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table of contents
The Eiffel Project
New York City's Small Schools Partnership
Technology Learning Challenge
Version 1.2
September 1996
Contents
3) Implementation: A Research University
Serving the Reformed School
3a) Develop Good Technical Infrastructure
3b) Create Content: Potent Curricular
Resources and Intellectual Tools
3c) Provide Students, Teachers, and
Communities Enabling Support
3) Implementation: A Research University Serving the
Reformed School
In this section, we seek to explain our strategies for implementing
the Eiffel Project, with sections on the needed technological infrastructure,
development of content, and the provision of on-going support. New
York City is one of those points where the energies and talents
of the country and the world concentrate, and we seek through the
Eiffel Project to bring these concentrated resources to bear on
the challenge of using school reform, augmented through advanced
media, to break the constraints of traditional schooling.
3a) Develop Good Technical Infrastructure
In extending high-speed Internet access to schools through the
Harlem Environmental Access Project and the Living Schoolbook Project,
we have learned the importance of adapting plans to the unique character
of each school site and working with key people in each school to
ensure that a full transfer of technical know-how takes place. We
expect to bring at least 12 schools into the Eiffel Project each
year during the life of the project, as well as two CBOs annually.
In each location we seek to introduce essentially ubiquitous access
to a robust, manageable infrastructure that readily accommodates
future growth. The wide-area infrastructure will use T1 connections
(1.5 megabits per second) for the most part, introducing ATM and/or
cable modem connections when and if these become cost competitive
and highly dependable. Our aim is to progress from initial broad-band
connectivity to a fully developed technical infrastructure in the
school through a series of four stages - 1) Preparatory Access;
2) followed by Base Connectivity, providing T1 connections, library
access, and one classroom equipped for small-group problem solving;
3) Level One, equipping one third of the school's classrooms for
such work; and 4) Level Two, making one computer per five students
available in all the classrooms of the school. Early on in the project,
12 Media Centers, with 8 more added each year, will be created in
key locations that will have important roles in promoting communication
between localities served by the project and in developing the links
between on-line portfolios and exhibitions as a means of assessment.
3b) Create Content: Potent Curricular Resources and
Intellectual Tools
Key representatives from all project schools will function as participatory
design teams, working with content and technical specialists. Curriculum
development should take place as close to the classroom as possible.
Our Technology Learning Challenge will match local, corporate and
foundation funds with federal support to implement four interrelated
educational applications of new media. These include:
- On-line curriculum development among Small Schools Partnerships
practitioners and electronic dissemination of curriculum products
via the Internet and the WWW to interested New York City K12 schools
and other educators outside the City.
- Production and dissemination of multimedia student and teacher
portfolios and school profiles in conjunction with the Eastman
Kodak Company, using its technology for low-cost CD-ROM production.
- Design and implementation of diverse professional development
activities, including Design Studios for Teachers modeled after
those conducted by ILT in the context of HEAP.
- Implementation of Media Centers affiliated with participating
schools that will serve as facilities supporting curriculum development,
professional development, student research, demonstrations, new
media workshops, and related research, development, implementation,
and evaluation efforts.
CCE and ILT -- two organizations with extensive experience supporting
innovative curricular reforms in small, restructured schools --
share a fundamental commitment borne out repeatedly by both organizations'
experiences: for innovative curriculum development to succeed it
must flow from teachers, and it must receive support and guidance
from administrative structures. That is, neither a largely top-down
nor a largely bottom-up model of design and implementation is likely
to result in curricular innovation on a significant scale. Teachers
must be deeply invested in curricular ideas that they share in germinating,
and they must have access to informed counsel, support resources
for development, evaluation capacity, and dissemination channels.
Our proposal seeks to realize this interaction of classroom-level
and system-level activity through the proposed Media Centers that
will function as agencies helping to manage technology-enabled innovation
at the appropriate level -- above the classroom, but below the overarching
system. ILT's many formal evaluations of diverse educational technology
initiatives, taken together, indicate that one difficulty mitigates
the success of new programs far more than any other -- namely, inadequate
coordination of distributed efforts. The Media Centers will provide
the crucial management and support layer these studies have called
for again and again.
Much of the exciting educational activity in Partnership Schools
is ripe for enhancement through new media. At one participating
CCE school, students studying momentum and deceleration in physics
explored the dynamics of roller coasters using frame-by-frame analysis
of a laserdisc. Then, they had to design and actually build their
own roller coasters. Their designs were put to the test when a marble
was rolled along the track; if it broke an egg at the end, students
returned to the drafting table and the machine shop. This innovative
project work could be profoundly enhanced by Computer-Aided Design
tools. At Columbia's School of Engineering and Applied Science,
numerous CAD-supported mechanical and electrical engineering design
programs have been developed that can significantly extend these
interdisciplinary math, physics, engineering and design curricula.
Portfolio assessment is at the core of most of this project-based
curricular work at CCE schools. Exploring the ways that networked
multimedia can enhance and/or transform the concept and role of
the student portfolio must be a process characterized by both relatively
unconstrained experimentation and careful monitoring. Teachers and
students must be free to develop and pursue new projects and products,
guided by their imaginations and, in the case of teachers, by their
experience as educators, thus beginning to define the curricular
forms of the 21st century. But they must also be situated such that
their experimentation is as informed as possible and is thoroughly
and formatively assessed. This means that teachers must be in on-going
contact with colleagues experimenting in similar ways; they must
have access to emerging technologies so they can explore them and
consider possible classroom applications; they must have technical
support for development and for implementation; they must work with
formative evaluators who can help them plan and respond to outcomes
rationally.
We envision the Media Centers as sites through which teachers and
students will lead the way toward new curricula oriented around
multimedia portfolios with precisely these development assets at
hand. Students will use the Centers as research facilities during
the course of their work; workshops and demos will be conducted
at them; teachers will present their work to colleagues and to other
interested parties; software development support will be provided;
teacher-in-residence programs will locate particular teachers with
strong experience in successful innovation at the Centers to work
with other teachers on projects; libraries of multimedia resources
will be housed in them and high-speed WAN connections at the Centers
will provide opportunities for teachers to plan for a time when
such broadband connectivity is ubiquitous. Different Centers will
no doubt emphasize different areas of activity and develop different
particular strengths. But all will be guided by the aim of providing
a locale that brings together the range of development resources
described above.
We should make it clear that the Eiffel Project intends to work
systematically to reshape the whole curriculum and to do this over
an extended period of time. The small schools movement in New York
City involves whole schools and it is based on the proposition that
each of those schools is responsible for the whole of its curriculum.
The Eiffel Project proposes to develop the uses of advanced digital
technologies in support of these small schools, facilitating their
efforts to design and implement their curricula. We are not proposing
a limited curriculum development effort targeted to specific subjects
to be housed, in part, at Columbia University, and to be implemented
in selected classes of selected grades in selected schools. We are
instead proposing a thorough-going engagement by Columbia University
and its affiliates with a fundamental City-wide effort to reshape
the whole educational experience that children receive in schools,
using digital technologies to bring academic and professional resources
to bear in support of small schools reform in ways that have previously
not been feasible. We expect general educational strategies, and
the uses of technology to support them, modeled by the small school
movement to scale out to the whole system and to affect the educational
experience of children throughout it. Participants in the Eiffel
Project have an extensive track-record in changing the ethos of
schooling through changes in teaching and learning and through technology
programs that support a wide range of curricular initiatives - the
Dalton Technology Plan (social studies, astronomy, chemistry, paleontology,
English, French, art and design, geometry and algebra), the Living
Schoolbook Project (English, Spanish, social studies, current events),
the Harlem Environmental Access Project (earth science), the Columbia
Gateway Engineering Lab (calculus, design), the Edison Project (chemistry),
the Amiens Project and the Museum Educational Site Licensing Project
(art history), the EarthView Project (earth science), Where Are
We? (mapping and abstraction skills), Discovery Web (general science),
the Reinventing Libraries Project and Library Power (digital libraries
in support of the school curriculum), and so on. All of these efforts
enable students to engage primary sources and real data, to work
with powerful tools, to pursue difficult questions; they provide
an open-ended curriculum consisting in diverse supports for student
inquiry. In short, within the limits of available resources, we
expect the digital pedagogy outlined above to affect the whole educational
experience and to integrate technology throughout the school.
3c) Provide Students, Teachers, and Communities Enabling
Support
Strong, on-going provisions for teacher development and support
are essential. The Eiffel Project will hold design workshops during
summers and will provide an on-going program of on-site support
buttressed with "just-in-time" training delivered in classrooms
over the project's desktop video-conferencing capacities.
The Institute for Learning Technologies has pioneered innovative
professional development programs in the context of the Harlem Environmental
Access Project that will be extended and further developed in the
Eiffel Project. Design Studios for Teachers bring together teachers,
technologists, content experts, and even students for extended,
multi-session workshops on the development of curricular applications
of networked multimedia. These Design Studios are more than mere
technical training for teachers. Teachers work with the advanced
technologies in the context of real curriculum development and in
a setting where ILT associates and relevant content experts are
at hand. The Design Studio is more a collaborative research and
development think tank than it is teacher training in any particular
technology. Advanced computer tools are brought to bear on complex
educational problems by a cohort of experienced educators and educational
technologists over an extended period of time. During the course
of this work, teachers acquire significant technical facility in
a broad range of applications and can return to their schools prepared
to lead their colleagues in novel directions with new tools and
resources. The Eiffel Project will feature numerous Design Studios,
and the Media Centers will augment these formal workshops with less
formal, but continuous, staff development through design.
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