THE EIFFEL PROJECT

The Eiffel Project
New York City's Small Schools Partnership
Technology Learning Challenge

Version 1.2
September 1996

Contents

2) The Response: A Digital Pedagogy for New Learning Communities

By itself, technology is a limp educational resource. To benefit complex persons and communities, effective educational ideas and actions must inform use of information technology. The Eiffel Project seeks to infuse technology with powerful pedagogical ideas, and to empower those ideas with the force of technical innovation. We explain our pedagogy in two sections. First, in "The School and the Child," we present our convictions about how the reform of schools combined with the astute use of technology can liberate the child to learn more effectively, more deeply, more meaningfully. Then, in "The School and Society," we examine how the reformed school opened to the world through digital networks will help children be more effective and sure as they encounter the complexities of public life, the workplace, and the culture.

2a) The School and the Child

To achieve its educational objectives, the Eiffel Project needs to make them real in the educational experience of participating students and teachers. Our mission is the radical improvement of educational experience for thousands of students and teachers, and as they model new educational possibilities, for millions more. Education is the end; reformed schools and new technologies are the means.

In this section we discuss four established educational elements - libraries, experts, project-based learning, and portfolios. Significant change is possible because information technology strengthens their educational power. Technologically transformed, these all loosen the intellectual constraints operating in the school and thereby expand the educational potentialities of the child.

2a1) 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. Columbia University is drawing out the implications of digital libraries for the advancement of learning through design initiatives by the Center for Research on Information Access, the Center for New Media, and the Center for Image Technology for New Media, and through implementation projects in art history, history, chemistry, earth sciences, journalism, and so on. Within this overall effort, the Institute for Learning Technologies (ILT) directs application of work on digital libraries to the reform of K-12 education.

Digital libraries can significantly loosen the constraints that have historically determined the spectrum of possible educational achievement by the young. Digital libraries are a key, emerging agency that makes feasible the basic aim of enabling students growing up under conditions of adversity to attain unprecedented levels of excellence. Whether modeling El Niño effects with data from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, researching Renaissance portraiture with the Columbia Art Humanities digital image archive, or comparing Orson Welles' and Roman Polanski's interpretations of Macbeth using a multimedia database constructed by the New Lab for Teaching and Learning, students can be engaged in serious disciplinary study when they have access to digital libraries. To enable students and teachers to make full use of digital libraries in their daily educational work, we 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.

2a2) 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.

To make interactions between students, mentors, and experts sustainable and effective, it is important to recognize and respect the constraints inherent in adult responsibilities. Mentors and experts cannot ignore imperatives of their own work to take up the concerns of children. Rather, the educational work must synchronize with their professional efforts or it will become a complicating, distracting chore. The Eiffel Project will work with both the business community and the academic community to design ways to enable their members to work educationally as mentors and experts while minimally deflecting them from their primary goals.

Junior Achievement of New York City, a strong chapter of a national effort by business people to provide volunteers to teach children at all levels about the economics of work and life, will join in the Eiffel Project to use advanced media to facilitate their mentoring work. Currently, Junior Achievement volunteers go to a school to teach specially designed courses and to provide counsel and advice. This procedure has limits arising from the constraints on the volunteer's time and it leaves the student at a distance from the world of practice that the volunteer represents. As schools become wired, so do businesses, and it becomes possible for the students to gain virtual access to the operations of the work world, with volunteers from it acting, not as emissaries, but as hosts. Junior Achievement will work through the Eiffel Project to implement these possibilities as an important means of strengthening the understanding of economic life that children in participating schools develop and as a productive way to improve the school-to-work transition.

Small groups of students, working to solve difficult problems, often need to discuss their ideas with people who have greater expertise than they, or their teachers, may have. Wisdom and skill are scarce qualities, however, and eminent scholars would be overwhelmed were every curious novice to take his questions directly to the highest possible authority. Through the Eiffel Project, we will use distance learning technologies to create a relationship between schools and universities that enhances educational processes in each domain without deflecting people in either from their proper concerns. Students will develop the capacity to judge when someone else has satisfactorily helped to clarify their questions. If responses to queries have been sufficient, students should go on to other matters, and if they have not, they should push on with their inquiries, seeking other, more productive interlocutors. On the university side, responding to school-based queries can become an important enhancement to learning in higher education. Consider the academic cliché that someone never learns anything so well as when he must teach it. Undergraduates will advance their study of a subject by helping children in schools answer difficult questions, interacting with them through distributed learning technologies. Queries that the undergraduates find too difficult to help with, they can refer to graduate students, and from there, if necessary, to research scholars, professors, and other professionals. A team from the Institute for Learning Technologies and the Center for Imaging Technologies for New Media has developed a prototype desktop videoconferencing system by which universities can announce the availability of respondents, and students in schools can initiate exchanges as suits their inquiries. As part of the Eiffel Project, we will develop the prototype into a working system and test it in key subject areas.

2a3) 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. How can a major research university, collaborating with diverse schools, shift the process of curriculum development away from packaging prescribed epitomes of answers to be learned by cohorts of pupils toward a process of selecting and putting powerful questions worth engaging all students in the effort to answer them?

A successful response to this question must meet key constraints - 1) development costs need to be limited; 2) a unified set of changes affecting the educational process from beginning to end needs to be introduced; 3) changes need to be on one side radical and thorough, yet on the other relatively well-aligned with existing practices; and 4) educational results need to be dramatically better than those of the status quo ante. The Eiffel Project, through its relationship to Columbia University, will use advanced media to develop a pedagogy of project-based problem solving designed to meet these constraints. This effort will build on a range of prior work by the New Laboratory for Teaching and Learning at the Dalton School developing powerful curricular prototypes such as Archaeotype, at the Ralph Bunche School with Internet-based inquiries such as The Great Penny Toss, and through ILT's Harlem Environmental Access Project.

Basically, the new curricula will have three components -- questions or problems requiring solution, tools or intellectual strategies for working on the problems, and resources or data and materials upon which the tools can operate. The first task of curriculum design is to lay out highly generative sets of questions, put forward without answers, which students can address at one or another level of sophistication:

• FAQs, or Frequently Asked Questions, pronounced "facts." For any subject there are many FAQs, which can be organized according to difficulty and scope. A FAQ requires a clear, informative response. In educational experience, it is useful to work up answers to many FAQs, developing in the process a clear overview of a subject.

• HAQs, or Hotly Argued Questions, pronounced "hacks." HAQs generally elicit more heat than light, and the challenge to the student is to understand why the question so provokes the passions. In educational experience, a HAQ should elicit a clear presentation of all sides of the argument, with a dispassionate weighing of the strengths and weaknesses on each side. Such treatment of a HAQ will develop perspective and intellectual independence.

• LUQs, or Largely Unanswered Questions, pronounced "lucks." The object in engaging with a LUQ is not to try heroically to answer it, but to ascertain what aspects of it are subject to comprehension and to be able to explain why the question remains largely unanswered. In educational experience, a LUQ leads the student to reflect on the limits of knowledge and to set his sights on extending it.

• PIQs, or Profoundly Important Questions, pronounced "picks." With a PIQ, the key is to grasp the importance of the question and to feel the urgency of developing a response to it, as well as the import of that response. In educational experience, a student comes to realize that a PIQ can affect the fundamental prospects of life, personal or collective, as operative answers to PIQs contribute to defining what it means to live and to be human.

Tools and resources gain meaning in relation to such sets of questions because tools and resources are what a problem-solving student employs in seeking to respond productively to questions that have been effectively posed. On-line tools and resources suit a problem-solving pedagogy because they are comprehensive and unbounded, sustaining the questioning process without extrinsic limitations. We believe that academic groups can be very helpful curricular resources for students and teachers in schools by identifying key sets of questions, building powerful tools with which students can address those questions, and opening paths to significant resources, grist for the educative mill of inquiry.

Initially, scholars from Columbia's African Institute, researchers from classics, history, and archaeology, and scientists from the Black Rock Forest Consortium, Biosphere II, and the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory will work with students and teachers in the Eiffel Project to develop and test this model of problem-solving curriculum development. It allows for high-level academic involvement in the process while keeping operative control of inquiry and learning in the hands of teachers and students at the school level. Each year, academics will lay out a distinctive set of questions for their respective fields and they will work to provide a growing repertoire of tools and resources useful in pursuing generative questions from each field. But organizing and putting questions so that collaborative groups embark on a course of problem solving, and activating and using the tools and resources, will remain the work of teachers and students, done distinctively in each school. We envision the University annually publicizing its technology learning challenges across a variety of fields, posting sets of FAQs, HAQs, LUQs and PIQs, along with continually developing sets of smart tools and intellectual resources linked to them. Collaborative groups of students, with teachers on site and mentors and experts at a distance, would use the on-line system of tools and resources to develop their unique responses to these learning challenges, posting them to the world on their local websites. As the Eiffel Project proceeds, we will extend this pedagogy across all the areas of learning as quickly as resources permit. We believe that such a pedagogy can meet the four key constraints indicated above and lead to the radical restructuring of the curriculum in ways that will be highly conducive to effective learning by all students.

2a4) 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. In Coalition schools, the portfolio constitutes a representation of a student's total academic experience, either within one course or across many. It assembles academic work that exhibits the student's development through his studies. As for the professional, so for the student: a portfolio presents cumulative accomplishment through assembled work. As such, 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.

A networked, multimedia information environment extends and reconfigures the portfolio as a curriculum tool in three important ways:

First, as the student works in more diverse media, the palette of tools with which he may engage his subjects broadens. In the print-based school, most activity is limited to reading and writing textual material; in a digital school, students work with image, audio, video, and text more freely and continuously. They learn the "grammar" of video and audio editing, just as they always have the grammar of text. Two key partners, the Educational Video Center, which has pioneered use of video production as a means of education, and the Institute for Learning Technologies, which has done the same using web-site production as an educative tool, will join to integrate these techniques into the project's portfolio designs.

Second, as the student works in a networked information environment, he can extend the audience for his portfolio as widely as the student or his teachers desire. The networked school thus connects two fundamental concepts in the small schools effort -- portfolio and exhibition. Exhibition ceases to be set apart and becomes inherent in the portfolio, through which students and teachers can engage each other's work. Work can be shared asynchronously; students can make their work accessible, allowing others in the virtual community to comment, advise, respond at their convenience. In a sense, work is always on exhibit except where workers feel it is not ready for public view.

Third, as the student works through the inherent web-like structure of a hypermedia "document," the portfolio ceases to be an assemblage of finished works. The virtual portfolio becomes a dynamic combination of refined, polished works with works-in-progress, notes, annotations, and even passing thoughts. In this sense, the hypermedia portfolio is a fuller realization of the basic notion of the portfolio because it easily allows the student to document all his thinking, and it allows the student to keep active the total corpus of his academic and other intellectual experiences and acquirements throughout his academic career as the portfolio is built over time.

In the context of the Eiffel Project, the portfolio will be a central structure, used in novel ways that build on past successes. One of the participating Partnership schools -- the Central Park East Secondary School (CPESS) -- has been at the forefront of graduation by portfolio for many years. In June 1996, CPESS graduated its sixth high school class by performance-based assessment. Students must prepare and defend 14 different portfolios of material to graduate. We will build on this experience with portfolio assessment in order to use it in new ways in new schools.

For instance, in addition to dissemination of project work within the network of project collaborators, students, teachers, and schools can begin to disseminate their portfolios and share their knowledge and ideas on a national, and even a global, scale. Working with Eastman Kodak Company, our consortium will use digital imaging to experiment with the documentation of multimedia portfolios in CD-ROM format. Since few members of the larger educational community enjoy the broadband network connectivity that makes high-speed multimedia networking feasible, CDs represent a simple, and increasingly inexpensive, means for teachers and students to exhibit their work. Of course, students will mount this work on the Web, as well, to promote easy use by those with adequate connections.

Portfolios and exhibitions not only enable students to integrate their educational experience: they equally enable the Eiffel Project itself to integrate its pedagogical accomplishments and present them to the general public. The portfolio process can play an integral role in teachers' professional development and in program dissemination as well. As CPESS students can represent their work in multimedia portfolios, so too can their teachers. Through such documentation, parents and the public can assess, critique, exhibit, and acclaim teachers' work. Thus the teacher portfolio is a professional development, a dissemination, and an accountability mechanism all in one. Whole schools can use the multimedia portfolio in similar ways to exhibit their innovations and disseminate successful programs and projects.

Such online resources will enable the Eiffel Project to engage parents more productively. For instance, through a carefully placed network of off-site nodes, available at hours outside the typical 9:00 to 3:00 school day, parents will be able to access teachers and school web-sites and portfolios, enhancing their role as stakeholders in the education of their children. As we add schools, so will we add such community service providers, for instance, the Harlem Parents Tutorial Project, with a 25-year history of parent training, as key in administering off-site parent access to the network and the adult involvement in the education of their children that the network provides.

Educational accountability remains an intractable public problem largely because the work and fruits of education are hidden from view behind classroom walls. What the Eiffel Project enables students and teachers to accomplish with respect to each of its pedagogical objectives will be visible to anyone who cares to look. How students and teachers work as educators -- how they develop the small schools ethos, use digital libraries, collaborate in learning, interact with mentors and experts, synthesize knowledge while solving problems, engage in civic issues, seize workplace opportunities, create cultural meanings from multiple traditions, and integrate it all into expressions of unique personhood -- will be public knowledge, evident through the portfolios of project participants. The school and the child leads through emerging networks to an entirely new relation between the school and society, one that opens innumerable opportunities, enabling children to develop their capacities to the fullest possible extent.

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