About the Electronic Emissary Project©1999, Judi Harris, Ph.D.
There are literally millions of people in the world who use Internet-based tools and resources. (Want to know how many?) Many are subject matter specialists whose knowledge encompasses a wide spectrum of expertise. What if electronic teams could be formed so that volunteers from among this group could communicate directly with K-12 students and teachers who are studying about these experts' specialties?
What is the Emissary?
There are a few online efforts that bring people together in this way. Ours, the Electronic Emissary, is an Internet-based service that has been in operation since February of 1993. It is global in scope, but is coordinated from the University of Texas at Austin. The Emissary is a "matching service" that helps K-12 teachers and students with access to the World Wide Web locate other Internet account-holders who are experts in different disciplines, for purposes of setting up curriculum-based, electronic exchanges among the teachers, their students, and the experts. In this way, the interaction that occurs among teachers and students face-to-face in the classroom is supplemented and extended by exchanges that occur among teachers, students, and experts online, via electronic mail and desktop teleconferencing. The Emissary is also a research project, which focuses upon the nature of telementoring interactions in which K-12 students are active inquirers.
Facilitation is important!
Online communication is different from most other forms of interchange in significant ways. It lacks the full spectrum of visual and audible information that we depend upon, often unconsciously, in face-to-face exchange. Therefore, it requires somewhat different interaction strategies if it is to be used to create maximal educational benefit by and for students and teachers. These techniques can be modeled and made explicit by someone closely following online conversations in the role of facilitator, helping participants to construct the online teaching/learning experience in mutually beneficial ways. The Electronic Emissary1s years of research have shown that the people best prepared to assist in this way are those having the experience requisite in both online communication and education to know how to help project participants build mutually accessible bridges between differing workplaces. The most important and valuable part of the Emissary1s services is its online facilitation, providing "just in time" assistance to teachers, students, and subject matter experts.
Sample telementoring projects
Here are some examples of recent curriculum-related work conducted via Emissary-arranged "matches:"
High school students in Delaware who were studying Nathaniel Hawthorne1s The Scarlet Letter communicated with the character Arthur Dimsdale, who was actually an American literature professor at the U.S. Naval Academy. During the following semester, the students communicated with the professor himself about Mark Twain1s Huck Finn, culminating their exchange by creating a newspaper that they called The Mississippi Times, an idea first suggested by the expert. The teacher and the professor shared instructional ideas, resources, and perspectives about Mark Twain1s works and views.
Students in the "upper room" of a country school in a rural and mountainous region of northern California (11 students, ranging from 4th to 8th grade in the same classroom) learned about bones and skeletons by studying their own skeletal systems and the bones found in owl pellets in the woods near their school. Their teacher, along with a biological researcher at Michigan State University, guided the students' hypothesis formation and testing as they extracted the bones from the pellets, measured them, labeled them, then reconstructed the skeletons, and deduced what kinds of animals the bones supported.
Jannah, a 10-year-old student in Connecticut, corresponded frequently with Dr. Eisner, a professor in Arizona. They continued their study of Arthurian legends that begun in the spring semester of 1995 for more than three years. Jannah, Dr. Eisner, their online facilitator, and the Emissary1s director, co-authored an article describing their online educational experiences that appeared in the May 1996 issue of the professional journal, Learning and Leading With Technology.
An Advanced Placement Spanish Literature class in Ross, California communicated with Bob Fritz, a professor of Spanish at Ball State University. All communication was conducted in Spanish. Topics addressed included the nivolas of Miguel de Unamuno and how these works fit into the cultural and historical context of Spain.
19 4th- and 5th-grade students in McAllen, Texas compared the experiences of their families on the Texas "La Frontera" to colonial life in the original 13 U.S. colonies, with the help of the director of a historic preservation center and museum in Fredericksburg, Virginia.
Eight groups of four girls each, studying in an honors science program at a New England high school, communicated with a graduate student at the University of Minnesota about DNA & infantile leukemia (the topic of the subject matter expert1s thesis), cancer research & therapy, and professional careers for women in science. The teams discussed both scientific and ethical issues online with the university-based genetics expert.
A computer scientist at the State University of New York-Potsdam with interest and expertise in American history posed as a young Union soldier to help gifted and talented fifth-grade students in Omaha, Nebraska learn about the Civil War. He answered the students' questions in character. The students used what they learned from his responses to write a play about the Civil War, which was performed at their school.
Why telementoring?
To date, the Emissary has supported more than 400 electronic teams of students, teachers, facilitators, and subject matter experts. The members of these teams were engaged in in-depth, dynamic exchange using Internet-based tools such as electronic mail, text-based chats, and World Wide Web pages. Project evaluation results provided by team members have emphasized the importance of the relationships that have developed among participants. Subject matter "came alive" for students who could interact with someone for whom curriculum content is part of everyday life. Many of the teachers developed close, apprenticelike relationships with the experts, requesting and receiving assistance with content-related concepts, resources, and activity design. Subject matter experts often reported delighting in opportunities to revisit and delve deeper into their disciplinary specializations by interacting with interested, but less knowledgeable others. Online facilitators expressed fascination with the often challenging, personal, and in-depth communication that people who know each other only as arrangements of pixels on a screen can co-create.
We have learned that students and teachers exploring real-world, many-faceted, curriculum-based topics need to actively build deep and sophisticated understanding. One of the most effective ways to do this is by engaging in ongoing dialogue with knowledgeable others, as the students form, refine, and expand their comprehension. Classroom teachers typically serve as the subject matter experts with whom students interact in such complex areas of inquiry. Yet when the issues being explored are multi-disciplinary, technically and conceptually sophisticated, or dependent upon current and highly specialized research and theory, additional expertise must be made directly available to students and teachers longitudinally, and on an as-needed basis. This is what telementoring offers to learners and educators today, and what the Electronic Emissary Project brings to students and teachers worldwide.
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