This work was supported in part by The National Science Foundation
The appearance of the many veterans and their wives was one of the main attractions for me and my grandmother . . . They helped to personalize the event and make it official. With their solemn presence, the goals of the WW II Commemorative Command Program were achieved . . . From a personal perspective, I am proud to be related to a widow of a WW II veteran. My grandmother has been one of the great things that has helped me to understand the war pains of the countries involved in the war effort, and has given me even greater respect for the soldiers and their FAMILIES that experienced and paid the high price of war . . . I was the only one in the room under twenty and my grandmother was the oldest, so we attracted the attention of many . . . For the sake of the rest of us, D-Day + 50 must not be the end of the commemorative efforts of the world. Instead, it should be just the beginning of our respect and pride for the countries that were willing to risk a generation. We must show that their courage was not in vain, and that we understand the cost of our most deadly game.
-- Kris Abel
On June 1, 1994, Patch American High School's exhibit, "D-Day: The World Remembers," was announced on the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) "What's New Page." In the following four months, more than 77,000 "visits" to its Web server were registered. The visitors represented people from 39 countries on the globe (ranging from Taiwan, to Russia, to Israel, to South Africa, to New Zealand, to Brazil, to the United States). The D-Day exhibit comprises work from a variety of sources, such as articles from Stars and Stripes, invasion maps from Department of Defense historians, newsreels of the landing, and speeches from Churchill and Truman. The main exhibits, however, are student and teacher essays and photos on the topics of D-Day and World War II. This exhibit continues to attract visitors and researchers from around the world. Click here to see a sample of the following materials.
--President Clinton, February 1994 speech to the American Council on Education
The changing nature of the world's economic system--the shift from an industry- based society to an information-based society--is a pervasive factor driving educational changes for people of all ages. Society is shifting to the application of knowledge as the primary means of raising productivity. Phillip Schlechty (1990) argues, "In an information-based society, knowledge work is the primary mode of work, since information provides the primary means by which work is accomplished" (p. 35). This presents qualitatively different challenges to traditional companies. Innovative companies are responding to these challenges by transforming, in Peter Senge's terms, into "learning organizations":
. . . organizations where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning how to learn together (Senge 1990, p. 3).
Effective knowledge workers need to develop new higher-level skills for accessing, selecting, manipulating, and representing information in a variety of formats. But this alone is not sufficient. As George Leonard said in 1968, "The highly technological, regenerative society now emerging will require something akin to mass genius, mass creativity, and lifelong learning" (Leonard 1968).
That vision of a quarter-century ago is now reality. We are facing the challenge of large-scale knowledge production. The report of the Secretary's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS) says, "Modern work is just too complex for a small cadre of managers to possess all the answers" (SCANS 1992, p. 16). Workers at every stage or level of a knowledge-based organization must contribute to the production of knowledge.
"A learning organization is an organization in which people at all levels are, collectively, continually enhancing their capacity to create things they really want to create" (Senge, as quoted in O'Neil 1995, p. 20).
Schools, in turn, can respond to this challenge by taking seriously the constructivist approach to learning. If children and teachers are engaged, collaboratively, in actively constructing their own knowledge, then schools are laying a foundation for the intellectual development of the knowledge worker. We can then extend the metaphor of a learning organization to the school system (cf. Goldberg and Richards 1995).
There are hundreds of such collaborative inquiry projects and communities organized by teachers, experts, and students. Such projects help students move between the concrete, physical world they can touch and measure, and the electronic world of data they analyze to make and communicate powerful abstractions--exactly the kind of workers Reich (1991) characterizes as "symbolic analysts." By learning to observe and describe their local physical and social world in ways useful to people in other locations, they learn to create knowledge, a role that in earlier times was enjoyed by only the small minority of scientists, inventors, writers, industrialists, or statesmen.
In these kinds of collaborative inquiry communities, the learner has a real and responsive audience. This is highly motivating, just as it is motivating to any professional to get feedback from colleagues or audiences. The beneficial effects of this motivational aspect on learning have been studied in a systematic way by educational researchers, including Margaret Riel, who has studied children's writing (Riel 1990), and Nancy Songer, who is studying children's learning about weather and climate (Songer 1994).
Such networked educational projects sometimes have direct and concrete benefits to the local school and neighborhood. One example is the series of air quality studies conducted by Global Lab students in Pease Middle School in San Antonio, Texas, which resulted in improvements to the ventilation system of the school and a new appreciation by parents and administrators of the contributions their young people can make (Berenfeld 1993).
In Ann Arbor, Michigan, school children's data on water quality have been of such utility to the town that banks and the Chamber of Commerce have established low- cost loans for parents to purchase computers for children, and companies are offering jobs for students to earn their own computers.
Both are high school students who have already been working to develop educational programs and materials for use by learners anywhere in the world. With some support from BOCES staff, and with multiple talents already in their possession, these young students have exemplified what happens when motivation and opportunity converge.
Chris has now moved to Pittsford, New York, where he is working on "Quest," NASA's K-12 Internet project. There Chris has spent the entire summer implementing the advanced interactive features of the NASA server. "Quest" has several purposes: to help schools and teachers connect to the Internet; to point to useful resources and information; and to assist teachers integrating the Internet into their classroom to support restructured math and science learning. Steve Hodas of NASA (hodas@nsipo.nasa.gov) commented, "We would like to connect teachers with NASA projects so that kids can see what real scientists do!"
Using the opportunity and knowledge gained from this endeavor, Seth has formed his own consulting enterprise. He produces Web pages for area small businesses so that they may advertise on the Internet. He is also working during the summer to help automate some of the BOCES registration procedures used by teachers to subscribe to workshops held by the CNYRIC Learning Technologies Department. In the fall, he will continue adding Everson imagery to the F-M ClayNet project as part of an independent study effort working with other students.
Chris and Seth are prime examples of the idea that learning and work may be integrated into a profitable enterprise by motivated students. All they need are support and opportunity provided by their teachers--and in these two cases, support from OCM BOCES support staff working to create productive learning environments in our community.
To support the cultural diversity of its students, Dzantik'i Heeni Middle School has an enduring theme celebrating diversity and invites community participation for one month of the year. The Dzantik'i Heeni Web server describes the schools, community, and school projects, including one where students are developing interpretive guides for two popular trails in the Juneau area and another called Alaska Online that is the product of an ongoing curriculum project. The story below is about the Dzantik'i Heeni Middle School's work on the Alaska Online project.
My grade eight students and I quickly entered the technology revolution last school year. Together we crafted a project we call "Alaska Online." The project goal is to educate people about our great state by publishing useful information on the World Wide Web.
As our project grew, students developed working relationships with many community, state, and federal organizations. They became keenly aware that Alaska Online was very different from their previous classroom experiences. They clearly understood that our classroom was making a valuable contribution to the global computer network.
Throughout the project students faced and overcame many challenges. Many of these students were at risk, lacked writing skills, and had lost pride in their community. In many ways this project helped them overcome these problems. Getting involved, learning about their community, taking on the responsibility of working with professionals in the Alaskan federal agencies, all gave them a sense of ownership, awareness of their abilities, and pride. One challenge was to fill the role of a professional writer. I recall the day a student asked me, "Do I really have to rewrite this piece again?" My response was, when we write for a potential audience of 30 million people, we don't want to spell things incorrectly. He smiled and went to draft another paper.
--Devon Jones, teacher, Dzantik'i Heeni Middle School
Creating this kind of foundation will be a collaborative effort or partnership among administrators, university faculty members, community, business, labor, and political leaders, as well as parents, teachers, and students.
The central value of internetworking to support learning and teaching for our changing world is that internetworking can support or enable authentic learning experiences and cross-institutional collaborations needed for the reform of education (Hunter 1993a). When learners and teachers contribute to the information infrastructure by participating in virtual communities and by setting up information services on the networks, their experience has many of the visionary qualities summarized above. The key characteristic of internetworking that enables this kind of experience is that the people who use the Internet are creating and exchanging knowledge, rather than passively receiving someone else's information. There is a danger that the networks could be used to transmit and amplify traditional and outmoded elements of schooling instead of providing a mechanism for the transformation to lifelong learning needed by all citizens. Many well-intentioned efforts to apply technologies to schooling (often in the name of "reform") still assume such factory-era constraints as segregation of learners by age, a sequential curriculum, an emphasis on everyone learning the same thing at the same time, learning activities confined to the school or classroom, no participation of parents in the learning activities of their children, knowledge predigested by experts, teacher as authoritative knowledge base, memorization of facts today for use in later years, subjects isolated by disciplines, same roles for all teachers, right answers to all test questions, students following procedures written by outside authorities, class periods too short to think in, teachers as the only audience for students' work, and abstractions separated from experiential context.
How we shape and engineer the technology, tools, organization of knowledge, and virtual communities on the expanding Internet information infrastructure will directly affect the potential productivity, roles, and equity of opportunity of young people in the near and distant future, and thereby will affect the kind of society into which we evolve.
These examples of learner and teacher contributions to the current Internet provide a glimpse of what is possible with today's technology, infrastructure, and organizational arrangements. However, the value that people can contribute and the value that they get is limited by the local networking infrastructure, tools, and services on the Internet, and by the free-for-all nature of the interactions on most current virtual communities. Most contributions wind up as flotsam and jetsam on a vast chaotic sea of e-mail, newsgroup messages, and Web pages--with little order, discipline, quality assessment, structure, retrievability, review, or aggregation.
There has been considerable recent progress in developing software that makes it easier to get onto the networks and discover information from personal computers. As more people attempt to participate and more virtual communities are formed, we are gaining more insight into the kinds of tools and services needed for full participation, including user construction of knowledge and information services. The Clinton-Gore Administration's National Information Infrastructure plan recognizes the importance of broad-based participation in the development of the Internet and the evolving nature of the NII:
[T]he NII will be of maximum value to users if it is sufficiently "open" and interactive so that users can develop new services and applications or exchange information among themselves, without waiting for services to be offered by the firms that operate the NII. In this way, users will develop new "electronic communities" and share knowledge and experiences that can improve the way that they learn, work, play, and participate in the American democracy (NTIA, 1993).
If internetworking and the National Information Infrastructure are to support the transformation outlined here, then "scaling up" has to mean all these things, and more. Decisions made by government agencies, corporations, and communities about investment in infrastructure and educational reform will take into account the mechanisms needed to make progress on all of these fronts. The following four-part vision (of a school as a learning organization) may help to guide our decision-making, particularly with regard to elementary and secondary education in the future:
School itself is a more integrated system. School is divided into smaller clusters, where teachers and students and their families get to know one another and form a sense of community. Collaborative groups work on meaningful projects, and just-in-time seminars and workshops provide support for the projects.
Goldberg, B. and J. Richards. 1995. Leveraging technology for reform: Changing schools and communities into learning organizations. Educational Technology, September 1995: 5-16.
Hunter, Beverly. 1993a. Internetworking: Coordinating technology for systemic reform. Communications of the ACM. May 1993: 42-46.
Hunter, Beverly. 1993b. Collaborative inquiry in networked communities. Hands On! 16(2). Cambridge: TERC.
Hunter, Beverly. 1995. Internetworking and educational reform: The national school network testbed partnership. Proceedings of the International Internet Conference, Honolulu, June 1995.
Leonard, George B. 1968. Education and ecstasy. New York: Delacorte Press. National Telecommunications and Information Administration. 1993.
The national information infrastructure: Agenda for action. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Commerce.
O'Neil, John. 1995. On schools as learning organizations: A conversation with Peter Senge. Educational Leadership, April 1995: 20-23.
Reich, Robert. 1991. The work of nations: Preparing ourselves for 21st century capitalism. New York: Vintage Books.
Riel, Margaret. 1990. Cooperative learning across classrooms in electronic learning circles. Instructional Science 19: 445-466.
Schlechty, Phillip C. 1990. Schools for the 21st century. San Francisco: Jossey Bass.
Secretary's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS). 1992. Learning a living: A blueprint for high performance. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Labor.
Senge, Peter. 1990. The fifth discipline: The art and practice of the learning organization. New York: Doubleday.
Songer, Nancy. 1994. Knowledge construction through global exchange and dialogue: A case of kids as global scientists. Paper submitted to the Journal of the Learning Sciences.
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Last modified April 4, 2003 (eal).