Viewpoints

About this Contributor

My Story

I started teaching high school history and philosophy at my alma mater, The Dalton School, in 1989. Fresh out of college, I was shocked at how little I remembered from my years as a student. It was a humbling lesson about the impermanence of learning staying a chapter ahead of my students each day.  I had spent so many hours reading history books, memorizing names of kings – what had gone wrong?

Later, that same year, I participated in an early experiment in the use of digital multimedia.  Together with a team of educators, I helped to build a simulated archeological excavation – “buried” in four Macintosh SE computers.  “Archaeotype” became the replacement for the textbook-bound sixth-grade social studies curriculum.  Instead of memorizing the facts of ancient Greek history form a textbook, Archaeotype required ten-year-olds to dig through virtual dirt, find the constituent pieces of history, and create their own hypotheses.  The relationship between these sixth graders and the history they were studying was stunningly different from my ninth-grade students and their textbooks.  There was no doubt that the latter would suffer the same memory lapse I experienced as a new teacher.  But my little archeologists – they owned what they learned in a way I had never thought possible.

This experience made me a firm believer in the power of learning experiences that foster individual discovery and the opportunity to construct one’s own understanding of the world.  It also convinced me that technology could play a special role in supporting this sort of learning.

In 1993, I left Dalton to start an education software company, LearnTech.  LearnTech produced a number of award-winning and highly-successful CD-ROMs on topics ranging from American art to robotics to ancient Chinese history.