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:
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 (https://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.
