Progress Towards a National Initiative for Information Technology to Improve Learning and Teaching

We are making good progress in our efforts to create a major national initiative to transform education, training and lifelong learning through innovative use of advanced information technologies. FAS has joined a national coalition of public and private sector organizations to support an important new national educational research and development initiative, the Digital Promise Project. The project proposes that Congress create a major national trust fund that would be used to sponsor research in learning science and technology, help bring the contents of the nation’s libraries, museums, universities and schools into the digital age, and encourage these institutions to teach the skills and disciplines needed for the information-based economy. The proposed fund, known as the Digital Opportunity Investment Trust (DO IT), would do for education in its broadest sense what the National Science Foundation does for science, the National Institutes of Health does for health, and the Defense Department’s DARPA does for national defense. The fund would finance this work with revenue from auctions and fees for licenses to the publicly owned electromagnetic spectrum (the frequencies that transit radio and television signals, for example).

The national initiative proposed by DO IT would help make the Internet into an enriched tool for training, learning and public participation. Students could travel through a virtual solar system, and students studying medicine could practice surgery on a digital, anatomically correct, 3-D recreation of the human body. People of all ages could gain access to individual virtual tutors, to improve their reading, language skills, and mastery of math and science. By funding content development and research, the riches stored in our nation’s museums, archives and libraries would be accessible to every school, and to the most remote homes in the nation and the world.

Recognizing the need for a national program to support creative research and forge new alliances between corporate and university teams, Congressman Ralph Regula (R-OH) led a Congressional effort that resulted in a $750,000 appropriation to FAS for the Digital Opportunity Investment Trust. Taken in combination with corporate, foundation and other government funding already committed, this will allow us to develop and communicate a detailed plan for a national program. These funds will support the Digital Promise Project’s campaign to promote awareness of both the potential and the possibilities offered by educational technology and FAS’ Learning Federation Project’s preparation of a plan for a coherent research program.

The Learning Federation we are forming is designed to support and manage the kinds of research in learning science and technology that are called for in the national program proposed by DO IT. Our first goal is to develop a research plan, or technology roadmap, that describes the types of learning environments that are possible and outlines the types of projects that should be supported to achieve them. The roadmap is a plan with clear goals and objectives that includes a research agenda with priorities set for the near-, mid-, and long-term and a management plan that will ensure continuous evaluation and feedback of the R&D activities. The roadmap is being developed through an iterative process that includes: literature reviews; interviews with researchers and practioners; and a series of workshops that convene experts from universities, schools, government, corporate training organizations and software publishers. We are developing individual roadmaps for specific research focus areas, including: learning science and technologies, learning tools and evaluation and assessment. Three workshops have been completed: Question Generation and Answering Systems for Technology-Enabled Systems; Instructional Design for New Technology-Enabled Approaches to Learning; and Open Architectures and Interoperable Simulations for Exploration Based Learning. A workshop on User Modeling and Assessment is scheduled for May. A final comprehensive roadmap will be assembled from the work of these components, and is scheduled for publication September 2003.

Follow our progress via the Learning Federation link on the FAS website, www.fas.org and www.digitalpromise.org. We encourage your support for this important investment in the future of American education.

Kay Howell is Director of the Learning Federation Project at the Federation of American Scientists.