Thursday, October 25, 2001

Education Department Backs 2 Technology Projects to Benefit Pacific Rim Countries By DAN CARNEVALE The Department of Education on Tuesday endorsed a two-part proposal to help Pacific Rim countries use technology in education and develop online courses. The department is helping put together the two proposed projects. One is to create an online bank of "best practices" information for using technology in education, with contributions from the 21 members of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum. For example, Singapore plans to provide material on math curriculum and lesson plans for math courses -- a good fit, given that Singapore's students achieve some of the highest mathematics scores of students in any country. The department will also support a program that will help educators use the Internet to teach students a second language, with an initial focus on English, Chinese, and Spanish. The plan is to begin the project by using technology tools in traditional classrooms, but eventually an independent online program would be developed. The Education Department will spend about $600,000 on the two projects, which will cost about $2-million in total. The projects still need the approval of the other APEC members, which include Australia, China, and Hong Kong. Prototypes are expected to be available in spring 2002. The announcement came on the heels of last week's APEC conference in Shanghai. President Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell attended the conference and encouraged members to use online learning for improving teacher training and promoting higher educational standards. Dan Langan, press secretary for the department, said the existing collaboration of APEC members would help make these projects successful. "APEC allowed us the flexibility to work with several nations at one time," he said. "It was an opportunity to work collaboratively with all the nations instead of forming agreements with individual countries." A private-sector group of 10 computer companies, called the Asia-Pacific e-Learning Alliance, will offer technical support and policy advice in developing the two projects. The group includes AOL Time Warner, Sun Microsystems, and Fujitsu. Thomas Gann, director of strategic alliances for Sun Microsystems' Global, Educational, and Research Group, said the companies have been working for about a year with many of the APEC members to develop educational technology. "We're trying to help governments do some good things," he said. "That's good for us and hopefully good for the country." Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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