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WHAT'S
NEXT
June
6, 2002
"simulations
involve old-fashioned tools, too. At the Bread and Roses Integrated
Arts High School in Harlem, eight 11th graders are using paper,
scissors and tape with one of the simulations to design buildings
for the World Trade Center site."
The image
and excerpt above are from a New York Times article on virtual
environments as they are being used in a set of learning situations,
including public schools. The excerpt describes a research
site being developed with the Bread and Roses Integrated Arts
High School as part of a broad initiative of the Institute
for Learning Technologies (ILT) at Columbia University's Teachers
College. This broader initiative, being designed by project
director Louis Tomaino with other ILT and Columbia University
associates, explores the potential of virtual multi-user environments
as a format for transforming the Internet from a place characterized
primarily by information gathering, into one characterized
primarily by its ability to support information synthesis
and original creative work.
The article
image shows one wing of a virtual design studio used by students
at the Bread and Roses School site. In a picture on the studio's
wall, the student who designed the studio seems to be looking
down to two other students in virtual form standing on the
studio floor below, and at the studio filled with student
models. She is holding an architect's scale. The models utilize
building modules derived from her design and modules derived
from other students' designs. These models are created to
be links to full-scale buildings that the students may enter,
and in which they may continue their work. On the wall below
her image, in colored paper, is a plan view of the studio.
The
article image also suggests what it might be like to have
streaming video that would show students in their real forms
as they look into the virtual world, and to have other, more
developed merging of real and virtual spaces.
 The
image to the right shows the same wing of the students' studio
from a different point of view. Like the first picture, it
shows the scale of the workspace and the size of the blocks
and models the students work with there. In the foreground
is a bird form, one of the embodiments students take as they
work. On the wall are pictures of visionary architecture,
including LeCorbusier's chapel (Notre Dame du Haut), Buckminster
Fuller's Expo 67 dome, and Antoni Gaudi's organic Casa Mila,
mixed with student work and images of students at work in
the physical classroom.
Bread
ad Roses School art instructor Robert Midtlyng, working with
Mr. Tomaino, has turned his classroom into a place that juxtaposes
work in virtual and real settings, creating a virtual layer
to it and developing the beginnings of a 'virtual-real' continuum
of materials and settings in which students will work. As
this work continues at his school, students will build settings
that can be developed by instructors and students in a variety
of areas across the school's curriculum. In these settings,
students would use the information they gain in classes to
build components of worlds that embody that content, much
as students have done for this building project.
Besides
the forms of things, it is possible to create behaviors for
objects and entities in these worlds, offering students opportunities
to apply their knowledge and vary its application by defining
systems of different degrees of complexity. This work could
involve, for instance, students creating 'learning companions'
that they would tutor with information, and that would be
able, in turn, to help them with various tasks.
 Worldbuilding
is a format through which the knowledge component of learning
may be used as the basis for crafting original works based
on that knowledge. In the traditional educational language
of 'learning objectives', this moves the focus of learning
from knowledge acquisition to knowledge synthesis and evaluation.
The process of synthesis - creating original works - becomes
the motivator for gathering information and acquiring skills,
and for making them personally meaningful and useful. The
assemblage of visionary architecture brought to the students'
studio wall is, for this project, a beginning of this type
of use of information. In future work, collaborations with
museums, and other cultural institutions and local communities,
will provide a needed framework of context in which students
may develop their senses of inventive and aesthetic possibilities.
 Students
from the project came with Bread and Roses School principal
Carol Foresta and Mr. Midtlyng to Columbia University's yearly
Educational Technology Summit, to present their ideas to school
principals, district technology supervisors, and other education
specialists from across the country. Two of the students,
working in another part of the campus at Teachers College,
built in the virtual environment while they were projected
in virtual form on a wall above an ILT-organized discussion
panel before an auditorium of Summit attendees. Other students
spoke to the audience from the auditorium and answered questions
about their work: Al Parantar discussed the creation of building
modules that the students use and combine as a way to design
structures. Tyhesha Coleman (pictured above, to the right
side of an image with fellow student Ntozake Morgan) described
the processes she has learned as being stimulating options
in her skill repertoire as an artist. Ntozake described her
sense of the value of the work in helping her visualize ideas
and develop her imagination in ways that could be applied
in many study areas.
Future
research studies are to be designed for this project at this
and other project sites to help understand and define many
facets of this work. Among other things, these studies will
track peoples' perception of the Internet as a place in which
creative work may and does occur, as new components and formats
for Internet use are developed, both through this project
and elsewhere in the course of the Internet's general evolution.
The studies will look at the uses and values of tools and
materials developed at different points along a virtual-real
continuum (having qualities in different degrees of, for instance,
virtual manipulatives that one would use in a virtual world,
physical manipulatives, and formats for work at building behaviors
of both real and virtual objects and entities, as described
above). Other core areas of investigation will be the application
of design curriculum to support learning in many fields, the
linking of the physical city to a virtual layer or learning
district that parallels it and its cultural resources and
stories, the use of cultural archives to broaden sensibilities
about 'what might be made', the development of graphical interface
systems that utilize and facilitate spatial navigation, and
research that can be used in policy decisions to protect the
integrity of the myriad of learning environments that may
be reached from the forming global collection of portals at
schools, homes, the park, and the street.
The students
whose work is described here are Jennifer Aldebot, Adama Bagayoko,
Tyhesha Coleman, Maria Diaz (pictured in the first and third
images above, wearing a scarf), Marlon Jordan, Ntozake Morgan,
Al Parantar (whose work and image are shown in the second
image above), and Manuel Rincon.
More
images and information may be found through at the ILT Web
site, here: http://www.ilt.columbia.edu/projects/cityscope.html
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