Perspective - Celebrating a Decade

This is our tenth birthday! It’s hard to believe. The Concord Consortium started in 1994 with one modest project called Hands On Physics in a tiny house in Concord, Massachusetts, that we shared with a small store. Then we were awarded two additional grants and took over the store. Now there are more than 50 of us working on a score of projects in four different locations. But the expansion is simply an outward manifestation of the growth in scope and importance of the work we do: realizing the educational promise of computer and information technologies.

Innovation is in short supply in education, at least the kind of practical innovations that help learners and teachers in new and more powerful ways. Information and computer technologies are the major enablers of innovation in all fields, but there is surprisingly little effort going into exploiting technology for education in fundamentally new ways. Most of what passes as educational technology involves recycled ideas, small applications, or impractically complex demonstrations.

Of course, technology itself does not advance education, but no plan for improvement that overlooks the contributions of technology makes sense. Educational gains require all the resources at hand, and technology is the single most important new resource available. Unlike most educational reforms that have been tried – often repeatedly – technology brings exciting new possibilities to the table.

Computers and networks can re-define the teaching and learning experience. All the resources commonly used in education will be transformed by innovative use of technology: texts, references, libraries, lesson plans, homework assignments, illustrations, explorations, demonstrations, labs, fieldwork, quizzes, and tests. Furthermore, the preparation and work of teachers – including preservice programs, certification, professional development, text selection, lesson planning, lectures, labs, grading, mentoring, and advising – will be transformed. Such transformation will be possible because most of the supporting materials will be on networked computers and because all student and teacher creations will be digital.

Having all this online makes everything more plastic and more easily shared. Teachers can customize materials for their school and for specific students. Measures of student performance can be embedded in the materials. The technology can use the assessment data to summarize quickly student understanding so teachers can adjust their instruction. Teacher professional development can be “just in time” instead of “just in case” because it is adjusted to a participant’s teaching schedule and content. Teachers can learn new ideas using tools and approaches that they can modify for use with their students. New collaborators and mentors are available online for teachers and students.

Technology offers far more than an online medium for old approaches. The content is more interactive and can have functionality that is possible no other way. Graphs become something you do instead of something you observe. Probes turn computers into instruments that can measure the real world. You can play with models of atoms or galaxies, and see what happens in time scales ranging from femtoseconds to billions of years. To shed light on the real world, you can explore unreal worlds where dragons breed, light travels at 10 miles an hour, and agriculture is just being developed. Your explorations can be guided so that your learning is effective and efficient.

This combination of flexible media, tools for exploration, and online resources requires careful planning and development. No one of these technologies represents a silver bullet, but their sum total represents a new conception of teaching and learning that will be more powerful and effective. Few educators can make good use of these technologies in their raw form. They need to be combined into resources for teaching and learning that can be tested and disseminated. This is where our innovations are concentrated.

Aspects of this vision can be seen in our work reported in this newsletter. The Seeing Math project is advancing the art of online teacher professional development in a number of important ways. It is combining collaborative reflection, video case studies, and interactive software with our successful model for asynchronous, scheduled online courses. It is also experimenting with providing Close Support™ help to algebra teachers before they teach a topic and giving them software and approaches that they can use to improve their teaching.

The Molecular Workbench projects are experimenting with applying to teaching a very large and sophisticated simulation derived from approaches used in current research. The free software allows students to experiment with models of atoms and molecules that obey basic physical laws. Recent studies with students indicate that this approach allows students to gain useful insights into the molecular world. Current research is directed at using the software to learn not only physics, but also chemistry, biology, and the background needed by technicians in biotechnology and nanotechnology.

The Modeling Across the Curriculum project is studying applications of interactive models in high school science. In addition to looking for student gains as a result of specific units, the project is set up to detect cumulative gains that might result from student exposure to multiple similar models across several years. This project has pioneered the idea of capturing data from student explorations of these models and returning these data to us over the Internet. The result is very detailed research data from large numbers of students located nationwide. This approach can change the nature of educational research and, potentially, be of tremendous value to teachers.

We are deeply concerned about the special obligation we all have to provide the best possible education to every learner. At first blush, technology seems inconsistent with equity, but just the opposite is true. In the Information Age, we must ensure that the power of information and computer technology is universally available and well used.

The cost of computer hardware is not the major barrier to its use in under-funded schools. Our work has demonstrated the viability of inexpensive technologies like open source applications, Linux, and handheld computers. Under-performing schools often lack the ability to take full advantage of technology because too much of the job of integrating technology into education is left to the schools. Instead of expecting that each school fend for itself, we are providing solutions that can be scaled up to large numbers of schools.

Schools, even poor ones, will find the necessary resources, if they see that technology helps solve their instructional challenges. Before this happens, we need more technology-rich curricula to compete with texts, more applied research that can persuade skeptical decision-makers, and more proven alternatives to traditional student assessments.

We have accomplished much in our first decade and we are well positioned for the future. We are proud of our achievements over the past ten years and invite you to join us in making the next ten even more successful.