Currents in Electronic Literacy Spring 2000(3), 
 <http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/currents/spr00/slatin.html> 

Lessons So Far

27. TX2K has proved more difficult to implement than we had envisioned, and some of the difficulties have persisted over several years, despite our best efforts—and the best efforts of participating teachers.  It has been difficult, for example, for schools to complete exhibits on time, and difficult for them to complete three exhibits in the course of a year. Student participation in online dialogues has been sporadic, and teachers have made only limited use of the tx2kteach electronic mailing list.
28. It is difficult to account for these weaknesses.  It is always possible, of course, that TX2K is simply not well designed.  I do not think that this is an adequate explanation, however.  Or rather, I think that the problems that beset TX2K are closely akin to the problems besetting public education in general, problems which are amplified by the introduction of new technologies and the effort to integrate them into classrooms and curricula.

Time Pressure

29.  Perhaps the greatest single barrier to the success of TX2K (or any comparable project) is the fierce time pressure under which K-12 teachers operate.  Teachers are under great pressure to cover a great deal of material; this pressure is exacerbated by the fact that the goal of "raising standards" of student achievement is operationalized as the goal of raising students’ scores on the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills test (the TAAS).  As a result, teachers are understandably reluctant to innovate, since we cannot yet offer them well documented assurances that student work on TX2K projects will lead to the improved test scores which are rapidly becoming the most important single measure of teacher "accountability."

Infrequent Professional Contact

30. University researchers—even those in fields like English where scholarship is mostly an individual pursuit—know that it is essential to feel that one is part of a scholarly community.  Great universities depend upon and promote the formation of such communities within and across many disciplines.  They devote substantial resources to sustain participation in these communities, not just locally but nationally and internationally as well.  The Internet has emerged—especially in the past five years—as a vitally important force in this regard, enabling scholars to collaborate across great distances on projects that would be inconceivably difficult without such technological support.  The Human Genome Project is one example; the continuing development of the World Wide Web itself is another.
31. Community has an important impact on teaching as well.  The success of the Computer Writing and Research Lab at the University of Texas at Austin has been due in large part to the emergence of a genuine community of practice which has persisted for more than a decade (Slatin 1998). Scholars at the Center for Research on Information Technology in Organizations (CRITO) at the University of California, Irvine report that a 1998 survey of more than 4,000 teachers confirmed a very strong correlation between frequency of professional contact and changes in pedagogical practice  (Henry J. Becker, and Margaret M. Riel, "Teacher Professionalism, School Work Culture, and the Emergence of Constructivist-Compatible Pedagogies," http://www.crito.uci.edu/tlc/findings/special_report2/index.htm).  But K-12 teachers often work in isolation from their peers, as Secretary Riley has said  (Riley 2000); many TX2K teachers report that collaboration on the project is made difficult by such things as a lack of common planning periods.  The same CRITO study which found a strong correlation between frequency of professional contact and a shift toward constructivist pedagogy reported that a very small percentage of their respondents had had enough contact with colleagues to move toward leadership as pedagogical innovators.  By the same token, Richard Elmore (1996) has argued that one important factor in the failure of previous national efforts at curricular reform was [the] withdrawal of support for communication among teachers charged with implementing the new curricula (Elmore, R. F. (1996).  Getting to scale with good educational practice.  Harvard Education Review 66.1: 1-26.)
32. It is tempting to think that contemporary technologies such as electronic mail and (especially) the World Wide Web have made such obstacles far less significant than they might have been even a decade ago.  But here too there are unexpected new problems.  TX2K requires participating schools to store their digital artifacts on their own district or campus Web servers.  But understandable security concerns mean that students are rarely if ever allowed to upload materials directly to these servers, thus imposing an additional burden on teachers, who must now perform this task but often lack the necessary skills—or the certification that some districts require.  In other cases, “firewalls” meant to guard against hacker attacks and to prevent students from encountering pornographic materials have the unintended effect of making TX2K exhibits unavailable to participants from other communities.  And in some districts, teachers are unable to use their district-supported email accounts from any location except buildings on their district network, limiting their ability to exchange information and ideas with colleagues from other campuses or districts.

What Teachers Value About TX2K

33. In view of such difficulties, it sometimes seems remarkable that TX2K has had any success at all.  But teachers have found it a rewarding experience nonetheless. 
34. Asked what they find most valuable about TX2K, many teachers reply that the project's flexible design allows them to satisfy many of the performance requirements specified in the state’s new curriculum framework, the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS).  Indeed, some have reported that TX2K has helped them understand the importance of the TEKS.  This is vital to TX2K's success: the constraints on teachers' time are so severe, and their work is so minutely scrutinized, that TX2K can work only if teachers see it as a means of accomplishing existing goals rather than as "extra" work.  With the help of participating teachers, we are in the process of redesigning our summer workshops and our documentation to emphasize and clarify the ways in which TX2K supports the TEKS; we are also developing (and seeking external funding for) strategies to improve ongoing support for participants during the academic year.
35. The most poignant responses to our question about the value of TX2K were anecdotes illustrating teachers' surprise at the project's power to engage students and community members.  An English  teacher at an almost entirely Mexican-American  high school serving a number of small border towns in the Lower Rio Grande Valley related his astonishment when 30 students took him up on his offer to open the school library on a Saturday so they could continue their research on the history of the town square.  A physics teacher, working with her students to document the history of local schools named after women, told of her students' amazement when elderly men of considerable stature in the community wept as they recounted how the women for whom these schools were named had influenced their lives years ago.  Another teacher told of middle-schoolers sitting in rapt attention as a former member of their football team who had grown up in the area described life in this African-American community during Jim Crow days.  An African-American himself, he painted such a compelling picture that a young girl, reluctant to leave when the session ended, could only reply, "I wish!" when the teacher asked if she lived in the neighborhood the visitor had described—a neighborhood now torn by high poverty, unemployment, drug abuse, and violence.  A social studies teacher from another middle school said that TX2K had demonstrated to the community that the students were far more capable than people generally chose to believe; the project had shown the community the school’s worth.
36. The passage below is excerpted from a letter I received in November 1999 from Ann DeBolt, a technology specialist at Brenham Junior High School.  It  offers a compelling summary of TX2K’s potential impact: 

I think Tx2k is a wonderful project! I am proud that our 7th graders are participating. They have learned so much about Brenham and the surrounding area. We have a great parent volunteer who arranged for a panel discussion for our students. She brought in the Mayor, a former Mayor, the President of Blinn College, a Professor from Blinn who has taught [there] for over 50 years, the County Clerk, and the curator from the Brenham Heritage Museum. Our students interviewed them, and the press was there. Our wonderful parent volunteer also arranged several mini-field trips for our students to go out and do research. She also took them to the local cable TV station where they were interviewed for a news segment. I appreciate the wonderful things that have happened to our students and Brenham Junior High School as a result of Tx2k. We could not have found a better project for school-community involvement. PLUS it is helping educate the community about the power of the Internet  (Personal communication.  Used by permission.)

37. This is powerful testimony.  But there is a sad irony here as well, for this teacher, like several of the others’ whose responses I summarized above and a number of others as well, has not yet been able to publish her students’ work in the TX2K Gallery. 

Next: Directions: Where Do We Go From Here?