A Strategic Plan for Educational Leadership
January 2000 through December 2004

A Proof of Concept

A significant alternative to current practice will necessarily not be entirely novel. It will nevertheless be massive, pervasive, and thorough-going in its effects. Technological innovation exerts historical influence by empowering traditionally marginal practices to become dominant and formerly dominant ones marginal. Technological change enables such new possibilities by shifting the balance of constraint and facilitation, altering which possibilities predominate and which hover eccentrically at the margins of practice. The proof of concept that the Institute seeks will show that several factors converge through the new technologies to make the implementation of progressive educational principles more effective in the absolute and relatively more suitable as the predominant form of educational practice than they have hitherto been.

Traditional educational technology made implementation of progressive principles difficult. The individual teacher had a limited stock of knowledge. Were the teacher to give a class of active children free rein to inquire about a topic, starting from a given set of particulars, the children would quickly branch out beyond the limits of the teacher's competence. The school, which would have at best a limited library that is awkward to use in the give and take of questioning, could not respond effectively to the play of inquiry. Thus in practice the child-centered pedagogy encountered difficulties in implementation. Once so real, these difficulties now diminish. The new information technologies significantly increase the ability of the teacher and the school to sustain the open-ended inquiries that diverse students can generate, making progressive pedagogy more practicable.

This resuscitation of progressivism is the concept. The proof of it will be in the practice, however. The real know-how essential will come from the field. The Institute is working with numerous teachers in diverse schools, across all grades and subjects. ILT will increasingly shape its professional development work to identify and communicate classroom-based know-how to an ever-widening circle of teachers. ILT needs first to help innovating teachers discover how to use digital tools to support progressive pedagogy, and then, observing and celebrating their discoveries, it needs to develop ways to spread successful practices to more and more electronic classrooms, disseminating the emerging norms of new practice. In this way, the Institute will test whether a renewal of progressivism can shift the balance of pedagogical practice.

A digital information infrastructure, enabling students and teachers to use powerful educational tools in the study of cultural resources, unprecedented in depth, breadth, and flexibility, will enable educators to raise the span of pedagogical possibility for all. These developments should have greatest value for those presently least-well served by our educational institutions. Many activities associated with the Institute seek to demonstrate that educational use of networked multimedia can greatly shorten the intellectual distance separating the frontiers of research, professional practice, and creative artistry from the introductory processes by which people, especially the young, construct their understanding of their culture. The Institute seeks to demonstrate the educational significance of such developments through diverse projects, among them -

• The Harlem Environmental Access Project, or HEAP, which was an NTIA-funded pilot program to extend the National Information Infrastructure to connect the information resources and expertise of Columbia University and the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) with students and teachers in the Upper Manhattan Economic Empowerment Zone (1995-97);
• The Living Schoolbook Project, which was a New York State funded collaboration among Columbia University, Syracuse University and Bell Atlantic (then NYNEX) to provide high-speed connectivity and networked curricular support to NYS schools (1995-98); and
• The Eiffel Project, which is a collaboration among the Center for Collaborative Education, the Institute for Learning Technologies, the New York City Board of Education, and a consortium of partner organization and schools, funded by a U.S. Department of Education Challenge Grant, to empower the small-schools reform movement through technology (1997-2001).

ILT will seek to sustain such projects for extended periods for the current distance separating the culture of the schools from the culture of the universities arose from an extended process of historical development, which we cannot transform quickly.

In typical schools, the reigning instructional strategy is based on the textbook as an abridgment of subject matter that students should master in unison, subject by subject and grade by grade, even school by school. The Institute believes that construction will displace instruction and curricula will become a study support system, helping students construct their understanding of a field by working in small groups, with advanced tools and resources, surrounded by engaging databases of networked multimedia resources, motivated by powerful pedagogical questions, ones inherent in living finite lives in an infinite universe. The Institute is seeking to develop a proof of concept for this alternative model of study and believes that there are significant opportunities for joint development projects between educational practitioners and a research university such as Columbia. Over the coming years, the Institute will continue to expand such efforts, currently represented by projects such as these -

• Digital Dante, a long-term effort to prototype and develop an online, multimedia Dante-related academic resource combining traditional elements of scholarly research with new communication and presentation possibilities enabled by networked digital technology.
• Where Are We?, a computer-aided learning tool, which simultaneously displays a visual-representation of an interesting, real, environment, and a map view of that same terrain, in order expand the bounds of what can be learned in a classroom setting.
• New Deal Network, designed as an educational web site sponsored by the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute and ILT to stimulate students and historians throughout the United States to discover and document the human and material legacy of the New Deal.
• Columbia Curriculum Navigator, a prototype designed for K12 educators using the New York State Regents standards as an interface in order to demonstrate how education reform and technology can merge in a resource useful across the full span of the school curriculum.

Throughout the 20th century, a significant divide separated higher education from elementary, secondary, and adult education. Essentially the apparatus developed to support higher education was too expensive per capita to deploy in elementary and secondary schools. This was especially true of the apparatus developed to support work in elite colleges and research universities, with the result that a gulf separated the cultural character of work in these institutions and that in typical schools. This situation is changing.

Creating a digitally-based apparatus for scholarship, research, and professional practice is still a difficult and expensive enterprise. But insofar as this digital apparatus has been created, the per capita marginal costs of extending access to it will be minimal. As a result, educators can dismantle the divide, and research universities, long set apart from the rest of education, can become the font of preferred educational practice, not by turning away from what they do best, but by pushing forward with it, adapting it fully to the possibilities of digital communication.

In this process, the Institute for Learning Technologies functions as a facilitator, helping Columbia and other universities redirect their on-line intellectual resources, creating pedagogical strategies enabling novices to use advanced materials productively, and developing the potentialities of a unified intellectual environment for educational practice writ large. To fulfill this role, the Institute seeks to push initial projects to a much higher level of development in two overlapping areas: curriculum development and teacher education.

With curriculum development, ILT wants to mobilize substantial resources to convert its prototype, the Columbia Curriculum Navigator, into a premier Web portal for K12 education, bringing the intellectual resources of higher education fully into operation within elementary, secondary, and adult education. Columbia can advance this purpose with effective attention to three things. First, subject-matter specialists need to expand the correlation between national and state learning standards and the ever-changing contents of the web. Second, ILT and its collaborators should generate a growing, deepening body of on-line pedagogical insight, know-how, and reflection, providing would-be users - teachers, parents, and children - with immediate support. Third, the pedagogical implications of electronic curricula need much further development with careful attention to the way sustained assignments, addressed to small groups of collaborating students, may supplant collections of traditional lesson plans, which address the work and needs of teachers, not those of students. Students, not teachers, are the primary users of information and communications technologies in homes and schools. In the emerging educational environment, the locus of causal initiative in the process of education will shift from the teacher to the student. The successful design of a powerful pedagogical portal will follow from the degree to which it enables both the student and the teacher to act effectively in educational settings where this shift in initiative and control has taken place.

With teacher education, the near monopoly on the interaction between K12 classrooms and higher education, which schools of education have traditionally held, is fast disappearing as the World Wide Web opens the on-line reference, research, and course resources developed in colleges and universities to study by curious children around the globe. With digital communications technologies spreading throughout the world of education, the separation of schools and higher education into two, largely distinct, educational cultures will markedly diminish. Specialists in education will need to work closely with scholars, scientists, and professionals to embed powerful learning experiences for diverse students into the digital means for advancing knowledge. Students in schools will routinely have access to a wide range of sophisticated sources and intellectual tools, enabling them to raise questions to which teachers will frequently have no ready answers. In schools that use technology well, the teaching staff will need much greater sophistication than it has traditionally needed in managing open-ended inquiry by students, using advanced intellectual sources and tools. In short, those engaged in advancing the frontiers of knowledge will need greater sophistication in the pedagogies of its apprehension by the less sophisticated, and those engaged in helping the young learn to participate in the use of knowledge will need greater sophistication about advanced research and inquiry. Such changes suggest that recruitment to the teaching profession and the locus of teacher preparation in the university will undergo significant long-term secular changes. ILT will work across Columbia University and Teachers College to organize a consortium to use the University's telecommunications linkages with New York City schools to create a 21st Century Teacher Preparation network serving the schools in the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone, and elsewhere throughout New York City.

To provide a full proof of concept for a new paradigm of education, educators need to develop comprehensive initiatives in all these areas. Educational institutions have entered into the initial stages of a profound historical reconfiguration. The Institute for Learning Technologies, Teachers College, and Columbia University have the responsibility and the opportunity to exert leadership in this reconfiguration, showing how networked multimedia on a national and global scale can support diverse, engaging efforts to transmit and extend the culture.

By developing its planned initiatives in these areas, the Institute must show that significant transformations of education are in fact feasible, providing the first component, the proof of concept, requisite to its strategic vision. Consider now the second component, a driving force, something that might provide the historical energy needed to convert intimations of the possible into instantiations of the actual.

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