History of the NAB Project: 1990 - 1996
The Development of an Electronic Network
1990: With a grant from the Iowa Department of Education, for innovative practices in teacher education, New Art Basics moved beyond an exclusively workshop and curriculum-on-paper project. The first NAB computer services were a UNIX "word based" format on the Iowa State Extension Service, EXNET, network. Included in this first network were: 1.) on-line internal e-mail service, and 2.) electronic bulletin boards for sharing ideas and information and providing an index of teaching materials available in the NAB Lending Library. NAB Teacher/Researchers of this time period were real pioneers in developing and using on-line curriculum resources.
1992: The Iowa State University's College of Design research arm, The Institute for Design Research and Outreach (IDRO) provided the funding for a further expansion of the NAB computer telecommunications. IDRO support allowed the NAB project to program and integrate, into its Internet service, an interactive database containing the text of all, at that time, 1000+ original, teacher-designed strategies. In addition to being able to search for lesson plans to teach a specific thinking skill, grade level, art history term, or theme, this first database was interactive in allowing NAB teacher/researchers to record their evaluation of the strategy's degree of success, in the classroom, by inputting a series of numeric scores for each strategy they tested. This cumulative evaluation was then available to any other teacher/researchers reading that strategy.
1995: Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri became the first NAB Partner school. A Missouri chapter of NAB teacher/researchers, connected through Washington Univ., has been formed to expand and test the teacher-design strategies, resources, and ideas that continue to enrich the NAB project.
1996: Design of the New Art Basics World Wide Web site was completed and went on-line. Additional funding was sought to create an on-line interactive WWW database that would allow NAB to place on-line, all project materials, including thousands of images of student art works, which have been provided by the NAB teacher/researchers as the primary educational outcomes of NAB strategies.
The NAB Project continues to grow each year, in strategies, services, new teacher-researchers, and share owner schools. The biggest change in the project however took place in 1997.
1990 - 1996: Development of an electronic network
1997 - 1998: A Living Curriculum on the World Wide Web