TOOLS FOR THE TEKS: INTEGRATING TECHNOLOGY IN THE CLASSROOM

Digital Curriculum and The Last Mile:
Providing Curricular Flexibility and Limitless Bandwidth

by Wesley A. Fryer
www.speedofcreativity.org

Note: This article was not accepted for publication by the TechEdge in December 2005. I will be editing it further in early 2006 for submission to alternate publishers with additional research support, particularly relating to the defeat of HB4.

Educational technology magazines, conferences and the blogs of techno-evangelists teem with enthusiasm for the potential of new digital innovations to transform teaching and learning environments and enable students to boldly go where none have gone before. In the opening chapter of his book “The Flickering Mind: The False Promise of Technology in the Classroom and How Learning Can Be Saved,” Todd Oppenheimer tells the story of “Education’s History of Technotopia.” His anecdotes begin with Thomas Edison’s proclamation in 1922 that “…the motion picture is destined to revolutionize our educational system” and include Seymour Papert’s confident prediction in 1975 that within twenty years “education will have undergone a fundamental change through the impact of computers” (2003). In November 2005, United Nations’ Secretary General Kofi Annan and MIT Media Lab Director Nicholas Negraponte announced the prototype of the $100 laptop, destined to revolutionize education for kids around the world when at last each student has one of his/her own. Annan pronounced at the press conference on November 16,2005:

When they [laptops] start reaching the hands of the worlds’ children, these robust, versatile machines will enable kids to become more active in their learning. Children will be able to learn by doing, not just through instruction or rote memorization. They will be able to open new fronts for their education, particularly by peer to peer learning... (Annan, 2005).

While the enthusiastic predictions of educational technology advocates may seem to some like a broken record which enjoys continued airtime thanks to the conspiratorial influence of technology companies, the changes wrought by technology in the economic marketplace are difficult to deny. In “The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century,” New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman relates an alarming tale of offshoring and outsourcing job trends predicted to accelerate dramatically in the years to come. The ten “flatteners” Friedman describes have changed the ways many companies provide telephone product support and the locations where tax forms are completed for thousands of U.S. citizens (2005). Many of these services are now provided by comparatively low-wage earning Asian employees in India, China, the Philippines, and elsewhere. Our global business environment has changed, and the role technology has played in this transformation seems undeniable. In this environment of prophesied educational transformation thanks to the influence of new computer technologies, and a business environment clearly changed thanks to technology’s disruptive powers, what are teachers, educational leaders, and policymakers to do?

The simultaneously simple and difficult answer to this question is “change.” Defining the type and scope of that change is challenging, however. The policy framework in which educational organizations must operate plays a pivotal role, and two key changes are now overdue. Laws and regulations must change to permit school districts to purchase digital curriculum instead of only analog / paper-based textbooks, and telecommunication companies must be forced to provide fiber-optic Internet connections to every public school district in the states of our nation.

ONE TO ONE IS COMING

Increasingly, the promises of educational technology’s potential to improve student academic performance and enhance their literacy skills hinges on two things: Access to computer technology and Internet bandwidth available to access digital content. While one to one laptop immersion environments remain the exception rather than the rule in schools in 2005-2006, that condition is likely to change within five years. The MIT $100 Laptop Initiative (http://laptop.media.mit.edu/) is expected to begin shipping thousands of laptops in late 2006 and early 2007 to students in the developing world. A comparably priced wireless laptop is predicted to become commercially available in the United States at the same time. The future of education is one to one. This means that every teacher and every student in schools will have a wireless, portable device capable of accessing digital curriculum content and collaborating with other learners across the room and across the globe. This reality is advancing upon us more rapidly than most educators, parents, and policymakers are aware or are prepared to acknowledge. It is imperative that we prepare now for this fundamental change in the basis of educational curriculum.

Image from http://laptop.media.mit.edu/images/laptop-front.jpg

For hundreds of years, printed books have been the basis of school curricula. When all students have a wireless, mobile computing device at their fingertips, both at home and at school, this traditional paradigm of education will be overturned. This process has been opposed and will continue to be opposed by various groups in our society, most notably the extremely influential and self-interested textbook publishing lobby. To prepare our teachers and students for the “flat world” in which we live, there are two critical policy issues which must be addressed in all states as soon as possible.

ACTION ITEM #1: FLEXIBILITY TO PURCHASE DIGITAL CURRICULUM

It is a crime that in the last Texas legislative session, not only did representatives fail to pass a school finance reform proposal that would fund education for all students that is both equitable and adequate, but they also failed to pass a relatively simple proposal originally conceived as House Bill 4. In its original introduced version (http://www.capitol.state.tx.us/data/docmodel/79r/billtext/pdf/HB00004I.PDF), House Bill 4 proposed changing the word “textbook” in the Texas Education Code and replacing it with the more flexible and broadly defined phrase “instructional materials.” In the original bill, “instructional materials” were defined as follows.

Instructional material means a medium for conveying information to a student. The term includes a book, supplementary materials, a combination of a book and supplementary materials, computer software, interactive videodisc, magnetic media, CD-ROM, computer courseware, on-line services, or an electronic medium.

Note that this definition is inclusive of the previous “textbook” category, but is more inclusive to permit local school districts to be much more flexible, empowered, and free in their purchase of curricular content. Similarly, the original bill proposed changing the definition of the word “publisher,” and establishing a more frequent and flexible curriculum adoption cycle. In the original bill, a “publisher” is redefined as:

a person who prepares instructional materials for sale or distribution to educational institutions. The term includes an online-service or a developer or distributor of electronic instructional materials.

For more about the content and intended consequences of House Bill 4, refer to my blog post from March 2, 2005 entitled “House Bill 4 Could Dramatically Shape the Face of Public Education” (http://www.speedofcreativity.org/?p=110). The subsequent post from April 8, 2005 entitled “Sad to see the textbook lobby resort to personal attacks in the HB4 discussion” (http://www.speedofcreativity.org/?p=132) may also be of interest.

The eventual defeat of House Bill 4 and its Senate companion bill in the 2005 Texas legislative session was a major victory for the textbook lobby and industry as a whole. I have no idea how much money was spent by textbook publishers to defeat this initiative, but I have no doubt the final sum was impressive.

This legislative failure hurt Texas students the most, my own children included. As David Warlick has observed in his presentations about digital literacy, students may be a relatively small part of our population today, but they represent one hundred percent of our future. It is ridiculous for the school districts in Texas and elsewhere in the United States to be crippled in their abilities to prepare literate students for the twenty-first century by laws and regulations that force curriculum budgets to only be used for print-based materials. (There are a few exceptions to this rule, but by and large the lion’s share of Texas curriculum budgets still purchase paper-based textbooks.) This limitation is analogous to a prize fighter being forced to challenge an opponent with one hand tied behind his back. Without adequate resources, schools are unreasonably hard pressed to meet the challenges of educating the twenty-first century digital natives now inhabiting classrooms everywhere.

LET ME BE CLEAR AND UNEQUIVOCAL, LEST SOMONE MISINTERPRET OR FALSELY WATER DOWN MY MESSAGE. The Texas legislature must immediately, without delay, change the word “textbook” to “instructional materials” in the education code as originally proposed in House Bill 4. To do otherwise would only serve to further deprive Texas children of the twenty-first century education each richly deserves and desperately needs.

ACTION ITEM #2: BANDWIDTH TO THE LAST MILE

The flexibility to purchase digital as well as analog (paper-based) curriculum materials is only one of the action items which should be on the plate of Texas legislators and lawmakers in other states. Providing not just “adequate” Internet bandwidth—but “unlimited” bandwidth is the second item.

In some school districts (but probably only a few), computer network connectivity for teachers and students alike is robust and plentiful. What is meant by the term “connectivity” or “bandwidth?” An Internet connection speed analysis graph provided by the Internet Frog Speed Test (http://www.internetfrog.com/mypc/speedtest/) can answer this question better than words alone:

Image from http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=63655816&context=set-1374474&size=o

In this graph of my Internet download and upload speeds from home over a broadband cable modem, the relative speed of a “T1 line” is shown next to the acronym “DSL” and the speed 1500 kbps. At the time this speed test was conducted, my computer at home was able to access the Internet (in downloading content) at the amazing rate of 3130 kbps, or kilobits per second.

To put this into perspective, look lower on the graph at the speed of a “V.92 modem” commonly called a “56K modem.” Its maximum theoretical speed is 56 kbps. So at home, over my cable modem connection at the time of this test, I was connecting to the Internet over 50 times faster than the fastest 56K modem user ever could.

That is impressive, but consider the following fact, which is both sobering and potentially motivational. Over half the school districts in the State of Texas are estimated to connect (the ENTIRE SCHOOL DISTRICT includes all students, teachers, administrators and staff members) with a single T-1 line (Fryer, 2005). From the chart, you can see that a T-1 line has a theoretical maximum bandwidth of 1500 kbps. So my personal home broadband connection (in Lubbock, Texas from Cox Communications) is at times more than twice as fast as the entire bandwidth allocation of MOST Texas school districts.

The last statement should mortify anyone reading this and following this line of technical analysis. As previously stated, the promises of twenty-first century educational technologies and their potential to positively transform classrooms hinge increasingly on students and teachers having robust access to the Internet. For the majority of rural Texas learners and teachers today, however, that type of access is literally a pipe dream.

This bandwidth connectivity to actual school districts and school campuses is what is meant by the term “the last mile.” As taxpayers and caregivers of the next generation, we must provide robust bandwidth down to THE LAST MILE for every school in the United States.

It is time that the Texas legislature and governmental entities in other states got serious about making this pipe dream: a dream of plentiful Internet bandwidth pipes, a reality for all learners. How can this be achieved? Some will undoubtedly call me naïve and unrealistic, but I think again this answer is simple and straightforward: LAY THE FIBER.

Fiber optic cable carries the potential for virtually unlimited bandwidth. According to WikiPedia, “Using Wavelength division multiplexing (WDM), the bandwidth carried by a single fiber can be increased into the range of terabits per second” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber_optic_cable). A standard fiber optic cable includes a “bundle” of strands, which can each transmit terabits of data per second. A terabit is equal to a trillion (1,000,000,000,000) bits, or to keep our labels the same from previous bandwidth comparisons, a billion (1,000,000,000) kilobits. So a single strand of fiber optic cable can provide bandwidth that is more than 600,000 times faster than a T-1 line.

What does all this mean? It means that the bandwidth constraints now hampering instructional technology applications using the Internet in the majority of Texas school districts would be a distant memory if fiber optic connections were available down to THE LAST MILE.

It means that the constructively disruptive uses of educational technology like interactive videoconferencing (which are possibly the most lauded yet rarely realized uses) could become a potential reality if fiber optic connections were available down to THE LAST MILE in our schools.

CONCLUSIONS

In September 2004, the Alliance for Childhood (www.allianceforchildhood.net) published a controversial and thought-provoking report entitled, “Tech Tonic: Towards A New Literacy Of Technology.” The abstract reads:

The Alliance for Childhood calls for a new definition of technology literacy and a new approach to helping children develop the wisdom, compassion, courage, and creative energy they will need to face the daunting ethical choices of a high-tech future.

The report was highly critical of the educational technology purchasing trends followed by most school districts nationwide, in assuming that more and more technology faster and faster would result in a better education for students. Not surprisingly, the Consortium for School Networking (www.cosn.org), which includes corporate technology giants like Microsoft, Dell, IBM, and Intel, quickly issued a dissenting response. In their response, COSN noted:

…by using educational technology in appropriate ways we can and are enabling human connections. For example, through video conferencing between classrooms we can link children in the U.S. with children around the world to learn from each other. Likewise, email pen pals can improve children's writing skills. Similarly, we can create collaborative work environments with teams of students working together to collect scientific information. (COSN)

Sadly, as Larry Cuban documented in “Oversold and Underused: Computers in the Classroom,” these types of non-traditional, disruptive uses of educational technology tend to be few and far between in today’s schools (2001). Much more common are the uses of PowerPoint to lecture and attempt to transmit content from the mouth of the teacher into the mind of the student, and the use of web browsers to harvest text and graphics for use in fairly traditional school reports.

Several things are needed to change this present reality, and the most obvious are the choices teachers make about how to use available technology. But a second and equally important issue that needs to change is available bandwidth at school, and the ways district IT departments support or obstruct teachers in their desired uses of that bandwidth. For the majority of schools today, available bandwidth is in short supply, and this makes both interactive videoconferencing as well as bandwidth required for one to one laptop initiatives which will soon be upon all of us completely unrealistic. This must change.

Let me summarize my main points in clear, plain terms so even legislators who might occasion to read this article will understand me. Acknowledge that what it means to be literate today is different than what it meant yesterday. Act on this understanding by REDEFINING TEXTBOOKS AS INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS.

And order our telecommunications companies to LAY THE FIBER, right down to the last mile to the schoolhouses of our state and nation.

I am not so young and naïve to be ignorant of the vast geographical differences between a state like Texas and a state like Maine. Texas is a huge state, in fact we were our own nation at one point in the not-so-distant past. But in the case of the issue of bandwidth, size does not matter. The world may be flat for many businesses, but until fiber optic Internet connections find their way to every schoolhouse of our state and nation, it won’t be a flat world for our students. We must aggressively advocate for this agenda of change as educators, parents, and taxpayers passionately concerned about the futures of both our children and ourselves.

You can find out who to contact on the Texas Legislature’s “Districts By Address” website: http://www.capitol.state.tx.us/fyi/fyi.htm. An “adequate” education does not mean simply being able to pass a third grade reading test. It means being digitally literate in the twenty-first century. We need to prepare students for their future, not our past. It is time to take action.

Wesley Fryer is an educator, digital storyteller, and creative podcaster. Catch up on his latest thoughts at www.speedofcreativity.org.

References

Annan, K. (2005, November 16, 2005). One Laptop per Child: Launch of the $100 Laptop. Press Conference at the World Summit on the Information Society, Tunis.

COSN. CoSN Response to the Alliance for Childhood Study. from http://www.cosn.org/about/press/100404.cfm

Cuban, L. (2001). Oversold and underused: computers in the classroom. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

Friedman, T. L. (2005). The world is flat : a brief history of the twenty-first century (1st ed.). New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Fryer, W. (2005). Podcast20: Interactive Video: The Size of Texas. In W. Fryer (Ed.), Moving at the Speed of Creativity Podcasts.

Oppenheimer, T. (2003). The flickering mind : the false promise of technology in the classroom, and how learning can be saved (1st ed.). New York: Random House.

TOOLS FOR THE TEKS: INTEGRATING TECHNOLOGY IN THE CLASSROOM

Digital Curriculum and The Last Mile: Providing Curricular Flexibility and Limitless Bandwidth

Digital Curriculum and The Last Mile:
Providing Curricular Flexibility and Limitless Bandwidth