In the new Communication Age, technologies will merger and become transportable, empowering students to take more proactive roles in the acquisition of knowledge.
David, you've recently published Edutrends 2010 (1992). Bring me up to date on what you think the major trends in technology will be during the next 10 or 20 years in schools.
Something that's just gotten clarified in my mind is that the Information Age is now over, you know. It was nice while it lasted. We're entering a new Communication Age. Of course, a lot of schools still have not taken advantage of the tools of the Information Age. When a new age comes into existence, the old age is never displaced. For example, industry didn't eliminate agriculture, but it certainly changed the face of it. Information tools didn't make industry obsolete, but they changed the way it operates. Now we're seeing tools of the Communication Age starting to change the face of the Information Age.
What are the symptoms that suggest that the Information Age is over?
Take a look at IBM. It lost $5 billion last year, which was the world's record loss, and then beat its own personal best by posting an $8 billion dollar loss in the second quarter of this year alone. IBM is the prototypical information company—and they are experiencing painful change today. That's a sign that something's going on.
I think new ages come about whenever we see a thousand-fold increase in productivity of some major technology—in this case, computers and communication technologies. This shift is going to change our learning opportunities. It increases them profoundly, and in quite exciting ways.
How would you characterize the ways most schools are using technology today?
Many schools are barely entering the Information Age. They are using computers as data processing devices. Whenever any technology comes into education, it's generally used to do the old job better. Now, word processors are nothing more than glorified typewriters. Having said that, that doesn't make them any less useful. I'd never go back to a typewriter; the word processor is terrific. But to really take advantage of the Information Age tools in education, the challenge is not to use them to do the old job better but to do something new.
In the Communication Age, we'll see some brand-new things, for example, an increased use of multimedia. Students will integrate technologies to create their own multimedia projects. At this point, schools will shift from focusing on information processing to an emphasis on communication.
How will this emphasis on communication affect students and the ways educators teach?
When we take a look at all the research on learning styles— Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligences (1985), McCarthy's 4-MAT process (1981), for example—we find that students learn best when they learn in the way best suited to them. Information Age technology can empower learners in different ways. Kids will acquire information themselves in ways that are congruent with their natural styles of learning, and that's exciting.
Some teachers are reluctant to adopt new technologies because they fear they may lose control of the teaching process.
We're not going to lose any of the benefits of successful teaching strategies just because we've shifted into a new age. But we are going to have to adapt our strategies and adjust to new realities. The new technologies will make it possible to access all kinds of information and connect everything with everything else. Nobody's going to care where software is located, whether the software is in the classroom, whether it's on a file-server in the building, or whether it's sitting on some satellite in a geostationary orbit 25,000 miles above the earth. Anybody who wants information will have access to it whenever and wherever they want it.
In the Information Age we had our computers bolted to the desk and chained to the wall by two cords, one for power, and the other, when we had it, for telecommunications. Now we're moving toward transportable equipment and wireless communication. That means that the informational tools and communications tools merge into one and become transportable; you can carry them and use them wherever you are.
This is the phenomenon I think you call “techno-merge.”
That's right, the merger of many technologies into one system. To give you a quick example, Casio introduced a wristwatch, called the Wrist Commander. In addition to being an excellent timepiece, the Wrist Commander also has a universal TV/VCR remote control built into it. What that has done is to put a local area network on every kid's wrist. Macy's sold an entire year's supply in 24 hours.
It's going to make life challenging for teachers who show videotapes. Kids who have already seen that tape will want to use their Wrist Commander to fast-forward past the parts they don't like. There's a message here, and the message is that information technology has become personalized. That's another very important trend. Students will be taking more control over their learning, taking control away from the educator. The whole role of the educator has changed. The watch I mentioned is a placeholder for even newer more powerful cheap devices that will interconnect us with each other and with informational tools and resources.
If this is true, what do you see as some of the implications for school as a place to learn? Are we moving toward decentralized education or school at home?
That's an interesting question. In School's Out, Lew Perleman (1992) suggests that schools is a failed institution and doesn't need to exist anymore. I don't agree with that. We're social creatures. We need to congregate with our peers and communicate with others in person. We need a physical place where we can do that. At the same time, we oughts to view our entire lifetime as providing opportunities for learning. The big challenge is to take advantage of that.
What are some ways we can expand the learning environment?
First, take a look at homework as something outside the context of schools. Some kids get a lot of parental support; they do their homework; other kids don't. As educators, we have to think about how we can communicate to the parents the importance of providing safe, quiet places for kids to do their work when they're not with teachers.
Second, a lot of informal learning will become more important as time goes on. Museums and libraries have historically provided space for informal learning. Those opportunities to learn informally will grow. When you've got access to experts at any time or any place where you happen to be, then everything, even a walk in the park, becomes an opportunity for learning.
This suggests to me that we have to be a lot more thoughtful about the uses and sources of information. That is, we have to become media literate and technology literate. What does that mean for curriculum designers?
Curriculum designers have to take a good look at pedagogical models used today in our classrooms and ask some tough questions. First, are we meeting kids' needs? That's the most important question. If we are, fine. If we're not, change! And we need to look at technology to see if it can help facilitate that transformation.
To me, technology's not the driving force for education. If we allow technology to be the engine, we're going to end up being quite disappointed. We make a mistake if we just bring a bunch of technology into a room and then think that an excellent educational program is going to materialize. We need to look at the child and base our decisions on how kids learn.
People are going to have to be life-long learners. My generation was told that we would graduate from school and go into one profession and stay there our whole lives. That's not true any more. New social factors will drive curriculum change. Technology is one way we respond to changes in our environment.
This sounds like you're talking about a very different future from the one most students are being prepared for. Are there some models of teaching and learning that would be particularly useful?
Well, educators are taking advantage of some of the ideas of Howard Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligences, for instance. By acknowledging that each of us has components of at least seven different intelligences—different pathways to learning—we can activate more of those pathways each day. The more we do, the more effective the learning environment will be.
Now, the problem that comes up immediately is how to do that in an effective way. Some suggest an individualized educational plan for each child, based on his or her dominant intelligence. The little bit of research that we've done on this topic has suggested that that is not the best way to create an effective learning environment. Logistically, it's virtually impossible. You just can't create individualized plans for the number of kids in our classes.
The good news that you don't have to. If you create rich learning environments where multiple intelligences are addressed simultaneously, kids really thrive. Just by mixing things up and making the classroom a more multisensory environment, you take advantage of these multiple pathways to learning and benefit all of the students. And multimedia is a great tool because it combines images, text, animation—all sorts of sensory experiences.
This sounds too easy. What's the catch?
There's a caveat, of course. A lot of multimedia products today are nothing more than glorified page-turners, based on the model of the mind as a vessel to be filled. Instead of presenting kids with just words and numbers, we add pictures and sound. This is not an improvement. To me, the value of the technology comes when we empower the student to take a more proactive role in the acquisition of information in the first place.
I love to tell Phil Schlechty's story of the Martians who visit one of our schools. When the Martians go home, they are asked what happens in schools. They say they didn't understand the language, but it seemed to them that schools were places where the young people got to watch the old people work. What technology does is provide opportunities for kids to do the bulk of the work.
What can a teacher do to help children take more responsibility for learning?
Well, the teacher can't simply be a coach who inspires kids. As McCarthy has taught us, many kids do need some direct instruction. But, with new technology, the teacher is freed from having to be the lion-tamer in the front of the room who presents information all day long. This new approach will make for some pretty interesting classrooms.
Chris Held, a teacher in Bellevue, Washington, for example, has a classroom that looks like gorgeous anarchy. The kids are learning all over the place using all kinds of technology, and they're so engaged in learning they don't even hear the recess bell. I went there to take him to lunch one day and he had to plead with the kids to please leave the room at lunchtime so that he could go have lunch with grown-ups! When you create environments that truly empower kids, kids don't want to leave them.
I've seen similar results with the Buddy Project in Indiana. Throughout the state, children in this project— high-income, low-income, urban, and rural—are provided computers, modems, and printers at their homes. This project is in its seventh year now. It has the effect of adding several days to the schools year by virtue of the fact that kids are spending time at home using technology to explore and learn rather than blast aliens with their Nintendo games.
One thing people will want to know in this age of resource scarcity is, How do they pay for providing every child with a computer?
It's a myth that we don't have the resources, that we cannot provide technology for every single child in this country. The people who are making that argument are basically afraid of what's going to happen if we do it.
Let me give you an analogy. An entity will preserve itself and resist infection of foreign organisms at all costs. To preserve the status quo, a body first tries to reject the foreign organism by putting a shield around it. The education community has reacted to computers as if they were foreign objects.
In the late '70s, computers ended up, in many cases, inside labs. We put them there to make sure the kids only had access to them when we wanted them to, which is very much how they put books into libraries in the Middle Ages. If you went into a library in the 1400s, you would see books literally chained to the walls. You had to get a priest to get access. My brief study of history has suggested that the early 1400s were not exactly the golden era for societal development. People guarded information and they restricted access to it.
Likewise, today people will say we can't afford to provide computers for all the kids. But this is really a way of clouding the issue. Many are afraid that if it could be done, it would mean that our whole educational system would have to change from top to bottom.
You believe that we could realistically afford to give every child a computer at home and at school?
Let me show you how we can do it. Let's say that we spend, on the average for education in this country, $5,000 per child a year. I'm basing this amount on my own state of California, where it is about $5,500 per child. We have over 400,000 kids per grade level in California. Here's what I'd do. I'd go to a major computer vendor and say, “I want a bid on a really nice system. We're talking about something with a high-speed modem, an inkjet printer, a color screen, a built-in CD-ROM drive— the works, on a very, very high-speed computer. If I wanted 400,000 of these per year, what kind of price could I get?”
After some talk, the vendor might come up with a number in the vicinity of $1,000 because of the volume. Take that amount and add $300 to it, that brings it up to $1,300. Divide that by 13 grades, so it works out to $100 per year per child. Now, here's what you do with that money. At the end of 2nd grade—I don't care if it's 2nd, 1st, or 3rd—every child goes home with the computer system I just described.
Now, with that $300 I told you about, we look at the 3rd grade teachers. Let's say the student/teacher ratio is 25/1. You take the $300, multiply it by 25, that gives you $7,500 per teacher. Here's how you spend that money: $1,000 of it goes to providing the teacher a computer system because the teacher has to have this at home, also. Very important. That brings you down to $6,500. You use a bit of that for some classroom equipment, which, by the way, you're getting in such volume that this price is going to be down also.
That leaves several thousand dollars per teacher for staff development. You pay that teacher a stipend over the summer for not only learning how to use the technology but also learning strategies for using technology with students. The teacher gets excellent staff development—not any of this two hours sitting in a faculty room on a hard chair bone-tired after teaching all day trying to listen to somebody tell you about how to transform education!
If you follow this plan, the following fall, every single 3rd grade classroom in California (or any other state) will be completely transformed. Every one.
Now, the following year, because the kids own those machines, they keep them. The next crop of 2nd graders get their systems. That year we provide staff development for the 4th grade teacher. And on and on it goes. Now, if we decide to be generous, instead of spending only $100 per child, we say, what the heck, let's spend $200, we could phase this program into two grades at once. We could phase it in at 2nd grade and at 8th grade.
The nice part about the second plan is that by the time the child had a system for five years, he or she would need a new one anyway. So, the child going into 3rd grade gets a system, then in 8th grade gets another one. By this time the systems are upgraded. When the kids go to high school, they're ready to use the learning technology there. Thus we put technology in the hands of every single child in this country for two cents on the dollar.
