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NETWORKS FOR LEARNING RENEWAL
THE CENTER FOR COLLABORATIVE EDUCATION
and
INSTITUTE FOR LEARNING TECHNOLOGIES
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK
New York City's Small Schools Partnership
Technology Learning Challenge
EXECUTIVE OVERVIEW
September 1996
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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
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