The School as a Workplace

Abstract

Considering the school as a workplace for both teachers and students leads to new approaches to the design of computer instructional systems. To support a project-based approach to teaching and learning, in which the students’ role is similar to an apprentice, computer network systems must provide for students gradually assuming greater responsibility. Individual and group work must be supported both within the school and over wide area networks from which resources for projects can be brought into the school.

Schools are the workplace for both teachers and students. Traditional instructional technologies usually ignore the work of the teacher while transforming the work of the student into the absorption of information. The notion that individual students are receptacles for information is a fundamental premise of many American schools and may have outlived its utility as we move from the industrial to the information age. Some of the technology now entering American schools is based on a different pedagogy, one that sees the teacher and student as simultaneously active. In broad strokes, schooling can be made more like an apprenticeship in which students are productive under the supervision and guidance of teachers. Students are engaged in projects which do not necessarily have real world economic value but do typically have some tangible product that is worked on over an extended period of time often by a collaborative group.

A project-based approach implies a shift in the nature of school work as well as in the relationship of the computer to the organization of instruction. The fundamental design problem for the technology is to create a system that has a chance of helping an organization to change. American schools are notoriously conservative. Work skills of both teachers and students will have to change. How can technology help not only with the educational change process for the students but also with the organizational change that teachers and other school personnel must engage in as a continuous process?

We have begun developing computer systems to support project-based school work. This paper will describe the work of the Earth Lab and the Copernicus projects which are developing local area and wide area network systems for schools (Newman, 1990; Newman et al., 1989; Newman, Bernstein & Reese, 1992). This work is a large part of the basis for the technology design for the Co-NECT School, a BBN project designing and creating technology-rich schools in which school work for both teachers and students will be transformed.