student pastes his/her written work into a form on the web; an automatically sent email message notifies the mentor (or mentors) that the "Net Pal's" work is waiting for him/her to read and includes the Web Page address (URL) where the student's writing is located. The mentor accesses the web page where the student's work along with a feedback form is posted. The mentor enters constructive comments which are automatically returned - either to the student or the teacher.

Technology:
The Mentor Center^TM tool uses publicly available software such as World Wide Web based pages, Internet browsers. It will be inexpensive to set-up and maintain on a school's machine. To keep the technical and cost requirements low, it does not require any particular commercial database system. All information is kept in files on the web-site which can be used as is or shipped to a commercial database if desired. Mentor Center^TM is designed so that at some future time we will be able to make it available to everyone, no matter what platform a site is using.

Market Opportunity:
Integration of the Internet into education and community centers is still in its introductory phase so that most people using telecommunications are innovators. The National School Network is a community of innovators, working in over 400 organizations (schools, school districts, museums, national information providers, research organizations, businesses). Many of these organizations have made the investment in telecommunications infrastructure and are looking for credible ways to use connectivity to demonstrate its value to their communities. The sense that we are still in the early phases of use of the Internet and the role Mentor Center^TM can play is reflected in the comments of a pilot user of the NSN telementoring tool Mentor Center^TM:

"Students are just learning to use email and the Internet as part of their regular instruction in English and in special computer education classes. The Mentor Center^TM project gives schools and teachers the excuse to get in and get such training into the curriculum. The project is exciting, and gives them the excuse they need to go after it."

The Mentor Center^TM tool was developed as a result of an expressed need from the NSN members. Their concern was that students were putting up materials and writing on the web with no way of receiving feedback about the quality and content. From this initial idea, Mentor Center^TM evolved and has now become a tool that can be adapted to many kinds of situations, requires a minimum of technology, and can be used in the classroom to support the traditional as well as a restructured classroom. Teachers and facilitators find that Mentor Center^TM provides a comfortable structure on which to base a telementoring project. Mentors and students find it easy to use. One project facilitator commented, "[Mentor Center^TM is ] extremely easy to set up and easy for students and mentors to learn." Interest in telementoring is growing and is demonstrated by the number of people who registered for the January 1997 telementoring conference held by the National School Network at BBN. Approximately 65 people attended the workshop, with the majority just from the New England region.

Current Pilots:

• ArtsEdge - Kennedy Center for Performing Arts Graduate music education students mentoring middle and high schools students.
• Educational Testing Service, Princeton NJ Accomplished teachers will work with teachers to see and analyze other's practice as a way to improve their own.
• Regional Information Center upstate NY Graduate education students mentor high school students in writing.
• Concord, NH Lawyers in a local law firm will mentor 6th graders in writing.
• Rosa Parks School, Cambridge, MA Employees of BBN mentor 6th graders in writing
• ALL School, Worcester, MA Employees of the Fleet Bank are mentoring middle and high school students in a business apprenticeship program.
• Milken Educational Foundation - workshop in June Award winning Milken Educators will participate in a workshop to learn how to use Mentor Center^TM for telementoring projects.