September 4, 2008 | Read Time: 1 minute
To celebrate its 50th anniversary, the Education Development Center, in Newton, Mass., has created an interactive timeline that draws on photography, audio, and video to tell the story of its work in education and health promotion.
The organization has focused much of its energy on curriculum development. A project in the 1960s — Man: a Course of Study — brought the traditional culture of the Netsilik Eskimos to elementary-school students, and the timeline features footage from a film produced as part of the curriculum that shows members of the community working together to build an igloo.
Interviews with longtime employees describe how different programs came about and the issues that shaped their development.
For example, a senior vice president talks about a current project in India for which the organization has designed software to allow 15 children to share a single computer and still all be actively engaged in a science lesson through a series of competitions. Most educational software, he notes, is designed for one child per computer.
“It captures all of this information in one place — all of our landmark programs, the things that we’re really proud of and that we didn’t want to get lost,” says Alison Cohen, media-relations manager at the Education Development Center. “It’s a living portfolio, and it’s easy to share with other people.”
Creating the timeline took nearly a year and cost $25,000 to $30,000.
To get there: Go to http://main.edc.org/timeline.
