She's talking about Foundations for the Future, a Georgia Institute of Technology project to assist Georgia K-12 educators in incorporating technology into their classrooms.
Huff has served as leader of the project, abbreviated as F3, since its inception five years ago. She purposely avoids descriptions like "boss" or "supervisor" because the 10-member F3 core staff operates by consensus, instead of the traditional hierarchical model. At a time when "team" is more often than not simply an overworked organizational buzzword, it truly applies to Foundations for the Future.
"We're all on a level playing field," says Dara O'Neil, an F3 staffer who has worked with Huff for 10 years at Tech on many different projects and considers her a mentor. "Everybody's input is valued, and decisions are not made without talking to each other about them.
"It's very much a nurturing environment," she adds. "The people who work on the team are selected for their ability to work that way."
Jim Demmers, also an F3 core team member, has known Huff for more than 25 years and considers her a close friend, as well as a co-worker. "She is very good about supplying the means and opportunities necessary for others to do their best work, without taking any of the credit for herself," he says. "This is what sets her apart from the majority – her willingness to share the glory, to shine by the reflected light of others."
Huff's abiding respect for colleagues and her insistence on sharing credit inspires strong loyalties not only among the staff, but helps motivate them for building upon F3's impressive achievements.
Student Scientists
Environmental education program has a global reach.
Researchers all over the world are learning a little more about the planet each day, thanks to a federal initiative that places thousands of K-12 students in the role of scientists.
The GLOBE program – Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment – involves specially trained teachers who instruct their students in collecting a specific set of data and uploading that information to the Internet.
photo by Gary Goettling
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Sixth-grade students Tina Vuncannon, left, and Kyle Staley measure rainfall and temperature at Brockett Elementary School's GLOBE station in Tucker, Ga.
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Since 1997, the Georgia Institute of Technology's Foundations for the Future (F3) has been one of the organizations training teachers in the GLOBE protocols. The program is designed to help students boost their skills in science and math, while providing hands-on environmental education.
"It's a 'train the trainer' kind of activity," says Claudia Huff, a Georgia Tech Research Institute researcher who helps coordinate F3's partnership with GLOBE. "The week-long training is quite intense. Teachers spend a lot of time in the field -- literally -- collecting data, making observations and learning the proper data-collection procedures. They also work on computers to learn how to add their data to the GLOBE site."
By providing comprehensive teaching skills, F3 develops committed, effective GLOBE teachers throughout Georgia. Those teachers can help more students benefit from the education program.
A network of 10,000 schools in 90 countries is involved in GLOBE. At each participating school, students collect a certain category of data daily at solar noon and log the information at the password-protected GLOBE Web site. Some schools may measure soil characteristics in a defined area, while others gather meteorological information.
Metro Atlanta's DeKalb County School System, whose teachers have received GLOBE training for the past several years, boasts several GLOBE participants. At Brockett Elementary in Tucker, Ga., for example, a band of Discovery class students maintains an outdoor weather station equipped to measure rainfall and temperature maximum and minimum readings over a 24-hour period. The students also note the type of cloud cover at data collection time. The information is immediately uploaded to www.globe.gov, where Brockett's contribution to the mosaic of atmospheric readings from schools around the world is accessible to scientists studying climate and other environmental activity.
"The students are pretty diligent about taking the measurements each day," says Brockett teacher Janie Cohen-Legge. "They have a schedule, and their commitment to following it is a useful lesson by itself. Logging their data and observing the changes taking place over time is a terrific hands-on experience for them in environmental science."
In upcoming months, F3 will focus on improving its teacher training by ensuring a closer fit between GLOBE protocol requirements and the state's Quality Core Curriculum mandate. F3 has also started offering refresher training and is pursuing partnerships with other institutions to enhance the resources available to GLOBE teachers.
"We've also been doing a lot of mentoring and support to keep the level of data collection high," Huff says. "It's a great program that brings together a lot of science skills. A great way to learn science is by doing science. Perhaps best of all, it guides students in using the Internet in a meaningful way."
— Gary Goettling
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Foundations for the Future is dedicated to breaking down the so-called "digital divide" in Georgia that separates schools with access to the Internet's vast resources and those without electronic links. To date, the organization has worked with 25 city and county school systems, primarily in rural and inner-city areas of the state.
One aspect of F3 is the nuts-and-bolts work associated with installing network infrastructure or providing technical assistance.
A recent example is Elbert County, where almost every school was networked to the Internet. Because of circumstances dictated in part by geography and distance, one elementary school had been left out of the loop. F3 engineers devised a way to bring that school online.
Huff's background in proposal writing, honed while she was in graduate school, has proven to be invaluable for another facet of F3's mission, which is to help communities and schools win funding for technology development and implementation. F3 staff teaches the "ins" and "outs" of writing proposals and locating grant resources.
Among F3's accomplishments last year, Huff and her associates were instrumental in helping the DeKalb County School System secure a $1 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education to expand a Family Technology Resource Centers program.
"Claudia has a vision about taking schools from the one-room schoolhouse to the one-world classroom," says Dr. Mindy DiSalvo, director of the program, which is considered a national model. "She has given us great ideas about grant opportunities and how to better use our resources. She's one of the most dynamic and delightful people I know."
Over the past five years, F3 has helped school districts across Georgia secure more than $6 million in funding.
A third aspect of F3's activity is professional development. Through a monthly gathering called the Explorers Guild, teachers come to Tech to learn how to take advantage of information technology. Topics range from how to use several forms of connectivity and Web-page design to basic Internet how-to instruction.
"The level of discomfort among teachers with regard to computers is still way too high for us as a nation," Huff says. "That's why the training we provide includes a lot of hand-holding."
Huff's exceptional people skills, which serve her so well with the F3 team, are equally advantageous in dealing with clients she encounters from all walks of life.
"She's a born facilitator and can pretty much carry on an intelligent conversation with just about anyone on any subject – even when she's not all that familiar with the topic," Demmers laughs. "She's able to do this because she's such a great listener and enabler. I've always been impressed with her optimism and joie de vivre."
Huff's empathy for others grew during her college days. A graduate of Indiana University with a degree in social science, she made the unusual – for a white person – move of enrolling at Atlanta University for a master's degree in Afro-American studies.
"I lived in the dorm and spent just about all my time on campus. It was a very immersive kind of experience," she says. "I had a terrific time, worked with some wonderful people and at the same time picked up a lot of insight and understanding.
"I learned to see the world from a different perspective, through other people's eyes," she explains. "When you put yourself in someone else's shoes and try to understand their perspective, you realize that truth isn't necessarily what you thought it was. If someone else perceives the world differently, that perception is what matters to that person."
Independent thinking is a carry-over trait familiar to those who work with Huff.
"It speaks to Claudia's rebellious nature that she's willing to challenge the accepted protocols and nuances of working in an academic environment," O'Neil says. "Things that people take for granted and think can't be changed, she'll try and change them."
O'Neil offers the example of state funding for F3, which conventional wisdom held to be a waste of time and energy. Huff went ahead anyway with a tenacious development effort that resulted in a $278,000 allocation from the General Assembly.
"Not taking 'no' for an answer is very much a Claudia trait," O'Neil observes.
The mother of an 11-year-old daughter, Hilary, and wife of Bill Riall, a principal research associate at the Economic Development Institute, Huff joined the Georgia Tech staff in 1983 as a research associate after several years in the private sector. Her activities have embraced energy conservation, international work and economic development.
"I've done a lot of things related to technology transfer and now, with Foundations for the Future, telecommunications, which is just another form of tech transfer," she says.
In addition, she is a principal research associate at GTRI's Electro-Optics, Environment and Materials Laboratory and a member of the faculty of the Test and Evaluation Research and Education Center. She is also serving a three-year term on the GTRI Fellows Council. But her primary focus remains the task of augmenting education in Georgia through Foundations for the Future.
"This is a great way to make a living," Huff says. "It's important work that's worth doing, and it's the kind of thing people look to Georgia Tech for, which is technological expertise."
For more information, contact Claudia Huff, Georgia Tech Research Institute, Atlanta, GA 30332-0837. (Telephone: 404-894-3941)
(E-mail: claudia.huff@gtri.gatech.edu)
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Last updated: July 14, 2001
