Education and Training

A school system in British Columbia has cut technology costs, created new support positions to work directly with teachers, and has dramatically reduced technical problems with their classroom and teacher computers. How did they do it?

They dropped licensed software, and over several years, moved to Free and Open Source (FOSS) alternatives.

This New York Times article (registration required, link may disappear) says that schools that give laptops to students have been wasting their money. This was entirely predictable, because just putting technology "stuff" in the classroom was never going to change anything.

Last night, I got to see what I think may be one of the best high school technology programs in the country. Mike Kaylor, a teacher at Blacksburg High School, convinced the school to convert the old high school woodworking shop into a multimedia design space, set up for professional digital photography, digital movie making, 3D modeling, online game design, and movie special effects. Kaylor's classes are mobbed--student demand is three times higher than the capacity of his classes. His students are already working in high paying jobs in the movie and entertainment industry.

Someone has finally found something good about playing video games for hours on end. Engadget reports that surgeons who relax by playing video games are better at what they do in the operating room. The improvement, unsurprisingly, is most noticeable when performong laproscopic surgery, where they manipulate tiny tools while watching a video screen. It is hardly worth getting excited about it though.

I think there are some interesting new job opportunities that are going to emerge in the next ten years, and one would hope K12 schools and colleges start now with new and revised curriculums to meet demand.

I am attending the Rural Telecommunications Congress Annual Conference, and as usual, it is loaded with excellent speakers. The opening keynote was presented by two representatives of the EAST (Environmental and Spatial Technologies) education program. EAST may be the most innovative approach to K12 education in the country. Typically offered as a year long class in high school, EAST students are presented with real community problems and issues and are told to solve them.

Henrico County, Virginia, has garnered national attention for its program of giving laptops to kids once they reach sixth grade. But if the school system is not prepared to truly transform the teaching and learning process, the results may not be what we expect. In this article, at least one mother made her daughter give the laptop back because it had become a time waster for the girl and her grades had dropped.

This is just one of several stories I have seen recently about K12 students who have their own blogs and get censured by K12 school officials. Student blogs are now common, and school systems have failed to adapt to the new reality. It clearly unnerves some school administrators that students now have a public forum completely independent of the school system. In the old days, students with a bent for writing worked on the school paper, which was monitored by a faculty member.

According to this USA Today story, teachers are finding that WiFi and laptops in the classroom is a mixed bag of results.

Students are coming to class, flipping their laptop computers open, and going shopping, among other activities observed by teachers. They are also answering email, chatting, downloading music, and doing anything but learning.

This blog entry from the always excellent David Strom describes the tools that a video production company is using these days to produce reality-based TV shows.

Here is an article from an executive recruiter about what kinds of skills a business executive needs in the global economy. As we slowly dumb down our schools and universities to meet the demands of students who think school should fit their needs, we have reason to be worried. In particular, look at the need to be multilingual and to be comfortable in Europe, North America, and Asia.

Your first reaction to the headline may be skepticism--iPods as a training tool? It may sound like a sly way to buy upper management a new toy, but it is nothing like that. A restaurant chain has thrown away its DVD-based training videos in favor of iPod playlists--short 30 to 60 second video clips that show an employee exactly how to do just one thing. According to the company, it allows the employees to train at their workstation, where they can watch how to do something and then do it immediately.

It turns out that kids who have spent years playing video games learn to use complex information systems more quickly. The U.S. military reports that new recruits pick up the use of highly specialized and complex data systems easily, compared to youth in other countries, where some of the same systems are exported and in use.

We have an education crisis in the United States. We're graduating kids from college that don't know how to evaluate a credit offer, use a checkbook, or calcuate a tip. If you are running a business and need workers, are these folks you want in the hiring pool?

George Mason University, in northern Virginia, has published plans for an open source robot designed for educational and research use.

ISUS (Improved Solutions for Urban Strategies) has an innovative alternative high school education program that helps high risk youths get a high school diploma while giving them a heavy dose of on the job construction training and high tech manufacturing skills.

The program provides proficiency-based high school classes that are integrated with work training in the construction industry. But the effort has a real high tech twist, and takes vo-tech to a whole new level by building and selling houses at market prices in distressed neighborhoods.

The City of Cleveland is addressing the issue of digital literacy. The program will offer training and certification to 30,000 low income workers over the next five years. This is an important program; so many areas of the country bemoan the loss of manufacturing jobs and the lack of opportunity for unemployed workers but fail to adjust economic development spending and job training programs to the realities of the global Knowledge Economy.

Clark McLeod, the CEO of FiberUtilities of Iowa and the head of OpportunityIowa, gave a stunning keynote address at the Digital Cities conference on Tuesday. What follows is a summary of his remarks.

The incumbent telephone and cable companies have monopolized both infrastructure and services, and they will do anything--ANYTHING--to stop threats to those monopolies. Nonetheless, the incumbents are not the enemy. The enemy is the complacency of American communities, who are letting the incumbents win the battle.

OpportunityIowa is a statewide effort to educate citizens and elected leaders about the importance of broadband to the future of the community, and it is trying to address the urgent need to help those citizens and elected leaders understand that broadband is tightly tied to economic development. The project has made over 1000 presentations across the state to educate communities about the issues.

OpportunityIowa has a simple answer to the question of why communities should invest in broadband: To reverse the downward economic trends (fewer and fewer jobs year after year); to build 21st century community infrastructure; and because community broadband is primarily a local problem. One of Iowa's main exports are college graduates, who leave the state and never come back because of the lack of opportunity.

McCleod says that education is the core problem (or the lack of it).

Communities need a fiber utility; it will drive the cost of telecom down. Creating a fiber utility (just the legal entity, not building anything) gets the attention of the incumbents and often has immediate positive results because communities that create these fiber utility entities often get better service quickly, even if they have not spent any money to build out a network. The first step for any community is to create the legal entity that could and would own and manage a community fiber network.

McLeod suggests that the legal entity be created without any commitment to actually spending any money or building any infrastructure. The mistake many communities make is to rush to build something without having an appropriate community legal entity in place.

The 'net is buzzing over an article called What You'll Wish You'd Known by computer scientist and dot-com success Paul Graham. The article is interesting, but I don't think most kids will take the time to read it--by their standards, it's way too long (a topic for another discussion).

But you can always rely on the geeks that inhabit SlashDot to not only read this stuff, but critique it extensively, and one comment jumped right off the page at me:

This CNet article describes what corporate America wants from its workforce. Surprise--it's not necessarily tech-savvy youths with oversize thumbs from playing video games and keying text messages on cellphones the size of chiclets.