For 11 years, ACSA has selected school leaders to participate in the ACSA/Xerox summer internship at the Palo Alto Research Center. The reflections of this year’s team of interns reveals education is catching up to the digital age.

“Working with a cutting edge organization like PARC demands educators align our methodologies with an orientation toward the future our students will live in,” said Eric Lehew, assistant superintendent in Poway USD. “I believe that interaction between education, research organizations and the business community is essential to keep student engagement relevant and to ensure our educational community is working from 21st century perspectives.”

In addition to Lehew, PARC interns for 2008-09 included Bob Gausman, technology and learning resources director, Stanislaus COE; ACSA Technology Leadership Group member Debby Hanson, assistant principal, El Dorado UHSD; Julianne Hoefer, principal, Anaheim City ESD; Frank Tinney, senior director, Palm Springs USD; and two interns selected through the Technology Information Center for Administrative Leadership Cadre: Devin Vodicka, director of curriculum and instruction in Carlsbad USD, and John White, principal in Los Angeles USD.

The interns attended laboratory meetings, interacted with researchers and brought their own expertise to inspire innovation. Discussion and activities focused on information science, knowledge sharing practice, computer-assisted learning and digital literacy.

“The pace of change continues to accelerate as we continue to integrate technology with living systems,” Vodicka said. “School leaders must understand that we have an urgent imperative to keep pace in order to adequately prepare students for future success. In particular, we need to begin attending to the process of innovation that emerges as a result of collaboration that is facilitated by interconnected technology resources.”

Vodicka strongly believes technology is a powerful tool to improve teaching and allow principals to use resources most effectively to impact student learning. He also sees technology providing the potential for creating a customized learning experience, which could break down the institutional nature of the educational system and make learning appropriate for each student’s individual needs.

Julianne Hoefer added that it is not the content taught to students that will matter, but their ability to manipulate, evaluate and synthesize ever-changing information.

“I believe technology is not something that should be visited once a week, like the computer lab, but rather embedded in all that we do,” Hoefer said. “In order to prepare our students to be successful in the 21st century we must develop their ability to think critically, work in teams and uncover patterns in unlikely places.”

Among the knowledge Hoefer returned home with from the PARC experience was the importance for educators to teach children how to work in teams. 

“PARC researchers rarely worked in isolation; diverse teams tackled problems from many different perspectives,” she said. “It is imperative that team members are skilled at getting along, dealing with conflict and being effective communicators.”

The PARC internship assists educational leaders in creating better learning opportunities for students through the use of social science methods, cutting edge technologies and innovative designs and implementations. Through the internship, the ACSA Technology Leadership Group seeks to provide a partnership in research where administrators learn about and discuss technology trends and innovation cultures in a unique environment conducive to sharing processes, technological expertise and organizational practices.

Frank Tinney found out three weeks prior to the internship he would be moving from director of elementary education to director of educational technology and information services. As an advocate for educational technology and an active vice president of legislative action, he knew the internship would offer a great learning experience as he began his new position.

Among the knowledge gained at PARC, Tinney includes:

• Amazing creativity is born of collaborative inquiry, and learning is fundamentally social.

• “Ubicomp,” or ubiquitous computing, requires a new interface that goes beyond command lines, menus and GUIs. Microsoft’s Surface takes touch-screen technology to a new level.

• Public education will never have the capital to invest in original research to advance the field of education. Therefore, it falls upon the leaders in education to keep abreast of advances and to figure out how to adapt educational processes to embrace those advances and improve both the rigor and the personalization of education for K-14 students and life-long learners.

• Increasingly, learning will occur in virtual worlds.

• The need to leverage technology to create elegantly integrated systems applies to education as urgently as it does to business.

“It has always been the responsibility of educators to meet the varied needs of students to ensure that essential knowledge and skills are learned,” Tinney said. “While that remains true today, the context of teaching and learning is radically changed from that of the industrial age. When students are engaged in authentic, real-world learning experiences, their learning increases significantly.

“Given the exponential rate of change, it is essential that we develop in our students the skills included in digital-age literacies, inventive thinking, effective communication and high productivity. That requires student access to technologies that are ubiquitous, responsive and collaborative.”

Eric Lehew added that technology serves as the “disruptive influence” required to ensure public education continues to be viable and relevant in an emerging world of increasing choices for concept, skill and knowledge building.

“Alternatives to the 20th century approach to education are developing right now, and we need to offer meaningful choices: technology-rich options for students and families that currently see themselves as not being served by the status quo educational system,” he said.

Lehew includes the following in the more important information gleaned from the PARC experience:

• The work of Web 2.0 and “socially augmented learning,” in which groups of learners, often strangers, converge to build knowledge, develop solutions and share strategies, is fundamentally shifting our approach to standard classroom-based education. These relationships and the free access to information are fundamentally altering the relationship between teacher and student and among students. Learners are currently engaged in this learning environment outside of the classroom, but limited by the practices and procedures of status quo schooling. 

• Massive, centralized organizations are reminiscent of main-frame computers which met needs of an industrialized, standardized era but do not match the customization and personalization of the digital age. 

 • Establishing a culture of identifying core, meaningful problems in an environment of risk-free inquiry is the day-to-day work of research and technology companies. This is a model not only for our students to be producing work in, but one to consider for our school faculty. 

“We are on the verge of extremely intelligent computing and data warehousing on a massive scale.” Lehew said. “The machine is now capable of learning much more rapidly from the input it receives and can adjust to the learner based on the interactions with the user, not overt user directions.”

Lehew said PARC interns also saw the expanding nature of massive databases, in which the innocent and self-directed tasks of individuals, such as Web searching or Wikipedia entries, can be mined for broader purposes. 

“As a rough example, one could imagine a student’s history of Web searches, catalogued and mined for learning directions over several years, sorted by length of time on particular subjects, readability of searches and types of links employed,” he said. “This data could lead to a student reading inventory, classifying and expanding personal interests, identifying readability levels and clarifying student information processing patterns. The computer could then direct other applications for reading development, create focused searches and identify reading opportunities tailored to the learner’s patterns and not the teacher’s assumptions.”

John White said he became interested in the work PARC does in the 1990s after watching documentaries on the rise of personal computers on PBS and later, “Revenge of the Nerds.”

His philosophy on technology in education is that it should be a seamless tool, such as it is on Wall Street, in banking and ATMs, and the keeping of student data in educational institutions.

“In essence, technology is a tool of whatever work that is being done,” White said. “The test is, could that work have been done as efficiently and cost effectively without the use of technology.”

At PARC, White learned the education world has to catch up with the implementation and use of technology, as business has done in order to improve products, services and cost.

He also valued information about making learning social, so that more students are included rather than excluded from the acquisition of knowledge that will permit them to survive and thrive in the 21st century.

“Today’s education system has the challenge of educating today’s student for tomorrow’s world, not our world of the past.” White said. “Middle school students today will be applying for jobs in six or seven years that have not been developed. Not only do students need yesterday’s knowledge in math, science and literacy, but they also need to be technologically literate and have the skills to be collaborative in a global world where sharing and collaboration of knowledge will rule the day.”

For more information and images from the PARC interns, visit www.acsa-parc.blogspot.com.