Reprinted with permission of copyright holder.

AN INTERVIEW WITH SUE GIBSON

Hart, Susan (1997). Transitions & Technology: An Interview with Sue Gibson. In Touch, Research Newsletter of the Faculty of Education at the Unviersity of Alberta. v4, No. 2, pp. 3-4.

Sue Gibson, a professor in the department of Elementary Education, works in the area of Social Studies education. She has extensive experience teaching social studies to students from elementary school through to university teacher education programs. Her doctoral research at UBC focused on teacher education in the social studies, and more specifically, on how student teachers learn to teach social studies and what kinds of experiences are most powerful for them. She is a relative newcomer to her latest research interest: technology. Sue's interest in technology began when a group of researchers from the university was invited to conduct research on Project E.L.I.T.E., an educational pilot project designed to deliver social studies curriculum through state-of-the-art multimedia technology in six Edmonton Public Schools. Sue initially joined the project because of her background in social studies curriculum; like the teachers in her study, she learned about the technological side of the project as she went. Sue's experience with Project E.L.I.T.E. has led to other research projects.

One current study involves researching~ how the Internet is used as an educational tool in classrooms.Sue. along with Dianne Oberg from Library Science and Elementary

Transitions & Technology:

Education, is now planning phase one of a projected five year study which involves a series of case studies of Internet use in six exemplary schools. From there they plan to design a provincial survey to send to Alberta schools. The survey will ask about Internet use :schools and will draw from the data collected in the initial phase of the project. The final phase involves a case ~study approach with six other schools in order to stud how teachers and students deal with the Internet - the barriers successes and concerns. Eventually, Sue is hoping that this study will give direction to teachers about how to effectively use the Internet as a teaching tool.

Sue is also interested in how the university is preparing prospective teachers to use technology in the classroom. Currently, she is working with Norma Nocente from Secondary Education to collect and synthesize information found in technology plans coming from the various Alberta school boards. The intent is to determine what kinds of expectations school boards have of new teachers coming into the system with regard to technological skills. Once Sue and Norma have determined what kinds of skills teachers are expected to graduate with, they will administer a survey to university staff and students in the Faculty of Education to find out what kinds of skills students have and what our faculty is doing to help students become more technologically literate.

Sue's interest in technology extends beyond her research to her teaching. The students in her social studies methods course are all required to activate their email addresses so they can e-mail the students they visit at Brander Gardens Elementary School. Sue's course also involves a visit to various social studies web sites on the Internet, a critique of the available CD ROM materials in the area of social studies, and a tutorial on how to use programs such as Hyperstudio to design teacher and student programs. When I asked Sue how her students responded to learning about technology in their social studies course, she had this to say:

I think they come to a new respect for technology in that we hear that it makes our life easier, but not necessarily.... That it is something that is really time consuming and that you do have to be ready for the glitches because they're going to happen...to be able to not get frustrated with it, to be patient,to give it time and to take the time to learn it yourself. So I think they do recognize that it is something that's going to help them in their teaching after the course and have a new commitment to upgrade themselves.

Sue's future research interests in the area of technology involve studying gender differences in the use of technology. A preliminary finding from Project E.L.I.T.E. was that boys and girls responded to learning through the technology in very different ways.Boys' attitudes about technology and themselves as users of technology improved over the duration of the project

while the girls' declined. Sue hopes to be able to follow up these findings to see whether these kinds of gender differences have occurred in other places and projects.