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This May, at the Software & Information Industry Association’s Ed Tech Industry Summit in San Francisco, one of the key note speakers was Eric Lauzon, the Chief Information Officer of the International Baccalaureate, who gave a presentation about technology and change.
Mr. Lauzon started by showing a 1954 photograph of what a future home computer was anticipated to look like. It took up about two rooms, had a considerable number of bells, dials, and levers, and would have been prohibitively expensive. Nobody really felt that a home computer was realistic. Thirty years later an affordable home computer is in a majority of homes and takes up very little space.
He also showed a 1903 photo of the Wright Brothers in their first glider. In the years since we have improved our aviation skills tremendously. At the end of the last century we were able to look at our Earth from outer space and better appreciate our place in the Universe.
But when we look at education we see an entirely different picture. The classroom of 1954 looks pretty much like the classroom of 2010. In fact, the classroom of 1900 looks very much like the classroom of 2010. Education is not keeping up with industry, and uses less Information Technology than any of the industries.
We are living in exponential times. These are not linear times. We talk about an Exabyte (EB) which is 14 trillion bits a second. 1 EB = 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes; EB = 1018 bytes = 1 billion gigabytes = 1 million terabytes. Lauzon showed the video Did You Know? which discussed examples of accelerating change.
The first text message was sent in 1992 and today, not twenty years later, there are millions of text messages being sent around the world and influencing world politics. Facebook is a social network that was launched in 2006 and has been translated into 100 languages and currently has over 400 million users. It encourages collaboration, interaction, creativity, connection and participation. This is how the new Z generation communicates.
The Z generation consists of digital natives and the Net generation. These are kids that study in a completely different way than how the schools are structured. One example of the difference is the Hole in the Wall School.
In India, which is one of the poorest countries, there is a school in New Delhi called the Hole in the Wall. There are computers that are available for the neighborhood children who can teach themselves through using the computers and talking with each other. This is truly an education of the children, by the children, and for the children. And it only costs about $1.35 per child
There is also the One Laptop Per Child which is the brainchild of Nicholas Negroponte. Recently they have been working on a program to bring one computer per student in Uruguay which would be about 400,000 computers. The Hole in the Wall and One Laptop Per Child are examples of efforts to bring technology to the underprivileged first.
But Lauzon was careful not to imply that change alone was sufficient to bring about improvement. He mentioned a course in electricity and magnetism at MIT that has, over the years, had a 75% failure rate. Obviously MIT has some of the smartest students but they could not handle this class. The class was restructured so the curriculum encouraged collaboration. But there was still failure. The course went through two changes before the administration realized that assessment needed to be changed to adjust to the curriculum changes.
Lauzon talked about the three main issues that he considered are in the way of utilizing technology in the schools. Many teachers are technophobic and still have a problem using technology and having it in their classrooms. Some school districts are banning the use of cell phones, smart phones, etc., which are the main sources of communication for the digital natives. And many districts lack the funds to utilize technology. In addition it is noted that curriculum and assessment have not changed much in the past 100 years.
The job of schools is to prepare their students for the future and help those students become intelligent, self reliant, and smart. But the job of the school is also not to get in the way of students becoming intelligent, self reliant and smart. The students today realize, almost instinctively, that the skills of collaboration, interaction, creativity, connection and participation are essential to understand a fast changing world. It is not so much about technology as it is about being a part of the 21st Century.
