Contact: Karie Patton
With support from the U.S. Department of Defense, a Mississippi State University research effort is exploring ways to make the Internet more useful for teachers.
A $3.8 million DoD Education Activity grant is helping the university develop resources to make searches of the World Wide Web more effective and efficient. The funding supplements a $2 million grant awarded in 1999 by another DoD entity, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
Because the web contains a vast amount of information, a topic search sometimes yields thousands of leads, noted Richard D. Koshel of MSU's Center for Educational and Training Technology, a project principal investigator. Sorting through the information can be time-consuming and unproductive.
"Our goal is to develop 'smart system' software with a synthesizing feature that can automatically take advantage of information in worldwide databases to make searches more targeted and effective," he said.
MSU researchers and colleagues at the University of Hawaii have worked on the preliminary software. Under the new grant, the project also will involve partners from the Indiana University of Pennsylvania [cq] and MountainTop Technologies of Johnstown, Pa.
With funding beginning July 1, researchers will launch the Technology Innovation and Teacher Education Collaborative. Its goal is to develop software that is even more "user friendly."
Koshel said the defense agency interest in software that allows teachers to integrate technology into military base classrooms also will benefit educators in general. "This software does not show teachers how to use their computer. Instead, it shows them how to teach with the computer," he noted.
The software developed under the project's initial funding will be tested in defense installations overseas and fine-tuned in the second phase of the research, he added. In the future, the information and software will be available to all Mississippi teachers through a separate grant with the Department of Education. Eventually, all information will be available online for reference.
"Teachers are always short on time, so we want to give them something that is very easy to use and doesn't take much time to learn," he said. "And, hopefully, this is something that business and private industry will be interested in as well for their training purposes."