Wired for Learning:
HGSE Alumni Harness the Power of Technology to Expand the Boundaries of the Classroom

by Lewis Rice

Lance Armstrong, who has devoted his life to riding a bicycle, wrote a book called It's Not About the Bike. The many Harvard Graduate School of Education alumni whose careers focus on computers, the Internet, software, and television could offer a similar contradiction in describing their work: It's not about the technology.

Those alumni agree that it is about the learning. For more than 20 years, HGSE students have learned about the intersection of technology and education in the school's recently renamed Technology, Innovation, and Education Program (TIE, formerly called Technology in Education), which annually attracts about 40 students--approximately two-thirds of them women--from around the world.

"Technology can enhance the learning process for both individuals and groups," says Joseph Blatt, director of TIE and a HGSE lecturer. "We try to emphasize the transformative power of technology in various settings--changing the ways teachers teach and children learn, enabling groups to collaborate across distance and time, even helping people overcome social and cultural barriers."

Graduates of the TIE Program go on to leadership careers in teaching, technology design, media production, evaluation, and research. Some bold alums launch their own ventures, using ideas developed at HGSE to help make better products.

Here are some examples of alumni, linked by their work in technology and in learning, who ensure that the vitality of the classroom expands as far as the imagination can go.

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Children learn from building sandcastles, says Idit Harel-Caperton, Ed.M.'84, C.A.S.'85. The only problem is that the waves will eventually wash their creations into the sea. With the power of technology, however, the lessons never fade away, she says.

"The nice thing with Internet technology is that it allows children to construct and build artifacts and then save them and come back," says Caperton. "When you build on metaphors like this, even the cyber-pessimists begin to understand, but it's never before they experience it themselves."

Since graduating from HGSE 20 years ago--with the first generation of TIE graduates--Harel-Caperton has been trying to expose an expanding audience to the power of Internet media technology as an educational tool. While pursuing her Ph.D. at the MIT Media Lab, the native of Israel researched high-density computer-based learning environments in an inner-city Boston school, and published her award-winning book, Children Designers, about fourth-graders who developed their own math software. In 1995, she founded MaMaMedia Inc., a children's newmedia company, with a large-scale website that offers activities and projects for children based on the "constructionist" model of learning, which theorizes that children learn best through the process of creation. The site boasts over 5.6 million members in more than 36 countries who have created and saved over 30 million projects online in the past 10 years. The company also offers companion websites for parents and educators.

Since 2003, she has also served as founder and president of the World Wide Workshop, a nonprofit organization that collaborates with universities, foundations, educational institutions, and research centers on developing computer and Internet applications and programs. This is all in addition to teaching in the education technology department at the Software Engineering Institute of East China Normal University in Shanghai this fall.

Harel-Caperton came to the Ed School to study children's television, but soon changed her focus to the interactive personal computer, a tool that she believes gives the user more control--a key to learning, she says."The nice thing with Internet technology is that it allows children to construct and build artifacts and then save them and come back."

"I was always very child-centric in the ways I was thinking about learning theory and education theory," Harel-Caperton says. "I was looking at different ways that children could interact with media in mindful and purposeful ways that can help them think about the way things work."

Today's children are born into a world of readily available Internet resources and global networks, and they expect to shape their own media experience and that of their online communities, Harel-Caperton says. In this information-driven world, educators should encourage the development of their students' three X's--exploration, expression, and exchange--as much as the traditional three R's, she says.

"This is something children love to do," she says. "This is where the learning experience really resonates. The Internet can be an ideal environment for such open-ended discovery and programming of creative projects."

In time, most children will have access to the Internet, she says, noting the boom of computer use in China and India and the decline of laptop computer prices. Harel-Caperton points out that in order to be a productive and participating citizen, people will need to know how best to use Internet media technology or be left behind.

"What will eventually be the divide between the haves and the have-nots are those who know what to do when they see the browser, and those who do not know what to do," says Harel- Caperton. "As educators we must ensure that everyone knows how to search and research the Internet fluently, of course. But we must also ensure that everyone has a set of skills for building and evaluating websites, using social software, and contributing to online communities--just as they can read and write stories, evaluate books, and participate in book clubs. That is what I call the new media literacy, which is critical and essential."

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Matt Crenshaw's education about the world began with a hole. When he was a young boy, his father returned from a trip to Japan with the country's coins to show his son. He noticed that some of the yen coins had holes in them, an aesthetic detail, says Crenshaw, Ed.M.'04, that "rocked my world."

Now Crenshaw wants to rock the world of this generation's young children by showing them the wonders of the world. But instead of bringing them a foreign object, he'll teach them through a most familiar medium.

In a venture begun when he was still a HGSE student, Crenshaw serves as creative director for World Notes, an educational television company that has created a DVD called Baku the Travel Bug. The 30-minute program for three- to eight-year-olds, the first in a hoped-for series, chronicles the adventures of an insect puppet who lives in the bag of its human traveling companion. In the premiere, they explore the cultures of Mexico, India, and Lebanon together.

What viewers see onscreen developed out of an independent study at HGSE, where Crenshaw cowrote a script for the show with fellow students Aaron Owen, Ed.M.'04, and Semira Rahemtulla, Ed.M.'04. He launched the company with Peter Arndt, an American expatriate in London who shared Crenshaw's passion for teaching children international literacy.

Crenshaw produced the pilot episode, his first foray into video production, though he had previously worked in new media as the Web managing editor for the Chicago Historical Society. At HGSE, he enrolled in the (then-named) Technology in Education Program, hoping to tap the potential educational value of media.

"One of the dominant messages of the program is that kids grow up in this media ecology," he says. "There's no way to divorce kids from the Internet or TV or movies or video games. If you ignore them as educational devices, you're really doing a disservice to kids. Education has to be interwoven in everything they do, not just in getting out the dusty textbook."

"There's no way to divorce kids from the Internet or TV or movies or video games. If you ignore them as educational devices, you're really doing a disservice to kids."

Yet Crenshaw has discovered that people often doubt the educational value of television. Even boosters of students' use of software programs and the Internet criticize television, contending that it lacks the interactivity of new media, he says. Crenshaw argues, however, that young children interact with the Baku program, which features characters who ask questions and make eye contact with viewers. He also contends that young children who watch the program with friends share a social experience that they wouldn't enjoy using the computer.

He has observed how children engage with the program. In one case, children wrapped themselves in towels in imitation of Indian saris. Parents have told him that children would recite the Spanish words for vegetables in their kitchen after they watched the episode. "You could argue that kids were just mimicking things they saw on TV," he says. "But one of the things we do is model their positive behavior in the show."

The program, he says, stimulates curiosity in the face of differences. Crenshaw recalls that when he was growing up, some children would call Indian women "dotheads." A white child in the show who encounters an Indian woman asks what she's wearing on her forehead. The woman explains that it's called a bindi and describes its importance. A child who watches the scene, says Crenshaw, may someday teach other children the same thing.

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As part of a team of researchers and clinicians in a hospital-based clinic, David Rose, Ed.D.'76, helped diagnose children who were having difficulty in school. The clinic issued reports filled with information about the children's problems. But it failed, he says, to offer a comparable list of solutions.

That's when Rose got into the solution business.

The clinic evolved into the Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST), which Rose cofounded in 1984. Based in Wakefield, Massachusetts, the organization researches and develops technologies that expand educational opportunities for students, particularly those with disabilities.

A neuropsychologist, Rose saw the potential of technology early on, when CAST began a program that offered computers as a learning tool to students with disabilities. Children who couldn't talk used a computer to talk for them. Those who couldn't write were able to create text. "For kids who had physical and sensory disabilities, it would be like night and day," says Rose. "Transformative things would happen. Tears would roll down people's faces."

CAST concentrates on changing prevailing technologies rather than trying to "fix" children, says Rose. The organization advocates a framework called Universal Design for Learning, which calls for flexible goals and methods to accommodate different learners. (Rose also teaches a class at the Ed School titled "Universal Design for Learning," offered by the TIE Program.)

"We saw a lot of educational environments that were really bad for some kids," says Rose, who serves as CAST's chief scientist in cognition and learning. "The kids with disabilities were really the canaries in the coal mines that showed this was not a healthy learning environment."

Digital media provide the flexibility that print alone cannot, he says. As an example, he points to a product he helped develop called Thinking Reader, a software program that presents unabridged literature frequently taught in schools. For struggling readers, the product offers individualized scaffolds to help students learn to apply reading strategies (such as summarizing or predicting), embedded cues to help readers identify important passages, and just-in-time vocabulary supports--in English, Spanish, or in pictorial form.

Research shows that the program improves not only students' understanding of individual texts, but their overall reading comprehension, according to Rose. Such products can be integrated into the classroom for all students, engaging them at their ability level and giving teachers a tool to individualize learning strategies, he says.

"For kids who had physical and sensory disabilities, it would be like night and day. Transformative things would happen. Tears would roll down people's faces."

"The power of the digital world is that we don't have to give everyone the same thing," Rose says. "Universal designs assume that we're giving everybody the learning experience that's just right for where they are in terms of their knowledge, the strategies they have, and how they're motivated."

Rose's vision for universal design received a boost with the recent adoption of the National Instructional Materials Accessibility Standard, which will mandate that publishers produce a digital version of texts along with the print version. CAST lobbied for the standard, which, according to Rose, "gives more incentive for the schools to look for these kinds of solutions and to have the technologies embedded within the regular classrooms."

As a lecturer at HGSE, Rose integrates technology into his own classroom. Yet he notes that most of his students, even those in the TIE Program, don't bring laptops to class. "It's really scary to me that educators are at the trailing edge of using [computers themselves] as the normal way of learning."

For all of his support for technology, Rose does not enjoy it himself. He needs help setting up anything from a VCR to a computer presentation in his class. In a way, that makes him an ideal proponent for his cause, he says. If he didn't believe technology improved learning, he would never advocate for it.

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Sometimes it pays to give something away. That's what Matthew Pittinsky, Ed.M.'95, found out in 1997 when he started Blackboard Inc., an e-learning company that produces education software applications. At the time, academic institutions told him that faculty would never use technology. So instead of selling the software to schools, Blackboard offered the product on its own servers free of charge to any teacher or faculty member who wanted to use it.

The results changed minds at educational institutions, and changed the fortunes of the company.

"In an incredibly short period of time, the conventional wisdom of the Luddite-ish faculty members disappeared because the truth is they did want to post their syllabi, they did want discussion boards, they did want to begin to use the Web in their classrooms," says Pittinsky. "Once we had hundreds of thousands of classrooms online, you could walk into any school and say, 'Did you know these 30 faculty members are already using it?' It became very easy to dispel the myth."

Since then, Blackboard has grown to be a public company with 550 employees, offices in Europe, Asia, and the United States (the headquarters are in Washington, D.C.), and $111 million in revenue. Its flagship product, the Blackboard Academic Suite, allows faculty to manage an online learning environment and offers students a resource to interact with classmates and teachers and access information outside the classroom.

"It's really a third dimension to the classroom," Pittinsky says. "So if the bell rings at a critical moment in the discussion, it continues online. We're seeing it being used to create a true living learning environment."

The seeds of the company took root at HGSE, where Pittinsky studied policy relating to equity, access, and efficiency in education. At the same time, faculty and students were beginning to discover the Internet and computer networks. Although he didn't have a technology focus, Pittinsky saw that technology could help address the problems he was studying.

"Once we had hundreds of thousands of classrooms online, you could walk into any school and say, 'Did you know these 30 faculty members are already using it?' It became very easy to dispel the myth." After a stint as a consultant with the higher education practice of KPMG, an international accounting and consulting firm, he launched Blackboard with Michael Chasen, a college classmate from American University who now serves as CEO. Pittinsky, the chairman of the company, jokes about his lack of business background and says "lucky stars aligned for us" in order to succeed. That, plus angel investors and contacts in the industry gained from his consulting work. He also credits a year of student teaching, which helped him shape his company's core product.

"For technology to be successful, it really has to solve a teacher's problems, and it has to take into account the daily life of a teacher," says Pittinsky. "It has to be easy to use and simple; it has to reduce work, not create work. That became a mantra that I drilled into our productdevelopment group."

Though people in education may see him as a businessperson, he sees himself as an educator, the same person who went to HGSE with plans to become a teacher. While continuing to work on behalf of Blackboard, Pittinsky is pursuing a doctorate at Teachers College, Columbia University. His thesis will focus on classroom composition--how students' classmates affect their achievement and aspirations. Someday, he may still teach. In the meantime, he says, he's still learning about how the Internet is changing education and what that means for the company he and his classmate began.

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Like many of his Ed School contemporaries, Andrew Zucker, Ed.D.'78, embarked on a career in the classroom. He taught mathematics and science, predominantly at the high school level. But he was also different from many of his peers. He learned to program a computer in the early 1960s, before most people had even seen one. He directed one of the first school computer centers in 1974. Back then, he worked with a "minicomputer," which was the size of a four-drawer file cabinet. It was considered state-ofthe- art.

Technology has progressed, of course, and Zucker has grown with it, currently as a senior research scientist with the Concord Consortium, a nonprofit educational research and development organization located in Concord, Massachusetts. He joined the organization in March after stints with the Education Development Center, SRI International, and the U.S. Department of Education.

Among the multiple projects he directs or codirects, Zucker has evaluated the impact of ubiquitous computing in classrooms in places like Virginia's Henrico County school system and the state of Maine, which provides a laptop computer to every middle school student. He wrote a paper aimed at policymakers like school superintendents about the lessons learned from such one-to- one computing initiatives, which he predicts will become the norm in classrooms across the country.

"I think it is going to change schooling," he says. "It changes what you study, how you study, and who you study with. School is still recognizable as school, but it's really different in some important respects."

One major difference that technology has spawned is distance learning, the subject of a book Zucker coauthored called The Virtual High School: Teaching Generation V. He calls the experience of online learning "surprisingly successful" and found that the virtual classroom garnered praise from students, teachers, and administrators alike (principals were most enthusiastic, he says, because they were able to give courses to their students that they could not otherwise justify for only one school).

"[Having computers in the classroom] changes what you study, how you study, and who you study with. School is still recognizable as school, but it's really different in some important respects."

"I think there's a lot of evidence that you can provide high quality in online courses," he says. "It's not for everybody. It does require more motivation on the part of the student. You don't have a teacher who can scowl at you and say, 'Where is your homework?' so it may be easier to fall behind."

Zucker would counsel young people to take most of their courses face-toface and one or two courses online. That model would combine the benefits of online learning--such as empowering shy students to participate and generating more thoughtful responses--with the personal interaction that remains vital for students.

His own education at HGSE, while lacking the technological innovations he now studies, has served him well throughout his career. The lessons in curriculum, instruction, and content will not go out of style like the "minicomputer." Indeed, regardless of the advances in technology, he says, people will always need to monitor how technology advances education.

"Technology, including the computer, is a two-edged sword for us," says Zucker. "I think there are many benefits that are going to accrue for schools, but it isn't going to happen automatically. We have to make sure we use the technology wisely."

About the Article

A version of this article originally appeared in the Winter 2005 issue of Ed., the magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

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