As defined in the FY 1997 Blue Book:
"The focus of ETHR R&D is on education and training
technologies. The goals of this education and training are to produce
(1) researchers and students in high performance computing,
communications, information technologies, and their application, and (2)
a citizenry with the skills to compete and prosper in the 21st century's
information age. ETHR includes curriculum development, fellowships, and
scholarships for computational, computer, and information sciences and
engineering. It includes the application of interdisciplinary research
to learning technologies, and R&D in information-based learning
tools, lifelong learning, and distance learning for people in remote
locations."
One major goal of the CIC's R&D program is accelerating the use of high performance computing, communications, and information technologies in U.S. education. Citizens should be prepared with the knowledge, skills, and insights to lead research in science and technology and the ability to apply the resulting discoveries to industrial needs. This activity complements the mission of the NSTC's Committee on Education and Training (CET), which is formulating strategies to raise the science and mathematical skills of all Americans. All citizens should be able to become fully engaged in the technological society of the future. In collaboration with the CET, the CIC will sponsor research in advanced information and learning technologies to establish a foundation for a new educational methodology.
Educational applications build on all of the computing, information, and communications technologies described above. These applications demand ease of use, interfaces that span a wide range of user sophistication, access to distributed collections of information and expertise, ease of authoring new materials, ease of indexing existing collections, low cost network access, management capabilities that must scale, extensive use of simulation, visualization, and virtual reality technologies to support training. They also demand privacy, security, protection of the learning infrastructure, intellectual property protection for authored materials, and associated billing and payment systems.
Research is needed to accelerate the development of educational authoring and presentation tools that provide seamless, friendly, portable, mobile, easy-to-use and easy-to-maintain environments for learning, and strong links to Human-centered Systems. Learning environments provide particular challenges in the user interface arena since interfaces are needed for learners at all levels of sophistication.
Techniques for improving the efficiency of digitizing holdings in our national archives and museums, of critical interest in Large-Scale Networking Technologies, would also have great benefit for educational technologies. Navigation assistants to help educational users browse through huge databases touch on both LSN and HuCS.
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