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Building the School of the Future

By Lindsay Oishi
URL: http://www.schoolcio.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=192501205

Microsoft and the School District of Philadelphia have worked together for three years to create the School of the Future, an innovative model for incorporating technology into education that opens on September 7, 2006. Rob Stevens, the project’s architect for software solutions, and Mary Cullinane, group manager for Microsoft’s Partners in Learning program, spoke to School CIO about how IT leaders can learn from the School of the Future’s vision and approach.

Q. How much has the school cost so far?
A. The entire project is funded at $63 million, which is a traditional budget for the School District of Philadelphi. The money required toa operate a school is mostly spent on maintenance. But we’ve used LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification guidelines, so that the overall cost of maintenance will be less than the cost for schools that don’t follow these guidelines.

Q. What technologies are you providing students with?
A. Wherever these kids go, whenever there’s a learning opportunity, they have access to an infrastructure has been built to give them an appropriate environment. That means wireless throughout the school, experts from around the world coming in via streaming media, and infrastructure allowing them to communicate with teachers and parents. The collaborative environment will be very powerful. The other area that will be very powerful is the Virtual Teaching Assistant and Virtual Library. With these, we hope to foster a community of learning.

Q. Tell me more about the Virtual Teaching Assistant.
A. One of the principles of this school is to create an adaptive learning environment. When we went to school, every kid had to turn the page at the same time. With the Virtual Teaching Assistant, the class can have an individualized pace. As a teacher, you can put together a quiz, give it to your students, and immediately ascertain where your class is. The quiz comes up as a window on the students’ machines—they each have their own laptop computer. The results go back to the teacher right away, and if a student gets a certain pattern of questions wrong, the teacher can give them extra help in that area.

Q. How do you keep student data secure?
A. We’re relying entirely on credentialed access. Once you log into the operating system, we know who you are. You don’t have to remember multiple passwords. We have very secure passwords that allow, for example, parents to be identified only with their children, so parents will not be able to get information on another child. We’re not custodians of extremely sensitive information. But we do have the ability to protect it. It’s a well-bounded community of learners—people from the outside will have great difficulty getting information.

Q. Which technologies offer the highest return on investment?
A. First, the multimedia capabilities available through Windows Media services give students a wealth of resources that are visual and online. These are the most valuable in terms of the ultimate product, which is educational accomplishment. The Virtual Library, for example, is a repository for different types of digital media. It allows movies, documents, Web sites, and other content to be stored together. Second, we have automatic mechanisms for student enrollment. Whenever a student is added to the school, they automatically get a Windows account for school portals, e-mail, and a personal Web site. This translates into savings of time and administrative effort, which also reduces cost.

Q. How do school portals work?
A. The school has portals for students, the extended community, and faculty and staff. When you log in to your computer, you’re automatically logged in to your portal. If you’re a student, the portal knows what classes you have and shows you a picture of everyone in your classes. The extended community portals allow parents to be more familiar with their students’ teachers, and to find out what happened in the classroom. Faculty and staff can also use their private portal to communicate about students or even view pay stubs online.

Q. Do you have advice about making public-private partnerships work?
A. CIOs shouldn’t limit themselves to the most obvious asset a partner can bring to the table. When someone thinks about Microsoft, they think of software. But the School District of Philadelphia got to see how we hire people, motivate people, and create the culture of our organization. The other thing to remember is that money is great, but people are better. Individuals and their thinking are valuable resources. We’ve had over 45 people at Microsoft touch this project in various ways, and you can’t put a price tag on that.

Q. How can CIOs keep informed about the school?
A. Every step of the strategic planning has been documented on the Web site, for all schools that are interested in following a similar process. U.S. Partners in Learning will host quarterly briefings with schools across the country, and there is also an annual global forum where school leaders can get together and discuss the results of these innovations.

Lindsay Oishi is a graduate student in Learning Sciences and Technology Design at Stanford University.

© School CIO

Relevance..............becomes INNOVATIVE!

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Published: August 30, 2006

Commentary

Why Thinking ‘Outside the Box’ Is Not So Easy

(And Why Present Reform Efforts Will Fail)

By Marion Brady

In the fall of 1987, the Associated Press carried a story from Tacoma, Wash., about a boy “penned in a coffin-sized box for two years because his stepgrandmother feared he was brain-damaged.”

Two years in a box! Did the kid scream to get out? Feel abused? Unhappy? No. When he was let out, according to the news item, “he was amazed to learn not all children are shut up in the same way.”

The boy illustrated, literally, the difficulty of “thinking outside the box.”

We all share that difficulty. We’re bundles of unexamined beliefs about what’s proper and acceptable, and many of those unexamined beliefs relate to schooling. We cling to them not because research has shown them to be true or because they make good, common sense, but simply because lifelong immersion in the status quo makes it exceedingly difficult to imagine alternatives.

Of all the education-related unexamined assumptions, none is more deeply embedded than the belief that the main business of schooling is to teach the “core curriculum”—math, science, social studies, and language arts. Supporting that belief is another assumption: that these four fields of study are the only, or at least the optimum, organizers of general knowledge.

That last assumption is so powerful it shapes education worldwide. At all levels, from middle through graduate school, the four areas of study are the main institutional organizers. So taken for granted is it that they are the fundamental building blocks of education, that reform movements don’t question their centrality. Separate sets of “standards” reinforce them. “Measures of accountability” are keyed to them. Even those who know that knowledge is seamless, who know that the walls between fields of study are artificial and arbitrary, tend to assume that the four are the ultimate organizers of knowledge. They may call themselves “interdisciplinarians,” or may make use of projects, themes, problems, student needs, or other content organizers, but they don’t push the disciplines aside. They try instead to “bring them to bear.”

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The traditional curriculum has given us much. We’ve created a way of life that makes specialized studies indispensable. But assuming that the “core” fields are pretty much the whole story has also cost us much, and the costs are escalating. School, finally, isn’t about disciplines and subjects, but about what they were originally meant to do—help the young make more sense of life, more sense of experience, more sense of an unknowable future. And in that sense-making effort, math, science, social studies, and language arts simply aren’t up to the challenge. They’ve given us a curriculum so deeply flawed it’s an affront to the young and a recipe for societal disaster.

TalkBack

Join the related discussion, “Thinking Outside the Box.”

Consider the problems listed below. Any one of them is serious enough to warrant calling a national conference, and the general curriculum in place in America’s schools and colleges suffers from all of them. It:

• Has no agreed-upon aim;

• Ignores the basic process by means of which knowledge expands;

• Disregards the holistic, systemic nature of knowledge;

• Neglects the brain’s need for order and organization;

• Fails to model the seamlessness of human perception;

• Has no criteria for determining the relative importance of what’s taught;

• Relates only tangentially to real-world experience;

• Disregards important fields of study;

• Doesn’t capitalize on the mutually supportive nature of knowledge;

• Uses short-term recall rather than logic to access memory;

• Has no built-in self-renewing capability;

• Is little concerned with moral and ethical issues;

• Lends itself to simplistic approaches to evaluation;

• Doesn’t move smoothly through ever-higher levels of intellectual complexity;

• Makes unreasonable demands on memory;

• Penalizes rather than capitalizes on student differences;

• Neglects higher-order thought processes;

• Doesn’t encourage novel, creative thought; and

• Vastly underestimates student intellectual potential.

These problems can be solved, and solved rather easily, but not by playing with course-distribution requirements, adding more math and science courses, or tightening the “rigor” screws. The solution lies “outside the box,” in raising students’ awareness of their thought processes. What they need but aren’t getting from school subjects is a “master system of mental organization.”

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The role played by mental organizers is easily demonstrated. Say to a student, “Name as many games as you can,” and, after a dozen or so, most will begin to stumble. But an occasional student will attack the problem differently, will think, “children’s games,” then, when he or she has exhausted that category, will move on to other categories—party games, games played with cards, dice, words, balls, computers, across nets, and so on. Performance will depend less on the quality of the student’s memory of games than on the quality of his or her “game categories” system. If it’s good, the names of a hundred games may be reeled off with little or no hesitation.

School isn’t about disciplines and subjects, but about what they were originally meant to do—help the young make more sense of life.

Math, science, social studies, and language arts are mental organizers. They give students elaborate category systems for thinking about certain kinds of things. But only certain kinds of things. This is especially true now, after a little over a century of “standardizing” via textbooks, legislation, and inattention. As the above list of problems should show, they’re not up to the challenge of comprehensive “sense making.” They don’t connect with each other, don’t adequately connect with or organize ordinary experience, don’t “stack” categories in order of importance, don’t include “open-ended” categories essential to novel, creative thought—don’t, in short, do the job that needs doing.

Ironically, every kid shows up for the first day of school already making sophisticated use of a “master” category system for organizing knowledge that can do the job that needs doing. There’ll be no major improvement in students’ intellectual performance until they’re helped to surface that system and put it deliberately to work.

Here’s where professional educators begin to balk. And the higher up the professional ladder they’ve climbed—the more rigid the box they’re in tends to be—the balkier they get. It’s unlikely most have ever given thought to the possibility of alternatives to the familiar disciplines, subjects, and courses as organizers of knowledge. That one of those alternatives might actually be superior seems too unlikely to take seriously. That that alternative is already known and used by everybody makes it either a threat to that which they’ve achieved or gets it labeled as too mundane to merit scholarly attention.

Notwithstanding obliviousness, lack of interest, skepticism, or other obstacles to acceptance of the idea, humans make sense of experience by weaving together, systemically, five main kinds of information:

TIME (the Ice Age, morning, during World War I, when the cap is removed, once upon a time, and so forth);

PLACE (ancient Egypt, the forest, on the five-yard line, Paradise, on the shelf);

ACTORS (Esau and Jacob, a crowd, the queen and court, me and Dad, or Goldilocks);

ACTION (sign the lease, attack the fort, pay a visit, check for clues); and

CAUSE (revenge, too much heat, loneliness, broken dam, impure water).

From the weaving together of these kinds of information, humans then draw SYSTEMIC RELATIONSHIPS (“One morning, Little Red Riding Hood asked her mother if she could go into the forest to visit her grandmother, as it had been a while since they’d seen each other.”)

There will be no significant improvement in student performance until educators begin to make use of the brain’s usual way of organizing knowledge.

Think of the five categories—time, place, actors, action, cause—as drawers in a file, each with a system of subcategories, sub-subcategories, and so on, encompassing not just the organizing systems of everything now taught, but all knowledge, everything cross-filed with everything else.

Now comes the hard part. Pointing out the most powerful mental organizer known to humankind is easy. Teaching it is also easy. In fact, it doesn’t have to be “taught” in the usual sense of the word, just raised into consciousness, elaborated, refined, and put to use as sense-maker. Students helped to see, early on, how their brains organize knowledge, before they’re pushed into the artificial confines of subject-matter boxes, will simply take it for granted that schooling deals primarily with the whole of human experience and only secondarily with certain useful but random parts of it.

Neither does use of the system mean trauma for traditionally trained teachers. No subject, no course, no favorite lesson need be discontinued, just put in larger perspective, rather like matching pieces of a jigsaw puzzle to the picture on the lid of the box.

The difficulties of acceptance of a supradisciplinary knowledge organizer lie where they always have, in policymakers unable to imagine alternatives to the status quo, in inertia, and in simplistic “reforms” like the No Child Left Behind Act,which aren’t reforms at all but simply attempts to pursue the status quo with greater diligence.

Education leaders came out of the 1960s aware of the instructional potential of systems theory and the centrality of conceptual frameworks. The institution was pointed in the right direction until the publication of the unduly alarmist A Nation at Risk in 1983 triggered the present reactionary trend. There will be no significant improvement in student performance until educators begin to make use of the brain’s usual way of organizing knowledge.

Marion Brady is a retired educator who writes a column on education for The Orlando Sentinel in Florida.

Innovation is the "Way Forward"

Bill Ford On Innovation and The Future of Ford Motor Company "Way Forward"

Detroit Free Press Article / Tom Walsh http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060123/BUSINESS01/601230398

Time Magazine Article http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1151787,00.html?internalid=AOT_h_01-22-2006_can_this_man_sa

Michigan's Job No. 1: Recovery

New York Times Article 12-27-2005
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/27/business/27state.html?th&emc=th

A Roadmap to Michigan's Future
http://milproj.dc.umich.edu/publications/roadmap/

December 27, 2005

Michigan's Job No. 1: Recovery
By MICHELINE MAYNARD

DETROIT, Dec. 26 - In another era, Jennifer M. Granholm's courtship of Toyota would have been considered heresy for the governor of Michigan, where American automakers and their suppliers fueled the economic engine for decades.

But with General Motors and the Ford Motor Company cutting thousands of jobs, closing plants and eliminating benefits for the shrinking number of workers still employed, the governor is vowing to "go anywhere, do anything" to find investment for her state.

And while the governor agrees that the state's monolithic economy has to be moved away from its dependence on manufacturing and toward high-tech industries, short term there is little she can do - or wants to do - to escape the auto industry's clutches.

While the pursuit of Toyota may strike some as desperate, it reflects her determination to draw an ace for the hand Michigan has been dealt. In July, she went to Toyota's offices in Nagoya, Japan, to promote sites in Michigan that could be home to a Toyota plant. She talked about the state's ample supply of skilled workers who have automotive experience and who would not need the degree of training that their counterparts at other Toyota plants in the United States have required.

Ms. Granholm, having landed a $150 million Toyota design center earlier this year, now has her eyes on a potentially bigger prize: an engine plant that Toyota may build in the Midwest.
"We want to make sure they know how welcome they would be here," she said in an interview last week in Michigan.

In an earlier era, Toyota might never have considered Michigan, where the United Automobile Workers union is such a powerful force. Nor would it have needed to, given its freedom to choose among union-averse areas nationwide.

But with Toyota on the verge of becoming the world's biggest carmaker, possibly eclipsing G.M. as soon as next year, a Michigan plant would take it to the center of the American automotive heartland. Last week, Toyota officials in the United States and Japan finally said they were giving serious thought to building a factory in Michigan, although a decision is still months away. Such is the new reality of Detroit, where what once seemed out of the question is now up for discussion.

And Ms. Granholm, the state's Democratic governor, acknowledges that. "We've got to transform Michigan. Change is imperative," the governor said in an interview last week.
"A Toyota plant in Michigan would be a very clear signal that this is the future," said Gary N. Chaison, a professor of industrial relations at Clark University in Worcester, Mass.

If anyone had any doubts about the impact of the auto industry's decline on Michigan, a report from the University of Michigan issued last fall put it bluntly. "Michigan's old manufacturing economy is dying, slowly but surely," declared the report, prepared by the Millennium Project at the university and called "A Roadmap to Michigan's Future." The economic shifts are "putting at risk the welfare of millions of citizens of our state in the face of withering competition from an emerging global knowledge economy."

But while her long-term goal is to diversify the state's economy and lessen its dependence on the auto industry, Ms. Granholm's immediate priority is to make sure car companies still provide jobs here.

Toyota has spent $16.3 billion during the last 20 years putting its North American plants in places like Ontario, Mexico, Alabama and Indiana, but never in the nation's automotive capital, where the U.A.W. is dominant. That trend initially caused some to view the governor's tactic as a Hail Mary pass. But her efforts now have a chance of bearing fruit.

"If we do a new plant, we would consider Michigan, along with other states," Dennis C. Cuneo, a senior vice president at Toyota Motor Manufacturing North America, said in an interview last week.

In some ways, a favorable decision would be a sign of continued cooperation with the governor, who came through for Toyota earlier this year when it was trying to acquire land to expand its technical center in Ann Arbor, about 45 miles from Detroit. Another developer seeking the same 600 acres in York Township offered a higher price than Toyota, but the governor prevailed when a court supported the state's decision to make the land available to Toyota.

Then the State Legislature passed an incentive package for Toyota worth $50 million, including tax credits - small change as far as such deals can go, but enough to impress Toyota officials that Ms. Granholm truly wanted them in her state.

"She really stuck her neck out for us politically, and we appreciated it," said Mr. Cuneo, who will play an important role in deciding whether Toyota will choose Michigan as the site for its engine plant.

But before that happens, Ms. Granholm must deal with a more immediate issue: persuading Ford Motor to spare its big luxury-car plant in Wixom, outside Detroit, which is on a list of plants that Ford may close when it announces an overhaul plan on Jan. 23.

The state is also bracing for a plant-closing announcement by the Delphi Corporation, which filed for Chapter 11 protection in October. One of Delphi's targets could be a big parts plant in Flint, a community already devastated by years of shutdowns.

Ms. Granholm's primary tactic is to persuade companies to consolidate operations in Michigan and shut plants elsewhere. Last week, she signed legislation granting $600 million in tax cuts to manufacturers, including a 100 percent tax break for companies that bring jobs back to the state in 2007 and 2008, and a specific break for Delphi, in a move to save its Michigan jobs.
Simply supporting manufacturing, however, would not be enough, argued the "Roadmap" report, which was led by James J. Duderstadt, the former president of the University of Michigan and now a professor of science and engineering there.

The report contended that the state's future relies on improving education and providing investment for advanced technologies that can create stable, high-paying jobs.
Less than a quarter of Michigan residents have college degrees, the report noted, reflecting an era when workers who lacked even a high school diploma could land lucrative jobs in auto plants. "Michigan today is sailing blindly into a profoundly different future," the report warned.

Indeed, statistics paint a gloomy picture. The state's unemployment rate, 6.6 percent, is the third-highest in the country, behind the hurricane-devastated states of Mississippi and Louisiana, and it ranks dead last in economic momentum, a measure based on employment growth, personal income and population trends, according to the Citizens' Research Council.
Even those who still have jobs are feeling the pinch of the auto industry's decline. In the fall, workers at G.M. and Ford agreed to health care restrictions that will require them to pay modest amounts for previously free coverage. G.M., meanwhile, will no longer match worker contributions to their 401(k) plans.

All that helps explain why Ms. Granholm, who faces re-election next November, is focusing her attention on strengthening the state's ties to Toyota, the world's most profitable auto company.
The factory she is vying for would supply engines to a Subaru plant in Lafayette, Ind., which plans to build 100,000 cars a year for Toyota beginning in 2006. Toyota has not said how many workers its engine plant might employ, but it typically hires a few hundred people as a start.
Still, any jobs would be significant. Toyota, which initially thought to put the plant next to a Subaru factory, has scouted possible sites in southwestern Michigan, near the Indiana border, and on the part of Interstate 94 that is opposite Detroit.

But no matter how far the plant is from the Motor City, Toyota officials must come to terms with the influence of the U.A.W., whose president, Ron Gettelfinger, has said the plant would benefit the state.

Organizing its work force also would benefit the union, which has failed to organize workers at any of the major factories built by foreign automakers in the United States in the last 25 years.
Still, Toyota has dealt with the union at New United Motor Manufacturing Inc., a joint venture plant owned by G.M. and Toyota in Fremont, Calif. At the plant, known as Nummi, formerly a G.M. site, workers operate under a special contract with more flexible work rules than other U.A.W. contracts, and the plant operates under Toyota's production methods.

Toyota can easily avoid such drama by picking another plant site. But it can score points in its drive to be seen as a good local citizen by helping a state that can meet its economic needs and arguably needs its assistance the most - Michigan.

"In a simple sense, one plant doesn't mean anything," Professor Chaison said, "but in a symbolic sense, it would show that there is still life in Michigan, and good jobs to be gotten."

INNOVATIVE Digital Simulations and Other Gizmos for the MIND!

Friends:

Check out this resource and let us know what your thoughts might be.
http://www.explorelearning.com

Enjoy!

INNOVATE or DIE!

Innovate-Live webcasts offer an opportunity to synchronously interact with the authors of the articles in the December 2005/January 2006 issue of Innovate (http://www.innovateonline.info ).

These webcasts are produced as a public service by our partner, ULiveandLearn. If you wish to participate in the webcasts, please register at http://www.uliveandlearn.com/innovate/

All times are New York time. You may use the world clock at http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/ to coordinate the time with your time zone.

The schedule for the December/January Innovate-Live Webcasts is provided below.

December 12, 2005, 12:00 PM New York Time
Applying Gaming and Simulation Techniques to the Design of Online Instructionhttp://www.innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=70 Karen Hughes Miller, authorJoel Foreman, moderator

December 12, 2005, 1:00 PM New York Time
Technology and Pedagogy: Building Techno-Pedagogical Skills in Preservice Teachers http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=36 Lorraine Beaudin & Corey Haden, authorsMaggie McVey Lynch, moderator

December 14, 2005, 1:00 PM New York Time
Taking a Journey with Today's Digital Kids:An Interview with Deneen Frazier Bowen http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=230 Deneen Frazier Bowen, authorJames Morrison, moderator

January 10, 2006, 3:00 PM New York Time
Implementing Organic Education:An Interview with Hugh Osborn http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=236 Hugh Osborne,authorJames Morrison, moderator

January 11, 2006, 3:00 PM New York Time
Designing e-Portfolios To Support Professional Teacher Preparation http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=65
Margo Pensavalle, authorKathryn Barker, moderator

As you may know, if you register for the webcasts, you can actively participate by typing your questions/comments in the chat area of the screen. If you would like to interact with the author using audio, you can do so but you will need to have the proper equipment and training to use ULiveandLearn’s Macromedia Breeze conferencing program.

Please go to http://www.uliveandlearn.com/innovate/ for details.

If you cannot attend a webcast, note that it will be archived within the features section of the article itself shortly after the webcast.
Many thanks.
Jim----

James L. MorrisonEditor-in-Chief, Innovatehttp://www.innovateonline.info Professor Emeritus of Educational LeadershipUNC-Chapel Hillhttp://horizon.unc.edu