Field Visits Part of Summit
By Pola Rosen, Ed.D.

One expects brilliant keynoters, erudite professors, the business sector and educators to exchange ideas at various panels when Teachers College, Columbia University organizes a special 3-day technology conference such as this one.

What is novel and extremely effective is being out in the field to see programs in action in the community. And that is just what Professor Joshua Halberstam, Chair, Education Techology Summit and Bruce Lincoln, Manager of Community Outreach at the Institute for Learning Technology (Teachers College) arranged for participants to do.

Playing to Win is a program located in Harlem since 1990. In partnership with the Boys and Girls Harbor of New York and affiliated with Columbia University, 100 people are taught computers each day including an after-school program for elementary school children, teens, and career training for adults at night. Princeton graduate Rahsaan Harris is the director of the program, while a cadre of 10 bright and energetic young people teach at nine computers. There is a math and science upward bound program; young people learn to be entrepreneurs and inventors. Probes, provided by a corporation, can take kids to Great Adventure; legos are used to introduce robotics. Shaneefa, a current student in the program, dreams of owning her own computer company. Via field trips to Sony Wonderlab and making digital journals, students like Shaneefa learn a variety of skills. Play to Win is just one of 136 Community Technology Centers (CTC) in New York City.

Among the many attendees, Mary McFerran, the Director of Education Technology at the Fieldston School, found the visits extremely useful. Our next stop was The Harlem School of the Arts, founded by New York City opera diva Dorothy Mayer. Our tour, led by Bernard Phillips, showed how software such as Music Ace (ages 8-12) and Practica Musica help in the students' learning and progress. Some of the software aids in composition, some can print out each part, which can be heard and modified easily. Different melodic lines and instrumentation can be heard immediately by the student composer, thereby allowing instant modification. One can't help but think of Beethoven as a mature composer, deaf and only able to hear the music in his mind!

In a wrapup, Lincoln, noted that we are at the epicenter of the technology movement, that we have a more technology oriented city council that we are seeing cablevision and RCN now giving money to learning and contributing to CTCs. His hope is that education becomes a ubiquitous, seamless process.#

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