The group of folks enumerated at the bottom of this post gathered together on a hot summer day (July 28, 2004) to yak about the subject of communication and collaboration in the Portland Oregon Public School System. Turns out that it's hard to know what everyone's doing and even harder for anyone to quickly and efficiently communicate with others regarding all the wonderful things going on in education reform.
Tim showed us his (almost famous) LEWIS ELEMENTARY.ORG site built by him using Movable Type software. It's pretty cool and very useful. Even more useful is the internal site (I'm not posting that address here because Tim may not want that to be public, even though it is "usually password protected" ;)
Steve talked about his company and offered to replicate the Lewis Elementary site for use by Franklin as a sort of sand box to play in.
Jennifer bought me a cappucino and two yummy breakfast rolls... thank you sis! (yeah... Jen's my sister.) She also talked about the lack of tools to publish and track what she and everyone else in PPS is doing regarding education reform. Having recently returned from a conference in Boston that covered this topic, she asked questions about blog, wiki, newsgroup, and other collaboration technologies.
Lynne talked about her needs which, not surprisingly, pretty much mirror those expressed by reps from Franklin High School and Lewis Elementary.
In summary, people want a way to publish, on a very frequent basis (daily, weekly at least) activities related to school reform. Lots of awesome work is happening on this front, yet there is no way to get the word out and let people watch the progress/process.
Attendees at this meeting: Lynne George, Jennifer Frentress, Tim Lauer, Steve Burt, and yours truly Jim Frentress
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