Louis Tomaino

This essay describes the grouping of forces necessary to guide the Internet during a critical time in its growth. It describes the state of the Internet and outlines a current initiative, and in doing so, describes ways these forces can guide its transformation into a constructivist learning medium.

The State of the Medium

The Internet is at the stage of development and relationship to learning that radio and television were in each of their infancies, when choices were made about both of these media that set the course of their use for decades. The work described here addresses core issues related to the development of the Internet as a place in which learning and creative work will occur and the ways that this development affects and is affected by individuals and cultures. It seeks to set precedent for positive transformation of the Internet at a crucial point in its development, when both public education and corporate interests are looking for ways to define it to meet their goals. Public education sees in the Internet opportunities for more inclusive access to learning resources, and it projects the Internet's value as a general format for self-motivated, investigative learning.

Looking to the Internet as a learning medium, public education does not yet know how to best utilise it, or how to fund its best use. Public education is also increasingly looking at the concept of corporate partnership to enable the Internet to move forward in the development of ideas for these uses - both in recognition of the Internet's potential and recognition of the obstacles to its presenting that potential, mirroring the condition of broadcast media in the twenties and thirties.

This work is developed around two fields of concern: studying and guiding the Internet's development through pedagogy in practice, and using the experience gained from that to create a social context to enable its best development. The meeting place of this work's specific concerns in each of these fields defines a large ground on which a viable learning environment through the Internet must occur in order to reach its potential in being beneficially transformative of society.

First, this work seeks to study and facilitate the transformation of the Internet from a medium characterised primarily by information gathering into a medium characterised primarily by information synthesis, original concept development, and self-expression. In the traditional language of "learning objectives", this means a transformation of its centre of activity from knowledge acquisition to knowledge synthesis and evaluation. In the language of affective objectives, it moves this centre to a place in which the learner orders information by values. "Organisation by values" means that a learner consciously tries to make best use of information and skills - finding and creating value in them. How to move education's focal point to this place has been a persistent topic in educational work for many years. Its implementation and theory is often defined within the meaning of "constructivism".

Within this meaning of constructivism is the concept that people gather and assimilate information, develop skills, and discover and create original value in their experience, in part through the process of creating both external embodiments and internal representations of knowledge. Project-based approaches, from building traditional dioramas to building programmed "micro worlds", define a progression of formats for this embodiment. Carried to a logical conclusion, the study of biology becomes one in which the students' focal "notebook" is not the one in which facts are listed, but one in which students put facts together to build functioning ecosystem models that deepen their senses of relationship to the natural world and their observations and activities there. The study of language becomes one in which this notebook is not one in which the rules of language are listed, but one in which vocabulary, syntax, and style are used by students to create ways for characters in their work to compose sentences and to speak, and in which learners juxtapose this type of work with work they create in the more traditional and direct methods of writing.

In this way of working, students seek knowledge to use in building more interesting, complete, and evocative models. Learners become designers and they become artists. This general way of considering knowledge, learning, and motivation for learning is described, in different ways, as one of the great benefits that the convergence of new tools with our understandings of how people learn might bring us, and how these things are converging to create a broadly applicable constructivist environment.

" . . . what we are concerned with here is cybernetics as a key to learning for children Is there a billionth [part of human knowledge] that will be especially effective in opening doors to much larger areas and giving people more freedom to make personal choices?" Seymour Papert, The Children's Machine

Cybernetics is defined as the theoretical study of the processes that determine the behaviours of physical and biological systems. Modelling and cybernetics can sometimes be seen as synonymous. Relatively simple descriptions of entities in the worlds that students build through modelling create behaviours and properties that emerge, often unexpectedly, when the entities grow or interact. As creators of both simple and complex phenomena, students engaged in this process work within a format offering great potential for gaining deep, grounded understandings of how these things work by successively adding properties to describe them.

"These properties of complex systems- a medium-sized number of intelligent, adaptive agents acting at the basis of local information - differ so greatly from simple systems that science has studied up to now that I feel it's safe to say their investigation represents an entirely new chapter in the pursuit of scientific knowledge and the world around us. Fortuitously, just at the moment in history when unforeseen behaviour of these systems is bringing them most forcefully to our attention, technology has presented us with a marvelous tool with which to probe their mercurial nature. This tool, of course, is the digital computer. " John Casti, Would-be Worlds; How Simulation is Changing the Frontiers of Science

The Internet is a place suitable for carrying this potential into actuality, along with a constellation of transformations that will accompany it, because it is a setting in which people may meet, work, and interact with each other and with their creations in a locus of activity between pure psyche and embodiment in physicality. That is, people are able to work and interact within it in "idea realms" much in the way they do in physical realms. One builds with one's hands objects that exist primarily in the mind, and this building happens not in the mind in isolation, but in a setting shared by others. This is experientially different from creating models from which one is separate and which do not become the settings for one's actions and interactions with others. The Internet is a shared psychic space. The Internet is the Internet between physicality and the psyche, connecting the two - an environment characterized by gradations of experience in a virtual to physical continuum. These characteristics of the Internet are the core of its potential as a constructivist medium.

That potential is enabled by the continued convergence, in its one medium, of the cultural and informational resources of the Web with a growing set of tools, including those of multimedia and programming. The current state of this convergence is part of what defines the infancy of this medium. Although these tools and cultural resources may all be used to create works that take form there, their integration into a unified medium that learners may use from a common type of "place" within the Internet is in formation.

From one point of view, the work described here studies, as the organising principle for enabling this transformation, the concept of "place", and of creating, organising, communicating, and navigating within that place. The text line in chat is spoken in a place, to another person in that place, and through the nature of the conversation, defines the nature of the place. Sometimes the text defines the emotional and intellectual tone of the place; sometimes it defines the participants' sense of imagined forms and composition of the setting - a lake, or the ocean - as they are speaking the environment into existence. In virtual spatial environments, simulated worlds in which users move in relationship to each other and objects they can see, this dialogue is taken in other directions, with the creation of settings, objects, and tools that are not purely conceptual and are not purely physical, but still have the potential to be defined and modified by their participants.

In this mutable state, components of environments that are normally considered "place" can be built to have attributes of tools, helpers, and other things. These components can have programming frameworks that make the definition of what they are depend upon the role they are taking on at any given time. For instance, a place that could be reconfigured upon request could be considered a tool for organising information in different ways. It could also be considered a helper in being able to respond to that request and carry on other dialog. This work can, therefore, focus on the aspects of parts of the environment that make them entities, tools, and other things, as well as their place-defining aspects.

The preparation of the environment to optimally prepare for this mutability is one of the keys that will open its constructivist potential. The work of facilitating this development is carried out in part by studying, planning, applying, and creating a new synthesis of existing tools and technologies, and in part by creating new tools when that synthesis leads to an approximation of the work's goals that missing pieces will bring into more complete actuality. More importantly, it is facilitated by the creation of a social and creative context for the use of these tools - one that deepens and broadens the sense of outcomes they may be applied towards. This work, then, studies, and hopes to facilitate and guide, the formation of natural next stages of a medium in which the world's cultural archives, informational documents, other kinds of information about humankind and the totality of the world, and tools for building and exploring are already embedded and accessible to different degrees.

It develops the concept that a setting in which thought can be made tangible more fluidly, and in which the representation and composition of the world, including one's self, is also mutable and fluid, provides a breakthrough in the potential for human learning and motivation to learn. It develops the concept that the thread that leads learners to beautiful works of human creation and those of the non-human natural world can be that of personal motivation to create, explore, and interact with other people in an environment defined by their creations and the shared creative process. It develops the concept that the presence of the historic continuum of human and natural creations gives a context for the aesthetic and inventive scope of new work. And it develops the concept that this work will be anchored to experiences and processes in the world outside of the virtual space, and that the work in virtual environments will help develop deeper levels of understanding and engagement with those experiences.

The creation of a social and creative context that will best enable these experiences is described below from three angles: in terms of the processes of the arts, in terms of a structure that will organize organically from the cultures of the people who use it, and in terms of building upon the groundwork of policy protocols and content standards pioneered by public broadcasting and those who conceptualised it in its different forms in different parts of the world.

The second field of concern motivating this work, then, is the study and development of a well-conceived framework for the definition and protection of the integrity of the forming global learning environment and its many meeting and work areas. An important part of this work is in developing the role of various organisations to define its character, and in setting clear boundaries about the roles that other organisations with different and contradictory goals will have in defining it. This initiative takes up a cause that began at the birth of radio, and reached a culmination in the creation of Public Broadcasting. How will the Internet's culture as a learning medium be defined, and how will it reach its potential?

At a time in which learners' interaction with the structure of learning environments, self-motivated choice of direction, and the use of tools to craft ideas into new forms are emerging as central in learning, this approach is not just about what information will be delivered - it is about how that information and the other experiences it offers will be used as a context for the creation of new works in the process of that learning. In the past, the 'works' being created have been more exclusively in the minds of learners. A new component in education now takes a major place: the creation by learners of works that define the structure of their learning environments. Each learning environment's seeding with a context of the traditions in the arts, sciences, and humanities will return in the form the works learners create that will in turn contribute to definition of the environment. Through the kind of juxtaposition of real and virtual foreseen here, the application of the virtual to the physical, and to cultures of aesthetic, invention, value, and content, within the Internet and outside of it, are catalysed in their capability to change and their ability to become pervasive.

Literacy and practice in the arts establishes a facilitating context for the development of original works, processes, styles, and values. This context exists and this development occurs in a work environment in which we, as learners, are creators, and are informed through the arts the classical, folk, modern, and emerging traditions of the world. Without this context, we are left to develop personal meaning and extrapolate from a relatively small set of options presented to us in our contacts with popular culture. The work at each stage of knowledge assimilation and creation is to take an inner step in which the world is created freshly - an essentially inner experience, refreshed and nourished by the environmental context.

The value of this context becomes especially apparent when we consider that the tools we are using and providing are largely, in essence, expressive and design tools that we might apply to help us learn as we construct personally interesting and meaningful representations of various aspects of the world, and as we consider that we are creating appropriate project-based environments for this use by others. These tools and environments are to help give us voice, and with this invitation to speak, it is essentially important which models we have as a social baseline to rise from in thinking about "what might be made".

The arts and design tradition is the model for constructivist learning. Education in these areas is perhaps the only type of study in which elements of the 50's taxonomy of learning objectives, which are behind so much the instructional approach, occur with synthesis as the core, opening the potential of that synthesis to draw memorisation, comprehension, application, analysis, and evaluation together. It turns the traditional taxonomy of learning skills inside out and makes them into a constructivist approach.

In giving ourselves and our children an opportunity to develop voice through constructivist uses of multimedia, we need to offer options beyond the few options most prevalent in corporate and popular culture - for what we and they can and might say. The works that students create can be guided by values embodied in much of commercial television, advertising, and modern Hollywood, driven by the marketing formulas of commercial popular culture, and they can be guided by the rightful guides of public learning, the commutative historical accomplishment of the ages. These are two very different things. Traditionally, public education's role offers people the opportunity to make and develop this distinction in their lives.

Providing models from the fine arts and design, in product, process, and aesthetic, is not the same as over-prescribing them by requiring that certain work be copied (although copying is often a good way to learn). That stalls constructivist work, is an intervention that takes the place of self-directed appropriation of knowledge, and has done these things in potentially valuable learning environments in the past that began with a highly constructivist basis. Providing models for process, product, and aesthetic is creating a culture of options and possibilities while helping learners to gain experience and skills. It is in a way of offering a kind of permission to find a broader and more refined variety of things interesting and valuable.

Work in the arts and design is most usually done in areas that fit only a small part of the scope of content requirements of public school, typically, the traditional visual art, music, and dance content areas. But, if the state of technologies has reached a point that will enable the constructivist approaches described here, then this is no longer so, and the processes, and models, that applied really only in self-expression, or in crafting, invention, and design in areas like architecture, now apply, and will be developed, across the curriculum. Thinking in terms of instruction rather than construction, this type of partnership may seem to have bearing mostly in "arts curricula" in isolation, but the bearing applies to the creative and project-based focus in all content areas. In a true constructivist environment, it is no longer peripheral, it becomes recognised as essential.

Furthermore, as the Internet becomes a global learning medium, it will become increasingly essential that it become a format and setting for the magnification of local cultures, using what is valuable in them to define its content and approaches, feeding those things into itself and counterbalancing tendencies for homogenisation of aesthetic and thought through globalisation. This concept of the benefit of drawing on the diversity of community cultures and cultural institutions is central to the success of the medium. "Cultural magnification" is a process in which a community's own culture is deliberately used as a setting for the community's development. Thoughtful preparation for the integration of local culture is a key component to the effectiveness and transportability of Internet learning concepts, both nationally and globally, both in what it might offer and in how it should offer it.

This work is about " ... facing the challenge of how to support the development of a global community in an age when both isolationism and nationalism seem to be fostering a fractured view of the world. And in a time when we are overwhelmed by information, how do we use it to build a sense of community instead of allowing it to tear us apart?" These phrases (from Carnegie Corporation of New York) and others like them describe a passionate interest in work that will, if successful, define a global common ground carefully crafted to support originality of culture - conceived so that the integrity of the cultures of its participants is what will make this global medium and its transformative effects thrive. As the forming global Internet learning environment reaches the world, it must not make the same mistakes that in the past have had decimating effects on the cultural integrity on local cultures through much of broadcast and other mass media. A new global media should let each culture take its place as the "educator of the world" as it educates itself. "The twenty-first century has left the age of the industrial worker, passing to the age of the knowledge worker." This statement, often articulated in various ways, is met in the specifics of this work's goals for studying and advancing how people will become able to become "knowledge workers" and what that may come to mean in receiving the "overwhelming flow of information" in a way that it becomes used in social and individual growth.

As this work seeks to establish working models that will support the diversification of culture, it is working to provide a framework, at its most basic level, to strengthen the culture of individuals - in thought, feeling, aesthetics, creative activity, and motivation. As mass media has the potentiality support or supplant the diversity of culture in societies, so it has the potential to support or supplant the originality and independence of the psyche of individuals. Within any culture, technology and what it carries, without well-conceived guidance and vision, has shown an alarming tendency to remove time and place for reflection and to interrupt it, rather than create space for it and deepen it. Too often, dealing with technology in order to help in learning and in expressive work takes time from satisfying the original opportunity and intention. Access to information and programming of different types, such as television has brought, has met some of its promise while causing much that was not expected or welcomed, including its large role in the fragmentation of society and the family, and the domination of the time that had been freed by progress, with largely passive attention to programming of often limited or questionable value. This initiative faces that issue. It is core to its vision that beneficially transformative changes in this area of concern can occur with the resources society has at hand.

The creation of public broadcasting defines the high-water mark from which this project seeks to proceed into the transformation of mass media from static, programmed, and information-based to dynamic, mutable, and constructivist-based. Public broadcasting has been the largest single force in bringing the works of the world in the best of its classical, folk, and modern traditions into times characterized by increasing prevalence of the use of new technologies: it has provided a continuity in the translation of works created throughout history into the new media of the past decades - television and radio - and has created a continuity in quality with those works as it has created new works for this media.

A similar stewardship is called for in relationship to the Internet and its transformation into a constructivist medium, but it is one that cannot wait thirty years to occur, and it is one that will need to develop means to meet a hugely broader application of responsibility to the public trust. It must build upon the protocols and values of public broadcasting, using them only as a starting point, then deepen and develop them and their broader application in society. The Internet, unlike television, has come into existence already a part of public education and poised to take an unprecedented role in the transformation of what education and learning will mean in the immediate and foreseeable future of the world.

Sources of Vision

It is part of the overarching vision of this work that the transformations it studies, and by study and accompanying development, guides, will occur eventually in various forms and to various degrees. These transformations are occurring now. It is also part of the vision of this work that, like public broadcasting, the results of these transformations could be delayed for decades, and after that time could face a difficult, continued struggle against lowered expectations for their potential and missteps that have become institutionalised throughout society in the process of defining society. The changes brought about by the advent of the technologies this work considers could have damaging effects, outweighing their values to individuals and society, and these effects could continue indefinitely, unless deliberate care is made to frame the use of technologies in ways proper to human growth.

The approach to the facilitation of these transformations must be open-ended and also goal-oriented. That is, its work must allow for invention that is guided by intuition and thread of personal vision and interest, and it must also offer to that work the context of the development of visions and understandings of how that work will be best supported, how it might reach its potential. In other words, the process of facilitating these transformations must be supported the way the environments they create will support the work of those who will work within them.

This work is built from the spheres of activity of the arts, learning, the concerns of public broadcasting, interest in the preservation and strengthening of individual cultures and the integrity of learning and cultural institutions, and public policy-making in the service of the aspirations of these fields. Steeped in the context of the needs and expectations of public education, working within organizations that focus specifically on learning, educational groups gain in all of these things a needed refreshment to their momentum and sense of possibilities through connection with the variety of creative arts research labs.

The quote below from Robert McClintock's Power and Pedagogy seems especially fitting as a reminder that our intervention, and lack of intervention, in this sphere of work will have effects, and of the value of bringing the best truths we know, and that we sense, to this development. The ways in which we extend ourselves to the opportunity presented us now to define and carry through a vision beneficial and transformative to society can have major effects that might never occur without our taking this role.

"Historically, architects built the case for new materials, not by improving familiar structures with them, but by putting up new structures that were previously impracticable, a wondrous Eiffel Tower, changing the span of architectural possibility.

"High-rise cities have their beauty and sophistication, as well as their despair and discontent. If we use new technologies to create a new educational system, we receive no guarantee that in the most profound sense it will be better than the old, effectively generating a higher humanity. Changes in conditions and contexts are important, not because they compel the stakes of life to culminate in any necessary outcome, be it good or bad. They are important because they alter the dynamics of interaction, allowing the stakes of life to play out in a myriad of ways, some new, some old, some good, some bad. They refresh the game - some losers become winners, some winners, losers; some visions that practical people could once dismiss with a snort become the realistic grounds for effective action. Changes in conditions shake the kaleidoscope of history, allowing new generations to struggle, again yet anew, with the great issues of meaning and value."

A well-made vision, be it about the smallest part of this work, has a chance to become the basis for much that follows. The work described here to effect the transformation of the Internet and of society's concept of schooling and learning meets the opportunities presented within a revolutionary change of conditions.

The Institute for Learning Technologies at Columbia University's Teachers College has a 16-year history of developing the potentials of the uses of new technologies in learning. This history allows an informed distillation, from the many directions that technology has led, to a set of choices about what will offer the best opportunities for transformation within society now. This initiative is set in the context of theory and practice of Teachers College, one of the oldest graduate-level education programmes in the world, and in the context of the university-wide resources of Columbia University. Thus, the project is able to draw on the experience, skills, and thinking of individuals and project teams whose work breaks ground in many of the areas of the project's development, including human communication, aesthetics, teaching and learning, cultural interaction and sensitivity, and computer science, each with their associated research and development teams.

As a base for this work, Teachers College has, in New York City and its public school system serving the largest and most culturally diverse learning population in the world, what is in many ways an ideal setting for its development. New York City offers the opportunity to draw upon a true diversity of community cultures and cultural institutions in the process of preparing learning environments and in the process of learning and creating within them. While linking the physical city to a virtual layer or learning district that parallels and offers access to it, and as it creates models for this work in other parts of the world, this initiative has at its doorstep many aspects of a microcosm of the world combined with one of the world's most developed arts, design, and cultural centres.

The Worldbuilding Project, based at the Institute for Learning Technologies, is in the process of creating a network of research and development sites from which to frame this work. In each of these sites, the project will carry out a set of activities; these activities include tool design and creation for work within virtual environments and for counterparts to that work outside of purely virtual space, interface design, innovation with the concept of place and its mutability, the creation of "learning companions" and other autonomous entities, the broadening and deepening of communication possibilities, the integration of the tasks of the core study areas of public education, the use of the processes of the arts and design in learning across the curriculum, the linking to real settings, working with the themes "City as Educator" and "Cityscope", and the juxtaposition of the physical with the virtual in the activities and experiences for which it prepares.

The project is underway at the Bread and Roses Integrated Arts High School in Harlem, in creating a Worldbuilding Centre based in its art department for use by teachers and students in all the school's study areas, with a focus on architecture; at the K- 8 School at Columbia, in creating magical spaces that extend the possibilities of its classrooms in ways fitting for a variety of developmental levels; with the Storm King Music Festival and its parent group, Arts Culture and Technology, in working with a group of internationally known composers and performers to develop both musical sculpture with virtual and physical counterparts, and environments developing a multi-sensory approach to music learning, composition, and performance; and with the dance and drama departments at the Harlem School of the Arts, in working on choreography, sound environments, and lighting. Also associated with this project, and part of its history, is a forming degree programme at Maui Community College, organised around the theme of worldbuilding, and a high school on Maui (the Kihei High School) established to innovate with technologies and the arts across the curriculum, through small project communities, or guilds. At all of these project sites the focus is on developing approaches generally applicable in learning. What follows is a description of some of the work at one of these sites.

A Design Studio Spanning the Virtual to Physical Continuum

"Simulations involve old-fashioned tools, too. At the Bread and Roses Integrated Arts High School in Harlem, eight 11th graders are using paper, scissors and tape with one of the simulations to design buildings for the World Trade Centre site."

The excerpt above is from a New York Times article on virtual environments as they are being used in a set of learning situations, including public schools. The excerpt describes a research site being developed with the Bread and Roses Integrated Arts High School as part of the broad worldbuilding initiative of the Institute for Learning Technologies and other Columbia University associates that explore the potential of virtual multi-user environments as a format for transforming the Internet from a place characterised primarily by information-gathering into one characterised primarily by its ability to support creative activity. This work is developed in ways that make the Internet a design studio, a place in which people may use information to craft works of different types - a process that gives impetus to learning.

The article is supplemented by an image showing one wing of a virtual design studio used by students at the Bread and Roses School site. In a picture on the studio's wall, the student who designed the studio seems to be looking down to two other students in virtual form standing on the studio floor below, and at the studio filled with student models. She is holding an architect's scale. The models utilise building modules derived from her design and modules derived from other students' designs. These models are created to be links to full-scale buildings that the students may enter, and in which they may continue their work.

The article suggests what it might be like to have streaming video that would show students in their real forms as they look into the virtual world, and to have other more developed merging of real and virtual spaces. Translation of experience between the virtual and physical is a basic concern of this work. A studio space may be considered an extension of a purely mental space in the way a piece of paper offers an extended field for idea development. Here, one writes with forms, colours, music, and words, in a place one may enter and interact with others. It is a medium for working with abstractions, for trying variations of the forms they will take. It is an anteroom between the mind and the physical world.

The Bread and Roses School art instructor, through this project, has turned his classroom into a place that juxtaposes work in virtual and real settings, creating a virtual layer to it and developing the beginnings of a "virtual-physical" continuum of materials and settings in which students will work. As this work continues at his school, students will build settings that can be developed by instructors and students in a variety of areas across the school's curriculum. In these settings, students would use the information they gain in classes to build components of worlds that embody that content, much as students have done for this building project.

Besides the forms of things, it is possible to create behaviours for objects and entities in these worlds offering students opportunities to apply their knowledge and vary its application by defining systems of different degrees of complexity. This work could involve, for instance, students creating "learning companions" that they would tutor with information, and that would be able, in turn, to help them with various tasks.

Worldbuilding is a format through which the knowledge component of learning may be used as the basis for crafting original works based on that knowledge. The process of synthesis - creating original works - becomes the motivator for gathering information and acquiring skills, and for making them personally meaningful and useful. It gives reason for analysis- looking into complex phenomena to find components of those phenomena that may be reassembled in a building process that has been undertaken. The assemblage of visionary architecture brought to the students' studio wall is, for this project, a beginning of these types of use of information. In future work, collaborations with museums, and other cultural institutions and local communities, will provide a needed framework of context in which students may develop their senses of inventive and aesthetic possibilities.

Students from the project came with the Bread and Roses School principal and their art instructor to Columbia University's yearly Educational Technology Summit, to present their ideas to school principals, district technology supervisors, and other education specialists from across the country. Two of the students, working in another part of the campus at Teachers College, built in the virtual environment while they were projected in virtual form on a wall above an ILT-organised discussion panel before an auditorium of summit attendees. Other students spoke to the audience from the auditorium and answered questions about their work: One discussed the creation of building modules that the students use and combine as a way to design structures. Another, described the processes she has learned in terms of stimulating options they offer her in her skill repertoire as an artist. A third student described her sense of the value of the work in helping her visualise ideas and develop her imagination in ways that could be applied in many study areas.

Future research studies are to be designed for this project at this and other project sites to help understand and define many facets of this work. Among other things, these studies will track peoples' perception of the Internet as a place in which creative work may and does occur, as new components and formats for Internet use are developed, both through this project and elsewhere in the course of the Internet's general evolution. The studies will look at the uses and values of tools and materials developed at different points along a virtual-real continuum (having qualities in different degrees of, for instance, virtual 'manipulatives' that one would use in a virtual world, physical 'manipulatives', and formats for work at building behaviours of both real and virtual objects and entities, as described above). Other core areas of investigation will be the application of design curricula to support learning in many fields, the linking of the physical city to a virtual layer or learning district that parallels it and its cultural resources and stories, the use of cultural archives to broaden sensibilities about "what might be made", the development of graphical interface systems that utilize and facilitate spatial navigation and idea transformation and organisation, various aspects of personal dynamics and self-concept that occur within these places, and research that can be used in policy decisions to protect the integrity of the myriad learning environments that may be reached from the forming global collection of portals at schools, homes, the park, and the street.

Images and information may be found at the ILT website: <http://www.ilt.columbia.edu/projects/cityscope.html>

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