The Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education (SITE) was established
to provide a forum for scholarship, collaboration, and discussion about the
use of technology in teacher education. To accomplish these goals, SITE needs
to work closely with other professional organizations. SITE has been holding
a series of retreats with leaders and representatives of other teacher educator
associations, with support from the U.S. Department of Education.
The most recent retreat, the National Technology Leadership Summit was held
just prior to the 2002 SITE conference. Representatives from the Association
for the Education of Teachers in Science (AETS), the Association of Mathematics
Teacher Educators (AMTE), the College and University Faculty Assembly (CUFA)
of the National Council for the Social Studies, the Conference on English Education
(CEE) within the National Council of Teachers of English, International Society
for Technology in Education (ISTE) and SITE met in Charlottesville, Virginia,
in March 2002. The task force developed a white paper addressing ubiquitous
computing, available at: www.aace.org/site/ntlsummit.htm.
These teacher educator associations representing the core content areas of
science, mathematics, English/language arts, and social studies are also the
joint sponsors of the CITE Journal. The CITE Journal itself provides a forum
for collaborative interactions and discussion. If you read an article in the
CITE Journal that resonates, we invite you to write a commentary that builds
upon the topic and advances scholarly dialog.
SITE's current president, Niki Davis, has been working to build collaborative
structures into the core of the organization. The recently revised SITE constitution
calls for three councilsa leadership council, a technology council, and a content
council. The Content Council consists of the chairs of committees representing
each content area. In addition to science, mathematics, language arts, and social
studies, a committee representing art education was formed at this year's SITE
conference. Bernard Robin, director of the instructional technology program
at the University of Houston, and Julie Springer, Coordinator of Teacher Programs
at the National Gallery of Art, joined forces to form this content committee.
To encourage participation by members of other teacher educator associations,
for the next five years SITE is sponsoring a series of National Technology Leadership
Initiative (NTLI) fellowships. This year's NTLI fellows include Sara Kajder
(selected by CEE to represent English education), Barbara Slater Stern (selected
by CUFA to represent social studies education), and Hollylynne Stohl (selected
by AMTE to represent mathematics education). Each year's NTLI fellows will meet
at SITE to discuss cross-disciplinary uses of technology in their respective
content areas.
We are experimenting with a variety of mechanisms for distribution of the CITE
Journal to reach as wide as possible an audience. For example, copies of the
CITE Journal were included on the CD provided to participants in this year's
SITE conference. This year's SITE conference featured another first. With support
from the Center for the Public Domain and special arrangement with Random House,
electronic copies of Lawrence Lessig's seminal work, The Future of Ideas: The
Fate of the Commons in a Connected World, was made available to all conference
participants. This is the first time that the book's publisher, Random House,
has arranged for a mass electronic distribution of a copyrighted work in this
manner, representingappropriately for a technology associationa historic precedent.
Allen Glenn, past president of the American Association of Colleges of Teacher
Education (AACTE) and recipient of the AACTE Pomeroy Award for lifetime achievement,
developed a keynote address for SITE addressing themes in The Future of Ideas.
This keynote was jointly delivered in concert with an announcement of an Open
Source Educational Initiative by Matthew Szulik, CEO of Red Hat, Inc. (one of
the leading developers of open source software). Their remarks will be published
in a future issue of the CITE Journal.
Debra Sprague, editor of the SITE print journal, Journal of Technology and
Teacher Education (JTATE), has taken the lead in developing an online electronic
resource, the SITE Digital Scholarship Portal (DSP). This resource will permit
closer coordination between the content of JTATE and its electronic counterpart,
the CITE Journal, and will also provide a forum for professional dialog related
to research and scholarly discussion. More information about this SITE initiative
is available at:
http://www.citejournal.org/vol1/iss4/editorials/article1.htm
The SITE seminal readings survey is another project sponsored by the SITE journals.
This initiative is intended to identify key readingsarticles, books, and chapters related
to educational technology that are recommended for preservice teachers. The
editor of the ISTE Journal of Computers in Teacher Education (JCTE), Ann Thompson,
and the Journal of Information Technology for Teacher Education (http://www.triangle.co.uk/jit),
Niki Davis, are also guiding and supporting this initiative.
Finally, we would like to call your attention to a special commentary strand
in this issue of the CITE Journal. "Grand Challenges: The Technological
Tipping Point" is a discussion of the coming shift to ubiquitous computing,
and the implications of this paradigm shift for inservice and preservice teachers.
This article is published in the May 2002 issue of Learning and Leading with
Technology (L<). Through special arrangement with the L< editor,
Anita McNear, a reference on the L< web site will link to a commentary
strand in the CITE Journal (http://www.citejournal.org/grandchallenges) another
example of collaboration and cooperation across organizations and institutions
in an increasingly interconnected world. The current issue includes related
commentaries by Michael Berson, president of CUFA, and Steve Rasmussen, CEO
of Key Curriculum Press.
The Internet provides the capability for collaboration, but this represents
a latent potential. Individuals must take the next step to create change. SITE
provides a vehicle for such interconnections through collaborative partnerships
with other institutions and organizations. SITE's president, Niki Davis, has
adopted the goal of involving more SITE members in collaborative initiatives
of this kind. We invite you to contact her if you have an initiative that you
would like to undertake in conjunction with your SITE affiliation.