Jack McCredie
The Digital California Project (DCP, http://www.cenic.org/DCP.html) is building an advanced-services K-12 statewide computer network designed to help transform teaching and learning in California. The project is funded by the State of California and administered by the University of California through a contract with CENIC, the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (http://www.cenic.org/index.html). California's higher-education community founded CENIC in 1997; its charter members are the California Institute of Technology, the California State University System, Stanford University, the University of California System, and the University of Southern California. CENIC is designing and building the DCP to be the best possible digital learning environment for our statewide education system.
The goals of the Digital California Project are to:
In an interview, UC President Richard Atkinson made the following statement regarding these goals.
"The DCP will make high-quality learning experiences and teacher training available in all areas of California, thereby helping teachers with their efforts to bridge the digital divide and increasing opportunities for students throughout the state to pursue further education at UC, CSU, and the community colleges."
The project is making rapid progress in implementing a seamless statewide advanced-services network backbone that will reach into each of the state's 58 counties. Individual schools will connect to the network through their county Office of Education. A map on the DCP website (http://www.cenic.org/DCP_map.html) shows both the proposed location of each of the nodes and the installation schedule. The CENIC Board of Directors created the DCP Program Steering Committee (http://www.cenic.org/DCP_psc.html), a broadly representative group of California educators, to formulate and oversee the execution of the specific strategies and tactics involved in planning and implementing the DCP. In addition, K-12 representatives serve on several work teams involved in various aspects of the project from network design to content delivery.
The University of California is taking a lead role in developing the DCP as part of its program to support education initiatives throughout the state. Members of the UC Berkeley campus community are active in both CENIC and the DCP. Berkeley has a tremendous amount of scholarly information and research data in collections throughout the campus in its many libraries, museums, institutes, and laboratories. Our goal in working with CENIC and DCP is to discover ways of making important parts of these valuable collections more available through the Internet.
Within IST, the Interactive University Project (IU, http://interactiveu.berkeley.edu:8000/IU/) explores how University/K-12 partnerships can best use the Internet to support schools and families. The IU started in 1995 as a campuswide initiative to investigate technology-mediated outreach and became the technology partner of the Berkeley Pledge, which is now called the School University Partnership Program. The IU addresses the issue of scale, using the Internet to amplify and extend effective University/K-12 relationships. It addresses the following important question: "How, through a balanced use of Internet-mediated relationships, can large numbers of University faculty, students, and staff engage with K-12 teachers, students, their families, and community organizations to improve K-12 education?"
This past fall, the Interactive University Project won a 2001 EDUCAUSE Award for Exemplary Practices in Information Technology Solutions (http://www.educause.edu/conference/e2001/awards.asp). These EDUCAUSE awards, given annually since 1995, recognize individuals and teams in higher education information technology communities for initiatives that have solved campus information management challenges with ingenuity, resourcefulness, elegance, and effectiveness. Besides its distinction of being a remarkably comprehensive model for the integration of research, teaching, and service, the Interactive University "is also exemplary in its skillful leveraging of resources through collaboration, and its sensitivity to the decentralized, distributed academic culture," said EDUCAUSE representatives as part of the publicity surrounding the award.
Connecting California's schools to the CENIC network through the DCP will certainly not magically transform the state's education system overnight. Technology is clearly not the only answer to improve the system. But for those of us who have experienced the power of technology-enhanced learning environments, campus-based projects like the Interactive University and statewide initiatives like the DCP are solid investments in the future education infrastructure of California.
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Berkeley Computing & Communications,
Volume 12, Number 1 (Winter 2002)
Copyright 2002, The Regents of the University of California