NETWORKS FOR LEARNING RENEWAL
THE CENTER FOR COLLABORATIVE EDUCATION
and
INSTITUTE FOR LEARNING TECHNOLOGIES
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK
THE EIFFEL PROJECT
New York City's Small Schools Partnership
Technology Learning Challenge
EXECUTIVE OVERVIEW
September 1996
Version 1.1.1
Institute for Learning Technologies
Teachers College · Columbia University
November 1999
Introduction.
Emerging communications forces are making a deep, lasting transformation
of education both feasible and necessary. A consortium -- led by the Center
for Collaborative Education (CCE) and the Institute for Learning
Technologies (ILT) at Columbia University
-- has joined together to demonstrate how children contending with poverty,
discrimination, and urban crowding can achieve world-class education standards
when liberated by fundamental efforts at school reform, empowered by the
full use of advanced digital information.
The goal is to develop and implement a high profile, large scale technology
learning challenge -- the Eiffel Project -- that will demonstrate that
the small schools reform movement, empowered with advanced media, can break
the constraints of the traditional school, thereby enabling all children
to achieve unprecedented levels of excellence.
The consortium intends to improve the educational experience of disadvantaged
children dramatically by connecting an increasing number of New York's
urban K-12 schools to the information superhighway, developing and implementing
innovative curricular strategies, and providing effective teacher professional
development, all in support of the small schools reform movement. As currently
envisioned, by the end of its fifth year, the project will directly benefit
over 30,000 students, most from African-American, Latino, immigrant, and
economically disadvantaged families in Harlem and Upper Manhattan, the
South Bronx, Queens, downtown Brooklyn, as well as Newburgh, NY, and will
serve as a national model for new educational processes suited for use
in all educational settings.
A New Pedagogy for Learning Communities.
To accomplish this mission, the Eiffel Project seeks to integrate technological
innovations into a practical process of education, creating fresh models
of educational excellence and professional development, and demonstrating
to students, parents, and the public how the new educational process will
meet their needs and interests more effectively than does the status quo.
Through these initiatives, the project will demonstrate how the new
network technologies can lead to better education by:
- overcoming the traditional
isolation of students, teachers, and schools;
- expanding the opportunity to
develop skills for work and civic life in the 21st
century;
- helping children build a
fuller sense of efficacy and personal empowerment;
- strengthening schools as
centers of communication, helping coordinate
initiatives in education, health, housing, employment,
and community development; and
- mobilizing the resources of private industry, foundations, and government
to improve the educational opportunities of those most in need.
Small Schools, Big Payoff.
Reform efforts nurturing small, effective schools, committed to equity
and engagement, are fast becoming the norm of good pedagogical practice.
A networking infrastructure for education, designed to enable teachers
and students in these schools to employ, at low cost and large effect,
the full range of powerful educational tools, cultural resources, and social
services available electronically, will enable such schools to provide
comprehensive yet compelling opportunities for their students more surely
and efficiently. This effect is particularly true in inner-city schools,
where wide-area networking can help redress the burden of inequitable access
to economic and cultural resources that children there suffer. In concept,
networked multimedia can make the richest, most powerful resources of our
culture available to anyone, anywhere, at any time, and in principle this
change should have greatest relative value to those who presently have
least access to the fullness of our culture. All children will benefit,
but the least advantaged children can benefit the most.
The Eiffel Project will combine the strong leadership of CCE in the
small schools reform movement with the intellectual, cultural and human
resources of Columbia University to address the complex problems of urban,
K-12 education.
The Eiffel Project.
Technologies, particularly multimedia and digital networks, can enable
people to change education profoundly. These technologies alter the methods
and economics governing how people produce, disseminate, and use knowledge.
These changes in turn affect the curriculum: what is taught, how students
gain access to it, and what human achievements result. Reshaping the curriculum
through digital communications has enormous potential for advancing both
intellectual excellence and democratic equity. These are the goals of this
project.
High-speed networks can deliver, to any person at any place at any time,
digital curricular materials that integrate multiple forms of knowledge
(i.e. audio, video, imagery, simulations and sophisticated tools of analysis
and synthesis) in addition to traditional text. Networks provide not only
access to curricular materials, but also the means to enable students and
teachers at the classroom level to communicate with the world at large,
thereby breaking out of their traditional isolation. In short, the world
of culture becomes a significant part of each class; and creative contribution
to that culture by students and teachers themselves becomes a possibility
in every educational encounter. High-speed networks can unite the library
and the classroom, and open the tools and the data of advanced research
to curious inquiry by all, creating a rich, high-quality environment of
educational resources that empowers teachers and students to take on new
and liberating roles.
To achieve its goals, the Eiffel Project will focus on using new media
technologies to allow schools, teachers and students to:
1. Use Digital Libraries to Enhance Learning. Digital libraries
-- the distributed, on-line collection of texts, images, sound, video,
simulations, and data, along with powerful tools for using them -- radically
reduce constraints on cultural and intellectual participation that traditionally
operate in educational institutions. To enable students and teachers to
make full use of digital libraries in their daily educational work, the
Eiffel Project will concentrate on four tasks:
- Infrastructure. Extend local
area networks into classrooms and link these to the
world's information infrastructure by very high-speed
connections, permitting small groups of students to
work collaboratively to employ digital libraries in
responding to significant questions and difficult
problems.
- Content. Work with scholars,
practitioners, teachers, and community leaders to
develop comprehensive and specialized collections;
tools of analysis, synthesis, and simulation; and
strategies of engagement to make the digital library a
routinely accessible and easily usable resource in the
educational work of students and teachers.
- Support. Provide schools and
teachers with effective professional development
experiences that will enable them to adapt to the
emerging pedagogical possibilities and provide
students with tools to consult hierarchies of on-line
expertise that will sustain an inquiry-driven learning
process.
- Evaluation. Engage in the continuous formative evaluation of
such efforts in order to assemble a record of practical experience, which
can then lead through progressive reflection to improved practices and
an understanding of guiding principles.
2. Interact with Mentors and Experts at a Distance. One-on-one
adult mentoring is tremendously effective in helping young people cope
with the complications of integrating all the disparate elements of human
development. Wide-area networking can greatly lower the cost in money and
time that such mentoring entails. Multimedia, wide-area networks, and desk-top
videoconferencing will likewise enable problem-solving groups in schools
and communities to interact with diverse strata of experts, who can help
the groups advance their efforts. The Eiffel Project will work to design
and implement ways to use digital technologies to enable working groups
of students to interact, frequently and easily, with mentors and experts.
3. Synthesize Knowledge through Project-Based Problem Solving.
As it exists, the school separates the fabric of learning into discrete
strands according to grade, subject, period, and lesson, and the curriculum
converts powerful intellectual means into the operative ends of educational
work -- e.g., whereas the historian uses chronology, the high-schooler
learns it. Advanced media in education permit the reintegration of intellectual
activity in the school, as students use powerful on-line tools and work
with the contents of the digital library to pursue answers to the questions
and issues that animate scholarship, science, and professional practice.
4. Integrate Educational Experience through Portfolios. Portfolios
are an educational resource that can enable students to tie together all
the lines of experience indicated in previous sections, using networked
multimedia tools to create a public persona that expresses the cumulative
character of their studies, achievements, and interests. The portfolio
-- along with the accompanying exhibitions or performances --
stands as documentation of where the student has been and what the student
has done through reflective action.
5. Engage in the Civic Concerns of Public Life. Through the project,
students in schools should be able to engage with representatives of their
communities, to work on health, environmental, and social issues, to develop
habits of service and involvement, and to form a sense that they face significant
choices and that they command significant resources with which to put their
choices into action. It is particularly important that children growing
up under difficult circumstances learn to engage in the effort to take
control of those circumstances, to experience life as a series of challenges
to which people can respond purposefully. Through the Eiffel Project we
intend to seek out diverse opportunities to use information technologies
to engage children in thinking and acting on real civic concerns. In this
project, we will work with the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone and other
groups seeking to effect long-term social change and human betterment in
health, housing, employment, safety, and environment, to apprise children
of serious issues and to engage their participation in deliberation and
action. We have piloted these practices through the Institute's Harlem
Environmental Access Project by using wide-area communications to encourage
students to recognize the breadth and diversity of concern for the environment.
6. Achieve Productive Potential in the Workplace. If the information
economy exists anywhere, it is the economy of the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut
Metropolitan Area. The Eiffel Project should deploy information technology
in the schools with, for, and through the diverse employers in the region
who constitute that information economy in communications, media, publishing,
banks, universities, medicine, and government. The Eiffel Project will
use high-speed digital telecommunications to build continuous, powerful
connections between participating schools and the information economy of
the City, region, and world, and its volunteers from Junior Achievement
and elsewhere will work with students and employers to ensure that these
connections provide learning opportunities and apprenticeships that will
enable students to achieve their full potential within the information
workplace.
7. Create Cultural Relevance within Community Experience. New
technologies can radically alter the traditional politics of the curriculum,
which have been narrow and exclusionary for centuries. As the Eiffel Project
proceeds, it will build more and more channels linking the advanced study
of the world's cultures and traditions with interested groups in the schools.
It is often incanted as cause for dismay that New York City's school children
speak over a hundred different native languages. By building links to the
full range of cultural scholarship in universities, museums, and institutes,
the Eiffel Project will make this multiplicity of linguistic and cultural
identification one of the great strengths of the emerging educational system.
Advanced media have great educational significance because they enable
students to master a fuller, more powerful curriculum. The Eiffel Project
is advancing these possibilities by drawing creatively on the talents and
intellectual property base of Columbia University and collaborating groups
from both the public and the private sector.
The Coalition Partners.
The Center for Collaborative Education has been at the forefront of
the small schools reform movement in New York City since 1987, providing
on-going leadership to a growing number of schools that are restructuring
on the model Deborah Meier created through the renowned Central Park East
Schools. The Institute for Learning Technologies (ILT)
at Columbia University has been a leader in the application of emerging
technologies to the process of educational innovation since its founding
in 1986.
Many of the strategies put forward in the Eiffel Project have been developed
and tested by CCE and ILT through their existing projects. CCE has been
a pioneer in the use of portfolios and exhibitions of student work as a
means of assessment and a key graduation requirement for students. ILT
has been a leader, through the Dalton Technology Plan, the Living Schoolbook
Project, and the Harlem Environmental Access Project, in restructuring
the educational process through advanced media. (See ILT
School-based projects page.)
The coalition -- led by the Center for Collaborative Education and the
Institute for Learning Technologies -- currently consists of Community
School District Five, Community School District Four, Countee Cullen Public
Library, Eastman Kodak Company, Educational Video Center, Environmental
Defense Fund, Fund for New York City Public Education, Harlem Parents Tutorial
Project, Junior Achievement of New York, Inc., Lander Street Partners,
National Center for Research on Education, Students and Teachers (NCREST),
Newburgh Enlarged City School District, New Lab for Teaching and Learning,
NYNEX, State Education Department Office of New York City School and Community
Services, Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone Development Corporation, and
forty-six K-12 schools in New York.
The Eiffel Project represents a major initiative for Columbia University
as a whole, involving groups from all its different parts: Teachers College
(Education), the Center for New Media (Journalism), the Center for Research
on Information Access (the Libraries), the Image Technology for New Media
Center (Engineering), the Institute of African Studies (Graduate Faculties),
Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (Environmental Research), and so on. Columbia
University is distinguished among leading research universities as a leader
in education through curricular innovation and is committed to improving
the quality of life in its surrounding communities. The Eiffel Project
is a key element in the University's strategic initiatives, particularly
the New York City Initiative, through which Columbia seeks to serve the
human needs of the City and its region.
Financial Support
Participants are aggregating funding for the project from four sources:
first, the project has received a grant of $7 million over five years from
the U. S. Department of Education through its Challenge Grants for Technology
in Education; second, the sponsoring coalition will provide substantial
matching resources through contributed effort, equipment, services, and
talent; third, the coalition is raising funds for component activities
within the project from other diverse granting agencies ó federal,
state, local, and private; and, fourth, the project seeks to raise funds
systematically to support the project from a wide cross-section of New
York City businesses and philanthropies.
The total projected budget over the initial five years of the project
is expected to exceed $20 million.
A Call for Participation.
A sound strategy makes it feasible to overcome impediments to educational
innovation, provided one has the capacity to act in a sustained effort
on a large scale. Through the Eiffel Project, the coalition is bringing
together substantial, enduring enterprises -- ones capable of long-term,
compelling action. Working together through this project, the coalition
partners have the potential to effect significant educational change; and
the potential to make innovations that will stand the test of time as a
model for an effective information-based society, one that people will
experience as both empowering and equitable.
Education is the process by which society takes the best of its past
and present and gives it to its young to make the best of the future. The
Center for Collaborative Education and the Institute for Learning Technologies
at Columbia University, on behalf of the Eiffel Project and our coalition
partners, invite participation and support on all levels from all those
seeking to improve education in New York, the nation and worldwide.
More information.
A fuller description of the project, including the technology plan,
is included in the Challenge Grant Proposal. For
additional information please contact:
INSTITUTE FOR LEARNING TECHNOLOGIES
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
525 West 120th Street Box 136
New York, NY 10027
212-678-4000 |