A Strategic Plan for Educational Leadership
January 2000 through December 2004

A Driving Force

Technological innovation is an essential enabling factor in the educational developments that the Institute seeks to promote. It is hard, however, to draw sustained strength from technological change alone. Too often educators adopt a new technology as if it were a stable foundation for their novel efforts; what starts as an energizing empowerment all-too-quickly becomes an impediment of installed obsolescence.

Over the past decade the Institute has kept current with the curve of innovation. During the early 1990's, ILT helped develop the Dalton Technology Plan, which represented the application of commercial grade local-area networking to the educational needs of the school. That project demonstrated the educational value of well-networked small-group workstations in the classroom, at a ratio of about one workstation to five students, linked to an advanced set of servers in the school, providing email and user accounts for all teachers and students, tethered to the Internet by a broadband connection. McKinsey & Company used that model as the basis for its influential report on the prospective costs of integrating technology into the schools nationally and ILT has continued to use the model as the basis of its testbed construction through HEAP, the Living Schoolbook Project, and the Eiffel Project. Beware obsolescence.

To draw power from new technologies over time, educators need to do so by engaging in the process of technological innovation, not simply by acquiring its products. A significant element of the Institute's program consists of efforts to integrate its activities into the very processes of technological innovation so that, over time, the processes themselves will become imbued with a substantial dynamism towards educational reform. In a knowledge socity, educational requirements will drive the design and implementation of communications technologies.

As a driving force in educational change, the well-networked presence in every classroom of multiple small-group workstations seems increasingly insufficient. Full access to the possibilities enabled by digital technologies requires a more complex technological environment. Until now, industry has designed few digital products specifically for use in schools. Educators generally must select hardware designed for home or office and turn it to classroom use. They should shift from perceiving potential educational value in products developed for non-educational activities to defining specifications for products optimized for educational purposes and finding manufacturers willing to provide those products at affordable costs.

For instance, high-end laptops designed for corporate executives are beginning to prove very useful in the classroom. They are nevertheless not necessarily optimized for those uses. Cheaper, more flexible devices might work even better. The Institute plans to develop and publicize a clear request for educational products, such as a student's hand-held digital companion. Such an appliance would have a distinctive list of features, and manufacturers should find it feasible to package these together effectively. If they did it well, the device could have a potentially very high-volume (although very low-margin) market. By far the largest job category in the world is that of "student," with some one to two billion persons in it. The era of adapting designs developed for other purposes to the needs of schools should end. It is time for educational leaders to define the hardware requirements for the devices they need and to challenge industry to deliver them at top quality and rock bottom prices.

Another problem with educational tools arises because schools often proceed on a one-size-fits-all basis. In reality, schools need tools for a number of different types of users in several different typical settings. In the school the network should be ubiquitous, offering wireless hook-up so that students and teachers need not be tethered to a room or to a desk. The needs of children vary, let us postulate on the basis of K through 2nd grade, 3rd through 5th, 6th through 8th, and 9th through 12th. Teachers need an in-class installation that supports their work with the whole class; they need a professional support center in the school; and they need a reasonably full-featured home or portable computer for use outside the school. Higher level administrators should move about the school and need flexible, easy-to-use, digital communications devices wherever they happen to be, while support staff should have well-networked desktop information management resources that allow them to interact effectively and efficiently with students, teachers, administrators, and parents. Parents should have access to information appliances that allow them to be apprised substantively about their child's educational experience and to act in support of the teacher and the school. In actuality, schools rarely plan with their full spectrum of needs in view. They respond first to one need and then to another. As a result, a hodgepodge of resources are usually available from one school to another.

Given an infrastructure, adequate programming is a further fundamental. The software available for education is incomplete, poorly integrated, bloated with unnecessary features, and difficult to use. Powerful corporations have designed the dominant operating systems and applications programs to market to affluent businesses and individuals under quasi monopoly conditions. This presents a problem to schools. One does not equip school-bus fleets with luxury tour buses. Developers have not yet optimized software for educational uses. Schools require a comprehensive, well-integrated user environment, serving a wide range of purposes, often in unique ways. Commercial software development conditions put the creators of educational software in difficult situations. Schools cannot afford all the different programs that they need, assuming they could find them all on the market. The Internet has, of course, greatly facilitated this option, providing a flood of quality content at very low costs with immense interoperability over diverse systems on the market. Yet content alone does not an education make; schools must integrate in many other programs as well - applications, simulation tools, experimental probes, multimedia editing and presentation programs, email and conferencing, information management resources, and on. With conditions of systems-bloat inflating costs for all these components and delaying their development, even affluent schools end up with an incomplete collection of programs that work poorly together and a staff desperate for sufficient training.

A chicken and egg problem impedes the educational use of the information infrastructure. Educators can solve it only by binding systems design and applications design in a tight, iterative reciprocity. The Institute will offer a full range of technology consulting services to schools, helping them design comprehensive, sustainable installations. ILT will also work with technology providers to help them understand the requirements of the emergent system of education. With respect to hardware, ILT will work with large schools systems, particularly that of New York City, to develop specifications for technology appliances and systems optimized for pedagogical usefulness, and will serve as an expert agent ensuring that major producers supply the types of products schools require. A major project of the Institute over the next five years will assemble a coalition of software developers to create a stable, easy-to-use, comprehensive body of software for schools through open source development. Educators will develop a driving force from new communications technologies as they move from the current level of per pupil software expenditure and force that cost down to $0 through a concerted effort to provide educational leadership to the open source software movement.

Throughout the post-War period, innovating entrepreneurs have made enormous personal fortunes creating digital information and communications technologies, but the benefit to people at large, throughout the nation and the world, has only recently started to arise as those technologies have finally penetrated deeply enough into established systems of production and exchange to yield gains in tangible productivity of significance to the whole economy. In like manner, ILT holds that technological innovation as a driving force in efforts to improve education must penetrate throughout the world system, improving substantially the spectrum of opportunity for each and every person. An unseen hand will not necessarily spread innovations throughout the world system of education. This purpose requires intentional policies, pursued by both technologists and by educators. ILT seeks to join both groups in a share, pervasive effort at innovation. From this shared purpose, a commitment to a social vision must follow.

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