Knowledge Building: IKIT Summer Institute

As some of my readers may know, I recently started a new job as educational technology director at Gimnasio La Montaña, a private school in Bogotá. One of the innovations we are going to start next year is the use of Knowledge Forum for two Knowledge Building (KB) projects (one Social Studies, one Science), in some areas (Religion, Philosophy, Language Arts...) and in teacher lesson study. KB is one of the most interesting and powerful ideas about education I have come across (thanks to Kate Bielaczyc at HGSE) and I love what KF can do.

I have been preparing a professional development course for the initial group of teachers and came across something I hadn't seen before. The Institute for Knowledge Innovation and Technology at the University of Toronto, where Marlene Scardamalia and Carl Bereiter work, holds a yearly institute on KB. We couldn't attend this year, but I found some great resource from previous institutes at the IKIT site. Last year, a group of teachers presented their research on lesson study. I wish there were a video of the presentation, but I found the slides and the videos of them teaching and discussing lessons. Awesome resources for my course! There's a lot more video available. Thanks IKIT for making that available! I wish you could do this year's Institute live (or link to participants' blogging or live-blogging) or publish everything pretty quickly.

IKIT Video site: http://video.ikit.org/si2007/slides

Edit: I'm desperately looking for professional development materials in Spanish for some of my teachers, especially translations of articles by Scardamalia and Bereiter like "Collective Cognitive Responsibility" and the article in "Encyclopedia of Education". Found a little in the COMConeixer site, but no more... any pointers will be appreciated.

Edit: Proofread and linked to Kate's profile at NIE.