The Inquiry Page
inquiry.uiuc.edu
Support
• Inquiry Teaching & Learning class • Illinois Board of Higher Education, Chickscope Professional Development • Committee on Institutional Cooperation • NCSA staff, students at Purdue and UIUC • UI Research Board • Inquiry partners
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History
• • • • • Course website Project website Ease of use issues Increasing support for collaboration Shift to community focus
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What is Inquiry?
• Creating opportunities to engage students in active learning based on their own questions. • A learner centered and learner driven process. • A cycle where each question leads to an exploration which will then lead to more questions to investigate. • The process of asking, investigating, creating, discussing, and reflecting, and then asking again.
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What is the Inquiry Page?
• Partner project • Resource for inquiry teaching philosophy • Collaborative teaching & learning community • Lesson planning support and idea site
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How does Inquiry work?
• Inquiry involves students as active learners. They may hatch chickens, run a business, or investigate evolution.
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The Inquiry Page
… is designed to foster inquiry-based learning. Participants include community members, P-12 teachers, museum educators, librarians, university students and faculty, scientists, and others engaged in a variety of lifelong and informal learning activities. The development of the site has been design-through-use: The processes of creating, using, and critiquing the site and the resources within it should exemplify the open-ended aspects of inquiry and social participation that the site itself is encouraging.
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A collaboratory, where users
find resources to support inquiry-based learning share, discuss and build upon each others' work use tools offered by Inquiry partners explore new ways to assess inquiry-based learning dialogue with others about new approaches to teaching, learning, and community problem-solving • participate in the institutions that affect their lives • • • • •
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Elements
• • • • • • • Quote of the Day: Writings on inquiry Collaborative technologies Inquiry in Action: What inquiry looks like Evaluation/Assessment resources Collaborative bibliography Inquiry Units: Searchable database of Units Inquiry Partners: projects, courses, libraries, museums, schools, community groups, …
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Types of Inquiry Units
• • • • • • • • Lesson plan Syllabus Student work product Locus for collaborative investigation Policy discussion thread Community action plan Multimedia digital library document Pathfinder or bibliography
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Curriculum units
• Graduate course: What are the processes and consequences of electronic publication?
• Reflection on teaching: What directions do children's interests take in story reading as inquiry? • Activities to connect science and language: What does hatching chicks have to do with language arts?? • Workshop on poetry writing: Poetry as play
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Library resources
• Multilingual needs: What library and information services are provided for librarians serving the Latino community? How can we present these in the form of a website to librarians and other information professionals? • Policy statement on a collection: What sort of selection policy would be appropriate for developing a 'zine collection?
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Independent inquiry
• How can a former language arts teacher utilize his or her experience in a library science career? • How can one create an evaluation scheme for web sites focusing on books for junior high students? • How can one create a pathfinder to aid students in literary reports?
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Community action
• Create Your Personal SisterNet Spiritual Health Plan
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Next steps
• Partners: National Science Digital Library, STC Water, Living on the Prairie, East St. Louis, Sisternet, Chicago Lab School, visualization of web • Search: VisIT, VIBE • Use in courses • Collaboratory enhancements • Business & Technical Writing program • Bibliography tool
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Participation
• inquiry.uiuc.edu • Weekly meeting: Tuesday, 5:00-6:00 pm at 131 LIS, 501 E. Daniel • Events: www.inquiry.uiuc.edu/bin/events.cgi • Listservs: all, developers, DIME, research, technical, assessment, … • Participatory design
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