Education and Training

A new report by the Kaufmann Foundation indicates that 465,000 new businesses are being created every month in the United States. This probably represents a million jobs or more being created by small businesses every single month. The growth in start ups demonstrates why a community or regional economic development strategy has to include not just business attraction as a strategy, but also business creation.

There are no technology problems when it comes to community broadband. In my work with hundreds of communities, success usually comes down to the kind of leaders that a community has, well, leading. Ed Batista has a great set of resources for leaders, and it is a short list of annotated references, not a two hundred item laundry list. Well worth a look.

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.

Sounds like a win-win-win, but some of us have been recommending that for years. It is largely an IT staff problem; IT staff trained in the monoculture Windows world have little experience with alternative platforms like Linux, and just won't budge. The cost is high. Taxpayers ultimately end up footing the bill for expensive, complex, and difficult to use systems that don't perform well.

A couple of years ago, I was working in a K12 school, trying to help them use FOSS applications in the classroom. One of the biggest obstacles was the school system's "seat management" system, which actually took the entire school off-line randomly throughout the day because students at another school were using licensed software. The school system could not afford to buy licenses for every computer in the school system, so the seat management software just shut off network access to computers to keep the number of licenses below the licenses maximum.

Who loses? Teachers and students both lose, and technology ends up sitting idle. The big myth, often perpetrated by parents as well as administrators, is that kids "need to use software used in the business world." Uh huh. Writing is writing, and using a word processor is a skill that transfers nicely whether you were trained to write with Word or a free alternative. The same is true with spreadsheets--it is about math and thinking skills, not "familiarity with Excel menus" skills.

Claiming that kids should only learn on Microsoft products is insulting to our kids (they are apparently too dumb to learn to transfer skills across different pieces of software) and nonsensical. It is like claiming that only Toyota cars should be used in driver's ed, because "that is the most popular car in America."

IT departments should not be making policy decisions in a vacuum that affect the whole organization. IT staff should be serving the organization, not the other way around. If the IT department seems to be offering flimsy excuses for high cost, low performance systems, insist on carefully considered research and studies for alternatives that cost less and do more. And if your IT staff refuses, maybe you need to clean house.

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.

Unfortunately, I got an early lesson in that in Blacksburg in the mid-nineties when we had the first schools in the country with broadband in every classroom. I learned some hard facts from teachers, and figured out that if you want technology to have an impact on learning in the classroom, you have to do five things.

• You do have to buy some stuff, and every child has to have easy access to it, hence the focus on laptops for everyone. But this is only step one, and unfortunately, it is where most schools and school boards stop.
• You have to provide training--extensive and regular training--to teachers. Without it, few teachers will be able to make good use of the complicated technology.
• You have to provide adequate technical support. Unfortunately, there is never enough to go around, and teachers have enough to do without also having to install software, fix problems, and maintain dozens of systems.
• You have to provide classroom ready learning materials that fit the curriculum teachers are expected to teach. You can't just give teachers a laptop and tell them, "Use the vast resources of the Internet." The vast resources are the problem; teachers don't have time to develop entirely new sets of teaching materials from scratch.
• Finally, you have to physically redesign the classroom to use the technology. How can kids use a laptop all day long if there is no place to plug in chargers at their desk? Where does the LCD projector go? How easy is it to have kids use the projector to show off their assignments? And so on.

We can barely teach kids the three Rs these days. It is naive to think spending money on feel-good initiatives like laptops will have any effect without extensive structural changes in the entire learning process. But at least we are finally learning these lessons.

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. And hundreds more are leaving his courses with a solid understanding of digital technology that will help them be successful no matter what career path they choose--business, government, or the nonprofit sector.

The sad truth is that most of our kids have a grasp of technology that is about as deep as a layer of tissue paper. Being able to text message and find a song quickly on an iPod does not prepare our youth for the work world, and too many adults, who tend to feel a bit inadequate, assume incorrectly that facility with email, the Web, and iPods somehow is enough.

Every high school in America ought to have a program like Kaylor's, and it should have the same vision as Kaylor's. When Kaylor wanted movie special effects software, he did not settle for low budget programs. Instead, he insisted on getting the same software that is used in the major studios to produce the special effects in movies like The Lord of the Rings. So Blacksburg kids in Kaylor's class are leaving with a solid foundation in digital media and the skills and training in demand by potential employers.

Not all of these kids will end up working in Hollywood. Some of them will settle down right here in the New River Valley, and the businesses in the area will benefit from having an ever expanding pool of job candidates with the right stuff.

Economic developers: How about your community? Worried about having a pool of workers ready for Knowledge Economy jobs? How about skipping the next shell building project and starting the kind of multimedia program that Mike Kaylor has at Blacksburg High School? From an economic development perspective, there are few other things that would be more interesting to a high tech business looking at your area for relocation.

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. Other recent studies of kids addicted to video games show that they perform less well in school, among other problems, meaning that video-addled kids won't have the grades to get into medical school in the first place, so they will never be able to put the great eye-hand coordination to good use.

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.

The first hot job is going to language specialist. Linguists who can speak at least four languages and ideally six or more are going to be able to write their own ticket in the work world, and will be able to command high dollar salaries. As the world economy continues to heat up, more and more businesses are going to be able to grow only by expanding into international markets, where they will have to be able to speak languages other than English. If six languages sounds like a lot, it really is not. Once you get past three, it is pretty easy. Languages that are going to be important include Chinese, Japanese, and Russian, among others.

The other hot job is going to be information manager. Traditionally, "information management" has been relegated to IT departments, where geeks build complicated databases and systems that usually require users to cram information into often convoluted and rigid formats, because that is the way IT people think. The new information manager will NOT be part of an IT department, but will work alongside business managers, salespeople, and project team members to keep information flowing between team members and clients. The information manager will have a high degree of skill using a wide variety of information tools, and will be able to craft custom solutions for individual projects using lots of off the shelf applications and judicious (and limited) use of scripts and small amounts of programming. This job will be the antithesis of the IT department approach to information management.

How about your local schools? Are they looking ten to twenty years ahead and trying to identify where job demand is going to create opportunities and needs? If not, why not?

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.

To help them do this, a typical EAST classroom has $700,000 in hardware and software, purchased from participating vendors for about ten cents on the dollar. EAST students are given no training on any of these systems, because it is literally impossible to train teachers to be competent in such a wide array of systems. Instead, EAST students are expected to figure out how to use the systems themselves and to work together to use them as part of the class projects.

And indeed, it is expectations that sets the EAST program apart. Students are not given an option to drift along through the class. Instead, EAST sets high expectations in terms of time, commitment, and effort from day one. The EAST classroom more closely resembles a business work place, and has the kinds of software and systems used by businesses. The program focuses on students being in charge of their own learning and growth. EAST teachers are facilitators and managers. EAST teachers don't regard students as empty vessels into which to pour measured chunks of memorized "knowledge."

An EAST project described in the talk involved going out into rural Arkansas and conducting a door to door survey of households to assess broadband availability. Students then created sophisticated GIS maps to show the actual patterns of broadband availability and use, as opposed to the FCC method of simply saying a zip code area has broadband if an incumbent can deliver service to a single subscriber.

EAST programs are in 225 schools in five states, but the program started in Arkansas, where more than 145 schools use the EAST program. After hearing about EAST, I have only one question: "Why doesn't every school in America have an EAST program?"

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.

It is easy to blame it on kids spending too much time chatting and goofing off on online Web sites, but those are only symptoms of the real problem. I can take some of the blame for all this, as the Blacksburg Electronic Village project helped our county schools become the first school system in the country to have broadband to every school and to become the first school system in the country to have broadband in every classroom. Since then I have worked on many other K12 technology projects--all with the best of intentions, but the results have been mixed at best.

Teaching kids is a complext process that requires years of experience, and you can't just drop a few computers into the middle of a centuries old way of doing things and expect magical results. I have learned that the hard way. In my experience, it is school administrators that are most often at fault. They are eager to win grants and push technology into the classroom; it looks good to parents and to elected leaders that decide school budgets.

But those same administrators are often much less enthusiastic about actually rolling up their sleeves, working side by side with teachers, and trying to figure out what changes need to be made to really leverage the promise of all this technology. And there is what I call the "five percent problem." Dump a bunch of technology into a school, and under any circumstances, you will have about five percent of teachers who are motivated to dig in and do amazing things with the stuff. Those "five percent" projects become the poster children for technology in the classroom. They are used to say, "See what great stuff all this is!"

But those five percenters are the exception, not the rule. Most teachers need a lot of help and support from the top down to get comparable results, and it usually is not there. So while computer manufacturers make money selling computers to schools, our kids are still learning the same old way. If your school district wants money for technology efforts, ask some hard questions about how administrators intend to support teachers with good tech support, appropriate learning resources, and assistance with curriculum changes.

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.

But today, students have blogs on MySpace, Xanga, and hundreds of other blog services. To be fair, parents have not always kept up with the times either; students are often posting too much personal information on their blogs, making them vulnerable to stalkers, sex offenders, or just other kids with a grudge. But the problem the schools have is actually just a free speech issue. Kids are writing about their dissatisfaction with a teacher or administrator, and schools are overreacting by labeling such writing as "threats" and punishing the student by suspension or expulsion.

Often the writing seems relatively innocuous, as it does in the case I linked to above--a Chicago area student who felt harrassed about having a blog. The school system is now trying to expel him. However puerile the writing may be, school officials have little control over what students do outside of school hours. The tactic most schools seem to be using is to call the writing a "threat" to school safety, but in the absence of something specific, it is not a threat just to express one's dissatisfaction with school officials. These overreactions often end up as free speech lawsuits, costing taxpayers thousands of dollars, with the schools usually on the losing end. School administrators need to take a deep breath and think outside the box a little.

My suggestion: Integrate blogging into English and writing classes. Teach kids what is appropriate, teach them good blogging writing styles, and encourage kids to write using these new tools. How about your school system? Have they used blog tools to help teach writing?