Literacy has always been an embodied, material act. Among other things, this means that it shapes and is shaped by its technologies. Today, we see changes in literacy practices as people gain access to new ways of communicating and making meaning. These changes raise many questions: How can we prepare students to participate in new literacies even as they are redefined by each new technological development? How can we build and sustain environments that promote the development of these new literacies?

One aspect of the new literacies is that it is easier now to produce, manipulate, and transmit images. In the past, many texts—memos, letters, reports—were created without pictures. The inclusion of images in children’s literature or textbooks was often a major production. Today, images are routinely added to documents created using computers, including Web pages and now e-mail messages. A related example is the ways that reading and writing can be more easily integrated with the use of online databases and interactive software.

This month, Umesh Thakkar, Maureen Hogan, Jo Williamson, and I look at a cross-curriculum innovation in which students engage in reading, writing, problem solving, interacting with simulations and databases, and performing various hands-on activities. A seemingly narrow focus on chicken eggs leads students to explore a broad array of questions in embryology, evolution, agriculture, economics, mathematics, and literature. The project provides students with the opportunity to participate in many of the new literacies. At the same time, teachers learn new skills as they use these same tools and participate with other teachers in a community of inquiry. Viewed retrospectively, the project also gives insights to how curriculum innovations can be implemented and sustained: What aspects of it can be scaled up? How can it continue beyond the initial excitement? What are the benefits and costs in creating a comprehensive learning environment?

We are especially indebted to our inservice and preservice teacher participants for their work as true collaborators and to all our colleagues who generously gave us their time and efforts on this project.


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Issue:
Inquiry Learning and Teaching with Chickscope

Because of the historical separation of disciplines in U.S. schools, K–12 science, mathematics, and technology reform programs might not be instantly associated with adolescent and adult literacy issues. However, the following description of one such project will illustrate how—in partnership—teachers, researchers, and practicing professionals are beginning to structure more authentic contexts to support students’ literacy practices. In the Chickscope project, participants form a community of practice around common interests. Their interactions provide an opportunity to observe how the interplay of human activity and cultural tools, such as emerging technologies, influence the ever changing definition of what it means to be literate. Through such activity, students and adults are immersed in the process of defining problems, answering questions, and communicating with others. During their collaborative inquiry, participants contextualize new tools and construct ways of talking, acting, and thinking that serve their purposes. As their work progresses and others move in and out of their community, their literacy practices evolve. Some practices are sustained and shared with others, while some fall out of use. In such situations, students not only practice literacy skills necessary for the future, but they also experience how language mediates meaningful and immediate tasks.

What is Chickscope?

The Chickscope project allows students and teachers to study chicken embryo development using a variety of educational resources such as inquiry-based curriculum materials, interactive modules on egg mathematics, image processing, and a remote controlled magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) instrument. The project, an educational innovation of the World Wide Laboratory (WWL), was initiated by Clint Potter of the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. Potter collaborated with educators and researchers from several university departments. Using a standard Web browser, researchers in any location and at any time can access the latest scientific instruments without having to travel to a remote site or invest in the hardware. Accordingly, the Web becomes a laboratory—a WWL—for long-distance, interactive imaging, and scientific experimentation.

From laboratory to pilot implementation. The Chickscope project was initiated in the spring of 1996 to enable students and teachers in 10 classrooms ranging from kindergarten to high school (including an after-school science club and an out-of-state home school) to access and control the MRI system to study the maturation of a chicken embryo during its 21-day development. Classrooms were selected on the basis of the teachers’ interest in the project, plans for integrating it with their curriculum, and access to the Internet from their classrooms. Prior to the start of the project, a training day was held at the university for teachers to familiarize themselves with project content and resources, as well as receive materials such as classroom incubators. The project objectives were twofold: (a) to understand the impact of using remote scientific instrumentation in the classroom in light of then-current education reform initiatives recommending the use of the Internet for learning, teaching, and research (e.g., Hunter, 1995); and (b) to further develop a human and technological infrastructure for the MRI system for scientists. It was reasoned that if kindergartners could use the system easily, then so could busy scientists.

Using computers in their classrooms with access to the Internet, students and teachers were able to log in to the computers at the university, manipulate experimental conditions, and then view resulting MR images of a chicken embryo in real time. (See http://chickscope.beckman.uiuc.edu/about/overview/ for a review of the project.) Researchers at the university answered students’ questions about the images they acquired and about related issues (e.g., Why is the MR image black and white?). An evaluation report documented that Chickscope was successful in immersing about 210 students, nine teachers, and 15 undergraduate students (including three preservice teachers) in a scientific community (Bruce et al., 1997). Students and teachers learned much about how to collect and analyze data, how to ask questions, and how to communicate their findings with others (Mason-Fossum & Thakkar, 1997). That is, Chickscope gave classrooms a human and technological infrastructure that is usually reserved for scientists. As a seventh-grade science teacher at one middle school in Urbana, Illinois, said,

My students gained knowledge about embryonic development and MRI. They learned new skills in using the World Wide Web and e-mail. My students also felt as though they were a community of learners playing an integral role in a project. They felt like respected people who were given control of an expensive machine. This control of their learning in turn provides motivation and interest towards learning science.

The Chickscope project as initially conceived was not sustainable because of the large number of human and technological resources needed to support a small number of classrooms. Since the completion of the project, there have been continuing inquiries from around the world asking if the project would be repeated and requesting access to the resources and expertise.

From pilot to widespread implementation. To address growing interest in the project, we initiated Illinois Chickscope—a professional development program for K–12 teachers from east-central Illinois interested in integrating the Chickscope project with their curriculum. The Illinois Chickscope program began in the fall of 1997 with the introduction of the project to 57 preservice teachers (in two concurrent science methods courses—one taught by Chip Bruce) through a month-long unit on chicken embryo development. These teachers then took their new pedagogical knowledge into their student teaching. Over the next year, there were 11 all-day inservice sessions. Each session included interactive discussions and hands-on and computer-based activities related to chicken embryology, egg mathematics, and MR imaging. The Illinois Chickscope teachers shared the work they did during the summer with the new group of preservice teachers in the fall of 1998.

Thirty-two teachers from 15 schools collaborated with preservice teachers, graduate students, and faculty and staff from different departments to develop inquiry-based curriculum activities (Bruce, Thakkar, & Hogan, 1999). Thus grew a community of teachers—inservice and preservice—and scientists in a variety of disciplines. The project promoted an integrated understanding of science and mathematics and facilitated new ways of using the Internet for learning, teaching, and research.

The program continued in a similar way in the second year with another group of 23 teachers. This group included a high school teacher taking leave for a year to finish his graduate coursework as well as two preservice teachers who wanted to participate in all program activities. Eleven teachers in this group were continuing from the first year of the program, and they served as mentors to new teachers, especially those from their schools. For example, a learning disabilities teacher from an Urbana elementary school was the only teacher from her school in the program’s first year. In the second year, she led a team of two teachers and a preservice teacher from her school on the Chickscope project. In a statement about participating again, she wrote,

Since I am familiar with the rich resources on the Chickscope page, I envision helping the classrooms to access appropriate materials. Teachers on the team identified technology as an area that they wish to have support. I have conducted several technology inservice opportunities for our staff and would collaborate with the participants as they begin using online resources in their classrooms related to this project. I see myself as a facilitator supporting these classroom teachers and student teacher and will act as a resource for their classrooms.

The levels taught by these four teachers ranged from kindergarten to fifth grade. In their joint statement about integrating Chickscope with their classroom curriculum, the teachers wrote as follows:

One of our school’s goals is to integrate technology with the curriculum. Chickscope provides classrooms access to the MRI database and the embryology images to support the hands-on learning involved with hatching chicken eggs.

1. Classrooms would access the embryology page each day during the 21-day incubation and allow students to “see” inside the egg the changes that are occurring. This pairs hands-on experience with technology, allowing students to experience information that would not be available in any other way.

2. One idea is to have upper-grade students from the resource room act as mentors for students in the kindergarten and first-grade classrooms. During the computer lab time, the mentors could show students some Chickscope online features that support the chick hatching experience.

The students would be able to access information developed by scientists, mathematicians, or educators and have opportunities to ask questions of the project scientists. Students will (a) seek answers to their inquiry-based questions—visit the Roost for answers from University scientists; (b) explore online activities—complete symmetry activities on the Chickscope math pages; (c) explore the Inquiry Page for both fiction and nonfiction literature on chickens and eggs; and (d) compare egg sizes of various birds or other egg-laying animals.

The teachers also created a Web page illustrating the Chickscope project activities where their students made predictions and collected data, and wrote and drew pictures about their observations, as well as hatched eggs.

The classroom experiences imply that Chickscope not only provided a rich, innovative technological environment, but also extended literacy practices across the content areas. For example, in order to carry out the project, students needed to learn new vocabulary (e.g., magnetic resonance imaging, germ spot, remote access) and communicate what they found out with others, both orally and in written texts—sometimes electronically, sometimes not. They also read both fiction and nonfiction texts to complement and expand their learning. Through their drawings and image accessing, they also used visual literacy. All in all, this was a full multimedia literacy experience within a burgeoning scientific community.

Challenges of inquiry-based learning and teaching

Many experts and recent U.S. reports concur that inquiry-based projects successfully facilitate learning. One considered “peer Inquiry Groups” as a valuable professional resource for teachers (National Commission on Mathematics and Science Teaching, 2000), which can be envisioned as communities of learning. Another report on technology and inquiry has suggested that inquiry-based instruction “allows students [and teachers] to engage in practices of scientists and to construct their own scientific knowledge through investigation rather than memorization” (Linn, Slotta, & Baumgartner, 2000, p. 2). Yet another report has called for an emphasis on inquiry in teaching and learning in classrooms across K–12 (National Research Council, 2000). However, getting teachers interested and familiar with inquiry and inquiry-based learning and teaching, and providing support for them, can be challenging.

Illinois Chickscope attempts to offer a best practice professional development program model for inquiry-based learning and teaching with emerging technologies. During the inservice sessions, the teachers focused on a broad question: How do we build a community for inquiry learning? Each day during the summer inservice we began with an inquiry question to guide the discussion as well as design and development of teacher-driven curriculum materials. The questions included the following:

• How do we get students to engage in inquiry?

• How do we ensure that all students are involved in inquiry activities?

• How do teachers link to other teachers and student teachers to facilitate inquiry learning and teaching?

• What are roles for scientists in supporting inquiry in classrooms?

• How can teachers study their own inquiry practice and share what they learn with others?

These questions served to connect theory and practice. For instance, a working definition of inquiry may be as follows:

Inquiry is one way of making sense out of what we experience.… Inquiry teaching is putting learners into situations in which they must engage in the intellectual operations that constitute inquiry. It requires learners to make their own meaning out of what they experience. (Beyer, 1971, p. 6)

Illinois Chickscope teachers seem to have different definitions yet some of the same general concepts. To one group of middle and high school teachers, inquiry learning refers to a “process to stimulate students’ critical thinking skills in which the teacher serves as a facilitator. It helps to encourage a desire for learning, and problem solving.” Teachers also noted that implementing inquiry-based learning was often a struggle because of institutional and scheduling constraints and overemphasis on behavioral management.

Despite these challenges, a sustained, scalable scientific discourse community emerged. During the 2 years of Illinois Chickscope, around 42 teachers from 17 schools, 150 preservice teachers, and 2,000 students became involved with the project. (Between 1996 and 1999, around 49 teachers from 24 schools have been involved with Chickscope.) In addition, several teachers involved their colleagues (such as librarians and technology coordinators), other classroom teachers, and their students’ parents in their projects.

Inquiry Page collaboratory

One outcome of the project has been the Inquiry Page, a collaboratory for curriculum development to support inquiry-based learning and teaching (Bruce, 2001). The Web site started in part because the teachers wanted to share their ongoing development of their inquiry units with one another and with the program staff. Each such inquiry unit starts with a guiding question and provides a space for activities of investigation, creation, discussion, and reflection. (To review teacher-created units, please search for Chickscope units on the Inquiry Page.) The Inquiry Page allows teachers (and students) to create their units using a Web-based inquiry unit generator. In addition, if a teacher wants to adapt an existing Chickscope unit, she or he can easily do this by using the Inquiry Page’s spin-off feature.

The Web site has been instrumental in sustaining the community for inquiry learning among the program participants—preservice and inservice teachers across K–12 and teaching different subject areas, such as arts, mathematics, science, social studies, and technology; graduate and undergraduate students from different disciplines, such as curriculum and instruction, computer science, and mathematics education; and program staff with a diverse expertise, such as chicken embryology, egg mathematics, inquiry learning, and MR imaging. The Inquiry Page provides yet another way to promote literacy practices across content areas and extend the discourse community.

Challenges of scalability and sustainability

Studies of systemic change usually identify the following principles: (a) fundamental change takes time, (b) collegiality and cooperation are essential, (c) professional development has much in common with effective teaching, (d) there are many ways to learn and teach, and (e) the system needs to change if the individuals within are to have the room to make changes themselves (e.g., Loucks-Horsley, 1997).

Principles such as these were confirmed for us in the initial and continuing evaluation of Chickscope. The infrastructure for change was part and parcel of improving mathematics and science instruction. In one sense the infrastructure was necessary to bring about changes, and in another a new infrastructure was the major change itself. One piece of evidence for this impact is that teachers and schools that participated in Chickscope through the initial project or through the Illinois Chickscope program are continuing to use the project in different ways in their classrooms while supporting literacy practices. In addition, teachers from across the U.S. are contacting the program staff regularly about getting involved in the project and using its resources. One such person, a science teacher from a middle school in Texas City, Texas, recently wrote this e-mail:

Hello Chickscope team,

[I] would like a chance to work with Chickscope. We learned of your site from Bugscope, which my students thoroughly enjoyed working with. If it is possible for my students to work with Chickscope, could we hatch ducks in place of chickens?

This teacher later would invite people, via her home page, to join her class during the hatching of chickens. For example, she sent Chip Bruce her URL and said, “We have the Web cam ready, and you can see a demo on March 26 and 27. Find on my page where it says Live Presentations, and there you are. We plan to hatch baby chicks after Easter.”

The project has expanded to other counties in Illinois, to schools across the U.S., and even worldwide. A partial explanation for the sustained enthusiasm is that teachers at all levels see how Chickscope could promote an integrated understanding in different subjects beyond science, mathematics, and technology, to support literacy across the content areas.

Educational reform and Chickscope

In writing about scaling educational reforms, Songer (2000) identified two approaches to scaling: maverick and systemic. The maverick approach suggests adaptation of a project innovation among teachers who are able to customize it to their needs and interests without extensive guidance. One can think of such teachers or administrators as early adopters or self-starters. The systemic approach suggests adaptation of a project innovation by using the local context to shape it (e.g., teachers in a single school district working with school administrators and university personnel to shape the innovation from within). Teachers in the systemic approach can also include self-starters (but that may not necessarily be the case), second-level adopters, and reluctant adopters.

Songer (2000) made a perceptive argument that the word scaling is a misnomer in the context of educational reform because it implies a replication of the same project innovation in many new locations. Instead, scaling within the context of systemic reform would occur only through customization and adoption of the project innovation. At the same time, it is important to note the interrelatedness between systemic reform and scalability. Songer’s colleagues, Blumenfeld, Fishman, Krajcik, and Marx (2000) rightfully argued that systemic reform implies that the innovation is scalable but a scalable innovation may not be systemic. Our guiding assumption has been that an innovation (e.g., the Chickscope project) is realized, or comes into being, only through use (Bruce & Rubin, 1993). Thus, for the Illinois Chickscope teachers there are various forms of innovation-in-use through districtwide or schoolwide implementations (e.g., Hogan, 2000). This situation, in turn, has helped the project to address the issues relating to scalability and sustainability.

We concur with Songer’s (2000) research with maverick populations that it takes a minimum of 3 years before a comprehensive adaptation of a project innovation occurs in a given classroom. However, we have found through our Chickscope and Illinois Chickscope experiences that such an adaptation of innovation can sometimes occur in less time. For instance, one high school teacher who participated throughout the Chickscope project continually integrates the project resources every academic year with her ninth graders in different ways, such as hatching chickens and using image processing with MR images to learn about the scientific method (e.g., forming a hypothesis that the eye of the chicken embryo grows larger each day and then using NIH Image to analyze the data and draw conclusions).

Final thoughts

Our experiences working with Chickscope teachers led us to develop a deeper understanding about integrating technologies with classroom curriculum. For instance, only a few of the teachers were able to incorporate MR images with their classroom activities because this technology appeared narrow with respect to the curriculum and required extra technical resources and expertise. However, every teacher used the chicken incubator, which was highly adaptable to diverse curricular goals. This evidence suggests that flexible, trailing-edge technologies have a greater likelihood of being adopted.

Another important result of the project was that the teachers saw it as a boundary object, a means for them to come together to share ideas and problems. A boundary object is one that is flexible enough to be used in different ways by any teacher, yet stable and tangible enough to maintain a common identity. Star and Griesemer (1989) said such boundary objects allow both autonomy and trade across boundaries. A new technology means different things to a scientist, a technology specialist, a teacher educator, a teacher, a student, or a child, but it offers enough of a fixed reference point to enable new forms of interaction among all these parties.


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Web Page of the Month

Bugscope is an educational outreach project that allows students and teachers across K–12 to study insects and other arthropods through remote access and control of an environmental scanning electron microscope from their classroom computers (Thakkar et al., 2000). Bugscope has been featured in a section of The New York Times and on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. There is no cost for classrooms to participate in the project.


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Glossary

Innovation—“an idea, practice, or object that is perceived as new by an individual or another unit of adoption” (Rogers, 1995, p. 11).
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Scaling up and scalability—scaling up occurs after an “implementation of a tested prototype program or design expands to many schools” (Datnow, Hubbard, & Mehan, 1998, p. 1). “Scalability means that an innovation can operate in more than a handful of select and resource-rich classrooms or schools” (Blumenfeld et al., 2000, p. 152).
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References

Beyer, B.K. (1971). Inquiry in the social studies classroom. Columbus, OH: Merrill.
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Blumenfeld, P., Fishman, B.J., Krajcik, J., Marx, R.W., & Soloway, E. (2000). Creating usable innovations in systemic reform: Scaling up technology-embedded project-based science in urban schools. Educational Psychologist, 35, 149-64.
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Bruce, B.C. (2001). The Inquiry Page: A collaboratory for curricular innovation. Learning Technology, 3(1). [Online]. Available: http://lttf.ieee.org/learn_tech/issues/january2001/
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Bruce, B.C., Carragher, B.O., Damon, B.M., Dawson, M.J., Eurell, J.A., Gregory, C.D., Lauterbur, P.C., Marjanovic, M.M., Mason-Fossum, B., Morris, H.D., Potter, C.S., & Thakkar, U. (1997). Chickscope: An interactive MRI classroom curriculum innovation for K–12. Computers and Education Journal, 29(2), 73–87.
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Bruce, B.C., & Rubin, A. (1993). Electronic quills: A situated evaluation of using computers for writing in classrooms. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
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Bruce, B.C., Thakkar, U., & Hogan, M.P. (1999). Inquiry-based learning and teaching with new technologies. Spectrum: Journal of the Illinois Science Teachers Association, 25(2), 16–19.
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Datnow, A., Hubbard, L., & Mehan, H. (1998). Educational reform implementation: A co-constructed process (Research Rep. No. 5). Center for Research on Education, Diversity, & Excellence, University of California, Santa Cruz. [Online]. Available: http://www.cal.org/crede/pubs/research/rr5.htm
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Hogan, M.P. (2000). Chickscope realized: A situated evaluation of a sixth-grade classroom. International Journal of Educational Technology, 2(1). [Online]. Available: http://www.outreach.uiuc.edu/ijet/v2n1/hogan/index.html
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Hunter, B. (1995). Learning and teaching on the Internet: Contributions to educational reform. In B. Kahin & J. Keller (Eds.), Public Access to the Internet (pp. 85–114). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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Linn, M.C., Slotta, J.D., & Baumgartner, E. (2000). Teaching high school science in the information age: A review of courses and technology for inquiry-based learning. Santa Monica, CA: Milken Family Foundation. [Online]. Available: http://www.mff.org
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Loucks-Horsley, S. (1997). Teacher change, staff development, and systemic change: Reflections from the eye of a paradigm shift. In S.N. Friel & G.W. Bright (Eds.), Reflecting on our work: NSF teacher enhancement in K–6 mathematics (pp. 133–149). Lanham, MD: University Press of America.
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Mason-Fossum, B., & Thakkar, U. (1997). Primary school classroom and Chickscope: Studying the egg in the classroom and using the Internet. Proceedings of the 3rd Conference on Human Factors and the Web. Denver, CO: US West Communications. [Online]. Available: http://www.inquiry.uiuc.edu/partners/chickscope/fossum.php3
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National Commission on Mathematics and Science Teaching. (2000). Before it’s too late: A report to the nation. Jessup, MD: U.S. Department of Education. [Online]. Available: http://www.ed.gov/americacounts/glenn
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National Research Council. (2000). Inquiry and the National Science Education Standards. Washington, DC: National Academy Press. [Online]. Available: http://books.nap.edu/html/inquiry_addendum/
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Rogers, E.M. (1995). Diffusions of innovations (4th ed.). New York: Free Press.
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Songer, N. (2000, October). Scaling beyond mavericks: What do our experiences tell us? Paper presented at the Workshop on Modeling and Visualization in Teacher Education, Arlington, VA. [Online]. Available: http://www.eot.org/edgrid/mvw.shtml
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Star, S.L., & Griesemer, J.R. (1989). Institutional ecology: “Translations” and boundary objects: Amateurs and professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907–39. Social Studies of Science, 19, 387–420.
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Thakkar, U., Carragher, B., Carroll, L., Conway, C., Grosser, B., Kisseberth, N., Potter, C.S., Robinson, S., Sinn-Hanlon, J., Stone, D., & Weber, D. (2000). Formative evaluation of Bugscope: A sustainable world wide laboratory for K–12. Educational Resources Information Center. (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. ED 441 018) [Online]. Available: http://www.itg.uiuc.edu/publications/techreports/00-008/00-008.pdf
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Guest Coauthors

Thakkar is a research scientist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and a visiting assistant professor in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. E-mail: uthakkar@ncsa.uiuc.edu. Mail: 152 Computer Applications Building, 605 East Springfield Avenue, Champaign, IL 61820, USA. Hogan teaches at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, and Williamson is a doctoral student in Curriculum & Instruction at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Reader comments on this column are welcome. Please send ideas for future discussion, sites for consideration, literacy and student Web pages for sharing, and Glossary suggestions to the Technology Department editor. E-mail: chip@uiuc.edu. Mail: Bertram C. Bruce, Graduate School of Library & Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 501 East Daniel Street, MC 493, Champaign, IL 61820, USA.

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Citation: Thakkar, U., Bruce, B.C., Hogan, M.P., & Williamson, J. (2001, November). Extending literacy through participation in new technologies. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 45(3). Available: http://www.readingonline.org/electronic/elec_index.asp?HREF=/electronic/jaal/11-01_Column/index.html

Reading Online, www.readingonline.org
Published November 2001 in the Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy
Posted simultaneously in Reading Online
© 2001 International Reading Association, Inc. ISSN 1096-1232