Serendipity35

This year's NJEDge.Net Annual Conference is October 31 - November 2.

I'll be presenting along with Jahanzeb Jabbar on that Thursday. Both of us are NJIT employees who are based day-to-day at Science Park High School here in Newark this year.

My role is as manager of intructional technology, which means I deal mostly with faculty to increase the use of technology in their classes. "JJ" is the manager of network resources, so he deals with the IT/telecom issues that make my work possible.

Science Park High School is a new (opened in November 2006) science & math magnet school that prepares students in grades 7-12 for academic careers in science, technology, engineering, and math.

NJIT is now the first of the Newark higher ed institutions (Rutgers, UMDNJ, Essex County College) to actually put staff positions into the school.

The two of us report to the principal on a daily basis and hope to be considered culturally part of the SPHS community.

There are loads of technology issues to address - from dealing with the content filtering that is common in K-12 that we don't usually deal with in higher ed, to bringing the school online with NJEDge, Access New Jersey and NJIT's own Internet 2 connection. But what I'm more interested in - and will be the focus of our presentation - is the human networking.

We are working to enable collaborations with NJIT and other colleges, other science/math magnet schools, and the private industry tenants of Science Park. These efforts are part of NJIT's new K-20 Initiative.

We hope to share NJIT's vision of a high school and university collaboration in science and technology that will affect the pedagogy of both schools. We'll show attendees examples of the current projects.

I hope there will be some human networking going on at the conference too. We'd love to meet other schools that are working on similar efforts. Hopefully, as we progress, this model can be replicated by other institutions.