Let's Think Critically About Future Classrooms and Technology

Let’s Apply Critical Thinking  Before We Adopt European-Centric Future Classroom Technology Models

            

In this week’s edition of DemoLetter, Chris Shipley recounts and explores a conversation she had with someone about the future of education.  It’s a great introductory piece to a long and very important conversation. I hope her readers respond and begin thinking about the classroom of the future.

http://www.demo.com/demoletter/how_will_technology_affect_tomorrows_classroom.php

For the last year I’ve been an involved casual observer in educational computing. My interest was first piqued as a result of my reviewing tablet computers, first a ThinkPad X41 and later its successor, the X60 tablet as well as two Gateway tablets. Although I was primarily interested in how specific technologies effect classroom and campus education and information delivery, I’ve come to believe that it’s time commercial software developers and hardware makers take a long hard look at the emerging classroom/campus of the future and look at what they can do to improve education,

A couple of general observations based on my specific interests and usage patterns I’ve observed:

1. Users, not college IT departments, set the trends in classroom and college computing.
2. Very few colleges have standard computing platforms. They do, however maintain campus wide networks and often establish standards for applications software and more importantly, data file formats.
   1. There have been some notable exceptions to this including:

                                                              i.      Early adoption and standardization of tablet computers at a handful of east coast technical and engineering schools.

                                                           ii.      Adoption of Wintel-based notebook computers as standard platforms. This was done at most of the armed forces service academies. The cost of the systems was deducted from students monthly pay (which as underclass men is the same as a USMC or Army sergeants make without adders such as hazardous duty, or overseas pay or proficiency bonuses. Hey service academy students get paid to go to school!

                                                         iii.      The adoption of Macintosh at colleges that offered students a steep discount on Apple Mac systems and printers. Very few “Mac” standard campuses remain.

3.      Any discussion of the classroom of the future has to take into consideration the following facts:

a.      Academic funding is a regional function.  In the US, university funding is based largely on  an individual’s tuition payments. High schools and lower forms get their funding from local property taxes and Average Daily Attendance (ADA) funding from the federal government.

                                                              i.      The amount of infrastructure funding spent on individual students varies widely from institution to institution.

2. School and college district tax-based funding has been cut to the bone nationwide.  States such as California, which until the passage Prop 13, had been top rated scholastically nationwide, have seen their ratings drop to the middle third nationwide.

                                                              i.      Funding for IT-based academic instruction is almost non-existent today.

                                                           ii.      Community colleges and state universities have adopted cost-effective, distance-based, learning programs that rely heavily on PBS affiliates and Internet classrooms.

                                                         iii.      A handful of hardware and software companies such as Hewlett Packard, Gateway, Fujitsu PC, and Microsoft have increased their academic evangelism programs and backed such activities with large grants in order to further the exposure and adoption of key new technologies that are relevant to the classroom of the future.

3. All of the above combine to make standards for the classroom of the future nearly impossible to implement.

4.            Discussions of the classroom of the future that are based on highly socialistic European educational models are ill suited for the American academic market.

While I am contrary by nature, discussions of the classroom of the future need to be moderated by large doses of location-based reality and big heapings of critical thinking. Failing that, it’s important to remember that the resources of the Gates and Barksdale Foundations can only go so far and that taxpayers bear the ultimate responsibility for paying the cost of technology for IT centric future classrooms.

            Anyone out there ready to pay higher property taxes?—Jim Forbes from the edge of the grid alongside the Cleveland National Forest in rural San Diego County.

(disclosure, my son, Sean Patrick Forbes is an educator who strongly believes that we as taxpayers need to assume greater responsibility for academic funding. Over 30 years ago, I voted against California’s Proposition 13, because I felt it would cripple the state’s schools)