Excerpt from Jessica Helfand, "The Culture of Reciprocity: A New Perspective for Design Education." Print, 49:1 (January/February 1995) 98-102.

Today, a new kind of cross-disciplinary learning is made possible by interactive technologies: it is a process that invites the student's active participation in the identification, acquisition and synthesis of varied content. And with the advent of "multi" media comes an emphasis on a new kind of interpretive thinking. Such educational practices have virtually reversed the rhetorical paradigm of the nineteenth-century classroom: In their place, a new educational initiative has emerged, one that focuses on authorship, scholarship, and, in the spirit of participatory media, reciprocity.

Efforts to better negotiate the equity gap between public and private schools remain the focus of certain concerned politicians--not the least of whom is Jerry Brown, who, as early as a decade ago, called for a "demonstration" school in each state which would devote itself to fully computerized instruction. Indeed, in the late 1980s, the California legislature called for a 30 million-dollar appropriation to insure that each student in the state--rich or poor--spent one hour per week in front of a video display terminal.

But California isn't the only state seeking progressive educational initiatives through technology. In Florida, the State Legislature and Department of Education have teamed up with Florida State University and Encyclopedia Brittanica to create School Year 2000, a cross-platform file server and software application that will provide students, faculty, administrators and parents with access to a wide array of information and data. In Rhode Island, Brown University president Vartan Gregorian is the key advisor on how philanthropist Walter H. Annenberg's $500 million gift aimed at improving public education will be spent: the nationwide challenge grants will largely go to support networks in and between schools, as well as to develop an electronic reference library that will eventually be available to every high school in America.

And from Nebraska, Senator Bob Kerrey presides over the executive board of the New Media Centers Program, a national consortium of 21 colleges and Universities that team industry and academia to explore new ways of using interactive media in higher education. Among the schools participating in the program are Stanford, where students are creating multimedia databases to study both the history of Silicon Valley and Elizabethan Theater; Princeton, where students are compiling 3-dimensional representations of seismic data for studying earthquakes and volcanoes; and Ohio State, where projects include archiving the world's largest collection of Asian and Buddhist Art, as well as a video archive documenting the work of dancer/choreographer Twyla Tharp.

So where, one might ask, are the design schools? And how are they revising their teaching methodologies to respond--as these other schools are beginning to do--to new media and new thinking?

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