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The use of the term project will become confusing for the Natcom team, colleagues in professional associations, DETYA and Education.au staff. This short paper seeks to clarify the various contexts in which the term will be used and seeks to describe how all stakeholders in Natcom might conceptualise the large scale telecommunications activity that will be planned and designed over the next few months by national KLA associations.

Definitions
The current activity amongst the national KLA associations which has the colloquial title Natcom 3 is a set of activities funded by DETYA, where each KLA will conceptualise and plan telecommunications activities for teachers to undertake with their students in classrooms. ACCE have been invited to coordinate the activity and undertake professional development of some KLA staff/executive amongst other activities. ACCE will sometimes use the term the Natcom project to refer to the large coordination and professional development program for which they are contracted.

Each association will be encouraged to plan a telecommunications curriculum project. Because there are several models for telecommunications projects, the Natcom 3 activity will define various models and articulate the structures and processes which are undertaken during design and implementation.

To develop a broad, important range of online activities for teachers to join in, the Natcom coordination team will use the term Umbrella project sometimes, as a synonym of telecommunications curriculum project. This will deliberately remind stakeholders that a single title (for a project) may involve a number of different activities or similar episodes of online activity that may be duplicated in various settings and timeframes.

For example the BookRaps project from oz-TeacherNet, is an umbrella project where different episode-coordinators elect to host a BookRap about a particular book. The same model of activity applies to each episode or different book. This allows multiple books for multiple purposes and ages to be the centre of email-based exchanges between students.

http://rite.ed.qut.edu.au/oz-teachernet/projects/book-rap/br.html

Project Atmosphere Australia is an umbrella project, funded by a Telstra Learn-IT Grant, designed to host a variety of activities of different types throughout the year by many different teachers. Weather forecasting, sharing interpretations of myths and legends about weather and various literacy activities are just some of the activities teachers use with their students.

http://www.schools.ash.org.au/paa/paa.htm

It may be that in everyday discussion about our work in 1999, we use the term telecommunications project, when we really mean telecommunications curriculum project. It should be understood that we are separating out curriculum activities from other telecommunications activity in school such as connecting schools, wiring networks and similar activity necessary to provide access to the Internet.

The term telecommunications curriculum project or umbrella project will be interpreted differently by the different stakeholders.

Systems (and web tourists), may see it as the title and short description that sits on web pages. This small artefact is seen as a 'project' and although it reflects a summary of a conceptualisation of a much bigger idea, it is a 'trivial' and impoverished view of the role of project designers, coordinators, volunteer mentors and episode managers, teachers and students.

Teachers in classrooms will see a project as the things they do in order to involve their classes. Teachers in the Travel Buddies Telecommunications Project refer to activities like: finding a partner, getting ready to work with your partner's class, mailing the buddy, sending email letters and so on. Their description does not always capture the work undertaken to support them in finding partners, knowing what to do, seeking help etc. Teachers assume a whole heap of infrastructure is in place and don't often understand how this happened or that a variety of people worked hard to build a project, even before they heard about it.

Project designers and those who implement umbrella projects will understand their 'project' very differently. They will see a project as conceptualising its purpose, as infrastructure development, as building communities of participating teachers, of describing the project for a variety of audiences in a variety of media and forums, of collecting expertise and ideas as the project is used by teachers and so on.

Probably umbrella project designers have the most sophisticated understanding of telecommunications curriculum project whether the activities are a single episode or project or an umbrella of activities and episodes.

The Natcom 3 activity will generate a suite of projects. It will be essential that although each association may have responsibility for the design and maintenance of an umbrella project, all associations will need to promote the suite of projects and project episodes to teachers. Project activities will cross boundaries between projects and teachers will want to know about taking advantage of different ideas, models and communities to enhance their implementation of the activity in their classroom. For many teachers their professional activity is within the bounds of several associations and so promoting telecommunications projects generally and especially the suites of projects KLA associations model, will be essential if this project is to have maximum benefit and make a difference. This is especially true when associations are cognisant that teachers they work with are often in leading roles in schools districts and regions. These teachers are in turn often involved in promoting curriculum ideas, use of learning technology, use of the Internet to many of their colleagues. Providing them with a broad picture from which to build their own stories to tell peers is crucial to maximising the potential of the Natcom 3 activities. Understanding the models from the suite of projects and drawing from the lessons learned by projects management groups of all the project models will be professional development for the Natcom participants. In coordinating this project, ACCE will be promoting the suite of projects and engendering a spirit of collaboration and mutual support amongst the Natcom participants.