| Abstract: | The National Science Foundation-funded Center for Innovative Learning Technologies (CILT) is designed to be a national resource
for stimulating research and development of technology-enabled solutions to critical problems in K-14 science, math, engineering
and technology learning. The Center, launched at the end of 1997, is organized around four themes identified as areas where
research is likely to result in major gains in teaching and learning, and sponsors research across disciplines and institutions
in its four theme areas. CILT brings together experts in the fields of cognitive science, educational technologies, computer
science, subject matter learning, and engineering. It engages business through an Industry Alliance Program and is also training
postdoctoral students. CILT's founding organizations are SRI International's Center for Technology in Learning, University
of California at Berkeley (School of Education and Department of Computer Science), Vanderbilt University's Learning Technology
Center, and the Concord Consortium. Through its programs, CILT seeks to reach beyond these organizations to create a web of
organizations, individuals, industries, schools, foundations, government agencies, and labs, that is devoted to the production,
sharing and use of new knowledge about how learning technologies can dramatically improve the processes and outcomes of learning
and teaching. This paper describes the rationale and operations of the Center, and first-year progress in defining a set of
CILT partnership projects with many other institutions that came out of our national theme-team workshops.
Roy Pea, of SRI International, is Director of CILT.
Marcia Linn (U. California, Berkeley), John Bransford (Vanderbilt University), Barbara Means (SRI International), and Robert
Tinker (Concord Consortium), serve as CILT's coprincipal investigators.
Sherry Hsi (Ubiquitous Computing) and Sean Brophy (Technology and Assessment Models) are among the first group of CILT Postdoctoral
Fellows.
Jeremy Roschelle (SRI International) and Nancy Songer (University of Michigan) are CILT theme-team leaders.
Roy Pea and Marcia Linn would like to thank the Spencer Foundation for support during their year at the Center for Advanced
Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University, in which they developed the CILT concept with the other authors. CILT
is funded by National Science Foundation grant #CDA-9720384. Pea and Linn would also like to acknowledge contributions to
this article by the many authors of CILT partnership project proposals, and by theme-team leaders.
The authors thankfully acknowledge Donna Baranski-Walker for her many contributions to developing the CILT Industrial Alliance
Program while serving as its Director in 1998. |
