ABOUT DIGITAL PROMISE

Digital Promise seeks to establish the National Center for Learning Science and Technology Trust Fund based on the principles of Digital Promise.  The Trust's goal is no less than to transform America’s education, workplace training, and lifelong learning through the development and use of the revolutionary advanced information technologies comparable to those that have already transformed the nation’s economy, its communications system, media, and the daily lives of its people. 

The Trust will enable the nation’s schools, universities, libraries, museums, and public broadcasters to reach out to millions of people in inner cities and remote regional areas, no matter how poor or deprived, in the U.S. and throughout the world, with the best of the educational and informational content now locked inside their walls.  It would support the research and development of new models and prototypes of educational content, taking full advantage of the Internet and other new digital distribution technologies. For example, the Trust will commission pre-competitive research and fund the development of prototypes to:  

• Demonstrate computer simulations that let learners tinker with chemical reactions in living cells, practice operating and repairing expensive equipment, or practice marketing techniques, thus making it easier to grasp complex concepts and transfer this understanding quickly to practical problems.
• Demonstrate sophisticated help systems that provide accurate answers to questions using a combination of artificial intelligence and live operators.
• Demonstrate new communication tools that could enable learners to collaborate in real-time on complex projects and ask for help from teachers and experts from around the world.
• Demonstrate learning systems that could adapt to differences in student’s personal interests, backgrounds, learning styles, and aptitudes.
• Demonstrate tools that provide successively more difficult challenges with appropriate levels of scaffolding that motivate the learner while avoiding frustration or boredom.
• Explore learning opportunities present in persistent, online learning environments.
• Provide continuous measures of competence—integral to the learning process—that can help teachers work more effectively with individuals and leave a record of achievement that is compelling to students and to employers.
• Demonstrate new tools that could allow continuous evaluation and improvement of the learning systems themselves.
• Digitize America’s collected memory stored in our nation’s universities, libraries, museums and public television archives to make these materials available anytime and anywhere.

The Trust is in the tradition of the great American educational innovations of previous centuries, the GI Bill,  Land Grant Colleges Act, and Northwest Ordinance, that helped transform the nation’s economy, strengthen its democracy and open up new opportunities for education and higher education to those who otherwise could not afford them.  The Trust is designed to do for education, workforce training, and lifelong learning in the 21st century what NSF has done for science, NIH for health, and DARPA for the military.

Building upon six years of development and a major report to Congress in 2004, Digital Promise has been endorsed by virtually ever major national association of educators and educational institutions, libraries, and museums, as well as by teachers’ and communications workers’ unions, the U.S. Conference of Mayors, the former chair of the National Governors’ Association, the Association of Public Television Stations, the National Science Board, many high tech corporate leaders, and public figures ranging from former Senator Warren Rudman to Internet pioneer and Presidential Medal of Freedom honoree Vinton Cerf.

The Project was launched by the Carnegie, Century, Knight, MacArthur, and Open Society foundations, which in 1999 asked former FCC Chairman Newton N. Minow and former NBC News and PBS president Lawrence K. Grossman to co-chair a research project that would recommend public policy for utilizing the dramatic new information technologies in the public interest.  The Project’s Executive Director in Washington, DC, is former Director of the American Arts Alliance Anne G. Murphy.