TELEPRESENCE.......aka......VIDEO CONFERENCING

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'Telepresence' adds realism to video conferencing
Initial cost is likely too steep for schools--but it could have future implications

From eSchool News staff and wire service reports
October 26, 2006
Imagine a virtual conferencing solution so advanced that unsuspecting visitors entering the room have been unaware that not all participants were physically present.

That's what Cisco Systems has designed with its new "Cisco TelePresence" system, technology that aims to remedy the detached feel of talking to a television set that long has plagued traditional video conferences. The technology is likely to have a limited impact in education in the near term, given its initial price point. But as the cost comes down, it could have implications for schools down the road, industry watchers say.

Cisco TelePresence is a tool for orchestrating meetings between far-flung parties that will deliver a vastly more intimate experience, Cisco claims. Announced on Oct. 23, the solution is the San Jose, Calif.-based networking gear maker's first foray into the fledgling "telepresence" market.

The term is industry jargon for attempting to simulate real-time interactions between people in different locations using high-definition monitors, highly sensitive audio equipment, and integrated networking gear.

The technology aims to be so realistic as to make conference-call participants believe the person talking on the monitor is actually in the same room.

For example, picture a conference room with six chairs, three on each side of a conference table. Envision a clear glass panel running down the center of the table.

Walk into this room while a high-level parlay is under way, and you'd see six executives deep in conversation. But here's the catch: Only three of them are physically present. The three participants closest to you actually are in the room. The others are in another location, but their life-size, high-definition images are on the glass partition in the conference room.

The illusion reportedly is heightened because both locations use matching furnishings. Other elements that enhance the effect are that participants appear to make direct eye contact with one another, the streaming video is smooth and flawless, and the audio is perfectly matched to lip movement.

Several companies, including Hewlett-Packard Co., already offer telepresence products. The market is projected to grow to $300 million by 2008, according to technology research firm Gartner Inc.

Cisco, which makes the routers and switches used to link networks, is banking that large corporate clients will flock to the technology and propel it into a billion-dollar business.

One of Cisco's newest products is a high-end room that can accommodate up to 12 people around the virtual table and comes with three 65-inch plasma displays, three high-definition cameras, and the table and lighting. Price: $299,000.






The other is a single-screen version that costs $79,000 and can accommodate up to four people.

Both products are designed to run across a company's existing network, said Marthin De Beer, vice president of Cisco's Emerging Markets Technology Group.

But to take advantage of the technology, customers must have robust bandwidth; the high-end room uses about 10 megabits of bandwidth per second.

De Beer said the technology marks a dramatic improvement in reliability, ease of use, and overall realism over traditional video conferencing products and solves a lingering business dilemma.

"This has been an elusive dream for many years," he said. "With all the technologies of the past, people were never comfortable to use it for real business, to close that deal or sign that contract."

Whether the illusion of greater intimacy is important enough for schools to justify the higher price tag remains to be seen.

"Telepresence will have a very limited role in education in the near future, given the [initial] price point," said Vijay Sonty, chief information officer for Florida's Broward County Public Schools.

Sonty said Broward County is now piloting a video conferencing system that lowers the cost to about $200 per end point and reportedly works with all other major systems. He said the high-definition capabilities of the district's current system are "more than sufficient for education," including teaching, learning, and research.

David Willis, chief of research for Gartner, said the steep price and network requirements make Cisco's products irrelevant for all but the largest of customers. But he was impressed with the technology.

"It's an amazing illusion," he said. "It really pulls off the experience of a real meeting. And I hate video conferencing ... But this is like David Copperfield. This is like magic."

Cisco said the systems are already available and should begin shipping to customers in about four weeks.

Link:

Cisco TelePresence
http://www.cisco.com/telepresence







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ALL things DIGITAL and SOME Unintended Consequences

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October 31, 2006

Essay

Computing, 2016: What Won’t Be Possible?

By STEVE LOHR

Computer science is not only a comparatively young field, but also one that has had to prove it is really science. Skeptics in academia would often say that after Alan Turing described the concept of the “universal machine” in the late 1930’s — the idea that a computer in theory could be made to do the work of any kind of calculating machine, including the human brain — all that remained to be done was mere engineering.

The more generous perspective today is that decades of stunningly rapid advances in processing speed, storage and networking, along with the development of increasingly clever software, have brought computing into science, business and culture in ways that were barely imagined years ago. The quantitative changes delivered through smart engineering opened the door to qualitative changes.

Computing changes what can be seen, simulated and done. So in science, computing makes it possible to simulate climate change and unravel the human genome. In business, low-cost computing, the Internet and digital communications are transforming the global economy. In culture, the artifacts of computing include the iPod, YouTube and computer-animated movies.

What’s next? That was the subject of a symposium in Washington this month held by the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, which is part of the National Academies and the nation’s leading advisory board on science and technology. Joseph F. Traub, the board’s chairman and a professor at Columbia University, titled the symposium “2016.”

Computer scientists from academia and companies like I.B.M. and Google discussed topics including social networks, digital imaging, online media and the impact on work and employment. But most talks touched on two broad themes: the impact of computing will go deeper into the sciences and spread more into the social sciences, and policy issues will loom large, as the technology becomes more powerful and more pervasive.

Richard M. Karp, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, gave a talk whose title seemed esoteric: “The Algorithmic Nature of Scientific Theories.”

Yet he presented a fundamental explanation for why computing has had such a major impact on other sciences, and Dr. Karp himself personifies the trend. His research has moved beyond computer science to microbiology in recent years. An algorithm, put simply, is a step-by-step recipe for calculation, and it is a central concept in both mathematics and computer science.

“Algorithms are small but beautiful,” Dr. Karp observed. And algorithms are good at describing dynamic processes, while scientific formulas or equations are more suited to static phenomena. Increasingly, scientific research seeks to understand dynamic processes, and computer science, he said, is the systematic study of algorithms.

Biology, Dr. Karp said, is now understood as an information science. And scientists seek to describe biological processes, like protein production, as algorithms. “In other words, nature is computing,” he said.

Social networks, noted Jon Kleinberg, a professor at Cornell, are pre-technological creations that sociologists have been analyzing for decades. A classic example, he noted, was the work of Stanley Milgram of Harvard, who in the 1960’s asked each of several volunteers in the Midwest to get a letter to a stranger in Boston. But the path was not direct: under the rules of the experiment, participants could send a letter only to someone they knew. The median number of intermediaries was six — hence, the term “six degrees of separation.”

But with the rise of the Internet, social networks and technology networks are becoming inextricably linked, so that behavior in social networks can be tracked on a scale never before possible.

“We’re really witnessing a revolution in measurement,” Dr. Kleinberg said.

The new social-and-technology networks that can be studied include e-mail patterns, buying recommendations on commercial Web sites like Amazon, messages and postings on community sites like MySpace and Facebook, and the diffusion of news, opinions, fads, urban myths, products and services over the Internet. Why do some online communities thrive, while others decline and perish? What forces or characteristics determine success? Can they be captured in a computing algorithm?

Social networking research promises a rich trove for marketers and politicians, as well as sociologists, economists, anthropologists, psychologists and educators.

“This is the introduction of computing and algorithmic processes into the social sciences in a big way,” Dr. Kleinberg said, “and we’re just at the beginning.”

But having a powerful new tool of tracking the online behavior of groups and individuals also raises serious privacy issues. That became apparent this summer when AOL inadvertently released Web search logs of 650,000 users.

Future trends in computer imaging and storage will make it possible for a person, wearing a tiny digital device with a microphone and camera, to essentially record his or her life. The potential for communication, media and personal enrichment is striking. Rick Rashid, a computer scientist and head of Microsoft’s research labs, noted that he would like to see a recording of the first steps of his grown son, or listen to a conversation he had with his father many years ago. “I’d like some of that back,” he said. “In the future, that will be possible.”

But clearly, the technology could also enable a surveillance society. “We’ll have the capability, and it will be up to society to determine how we use it,” Dr. Rashid said. “Society will determine that, not scientists.”

He surfaces...............!

DaimlerChrysler, science center offer tech education awards: The DaimlerChrysler Corporation Fund and the Detroit Science Center announced that the "Closing the Technology Gap" educational awards will return for a second year and applications can be submitted immediately.

The program, which honors teachers who have challenged and stimulated students in the areas of science, technology, engineering and math, will award a total of $87,000 to Michigan public schools.

The program aims to increase student interest and participation in the sciences and ultimately provide companies such as Chrysler Group with a viable, technology oriented work force in the future.

Michigan public school teachers who teach STEM courses are invited to submit an application via mail to the Detroit Science Center or the Web site www.chryslerteacherawards.com by Dec. 31.

Winners will be announced in May.

D.I.V.E. Handed to Students!

Amidst the flurry of positive developments over the past few months, the Operation DIVE project has traveled to new depths, up north! With some concerns raised over the safety issues of the project, a plan is currently working to have students at Traverse City Central High School develop the prototype design of the DIVE concept. Since CEF is about student-led learning, the teachers and students are weaving the DIVE design into a larger grant application that will involve the development of several underwater ROV teams.

One student sugested that perhaps we take the "Geocaching" idea but create a "Bay-Caching" project, where teams wirelessly maneuver their research vessels to specified coordinates and search the bay for the caches planted below!

A proposal from the school is expected this week! 10.30.06

DIVE DIGITAL WEB 2.0 (Coming to a Classroom Near You Soon?)

A Day in the Life of Web 2.0 By David Warlick Oct 15, 2006 URL: http://www.techlearning.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=193200296 The latest powerful online tools can be harnessed to transform and expand the learning experience. An 8th grade science teacher, Ms. S, retrieves her MP3 player from the computer-connected cradle where it's spent the night scanning the 17 podcasts she subscribes to. Having detected three new programs, the computer downloaded the files and copied them to the handheld. En route to work, Ms. S inserts the device into her dash-mounted cradle and reviews the podcasts, selecting a colleague's classroom presentation on global warming and a NASA conference lecture about interstellar space travel. As with all the teachers at her middle school, Ms. S keeps a regular blog where she writes about everything from homework assignments to reflections on course topics, with a full description posted each Monday morning on the how, what, and why of course material to be taught in the upcoming week. The teachers' blogs are all syndicated using RSS — Rich Site Summary, or the more informal and descriptive, Really Simple Syndication. With aggregation software, students, parents, administrators and other teachers can subscribe and have the freshly written blog entries immediately and automatically delivered to their desktops. Professional development, communication, cross-curricular lesson planning and articulation among grade levels are all served as educators regularly read each other's blogs and learn about topics and activities taking place in the various classrooms. The Monday reports in particular enable them to benefit by sharing strategies and materials with colleagues who teach the same subject or those in other departments. For instance, Mr. K, a health and P.E. teacher, frequently finds ways of integrating science issues covered in Ms. S's classroom with his health topics. He knows that Ms. S will focus on genetics this week, and he will be teaching about disease next week, so he arranges for them to meet and discuss a combination assignment. In preparation for the meeting, Mr. K conducts a Web search to find the most informative sites and adds the Center for Disease Control to his social bookmarks. (See the sidebar "How to Search and Tag," at bottom, right.) Meanwhile, social studies teacher Ms. L scans through sites tagged genetics in the school's social bookmark service. Her students may need quick access to them as they discuss genetic engineering current events during class. Mr. K's CDC site appears along with others that have been saved and tagged genetics. All assignments in Ms. L's class are turned in via blogs because she finds that their conversational nature encourages students to think and write in more depth than traditional formal essays or short answer assignments. Another advantage of receiving assignments in blog format is that both she and her students can subscribe, which means all of the kids' blogs appear in her aggregator, and students can reap the benefits of seeing each other's work. Ms. L crafts the blog assignments with an eye toward training students to think critically and to post informed, well-considered opinions. A common classroom activity, for instance, is to have students read the blogged entries of others and write persuasive reactions — one in agreement, another in disagreement — and post these writings as comments to their classmates' blogs. Initially, the students struggled with the task, but they eventually learned the goal was not necessarily to find an idea with which they personally disagreed but to find another side to an idea and write persuasively from that perspective. For the genetics assignment, students assume a range of positions — some that discourage work in genetic manipulation based on security, cost, and ethics, and others that support it based on the potential cure for disease, life extension, and increased food production. In response to these blogged assignments, Ms. L posts assessments in the form of comments. A few doors down the hall, veteran English teacher Mr. P is reviewing a new batch of student wikis. In an effort to help the students become better communicators, he never provides study guides for tests, instead relying on students to construct their own study resources using their team wikis. He rewards teams that create the most useful/popular study guides. How to Search and Tag To create a combination science/health lesson, Mr. K goes to Google News and searches for diseases that are in the news, cross-referencing them with the words genetics and mutation. The search engine returns references to about 10,000 articles from news sources from around the world. He sees several references to bird flu, so he right-clicks on the term and selects Search Google. A second browser window appears that reports 57.1 million hits, starting with a list of the top 10. The Web pages at the top are those most linked to by other pages — ranking by recommendation. Among the top links are sites from the Center for Disease Control, the World Health Organization, MSNBC, and the National Institute of Health. After selecting a facts page from the CDC, the health teacher clicks a link in the linksbar of his Web browser, adding the site in view to his online social bookmarks, what Mr. K calls his "personal digital library." In the page that follows, the health teacher selects from a list of tags to attach to the CDC Web page. These tags serve to categorize the Web page, enabling him to assign several categories (or tags) to a single page. He selects and clicks disease, genetics, health, Mr. K, and charlestonmiddle school. Because his online bookmarks are syndicated by tag, the site he has just added automatically appears on his Disease Unit Web page. Mr. P uses a wiki tool installed on the school's network. He devotes one part of the wiki site to general information and resources that he and the most accomplished students can edit. This part of the site serves as the class textbook. He also maintains other parts of the site for class teams, usually four students per team. These sections have their own passwords, and team members can log in to their wikis and enter text, images, links to audio and video files, and format their content in a variety of ways. Mr. P is able to track the number of unique views for each page so that he can measure and reward teams for producing the most useful communications. Earlier in the day, Student A had left Mr. P's room in a jubilant mood because she'd just learned that her team produced the most useful study guide for yesterday's test, which earned them 10 points toward level three in the class. Level three will give the team much more editing access to the class wiki and more opportunities to contribute to the class literary Web site and the literary book the students will publish at the end of the school year. Mr. P begins adjusting the volume on the microphone that hangs from his classroom ceiling. Today's discussion about The Grapes of Wrath will be recorded and posted in an audio file as a class podcast, as are all significant class presentations and discussions. Students, parents, community members, and other educators subscribe to his podcast programs. In fact, on the other side of town, Mrs. B, the parent of one of Mr. P's students, is listening to a podcast classroom conversation about a science fiction short story the students recently read. She and other parents subscribe to the podcasts so they can more easily engage their children in conversations about school. Page 2 At about the same time Mrs. B is listening to the lively classroom discussion, her son, Student B, is keying a text message from his school desk to his social studies class team. He briefly describes an idea for putting together a video as part of their current class project on rural cultures. The video idea had occurred to him a few days earlier while he and his mother were talking about one of the lesson recordings she'd listened to. Student C happens to be in study hall when she receives Student B's message and is excited about using a video in their presentation. She immediately accesses the school's social bookmarks, looking for sites that have been submitted by their science teacher, Ms. S, tagged with soil and plantgrowth. She identifies two sites, one from the Discovery Channel and the other from the USDA, called Ask a Worm. The idea is to create a video animation illustrating how soil quality affects cultures. As Student C tags the sites for her team, school librarian Ms. J is conducting research on behalf of a new math teacher. She and the school tech facilitator both subscribe to all of the teachers' Monday report blogs. With access to these weekly updates, they can use a shared spreadsheet to maintain an ongoing curriculum map of what's being taught in the school. The librarian and tech educator use the map to support teachers, finding and identifying resources and strategies related to what they are teaching. Ms. J is using a blogging search engine to find some serious Weblogs about mathematics so that the new teacher can include more practical applications in her current unit on real-world math. She finds several blogs: Galileo's Dilemma (math, physics, and chemistry), Dr. Katte's Blog (engineering), and BizImpresario (entrepreneurship). The librarian then adds the three blogs to the school's social bookmarks and tags them for the meeting that she has just noted on the school's collaborative social calendar. Meanwhile, the principal is also looking at the school calendar. She is finishing up a weekly blog entry that describes happenings at the school for the next seven days, including two class podcasts, a band concert (also to be podcasted), a guest speaker, an interesting lesson about ancient civilizations, and the PTO meeting. The administrator subscribes to and scans all of the teachers' Monday report blogs for material to include in her weekly report. She always posts the blog entry by the end of the day on Monday, which is read not only by parents but also by other schools, district leadership, and people from other parts of the community and country. Early that evening the district superintendent reads the principal's recently posted blog. He also subscribes to the teachers' Monday report blogs, finding that their writing gives him a bank of ideas for promoting the district and its efforts toward continued improvement. After he finishes the reading, he briefly accesses the wiki site where he and a committee of educators and community members are collaborating to develop a district improvement plan. He jots down a couple of ideas that occurred to him while reading the digital conversations that have come to define the middle school. He moves on to publish the wiki version of the improvement plan, inviting interested community members to edit the improvement plan within the wiki and insert their reflections and ideas through attached comments. This superintendent truly believes that, "It takes a village..." David Warlick is a blogger, podcaster, author, programmer, and public speaker. Podcast A syndicated audio (or video) program produced by traditional media such as radio and television but also by individuals including educators, hobbyists, students, or anyone passionate about a topic. Podcast Directories Education Podcast Network http://epnweb.org iTunes www.itunes.com Podcast.Net www.podcast.net Podcast Directory www.podcastdirectory.com Podcasting News www.podcastingnews.com Page 3 Blog Weblog, or chronological, online personal journal with reflections, comments, and often links to other Web sites provided by the writer. Others may subscribe to a person's blog, which allows them to read it and write comments in response. Blogging Software EduBlog http://edublogs.org Elgg http://elgg.org WordPress http://wordpress.org RSS Rich Site Summary (or Really Simple Syndication), a format for aggregating Web content in one place. Say you're a social studies teacher and you've found 20 or 30 Weblogs and media sites consistently publishing relevant information. Finding the time to visit those sites on a regular basis would be nearly impossible. A type of software called an aggregator or feed collector checks the feeds you subscribe to, usually every hour, and collects all the new content from those sites and sends it to your desktop. In other words, you check one site instead of 30. (See "The ABCs of RSS," on www.techlearning.com) Aggregators Bloglines http://bloglines.com Netvibes http://netvibes.com Social Bookmarking A Web-based service where shared lists of user-created Internet bookmarks are displayed. Social bookmarking sites are an increasingly popular way to locate, classify, rank, and share Internet resources through the practice of tagging and inferences drawn from grouping and analysis of tags. Some social bookmarking services let users list other users who have bookmarked the same Web sites. (Definition courtesy in part of Wikipedia.) Social Bookmarking Services Del.icio.us http://del.icio.us Furl http://furl.net Social Calendar Online schedules that allow more than one user to read and enter data. A team of workers can use the services as a collaborative scheduler to manage projects and business operations. Google Calendar http://calendar.google.com Yahoo Calendar http://calendar.yahoo.com Wiki A type of Web site that allows visitors to easily add, remove, or otherwise edit and change some available content, sometimes without the need for registration. This ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an effective tool for collaborative authoring. For information about creating wiki student guides, go to http://www.techlearning.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=191801354. (Definition courtesy of Wikipedia) Wiki Tools MediaWiki http://mediawiki.org Peanut Butter Wiki http://pbwiki.com PMWiki http://pmwiki.com Wikispaces http://wikispaces.com

The URGENCY of the DIGITAL EMERGENCY!

The Fischbowl

http://thefischbowl.blogspot.com/2006/08/did-you-know.html

Check-out the PowerPointe Slideshow........geared to "stretch" the mind and imagination!

NUFF SAID!

Summary, Please!

Karl:

Could you give us a "snapshot" of last weeks event(s) and let us know what's next?

Best,

Jim

The GIFT That Keeps on Giving!

More from Convergence: The Convergence Education Foundation will honor its Project Partners at this week's Convergence 2006 automotive technology event in Detroit. the program offers hands-on learning experiences to attract students to the careers that one day will support automotive technology. The foundation reaches more than 30,000 students per year across Michigan, Ohio and Indiana. Current Project Partners include Siemens VDO, Yazaki North American, Continental, General Motors Corp., NAVTEQ, SAE International, Microsoft, Jabil Circuit, Saturn Electronics and Engineering and Robert Bosch Corp. Students involved in one foundation effort, the Innovative Vehicle Design program, are showcasing their vehicle designs at the foundation's booth on the Convergence trade show floor. More at www.cef-trek.org. Also, San Jose, Calif.-based Atmel Corp. (NASDAQ: ATML) announced a new set of microcontroller-transmitter integrated circuits with sensor interface for tire pressure monitoring sensor gauge systems. The devices are the first to market that combine all necessary building blocks to support the measurement and calibration of capacitive pressure and motion sensors, plus complete radio transmission functionality.

CONGRATULATIONS!

Yazaki North America also announced that for the fourth straight year it is supporting "major support" to the Convergence Education Foundation, including financial, staff time and materials contributions. Yazaki CEO George Perry will also offer comments at a press conference scheduled for Wednesday at noon to announce a new partnership campaign for the foundation. More at www.cef-trek.org. Also, Munich, Germany-based chipmaker Infineon Technologies AG (NYSE: IFX) introduced advanced electronics that increase the energy efficiency of hybrids -- control systems half the size and weight of current units. More at www.infineon.com. Fujitsu Microelectronics America Inc. also made a bunch of product announcements. Included are a new high-speed controller intended for driver assistant applications, a new family of graphics display controllers for vehicle navigation systems featuring more speed for multimedia and dashboard applications, and three new high-speed, 32-bit microcontrollers for advanced auto body control applications, including door, seat, air conditioning and more. More at http://us.fujitsu.com/micro/.

MUCH CONTINUED SUCCESS!!!!!!!

Best,

Jim

ADDITIONALLY

Convergence 2006 offers host of auto technology innovations

Electronic companies by the score offered new wares Monday at the Convergence 2006 automotive technology show at Detroit's Cobo Center. There were a ton, so here goes a long list: San Jose, Calif.-based Atmel Corp. NASDAQ: ATML) introduced three new integrated circuits for high-temperature applications, up to 200 degrees Centigrade (), for applications like turbochargers or exhaust gas recirculation systems. The circuits also offer advanced packaging for increased reliability. More at www.atmel.com. Also, Austin, Texas-based Silicon Laboratories Inc. (NASDAQ: SLAB) introduced new mixed-signal integrated circuits for automotive electronics such as power windows, doors, sunroofs, trunks, adjustable seats and mirrors. More at www.silabs.com. Also, new technology for embedded electronics and mechatronics controls is being demonstrated by Dspace, a German tech company with its North American headquarters in Novi. Dspace technology turns prototype software into industry standard compliant code, as well as virtual vehicle simulation models. More at www.dspaceinc.com.

EXPERIENCE YOUR FUTURE THIS WEEK

BEST TO ALL PARTICIPANTS IN THIS WEEK OF EXCITING NEW DISCOVERIES.

Convergence Foundation Student Exhibitors

Good Luck Today! Enjoy, Teach, Learn and Understand The World Around You and The Way in Which It Works!

Best,

Jim Ross
21st Century Digital Learning Environments

Media BLITZ Begins ZOOMING!

Southeast Michigan high school students showcase electric vehicles: Four high school teams showcased electric vehicles over the weekend during a performance test day hosted by Siemens VDO in Auburn Hills. The Huron Intermediate School District in Bad Axe, Summit Academy High School in Flat Rock, University High School in Ferndale and the William D. Ford Career Technical Center in the Wayne-Westland schools participated in the Innovative Vehicle Design program, in which high school students work with corporate partners to build one-person electric vehicles. The IVD program, an initiative of the Convergence Education Foundation, is built as an innovation, not a racing competition. Each team received $5,000 from a corporate partner matched by $5,000 from the foundation, a 10-month build window, and the leadership for all portions of the planning and development for the vehicle. The test day, phase one of the judging process, evaluated each team's vehicle performance. Teams were evaluated on the distance traveled during two 30-minute windows on two different track configurations. The second phase of judging will take place at Convergence 2006 next week, where teams will be further evaluated in the areas of engineering, presentation, ambassadorship and innovation. The winning team will be announced at the Convergence Education Foundation's Convergence 2006 booth Oct. 18 at Cobo Center. More at www.cef-trek.org.

The Long Tail of the LONG ZOOM!

October 8, 2006

The Long Zoom

By STEVEN JOHNSON

Most eras have distinct “ways of seeing” that end up defining the period in retrospect: the fixed perspective of Renaissance art, the scattered collages of Cubism, the rapid-fire cuts introduced by MTV and the channel-surfing of the 80’s. Our own defining view is what you might call the long zoom: the satellites tracking in on license-plate numbers in the spy movies; the Google maps in which a few clicks take you from a view of an entire region to the roof of your house; the opening shot in “Fight Club” that pulls out from Edward Norton’s synapses all the way to his quivering face as he stares into the muzzle of a revolver; the fractal geometry of chaos theory in which each new scale reveals endless complexity. And this is not just a way of seeing but also a way of thinking: moving conceptually from the scale of DNA to the scale of personality all the way up to social movements and politics — and back again.

It is, by any measure, a difficult way of thinking, in part because our brains did not evolve tools to perceive or intuitively understand the scales of microbes or galaxies. You can catch glimpses of the long zoom in special-effects sequences, but to understand the connections between those different scales, to understand our place in the universe of the very large and the very small, you have to take another way in. To date, books and documentaries have done the best job of making the long zoom meaningful to mass audiences, starting with the Eames Brothers’ proto-long-zoom “Powers of Ten” documentary of the 70’s, which took the viewer from the outer cosmos to the atoms spinning in the hand of a man lying by the lake in Chicago. But a decade or two from now, when we look back at this period, it is more likely that the work that will fix the long zoom in the popular imagination will be neither a movie nor a book nor anything associated with the cultural products that dominated the 20th century. It will be a computer game.

The designer of the game happens to be both the most famous and most critically acclaimed designer in the young medium’s history: Will Wright, the 46-year-old creator of the blockbuster hits SimCity and the Sims. When I visited with Wright recently, he was sitting in a greenhouselike office on the roof of an anonymous-looking complex in Emeryville, Calif., a few miles west of Oakland, where his studio is based. For the first few minutes of our meeting, Wright was having trouble with the atmosphere of the game, which is called Spore. He was trying to explain how some players will be able to create entire galaxies populated by artificial life forms when the game is introduced sometime late next year. He had pulled up the highest level of Spore — where the player gets to create and colonize a new planet — to demonstrate the way in which the game simulates the complex dynamics of ecosystems and food webs. But before he could colonize the planet, he had to cultivate an environment hospitable to life by heating up the surface or cooling it down and by adding moisture. Unfortunately, Spore’s planetary simulator —- like our own atmosphere — is vulnerable to the inconvenient truths of runaway feedback loops; as Wright added a little heat to his planet, it quickly spiraled into a molten fireball. And so our conversation lurched to a halt as Wright tried to get the right balance.

“O.K., now we’re finally cooling off,” he said, clicking furiously on his computer screen. “The temperature’s going down, so we can get more water in here. Oh, now we’ve got way too much atmosphere.” While adjusting the planet, he paused long enough to say: “It’s kind of like that labyrinth game where you’re rolling the ball around the maze, trying to drop it in the hole. Except we’ve got these inertial effects, where your planet starts heating up, and you’re trying to slow it down, but you get these runaway greenhouse effects.” He turned back to the screen. “O.K., our temperature’s pretty good; our atmosphere’s pretty good. Now let’s see if we can add water.”

This atmospheric balancing act is emblematic of Wright’s whole career: hitting that elusive sweet spot between difficulty and accessibility, between highbrow concepts and lowbrow diversion. If he can get the atmosphere-building tool to work, it could be both an addictive game-play element and, at the same time, a hands-on lesson in the dynamics of atmospheric systems. The challenge here is, ultimately, a smaller version of the larger challenge that faces Spore. No one doubts that the game will be the most ambitious work in the history of this new medium, whenever it is released. But for it to succeed as a game, it can’t just be complex. It also has to be fun.

If anyone can pull it off, it’s Will Wright. This is the guy who made the urban planning simulation SimCity into one of the all-time top-selling games in history. There is probably no one alive who has a comparable track record of combining arcane scientific theories and compulsively addictive entertainment.

But even Wright hasn’t tried to simulate an entire universe before.



I got a first glimpse of Spore six years ago, when I visited Wright to talk to him about the Sims Online, the networked version of the massive international hit, the Sims. We talked about the Sims Online and his general design philosophy for an hour or so, and then he cut off our conversation abruptly and said, “Let me show you something else that I’m really excited about — but you can’t write about it yet.” He then proceeded to show me a sequence of animations that looked, to my eyes at least, like the trip-out special-effects sequence at the end of “2001.” I had no idea what I was even looking at. It wasn’t at all clear where the game was or if it was a game at all.

Spore has progressed mightily over the past six years — an eternity in game-development time — though an official start date has yet to be set by its producer, Electronic Arts, the world’s largest game maker. “What you’re doing in Spore is layer by layer creating an entire world that at the end of the day is entirely yours: the creatures, the vehicles, the cities, the planets,” Wright explained. Those layers map onto different spatial scales that you advance through as you play: cell, creature, tribe, city, civilization and space. (As in most traditional games, once you have completed a level, you can always go back to it. A skilled gamer might be able to reach the highest level after 30 hours of play, but like all of Wright’s creations, the game has no definite ending.) As you begin playing Spore, you take on the role of a single-celled organism, swimming in a sea of nutrients and tiny predators. This part of the game has a streamlined, 2-D look that harks back to classic games from the 80’s like PacMan. Once you have accumulated enough “DNA points” or “evolutionary credits,” you acquire the use of a feature called the “creature editor,” and things start to get really interesting. You assemble a new life form to represent yourself using an almost comically intuitive tool. If you have the technical chops to assemble a Mr. Potato Head, you can build a creature in Spore. You start with a basic body type wrapped around a standard skeleton, and then you can pretty much do whatever you want to it: stretch it out, condense it, add seven asymmetrical legs and one pincer, give it eyes on both sides of its head or wrap a polka-dot skin texture around it. I’ve seen creatures designed as exact replicas of the Care Bears, and I’ve seen creatures that look like H.R. Giger’s sketches for “Alien.”

Once you have assembled your creature, you deposit it in a functioning ecosystem, a computer-generated world populated by plants, food, water, weather, predators and prey. At first you guide a single creature, instructing it to forage, hunt, drink, sleep, mate; your strategy evolves depending on the needs of your creature and the opportunities and threats presented by the environment. As you struggle your way through this early stage, you earn more DNA points that allow you to add new attributes to your creature — like humanlike intelligence — and eventually graduate to the next level, where you control a group of creatures that form a primitive tribe, augmented by simple tools. (Wright showed me a tribe bonding around a campfire, playing drums and dancing, before heading out for a communal hunting expedition.) At this point, the player moves from questions of basic metabolism to social dynamics: Is your tribe a band of warriors or a peace-loving commune? Is it intent on exploiting new technologies? Or does it focus on low-tech social camaraderie?

When your tribe has reached a sufficient level of sophistication, it will begin to form cities, and the player shifts to issues of trade and commerce or constructing roads and buildings. All the while, decisions made at earlier stages of the game continue to shape the current stage: adopting a carnivorous lifestyle in the creature stage changes the activities available to your subsequent tribe; a tribe of warriors will have a harder time building alliances with other cities when it reaches that stage. Eventually, you ascend to a United Nations-like perspective as you try to unify an entire planet divided between rival civilizations. Once you successfully pass from the “clash of civilizations” stage to the “end of history,” the game grants you that ultimate in Hegelian rewards: a spaceship. And then you’re off terraforming other planets and exploring an entire universe teeming with Spore life.

The different levels of Spore call for radically different styles of game play, each a subtle tribute to a canonical game of the past that influenced Wright. There is an elegance to those allusions, but as a game design strategy, it’s a risky move; most games don’t force you to juggle different genres. “When I looked at each scale,” Wright said, “the game play just seemed kind of natural to me: at the cellular level, you’d be PacMan; at the city level, it’d be Populous. I was worried about that, because mixed-genre games don’t do that well. But eventually we just decided to break the rules, and the genres would just be a kind of landmark that the players would recognize.”

To date, Wright has publicly demonstrated Spore on four occasions. Three of them were major game-industry conferences, all of which have triggered a frenzy of online analysis and debate. (Video clips of those demos have been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times on YouTube.) But for people who still think of game design as the province of nerds and arrested adolescents, Wright’s most striking public demo came earlier this summer in San Francisco during an onstage conversation with the musician and artist Brian Eno in front of a thousand rapt fans gathered at the Herbst Theater. The two men riffed comfortably onstage, talking about “generative” art that evolves in unpredictable ways, often determined by the audience and not the original creator. Eno played one or two examples of his generative compositions, and Wright showed off a few levels of Spore.

“We’ve both been working on similar lines,” Eno said recently on the phone from his Notting Hill studio when I asked him about the connections between his work and Wright’s, “and I suppose we’ve converged. Instead of making fixed definitive things that we put out into the world, I think we’ve both decided that it’s much more interesting to make things that even we can’t predict.”

One explanation for the widespread interest in Spore is the gaming industry’s recent troubles. Sales have been uneven, and the best-seller lists are stacked with franchise hits, games whose basic conventions were established years ago, like the Madden football series, the controversial Grand Theft Auto titles and Wright’s own Sims franchise, which has thus far spun off more than a dozen sequels and expansion packs. When you factor in the moral panics over violent gaming emanating from Washington, it makes for a somewhat depressing time to be a game developer. Spore promises an escape from this bleak present: the game itself is about as violent as a cartoon version of Animal Planet, which should come as welcome relief for an industry tired of public attacks on Grand Theft Auto as a corrupter of youth.

Another factor in the hype is Wright’s extraordinary track record. His original breakthrough game, SimCity, released in 1989, helped inaugurate an entire genre of gaming: the “god game,” in which the player supervises a bustling and multifaceted system, managing resources, juggling different objectives. Visit the racks at a game store and you’ll see dozens of titles that descend from Wright’s original design for SimCity, games that let you manage a railroad empire or an amusement park or a zoo. (There are at least three games currently on the market that let you recreate Ancient Rome.) The Sims — released in 2000 — narrowed the god-game vista to the realm of the living room and the neighborhood. It went on to become the best-selling PC game of all time, in part because it attracted an unusual number of female players. Instead of allowing you to create the civic infrastructure for a vast metropolis, the Sims let players explore the more quotidian decision-making of home economics: paying the bills, buying furniture and appliances, cooking dinner for the kids. It is one of the resounding paradoxes of the game industry that its all-time best seller consists largely of performing household chores.

The sales history for the Sims is, of course, part of the reason that so many people are following Spore so closely. Since its introduction, more than 70 million copies of the original game and its spinoffs have been sold, generating $1.6 billion in sales. (The biggest Hollywood moneymaker of all-time, “Titanic,” grossed $1.8 billion worldwide.)

But Spore — which will reportedly cost about $20 million to develop — promises to be more than just a blockbuster diversion. As Wright’s appearance with Eno suggests, the game perhaps deserves to be seen as a work of art first and foremost, a way of seeing and making sense of the world. If it succeeds, it may be in part because of the way its long-zoom perspective resonates with this particular moment in time. “I don’t know if we’re thinking about ‘powers of 10’ more, but we definitely bump into that perspective now in all kinds of cultural contexts,” says the game designer Ralph Koster, who wrote one of the best books to date about games and culture, “A Theory of Fun.” “But Will has definitely been thinking about it. There was always something powers-of-10-ish about SimCity. And way, way back in SimEarth” — Wright’s 1990 game — “there was a window that would pop up and say, ‘This key reserved for future expansion for putting your SimCity into your SimEarth.”’



“It’s funny how many people, average people who aren’t science buffs or hard-core gamers, get the elegance of the theme — the powers of 10 idea,” Wright told me in his Emeryville office, having finally given up on creating a viable atmosphere. “Everybody has a different take on it: for some people, it has a religious theme; for others, it’s awe at nature and science. But everybody seems to understand that it’s a valuable perspective, and it’s a perspective that they like to have. In a way, what I’m trying to do is connect the almost inconceivable universal scale to the deeply personal, because what you do in the game is deeply personal.”

The long-zoom perspective is one of the key ways in which Wright’s work dovetails with Eno’s. Their talk in San Francisco was sponsored by the Long Now Foundation, an organization created to facilitate thinking on immense temporal scales: a thousand years or beyond. (The “long now” is a coinage of Eno’s, and the group’s most famous project to date is the Clock of the Long Now, an engineering marvel designed to keep time for thousands of years.) “One of the things that’s obviously been happening for the past 100 or 200 years,” Eno told me, “is that the range of our experience has greatly expanded: we can see much smaller things and much bigger things than we ever could before. But we can also start thinking about much longer futures and much deeper pasts as well. That really makes a big difference to us as humans, because on the one hand it makes us realize that we’re very powerful in that we’re able to comprehend and see all of this universe. But it also makes us seem so much less significant. We’re a tiny blip on a tiny radar screen. I think this is a feeling that people are trying to come to terms with, the feeling of where do we fit in all of this.”

And arguably the best way to come to terms with that feeling is to explore those different scales of experience directly, to move from the near-invisible realm of microbes to the vast distances of galaxies. Of all the forms of culture available to us today, games may well be the most effective at conveying that elusive perspective, precisely because they are so immersive and participatory and because their design can be so open-ended. “I wanted to make a game that would recreate a drug induced epiphany,” Wright told me. “I want people to be able to step back five steps, five really big steps. To think about life itself and its potential galactic-scale impact. I want the gamers to have this awesome perspective handed to them in a game. And then let them decide how to interpret it.”



The idea of a video game’s tackling such complex subject matter may strike some readers as surprising, but in truth staggeringly complex games have long appeared prominently on the gaming best-seller lists. One of the most lucrative franchises in the history of computer games is the Civilization series, which lets players recreate the entire course of human economic and technological history, experimenting with different political and legal systems, exploring alternate time lines of scientific development. The collaborative worlds of hugely popular, networked online games like World of Warcraft have evolved entire economies and social systems that mimic the complexity of small nation-states in the real world. Spore may be more ambitious in scope than these games, but its two most important innovations lie elsewhere: in its system for generating user-created creatures and in the way it allows players to share their creations with others.

Conventional game development follows a predictable pattern: the game designers decide which objects and characters will inhabit the world of the game, and then animators create computer models for those objects and characters, which are then inserted into a game in a fixed state — an animation of Tiger Woods swinging a golf club or James Bond reaching for a gun or a character in the Sims taking out the trash. But Spore’s open-ended approach to creature design fundamentally broke that system. Before I met with Wright, Spore’s executive producer, Lucy Bradshaw, gave me a tour of the Spore studio and introduced me to a barefoot, speed-talking “technology fellow” named Chris Hecker, who had helped develop Spore’s unique animation system. Hecker had a perfect one-liner for the technical hurdles the team faced: “The question is, How do you do animations for things you’ve never seen before?”

The solution Wright and his team hit upon revolves around something called “procedural animation,” a way for the game designer to model certain key behaviors — walk, run, grab, fight — without necessarily knowing anything about the basic body type of the creature itself. If you design a creature with five legs asymmetrically scattered around its body, the Spore animation engine will figure out how such a creature would walk. To demonstrate the adaptability of the system, Hecker pulled up a collection of a dozen Spore creatures on his monitor, each with a strikingly distinct body architecture. The initial image was comical enough: it looked as if the bizarre Cambrian-era fossils that Stephen Jay Gould wrote about in “Wonderful Life” had been reassembled for a police lineup. Some looked like slugs, some like spiders, some like extras from “Where the Wild Things Are.”

And then Hecker hit a key, and they all, miraculously, did a back flip, each in its own decidedly idiosyncratic way.

But surely, I asked, given the open-ended, no-two-creatures-alike nature of the editor, there are going to be some creatures that have body types that won’t perform certain actions? Hecker and Bradshaw nodded emphatically. They know that a certain percentage of their users will be building creatures deliberately designed to foil the procedural animation system. Those creatures won’t likely be “fit” in a traditional evolutionary sense, in that they will be less skilled at collecting food or avoiding predators. But they will be perversely satisfying to players keen on exploring the boundaries of the Spore architecture. Hecker pulled up a new lineup to demonstrate a clapping animation that included a creature whose cranium is so inconveniently located that clapping forces him to slap both his hands against the side of his head. It looked like slapstick comedy of the highest order — vaudeville meets “Monsters, Inc. ”

“Our philosophy is,” Bradshaw said, “if it’s going to break, it should break funny.”

The procedural approach has another fringe benefit, one that helped bring about Spore’s other major innovation. Characters and objects can be compressed down to incredibly small files. An entire planet in Spore — teeming with plants, weather and creatures — takes up about 80K of memory. By comparison, a typical song on your iPod is about 50 times larger. You could download an entire galaxy of Spore planets before you could download all the tracks on “Dark Side of the Moon.”

That small file size is crucial to the way the game allows players to share their creations with other players in the Spore universe. As you work your way through the Spore levels, your creatures are automatically sent back to the central Spore file servers, where they are then used to populate the worlds of other players. This approach was directly inspired by Freeman Dyson’s notion of Panspermia — the idea that life on earth may have been seeded via meteors carrying microscopic “spores” of life from other planets. (Dyson’s concept is also the origin of the game’s title.) When you land on a new planet in the game’s final stage, it may be teeming with multiple exotic species, all of whom have evolved separately on other computers around the world, guided by the tastes and imagination of complete strangers. But these creatures will, crucially, have lives of their own once they have found their ways onto your machine. They will not be controlled by other players as you interact with them on your screen. Once they have migrated to your computer, they will act autonomously, based on the procedural animation and artificial-intelligence algorithms of the Spore software. By the same token, the creatures that you have lovingly brought to life will spread throughout the alternate universes of other Spore players, struggling for existence on their own, independent from your direct control.

In this respect, Spore breaks decisively from the fastest-growing genre in gaming today: the so-called massively multiplayer networked games — like World of Warcraft — where thousands of players share a single persistent virtual world, interacting with other players via their onscreen characters. (Interestingly, Wright’s only foray into massively multiplayer design — the online version of the Sims that launched in 2002 — was a flop.) When you visit a bustling town center in a multiplayer game and see hundreds of characters sharing the space, you are intensely aware that each of these onscreen characters is being controlled from moment to moment by a live, sentient human somewhere in the real world. The social element is very much in the foreground of the experience. Spore flips that model on its head. Instead of a single shared world with millions of active participants, Spore promises a million alternate worlds, each occupied by a single player. You will meet creatures invented by others, but ultimately you are alone in your own private universe. Wright calls Spore “massively single player.”

It remains an open question whether this model will take hold with today’s players, who are increasingly used to the social dimension of online play. “I’m obviously biased toward the online worlds,” Koster said, “but the fact that I’ll never encounter someone else’s galactic empire that actually has some human brain behind it depresses me a little, because that would be awfully cool — especially with the scope and scale we’re talking about with Spore.”

When you visit the Spore studio in Emeryville, the largest open room looks, at first glance, like a standard well-financed Bay Area software company: the double-height loft-ceilings, the bean-bag chairs slung around an oversize monitor, the barefoot employees. But the art strung up on the walls suggests that something different is being concocted here. There are beautiful renderings of imagined Spore planets that demonstrate the range of aesthetics possible in the game: a lush, organic world called Shittake Moon; a surreal globe called Crabclaw with landmasses shaped like giant crustaceans. Everyone’s desk is populated by plastic action figures of Spore creatures, manufactured in-house by Wright’s employees using a 3-D printer that can generate a physical toy in a matter of minutes from a computer model. (Electronic Arts is investigating the possibility of selling customized Spore critters in toy stores as a side business.)

As Bradshaw, the executive producer, gave me a tour of the office, I found myself being reminded of something, but for a few minutes I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. And then it hit me: the general feel of the place reminded me of my son’s kindergarten classroom, with its walls covered with renderings of imaginary worlds and creatures and its shelves filled with toys designed to teach and entertain at the same time.

When we finally made it up to his office, I asked Wright about the educational side of his game. “The big underlying theme is creativity,” he said. “We want to prove to the players that they can make these really cool things that they never thought they could make. It’s the computer as an amplifier of your imagination.” Like all of Wright’s games, Spore is likely to attract a broad range of age groups. A tech-savvy 7-year-old could easily obsess over the game, as could a mid-50’s reader of Jared Diamond or E.O. Wilson.

Of course, some of the content of Spore is fanciful. The “DNA points” that players accumulate have no real-world analogue, for instance, and thus far no one — that we know of — has been able to grow a life-sustaining environment on a lifeless planet. “I’ve had a few people ask me if I think Spore will help teach evolution,” Wright said, “and the ironic thing is that, if anything, we’re teaching intelligent design. I’ve seen a few games that relied on evolution — I’ve even designed some of them — and it’s just not as fun.” But, of course, there’s one crucial way in which Spore breaks from intelligent design. The universe of the game is not dominated by a single, all-powerful creator. It’s a universe governed by a million intelligent designers, each unleashing his or her creations to be fruitful and multiply, to conquer and befriend, to fly spaceships and fashion planets.

Despite the fictions, many of the themes of Spore are immensely valuable ones, particularly in an age of environmental crisis: the fragility of life, the connection between micro- and macro- scales, the complex networks of ecosystems and food webs, the impact of new technology on social systems. Spore’s players will get to experience firsthand how choices made on a local scale — a single creature’s decision to, say, adopt an omnivorous lifestyle — can end up having global repercussions. They will detect similarities between one level of the game and another, the complex balancing act of global trade mirroring the complex balancing act of building a sustainable environment. And traveling through a simulated universe, from cells to constellations, will, ideally, make them more curious about the real-world universe they already inhabit — and show them that they have the power to shape that universe as well.

“What’s very interesting about games,” Eno said, “is that they let you begin thinking about possibilities when you’re young enough to incorporate them into your life. So I think a game that says to people, You can make things that then have independent lives, that’s already quite an amazing idea. And then these things can interact with other people’s objects — that’s quite a grown-up idea.”

It occurred to me as I wandered through the halls of the Spore offices that a troubled school system could probably do far worse than to devote an entire, say, fourth-grade year to playing Spore. The kids would get a valuable perspective on their universe; they would learn technical skills and exercise their imaginations at the same time; they would learn about the responsibility that comes from creating independent life. And no doubt you would have to drag them out of the classrooms at the end of the day. When I mentioned this to Eno, he immediately chimed in agreement. “I thought the same thing,” he said. “If you really want to reinvent education, look at games. They fold everything in: history, sociology, anthropology, chemistry — you can piggyback everything on it.

“But my wife made a good point when I was talking about this the other day. She says it’s important for kids to do boring things too. Because if you can find excitement in something boring, then you’re set up for life. Whereas if you constantly need entertainment, you might have a problem, because life is full of things that aren’t entertaining. So I think I’d have three days of Spore and two days of obligatory Latin.”

Steven Johnson is the author of “Everything Bad Is Good For You.” His new book, “The Ghost Map,” about an epidemic in Victorian London, will be published later this month.

School of the Future / Validation of OUR Research & Development Digital Education Executions

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Contents Copyright 2006 eSchool News. All rights reserved.

'School of the Future' opens
Microsoft, Philly explore new ground with high-tech facility

By Corey Murray, Senior Editor
October 1, 2006

The School of the Future, the long- anticipated joint venture between software giant Microsoft Corp. and the School District of Philadelphia, held its first day of classes Sept. 7. Project organizers say the state-of-the-art facility is intended to serve as a model for other school districts as administrators seek to better meet the needs of 21st-century learners.

eSchool Newswas on location as students and teachers took to the halls to explore this technological marvel. The sprawling facility, situated in the traditionally low-income neighborhood of Fairmont Park, just a few blocks from the Philadelphia Zoo, will serve some 750 students within four years.

More than simply building a school that would showcase technology for its own sake, project leaders sought to create a truly interactive learning environment that could tackle the unique needs of today's students.

Built for $63 million and paid for out the school system's capital improvement budget, the school was designed not as a one-of-a-kind institution, but as a concept that could be replicated by other school systems looking to better prepare their students for the challenges of the 21st century. Rather than donate money to help build the school or supply equipment, Microsoft instead donated human capital, assigning a team of educators and technologists to work in concert with the school system and the surrounding community to create a sustainable learning environment that could be expected to produce a more engaged, productive, and committed student body. "As a company, Microsoft didn't simply want to cut the school district a check," explained Mary Cullinane, Microsoft's lead on the project.

For the parents and students who took to the school for the first time to meet with teachers and administrators, the moment marked the start of a school year steeped in hope, pressure, and the highest of expectations.

"This is a very special moment & it's a very special class," said Philadelphia Mayor John Street prior to welcoming students into the school.

Street called the School of the Future "the premier institution of its kind anywhere in the country" and challenged the students as they walked through the doors for the first time to commit themselves fully to the opportunity before them. "There are no excuses," said Street as students entered the building for their first full day of classes.

"To whom much is given, much is expected," charged school district CEO Paul Vallas. Perhaps nowhere is such an adage more appropriate. Not only will the school's students be expected to meet all of the usual standards of accountability and testing that their counterparts throughout the state are required to meet; they also will be the poster children for a new approach to learning, one that leverages technology and creative thinking.

Prescriptive learning

More than simply putting computers in classrooms, Microsoft's Cullinane said, the School of the Future looks to apply technology prescriptively, complementing the individual learning habits of its students.

Apart from providing students with the latest in high-tech learning tools, including laptops, digital whiteboards, and campus-wide wireless access, Microsoft also has developed a suite of web-based tools designed to help educators meet the unique needs of each student.

One such innovation is the Virtual Teaching Assistant. Developed by Microsoft, this software program allows teachers to distribute ad-hoc assessments during class to gauge student progress more effectively. The assessments, given to each student during class via computer, are designed to allow teachers to work with students at their own pace. Depending on how well each student performs on the assessment, teachers can provide students with more advanced materials, or supply them with further remediation--all of which can be done anonymously, so slower learners don't have to suffer the embarrassment of being singled out in class, said Cullinane.

Looking to create a more engaging environment for students, the school also is equipped with several special rooms, including an Interactive Learning Center that includes access to streaming media and video. By using video conferencing and other technologies, educators hope to connect students with outside experts and professionals who can help them understand their various fields of study--and make more informed decisions about what careers they might pursue after high school.

Accessible to students via laptops from anywhere in the building and even from home, the Interactive Learning Center provides an open pipeline for students to their schoolwork and includes access to other resources, too, including a virtual encyclopedia and a customizable learning portal, which enables each student to configure his or her desktop to display information relevant to his or her particular course load.

Lesson in philosophy

Though the building's name--School of the Future--no doubt conjures up images of students pecking away on laptop computers and classrooms stocked with the most modern of learning amenities, administrators say the real victory for Microsoft and the school district isn't in the technology itself, but in the approach educators and students involved in the project take to learning.

Opting to shed the traditional title of principal, Shirley Grover, the school's top administrator, refers to herself as "chief learner" and says she demands that every educator on her staff adopt a philosophy of life-long learning, wherein teachers become partners with their students, working together as a team to solve complex problems and build lasting relationships.

Building on this subtle change in philosophy, project developers have equipped classrooms with a variety of tools designed to give teachers more control over how they use their environments. To promote a culture of teamwork and project-based learning, each classroom is equipped with desks that can be easily moved and rearranged to create customized learning spaces, where students can work together in groups or come together as a class to review key concepts. The school's auditorium provides a similarly adaptable space. Built on hydraulic lifts, the space can be mechanically adjusted to provide additional learning spaces for students and teachers.

Operating under the assumption that any school, no matter how advanced, is only as good as the teachers who staff its classrooms each day, the School of the Future encourages collaboration and teamwork among educators and students alike by providing controlled access to communications tools such as instant-messaging and personal eMail accounts. Looking to make better personnel and staffing decisions, administrators also have integrated a specially designed Education Competency Wheel to help them better match educators with assignments suited to their individual strengths and talents (see story: http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/ showStory.cfm?ArticleID=6493).

A technological marvel

But it isn't just the teachers and administrators who will be working smarter. Project developers integrated technology into every aspect of the building's design, using innovations and new developments in structural efficiency to help the school system better maintain the facility for years to come. Aside from simply helping students learn more effectively, architects said, technology also is used to aid in building upkeep and energy consumption. These two variables, they say, can siphon millions of dollars a year from the operating budgets of large metropolitan school systems.

To cut down on these costs, the School of the Future was built to LEEDS standards. Established by the United States Green Building Council, LEEDS, or the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Rating System, is a voluntary national standard in which construction and renovation projects earn credits toward certification as sustainable buildings. The standard considers aspects of new building construction and existing building upgrades and maintenance that include building materials, energy use, land use, facility and waste management, and water use.

As energy prices continue to soar, school administrators say, one way to keep costs down is to build smarter. Among the many "smart" features at work in the School of the Future are a water "catchment" system that stores and reuses rainwater in working toilets, a solar energy system for capturing sunlight and transforming it into usable energy, and a unique cooling system that stores air on cool days and reuses it to cut down on the rising cost of air conditioning during warmer ones.

Looking to improve efficiencies and further surround students with the types of technologies they're likely to encounter in the workforce of tomorrow, the school also has supplied every student with his or her own personal smartcard. Like interactive ID badges, the cards will be used throughout the building to do everything from check out library books and pay for school lunches, to open students' lockers.

Ensuring that students' access to technology doesn't end when the bell rings, each learner also is provided with a broadband internet connection so he or she can access learning materials stored on school servers from home.

Conjuring up images of innovation from years past, Jim Nevels, chairman of the city's School Reform Committee, compared the School of the Future to the World's Fair. He talked about the famous Machinery Hall, an exhibit that once stood a few short blocks from where the school building stands now, and how famous inventors and technologists debuted innovations--from the telephone to the printing press--that one day would change the world.

Branding the school "a 21st-century laboratory of innovation," Nevels said the School the Future would be a place where students and teachers would be encouraged to explore the innovations of tomorrow.

Craig Mundie, one of two Microsoft executives tapped by outgoing chairman Bill Gates to succeed him when he leaves the company to work full-time at his foundation, said Microsoft and other corporations have a vested interest in seeing the school succeed--not simply because the company's name is on the building, but because its students likely will be among the ones to help high-tech companies like Microsoft and others achieve success in the years to come.

"At the end of the day, we have a vested interest in making sure education happens effectively, every day," he said. The goal is to be competitive not in the world of the past, "but in the world of the future."

Stay Connected Digitally!

Government Technology

Digital Inclusion: Social Justice in a Communications Age

Sascha Meinrath

Sep 29, 2006

This is Part One of a 3-part series on Digital Inclusion perspectives from around the globe.

When do we recognize a shift in the fundamental social fabric of civilization? Where do we look to find better exemplars of participatory democracy? When do we realize that notions of justice have to expand to include a new ways of thinking about human rights? How do we change our institutions to support a more just and equitable world? These are the questions that thought leaders in the community and municipal wireless movement have been asking themselves more and more over the past few years.

An overarching theme that came up time and again during the interviews I conducted for this article is that we often think far too small when we talk about community networking. In a communications age, access to the resources, information, opportunities, and conversations that broadband services and community and municipal wireless networks facilitate is a vital element -- the foundation upon which the future of civil society rests.

The problem is to change the very nature of the municipal wireless debate -- incorporating a more liberatory language, more thoughtful actions, and the development and implementation of telecommunications infrastructures that directly improve the lives of users. At the heart of this debate is a tension between market economics and the "social contract" companies should be held to when providing critical resources to local communities. As Jim Baller, senior principal of the Baller Herbst Law Group, sums up, "digital inclusion is, or should be, a basic right of all Americans."

In citing the Declaration of Independence, Baller concludes that citizens have certain unalienable rights -- Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. "In the years and decades ahead, virtually everything that we do at work, in education, in public safety and homeland security, in medical care, in entertainment, in our communities, at the polls, etc., will depend increasingly on affordable access to advanced communications services and capabilities," states Baller. "No nation can lay claim to greatness without acting vigorously to ensure that none of its residents will be left out of the world."

What are the social and economic benefits of digital inclusion? Over the last few years, the importance of broadband services to communities has increased dramatically. Ben Scott, policy director for Free Press, puts it this way, "it is now beyond dispute that information and communications technologies bring advantages in education, job-training, social networking, health-care, and overall quality of life." However, accessing this critical resource is only one component of digital inclusion. As Scott relates, "Having the 'ICT trifecta' -- access to the Internet, the equipment to use it, and the skills to exploit it -- may well be the difference for many families between upward social mobility and a declining standard of living. For children especially, having access to technology is not a luxury, it is a social necessity."

The United States was founded on the notion of ubiquitous, equitable communications infrastructures. In fact, post-Independence, almost three-quarters of all federal employees worked for the Post Office. And the Post Office was built in response to the discriminatory policies prevalent at the time in the Royal Post of Great Britain. When Alexis de Tocqueville wrote "Democracy in America" in 1835, he praised the Postal Service and the newspapers and other information it conveyed as greatly responsible for the America's successes and the education of its populace. In discussing the Postal Service, de Tocqueville writes, "it is difficult to imagine the incredible rapidity with which thought circulates...It cannot be doubted that, in the United States, the instruction of the people powerfully contributes to the support of the democratic republic."

Paralleling this analysis, Jim Snider, senior research fellow at the New America Foundation, states, "Democracy requires well educated citizens. The Internet has become a necessary foundation for a well educated, economically productive citizenry for the 21st century."

John Atkinson, director of Wireless Ghana, concurs, positing that "communication and information give people hope and inspiration. You might say that communication access fosters social well-being, and that information access allows for economic potential." Dr. Arun Mehta, president of the Society for Telecommunications Empowerment, underscores the stakes for civil society, "you cannot have democratic processes that exclude a significant percentage of citizens."

The change in perspective that many wireless pioneers advocate is to look at digital inclusion as a vaccine that enhances civil society and protects against disruption. According to Harold Feld, Media Access Project's senior vice president, "leaving aside any considerations of social justice, creating permanently marginalized and technologically isolated pockets spread throughout our rural and urban areas is recipe for disaster. It imposes huge social and economic costs and creates a permanent underclass disconnected from the broader society."

And yet, leading broadband analyses support the notion that the United States has done a remarkably terrible job of connecting its citizenry over the past half-decade. Baller puts it thusly, "For the last six years, the Administration has defined America's best interests as synonymous with those of a handful of giant telephone and cable companies. During this period, trillions of dollars of investment capital have evaporated, America has plunged from 4th to 16th (some would say 19th) in global broadband penetration, and we have fallen increasingly behind the leading nations in access to high-bandwidth capacity and in cost per unit of bandwidth."

If we believe that civic participation is a central tenant of democratic society, then we need to think about Internet access as equally important. During the past half-decade, Matthew Rantanen, director of Southern California Tribal Technologies, has seen the impact of broadband services on Indian reservations he's worked with, "the people of this community have a better sense of control of their own destiny. They feel that by their own hand, they have taken control and have provided themselves with the opportunities that the majority of the rest of the country has access to."

Given the nature of broadband access, it is important to point out that the positive impacts of digital inclusion efforts do not accrue solely to those who are newly connected. As Mehta summarizes, "The value of a network goes up proportional to the square of its size." Like many "commons" (e.g., education, roads) everyone benefits as more people have access to the resource. Feld puts it this way, "The 'knowledge economy' really does benefit by having new people look at old problems in different ways or bring in wholly new considerations, ideas and tastes. In other words, digital inclusion is not about averting social catastrophe, or noblese oblige to the underprivileged, or charity. It is a calculated investment to promote our national self-interest, as sensible as any Silicon Valley VC investing in a start up."

With the class and knowledge divide growing in the United States, racism and xenophobia on the rise, and increasing concern about everything from the state of the Iraq war to woeful child poverty and healthcare coverage rates, why should we be concerning ourselves with municipal wireless? As Joshua Breitbart, principal at the Ethos Group, warns, "To the extent we digitize the public sphere, we exacerbate the racial and economic divides already prevalent in our society. It's the new Jim Crow. The Internet still offers the promise of a broader, more participatory democracy. Community wireless -- and not just civic projects, but networks with true community involvement and ownership -- is the vehicle for bringing people online and into the digitized public sphere."

Thus, when we talk about digital inclusion, it is important to think holistically about the potential impacts of this work. Michael Maranda, president of the Association for Community Networking has been forwarding what he calls "Digital Literacy, Access & Equity" for years. "Digital Inclusion is an aspect of social justice or equity," declares Maranda. "The Communications sector is both one of the most profitable and one of the most essential in the modern economy. The quality of the networks and infrastructure we have, along with the social and human capital investments in our communities, will define our quality of life and the direction our economies and societal structures will take."

This article is part of a three-part series on digital inclusion. Bellsouth declined comment for this series. Repeated e-mails and phone calls seeking comment were not returned by AT&T, Comcast, Earthlink, Insight, Qwest, and Verizon.