Perhaps the most impassioned audience for "learning organization" work consists of educators and people who care about schools. Yet realizing the promise of learning disciplines seems so elusive in education. Emily has taken steps to realize that promise. She is leading a group of 24 parents, students, teachers and administrators, from public and private schools to collaborate in defining a "Learning Habitat." based on their experience with the Mobius Project described here. The proposal they produced for the America 2000 project was the origin of this piece.
Introduction by Charlotte Roberts and Art Kleiner

My assignment five years ago to bring computing into the Chadds Ford Elementary School should have been easy for a computer software designer. Programmers are usually playful kids with a slight overfocus on technology; so it was easy for me to move into the company of eight-year-olds. I had high hopes.

I could imagine elementary school students designing bridges with computer- aided design, creating their own interactive videos, or using "microworlds," as the education innovator Seymour Papert had suggested, to simulate the real world and build their own learning environments. In particular, I knew we could use LOGO, the learning-oriented programming language which Papert had invented. Known for its "turtle geometry," LOGO is a compelling way for kids to discover problem-solving techniques and explore the interrelationships of math and logic. Using the computer, children draw insight out of themselves and their experience; they learn without having to be force-fed facts through memorization.

The students took to the LOGO language just as Papert's writings suggested they would. The results were so encouraging, that I was asked to offer in-service training for teachers so that they might carry LOGO back to transform their own lessons. The in-service course soon evolved into a prototype for a new type of learning laboratory, an intergenerational workshop which met every morning for one week. We had 25 attendees, evenly divided among parents, teachers, and school students, working side by side on computers, learning from each other as much as they learned from me. The children pulled us all forward. They skipped lunch to keep working and would have stayed all afternoon if I could have let them. Seeing their excitement, learning and growth convinced teachers of the value of interactive learning.

As a parent, I was delighted that I could make such a valued contribution to my child's school. Although the district gave me an award for outstanding service, the concept of computer-based, interactive learning didn't begin to make a dent in the rest of the school system. The teachers were talented and hard working, and the equipment was good enough. The factors limiting training and transfer of information about what computers could do was district management structure and size. The us-versus-them management structure virtually incapacitates teachers by setting them against the administrators. The management issue is often tackled by the school district restructuring efforts prevalent today. Many of those efforts fail to escape the mental model of the turn of the century school. Systems thinking reveals a deeper problem posed by ineffective information transfer. There is no longer time for a new technology to be developed, published in a text book, taught to a generation of teachers, then to their students. A century and a half before electronic mail and multimedia, Horace Mann created teacher training schools so that teachers could transfer information efficiently to a group of people. "Today's problems come from yesterdays solutions." The efficiency of gathering people around a central source of information became codified into state regulation and school districts. Technology offers, and in fact demands, a new way for learning. Whether other school districts as presently structured and funded can do what needs to be done remains to be seen.

The Mobius Project: The learning habitat, present and future The Mobius Project is the name given to a group of collaborators working to create habitats of continuous, cooperative, lifelong learning. Learning in this habitat , like a moebius strip, is without an end. We've held workshops in which grandparents and their elementary - age grandchildren compute in pairs, establishing a common bond for learning and conversation. Be it parent and child or unrelated people, all learn better than when segregated by age as measured by the number of tasks completed by the intergenerational group versus traditional school and adult classes doing the same tasks.

Two years ago, I began designing a learning laboratory at the Media- Providence Friends School, a Society of Friends (Quaker) school near Philadelphia. I was fortunate; the school had raised $40,000 in contributions for a computer lab, which we build from scratch. We now offer week-long "Computer Survival Expeditions," comprised of groups of students aged thirteen through adult. Many teachers attend because the course is approved by the State of Pennsylvania for continuing education credits. Yes, we have state-of-the-art equipment, but you can teach LOGO on the oldest Apple II computers.

A far more important factor is the transition to an open, learning environment, outside the traditional school district - where fleetness of foot exists to try new approaches. The openness is facilitated by small size and direct accountability to families in the school community. I am writing the in hopes that educators who want to build learning labs themselves - or make any kind of school more of a learning organization - may profit from our example. The first assignment in the "Survival Expedition" asks students to design the cover of their workbook. They are thrown into creating the cover without background or instruction and must learn through trial and error. As they get stuck they ask their neighbors, consult reference books, on-line help, or ask the workshop leader. Classes are small, and participants have a tangible results in less than an hour - and the beginning of a lifelong appreciation of their own potential resourcefulness.

Later, teams of students build computer images of the components of a town: roads, houses and offices. Then teams connect their parts to build a community. In another exercise, the entire class becomes a team to solve a survival puzzle. Each individual must communicate critical information over the computer network to succeed. Most importantly we try to set up our program to reinforce the view that every person is gifted , in their own unique way. In Quaker schools, the guiding principle is based on the religious belief that every person contains the light of God within themselves. The belief makes a profound difference; it provides a constructive mental model against which students and faculty may flourish. And it provides an alternative to the competitive mechanisms of most schools (such as tests, where "cheaters" are punished), that punish teamwork and collaboration. In his book Frames of Mind, psychologist Howard Gardner asserts that there are many equally valid expressions of human intelligence. For example, the late Martha Graham was a genius of kinesthetic intelligence. To legally require children to stand against one set of measures day in and day out is an application of a pernicious mental model of human potential.

A vision of what school might be Imagine, then a school as a niche where people join together to learn, regardless of their age, occupation or home address. Relationships between people are encouraged, because they facilitate learning. Common goals and expressed values shape the habitat. Each school-age student has an individual instruction plan, with at least on advocate who helps them refine and shape it. The length of the learning day, the number of days per year, are determined by individual achievements and the needs of the students, their families and the community. The length for periods of instruction varies by subject. Drill and practice acclivities are most effective is short bursts. Exploration and creative activities require longer periods of time. Some activities including the use of microworlds and other computer and non-computer based practice fields might go on intermittently, possible for weeks. The habitat-community interface is permeable. The "classroom" extends beyond the school building, into museums, science centers, colleges and universities, health care and social service organizations, businesses, and homes. Teachers move into local businesses or organizations for summers and sabbaticals to experience more the world they are bringing students into. Non- school employees return to spend weeks in the learning habitat regularly, to renew their own learning, and to teach others. Gradually, the community evolves its own sense of collective intelligence, greater than the sum of its individual parts.

I have come to believe that continuous learning is an innate vehicle for building shared visions of schools themselves (and other joint projects). To simply show up is to ask a question of yourself and other learners, "What can we create together?" As schools evolve their own visions, using examples and processes from prototypes like the Mobius Project, how will we know if our efforts have succeeded? Different communities will come up with different answers. For now, we see the success of learning in the faces of the people in the room, and in the fact that they return freely for more.