Living Schoolbook is a broad-based initiative with multiple stakeholders and interests. In the first two years, at least, the overarching purpose, for NYNEX, was to demonstrate the compelling utility of high bandwidth networks for education in New York State. For the Northeast Parallel Architecture Center (NPAC) of Syracuse University, the use of the NYNET to access supercomputers and explore strategies for information-on-demand was a compelling interest. ILT sought to refine and demonstrate it's program of participatory design and formative evaluation in university/school collaborations, through web-based constructivist classroom projects. These agenda, and the press of time to demonstrate project achievements, were forces that participating schools had to engage with. Against these opportunities and conditions, teachers weighed the time, space, and activity demands of their classrooms, and were free to implement whatever fit their curricula and pedagogy.
Opportunities and questions posed by LSB have afforded teachers in partner schools an opportunity to revisit educational intents and values as they make the personal and pedagogic adjustments required to participate, enculturating them to the dynamics of technological innovation. During the two-year research and development (R&D) phase of the project, participants ran the familiar gauntlet of computer deployment hurdles, watching some efforts flourish and others scuttle upon the rocky details of unstable technologies and classroom realities. But through this process, teachers have developed both a working understanding about the role technology can play in their work, and an appreciation for the R&D culture required for such innovations. After two years, participants are reflecting on lessons learned, building on successes, and preparing for a reframing of Living Schoolbook for next year.
A consensus recognizing a need for integration of public and private sectors in support of community schools, and of university and K-12 educators in redefining teacher education is growing, and reaching the political arena. University faculty have incentives to keep their curricula relevant to the changing landscape of school reform, computer manufacturers have economic incentives to seek school markets, and public schools require new sources of funding and support as budgets shrink and national priorities shift. A recent Governors Council conference recommended commercial partnerships be promoted for schools, along the lines delineated in Living Schoolbook's project proposal:
(Press Release, quoted in The Daily Report Card)
It has been said that if you pose any problem to an architect, your answer will be a plan for a building. Living Schoolbook represented, from an anthropological point of view, the collaboration of four cultures: technologists (who seek technical solutions, and generally believe that more technological power is better), businessmen (seeking to develop and exploit opportunities for expansion of markets and services), university faculty and staff (seeking to refine and demonstrate research-based models for improving education), and teachers (striving to uphold sound practice within a host of time, space, resource and contractual constraints). This acculturation of technologists, businessment, university faculty, and k-12 teachers to each other is no easy process; all are accustomed to a degree of authority in identifying issues, goals and contexts in their scope of activity, yet each generally lacks access to the experiential base, vocabulary, and therefore conceptual schema, of their partners.
An anthropological framework for social scientists analyzing settings, offered by Edward T. Hall, bear an interesting resemblance to these above perspectives:
The Silent Language, p. 191
Lev Vygotsky developed the concept of a "zone of proximal development" to describe how learners can be aided through contact with those who have just passed through their current developmental stage, able to serve as models and guides. On the other hand, Vygotsky noted, those who are too far along are beyond that zone, and may have a frustrating and limiting influence on less advanced learners. Formal level is inappropriate to those at the informal level of acculturation. Identifying which teachers, partners, and students are at which levels of mastery/acculturation, and developing working relationships on this basis, might help ease the tensions that otherwise arise when experts in one field are amateurs in another and may not be experienced in representing their needs and concerns from both positions.
The bottom line for success in school-based initiatives is what happens in the classroom - therefore, the teacher's willing and active involvement is paramount. Yet a failure of technologists to keep the network stable, or of university staff to frame and coordinate activity effectively, or of business partners to appreciate the pace and constraints of operating in public sector, can have serious consequences in an environment where, traditionally, the classroom door is shut to outside influences. The greatest pressure to acculturate to such collaboration, therefore, rests with the teacher, who must sacrifice autonomy and self-reliance in order to take advantage of new tools and online environments and the expertise to support them.
While LSB's technology deployment may have prodded teachers uncomfortably in some moments and lagged in others, the strains of the occasional dog-and-pony demo have been largely forgiven. At the time of the survey that supported this paper (April, 1996), teachers were sanguine in their reflections on the issues and effects of technology deployment, and still enthusiastic about planning for more collaborative activity and greater integration in the third year of implementation. This paper examines the experiences of the Downstate project group up until that period. The Downstate group was directed by the Institute for Learning Technologies (ILT) of Teachers College, Columbia University, and focussed on two New York City schools: The Ralph Bunche Computer Minischool (grades 4-6) and the School for the Physical City (then grades 5-11).
Peter Cochrane, New York Academy of Sciences
Socrates lobbied against the Athenian move from oral to print-based education, and he was proven right: we no longer memorize poetry in bulk - don't need to, now that there's print; and our memories have suffered, as Socrates warned they would. Also, having read a text, he warned, gave the illusion of knowledge, which was less a danger for those who had constructed their understanding in Socratic dialog rather than reading. In fairness, print has made great leaps forward possible, in part because of how much more information can be crafted, saved and shared. But it has also radically changed human experience in the societies it adopted, for better or worse. (The Internet has accelerated some of these same shifts, redirected or complemented others).
Television is a good example of a technology which, within recent collective memory, has transformed social and personal space and time in our society. Broadcast television never successfully took root in schools and probably never will, but has become normalized within the home, functionally excluding previous patterns of family life. The TV set, well-suited to small-group viewing in the comfort of upholstery, has become an expected item of living room furniture which co-determines the organization of family space and interaction, from the scheduling of meals to the defining of opportunities for conversation. Some families prefer electronically unmediated social space, and banish television from their homes - but the capacity to make such a choice requires significant effort and compromise.
Computers, in contrast to broadcast TV, have fast become fixtures in many school settings, with marked effects on communication, physical activity, space utilization, time allocation and the social construction of learning. Computers alter the social reality of school spacetime in predictable and unforeseen ways. Both the design of workspaces and scheduling of activities must change to accommodate computers, displacing book rooms and overhead projectors. The predictable effects are generally viewed favorably by school stake holders and are national priorities now. Other effects, like hidden Trojan horsemen, are latent or beginning to emerge.
How does the act of placing computers in classrooms affect the range and quality of what can go on within them? Can these effect be predicted, avoided, and/or mediated? The cases analyzed by this paper are intended to inform the strategic decision to either confine computers to labs or support their infiltration of classrooms, and explore the relationship between school culture, classroom culture, and technology as a change agent. Summary narratives of what took place in each setting will be presented first, followed by a section of analysis and recommendations.
=>Proceed to Case SummariesIntroduction
Through the Living Schoolbook Project, five public schools were offered connections to a broadband ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode, a new protocol faster than IP) network testbed and were seeded high-end hardware (SGIs upstate, Power Macs downstate) in return for a commitment to field-test appropriate materials developed for and with them by university R&D departments, coordinated by two schools of education. Participating schools accepted this bargain, and learned to dance with their new partners. An Anthropological Approach
The days of ivory tower schooling (both university and k-12 equivalent) are passing, as American instutions feel the pressure to restructure and reconnect for a host of reasons - and with that change, the traditional, bureaucratic culture associated with schools gives way to a more organic one. Though politicians argue educational policy, the way school settings are defined and purposed by legislation is clearly less relevant than the beliefs and practices which comprise their organizational cultures: every teacher knows to look with jaundiced eye upon the dictates of state education departments, and say, "politicians and administrators come and go, but we're still here." The recent federal and state reluctance to support public funding for education, however, has had a more powerful effect. Schools must seek external partners to fund technology initiatives.
"...each state should commit to provide universal access to technologies through the schools with reduced rate service through the new, universal service provisions for education in the Telecommunications Act of 1996; provide support for education professionals to learn to use technology in their teaching; and expand private/public partnerships with major technology and telecommunications companies to develop learning technologies throughout the schools."
These recommendations, while laudable in the abstract, pose real challenges in implementation. It's easy to agree that schools need to be wired, but hard to come up a specific plan guaranteed or even likely to accomplish something demonstrable and practical in return for the substantial investment of time and money required. For this reason, Living Schoolbook was open-ended in it's mission. Its deliverables were process-oriented, not product: participatory design and formative evaluation of products serving existing curricular goals. In keeping objectives open, LSB acknowledged that its university faculty framers were not themselves part of the cultures of the target school environments.
Man operates on three different levels: the formal, informal, and technical. Each is present in any situation, but one will dominate at any given instant in time. The shifts from level to level are rapid, and the study of these shifts is the study of the process of change.
Though these three levels are present in all of the partners, along the continuum of establishing a technological culture each has their own current level. Technologists have had the time to develop technical level solutions from their ample opportunities for informal experiment; teachers are often at the informal level, not yet prepared to accept these. Formal practices such as publicity demonstrations, with no avowed relationship to what teachers are prepared for, complicate the mix. Because different partners represent different levels of acculturation in their various spheres, and need to go through these stages in order, Hall's analytic is useful in developing sensitivity to each partner' level, protecting the suppression of or roughshod-riding over developmental stages. When a discussion about curricular goals turns into a discussion about software or network protocols, these forces may be at work.General Context: "The Medium is the Message"
Before entering into the case histories, it would be well to touch on some of the background social forces and emerging values that contextualized the tacit attitudes of all partners to the role of technology in education. While each organizational setting had its own technology culture, we all participate in the inexorable transition from orality to literacy to multimediacy, and from local culture to global village.
Imagine a school with children that can read or write, but with teachers who can not, and you have a metaphor of the Information Age in which we live.
Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller both observed that new technologies have irreversible impacts, for they often supplant or marginalize previous modes of activity. The current shift from print-based to electronic information technologies is changing many institutions and norms, as forcefully as the longer and slower shift from orality to print media changed them. The School, a traditionally conservative institution maintaining and transmitting the values and content that defines its host society, is deeply threatened by such grand shifts. Teachers today wrestle with the role of electronic media in the curriculum, just as Socrates wrestled with the role of print in Athenian education. (For him, the forces of change were inexorable, and he preferred execution.)