Teaching and Learning
Friday, November 12, 1999
3:45-5p.m.

Harold J. Burbach: My name is Hal Burbach and I'm Chair of the Department of Leadership, Foundations and Policy in the Curry School of Education and it's my pleasure to welcome you all and to introduce the panel. I hope you all have a program in which we list the flow of the program. I'm going to take just a minute to introduce the panel and in the program we give a brief bio of each person so that we won't have to give long, lengthy introductions and we can get right to the good stuff.

The panel discussion will be-- I'll take them in order of how I introduce them, and we'll do that up until 5:00 o'clock, hoping to be reasonably close to that time and then questions and comments from the audience, finishing at 5:15. We have just a terrific panel, a mixture of people from the world of business, of higher education, some of who have an interest in K-12 education, some post-secondary and two student representatives, so it's a broad view of the Internet and its implications for the University of Virginia which is the framing question for this conference.

To my immediate right is Brooke Graham. Brooke is a graduate student in the Curry School and working toward her M.Ed. degree. She graduated from the Curry School of the University in 1994, taught for two years in Botswana, Africa, and she has written a chapter in one of the best selling introductory textbooks in teacher education in the nation, a book by Jim Cooper and Kevin Ryan and it's called Those Who Can Teach and it was on technology. She also works with the Virginia Center for Digital History at the University.

To my immediate left is Bethany Poole, and Bethany is a fourth

year student at the University, and she's doing a thesis on analyzing the Internet's effect on commercial book publishing.

Next to her is John Griffin. John looks like an undergraduate . It's always shocking when you're looking at some of these folks around today. John has already been president of two companies, one of which he founded--Blue Ridge Capital and he graduated from the University's McIntire School of Commerce in 1985. Among other things, he's taught a videoconferencing course for the McIntire School in 1998 and one of the most impressive things about him to me is he's an iron man triathlete which is those of you who know-- He was just telling me. That's astonishing--they open with 2.4 miles swimming. Then they bicycle for 112 miles and then run a marathon , so this should be a chip shot for you .

Next to him is David Kunkle. David is the Vice Chairman and Executive Vice President for PSINET which is one of the most influential companies in the development of the Internet. He's been with them 14 years and it's fair to say, he's one of the pioneers in the development of the Internet and still a young man and a veteran at that, so we look forward to his comments.

Next to him is Bernard Robin. Bernard is a graduate of the Curry School, got his Ph.D. there in 1996 was it? '93, was it that long? Time flies, and he's now at the University of Houston where he is Associate Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction working in instructional technology. He also heads their graduate program in instructional technology and is widely published in that area.

Bringing up the end of the table there is John Unsworth. John is a member of the faculty here in the Department of English at the University of Virginia, got his Ph.D. in English from the University of Virginia, taught at North Carolina State for a few years, and returned here in 1993 to head up the newly formed Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities. He's done just a remarkable job with that. If you haven't checked that out, you definitely should do that. I encourage you to do that.

We're going to start with-- I'm just going to pick on people in the program as we go down. We'll start with John Griffin and we limiting it roughly to 10 minutes each and we'll work our way down, so John--

John A. Griffin: Thank you. Thank you for having me here. I thought you might find it interesting how I got here because teaching is not something I do full time but is something that I enjoy as much as my day job which is managing Blue Ridge Capital. What happened was when I was a student and I was studying investments, I was being taught about random [walk] theory and quantitative equations and nobody beats the market and all this. I thought to myself, you know, this didn't exactly seem right to me and when I embarked on a career in the investment world, I was happy to have many great teachers and mentors, mainly Julian Robertson who runs Tiger Management and after I left and I had a little more time beyond running Blue Ridge Capital which is an investment firm, I thought what do I really want to do and I said one thing I'd like to do is really teach people what the heck is going on in the investment world because it's nothing like what's going on in the classroom, and the only place that I could do this at the time was Columbia Business School and I said them, I can teach this class but the students have to come to my office and have to be these other sort of things so I can manage both, and they agreed to do it.

And some professors at UVA heard about this and they said wait a second. He's one of ours. He can't be teaching at Columbia Business School and someone who's in this room said to me, John, you've to teach down at UVA and I said there's no way I can get down here and he said, well, we'll do anything. We'll beam you down there, and I said, well, if you can do that, I'd clearly be interested in doing it and at the time the technology was changing such that there wasn't enough bandwidth where you could have a true interactive class through the pipe into the classroom and the McIntire School outfitted Room 130 with videoconferencing equipment, state of the art. I decided to put it into my office anyway, and we had the first class this past spring and I have to say, it was a remarkable experience and I think what I'd like to do-- This'll only take a minute. It'll be tough for people outside, but I would like to just show you just a snippet of the class. Now, this has not been well produced. Remember, this is a tape of a tape, so the quality's not great. The first speaker is Herb Greenberg, a star reporter on Wall Street talking to the class. He's works at the Street.com. I can get any speaker in the world because I just say come to my class. We beam you down. They're like, okay.

So I get them all. Julian-- I get reporters, I get hedge fund managers, anyone will do this. I think we'll get Warren Buffet next year because we'll bring the equipment to him or he'll just go downstairs in his building and we'll beam him in, so I had this reporter and he's talking a little bit and there'll be a scene where they scan the class. This is what he's seeing. He's seeing the students on a very large screen in my office just like I'm looking at this portion of the audience now. Why don't we just play that part and then I'll tell you when to stop it.

Audio and video of classroom. That's the class obviously. There's Herb. He's in my office sitting next to me. This is what the students see obviously. Here they are. This is what he's seeing. So you get a little flavor for it. I think the next one is another Wall Street guy who's a little controversial because he's a short seller and if you just put the second tape in. I think he asks a question of the class and one of the students answered. You can see what happens. When the students answers a question, their head becomes the whole screen. This is in Darden because we didn't have our room yet. So he answers. You can stop it now.

That was the old technology. Just one quick thing is it's even-- This was just eight months ago. Even now, it's more like just watching a video and remember, you're seeing a tape of a tape, so the experience is very rich. I don't want to use up too much time. My point is on doing this. I think this could greatly enrich the academic environment in terms of bringing in people. Maybe if they don't want to teach a whole class, because this is a big commitment. Not many people have that kind of flexibility, but just to bring in speakers--

I had lunch in Pavilion IX which is the Dean of the Architecture School. I was telling her about it. I said, how hard would it be to get Philip Johnson to just go into the conference room and answer questions from your top architecture students. I know you could get him to do it, but he's not going to get in a plane at his age and fly all the way to Charlottesville, but you know what? You're going to get so much of the interaction on the video conferencing, so that was what I wanted to share with you.

I think that helping the students at UVA apply what they learn in the academic environment to what's going on in the business world or the architecture world or even the arts world can greatly enhance their experiences. I have a bunch of other stuff I was going to talk about but I think my time's probably up so I'll wait until the discussion.

Burbach: We can circle back. Thank you, John. Do you have any stock tips for the group?

Griffin: No. Just one tip. Don't do Iron Man Triathlons.

Burbach: Let's hear next from Brooke Graham, a student, and get that point of view.

Brooke E. Graham: Sure. I'm actually going to kind of address the first question that's in the little handout about the biggest changes I see facing K-12 education. I'm going to talk from kind the K-12 perspective because I've been a classroom teacher and then how technology might address some of these. Some of the major concerns that I think are facing education is the growing standards movement which if you're in Virginia or probably anywhere in the country, you've heard about, and I think that standards are not a bad thing, but they can be implemented badly or they can be conceived badly or they can be conceived by people that aren't educators and aren't classroom teachers and I think that right now, particularly in Virginia and really in a lot of states in America, there's a lot of pressure on teachers to kind of meet these standards and the standards typically are very content driven. They're very kind of fact oriented tests, multiple choice, once a year for an hour in your content area, and I think if we're looking at the changes that technology is bringing to education, that's really the opposite way that the changes in technology are pushing education. They're not pushing classroom teachers to be content disseminators. They're challenging teachers to change the way that they're teaching and to ask students to be more problem solvers and be collaborators and be more researchers and critical thinkers, even at a pretty young age, so technology is pushing us in a direction to change our teaching style and the standards movement and the kind of political side of education is pushing us to these standards and to these content objectives. I think we need to reconcile that dichotomy. I think that the way that technology can push education with this kind of constructivist notion is really exciting, but it's a really different way of thinking about classroom teaching and a lot of teachers aren't comfortable with that because that's not the way they were taught as a student and then that's not the way they were taught in a school of education, so we're really kind of going through some radical changes and I think we need to think about how teachers can be retrained and technology's really a frightening experience for a lot of teachers.

This morning I was listening to people throw around these words with such ease and I thought, wow, it's really different than the experience I have when I go into a school, so I think we're really looking at two different worlds and we need to kind of bridge that gap and I think it can be done, but we really need to think about how we allow teachers to have professional development time and really time is a key part of that. It takes a long time to become comfortable with technology and I think a lot of us here, probably one of the reasons you're here is because you have some comfort with technology, but it's not necessarily the norm everywhere.

Another concern I have is that kind of reforms in education, we seem to have this notion of a reform de jour. This is the new cure. This is what we're going to do for the next-- This is my message. This is my platform. This is what I'm going to come in and save education and we really-- A lot of that is political and there's definitely a big political component of education, but I think we really do a disservice to our teachers and to our students if we're constantly having new platforms and new changes and not really based that on research and on our kind of overall goal but on peoples' political agenda and I think teachers get really tired of hearing the new miracle drug and I think technology can just be bunched in that category and can be seen along with every other reform that's been kind of touted by different superintendents, so I think we really need to be careful about the way we introduce technology and we need to, if this is the answer, then we need to stick with it and we need to have a commitment and there needs to be a long-term commitment and I think that's probably where we're headed, but teachers are probably going to have some resistance to that because of all the different reforms that they've been showered with.

I guess one of my kind of themes is just the professionalization of teaching. I think we heard a little bit about that this morning that we need to think about how we pay teachers, what time we give them for professional development, how we deliver that professional development. It's not like a one-time workshop where you learn how to do Excel. It's like a long-term commitment to training and then it takes a real time and financial commitment.

Burbach: Thank you, Brooke. Let's move now to another voice in the world of business, Mr. David Kunkel.

David N. Kunkel: Thanks, Hal. Like John, I guess, I was trying to understand why it was I was put on this panel instead of the one I just came from with all the lawyers and regulators over there, because that's sort of my professional background and I thought I had it figured out. I thought I was the most masochistic person in the room because I was a goalie on the lacrosse team here, but I found somebody who's even more masochistic than I am, so it can't be that. And I thought, well, maybe it has something to do with some age. President Casteen said last night there's somebody here that's as old as I am, referring to himself, who was in his class and that would be me , so maybe that's it. On the theory that somebody my age who's been around the Internet for 15 years, has some ability to learn something new, but then what do I know about teaching and learning. I mean, only as a professional student in many ways for much of my life, including now, which is really the most exciting learning time in my life, certainly the most fast-paced, but I figured it wasn't really that.

Then I dug up some e-mail that I'd sent to President Casteen back a few months ago and we were talking about this. Let me read this to you because I think he turned around and said, okay, I'm going to get you with that. In some of my e-mail I said to him after I was describing some of the things that are going on in the Internet today. I said there are business, government, and individual ramifications by the hundreds, many affect universities and learning and I take it that's what the November symposium is all about.

There's global democratization at the highest Jeffersonian level. Commercial and financial disintermediation. Instant global communication at affordable rates. Everything on the laptop or the Palm top, for better or for worse. Libraries become secondary to irrelevant, despite the bibliophile that lives in every university professor or lawyer. American English dominates the globe and so on, and I'm sure you see these predictions a lot. There're all likely to come true

So to the university. It's a challenge to the administration and the faculty to think in different ways. C. Negroponte at MIT, somewhat banal predictions, but you get the idea. The most difficult part is that people the age that you and I are or even those who are younger must constantly refresh their understanding of technology and how it can affect seemingly unrelated subjects such as whatever they teach, and how they can in fact must use it to help in education. Either that or their students will leave them behind. It cannot be at a top university that one earns tenure based simply on what one knows and has achieved. Constant change must be embraced. We do it every day in the business world, albeit building on skills and basic competencies learned long ago. In a larger sense, as we've all known since college, the university must teach learning with a methodology that didn't exist 200 years ago.

One of the greatest influences in my own learning skills came at the University at a relatively high cost. The Honors Program with one-on-one tutorials each week for two years with the understanding of the learning process that that gave me made law school, the practice of law, launching a career in an unheard-of new technology relatively easy. We have to find a way to translate that same benefit into a teaching and learning program based on the newer methods of that technology, not because there's anything wrong with the old ones, but because there are now too many people, the costs are too great, and because we can reach millions better with a new distributed technology. That's more than a challenge to a landed institution. It is at the heart of it a threat. No classroom time face-to-face with [Scoles or Mallet], no lectures by Faulkner. See, I do go way back , but whatever interaction can be had other than face-to-face can be had from a mountain top in South Africa or an apartment in Seoul.

How though is one to identify with the organization behind it? This has to be addressed or the unspoken threat will keep many from seriously embracing the possibilities. I feel that the University can be proactive here and that the Internet and its ramifications can be used to help continue a world class institution, foster better learning and be an agent for change, but I think as Brooke was saying, that's the real challenge, but taking this change agent and doing something new with it. I mean, here we are--

The university started as a place in the middle ages where learned people could congregate to share ideas and to teach. That was the only way it could be done. You had to physically go somewhere. Then with the advent of books, things got a little better. You could at least go back to your room from the library or you could go to a library with a book, but your education could be deemed to have been limited by your access to the particular library that you happen to be near and your ability to get to it and your ability to have time on it, and your ability to interact with somebody as a result of that learning, and I think we've all found that the better way now is interactive. There's lots of stuff out there on the Internet that you can look at in your space--education--that says you learn better with interaction rather than this kind of lecture which we still do today, which we all grew up with and we're comfortable with, but it's not the best way to do it, so we're trying to all find that together.

Now, our company happens to represent how you go about that in a large sense and we love it because we're going to places all around the world where learning and teaching are still much more controlled and much more limited than they are here and we kind of view ourselves as the camel getting his nose under the tent because once the Internet gets in there, folks, it's all changed no matter what the particular government de jour wants to do about it, so enough of that.

You're all more skilled at this business than I am, but I'm happy to sit and talk with you all and partake of this and thanks for having me.

Burbach: Let's turn our attention now to another student. This is Bethany Poole.

Bethany Poole: I'm currently working on my thesis on e-publishing and sort of its effect on the Internet and one of the major concerns and the problems that I've had researching is that not only is the technology up to the minute and so it's changing every day and if I write 10 pages today for my thesis, in February it's going to be totally null and void. It's really hard to disseminate which information is important and access. That's one of my major problems is finding the sites that I need to go to and the links are very helpful and you can click on a link and it'll take you to another site and then 10 minutes later you're 20 minutes literally from where you started because you've bypassed all this information.

But the problem is finding out what information is actually legitimate and what's current and still the web is so large that that's one of my major problems and I agree that teaching innovation has to change and show students how to do that and teachers really need to-- I don't know. I think that's one of the big skills that the university students need to know is how to access all that information and everything's at your fingertips but you have to be able to find it and being bombarded with that much information, teachers really need to make sure-- The information isn't what you need to teach the students per se, but it's how to use it and manipulate it because you have so much to choose from. That's just one of my concerns as a student.

The other one is obviously-- I think that classes over the Internet are harder being in a big lecture hall. I'm an English major and so we have core courses that we have to take and there're three of them that are history of English language and I think there're 200 of us, 200 students in the class, and the professors lecture to us twice a week and then we meet with TAs and a lot of English classes facilitate discussion through e-mail sites and you e-mail your professor and everybody class gets the e-mails and you read them and discuss them, hopefully, in class the next day, but it's a problem if the TAs decide to use that as the discussion and kind of lecture in class, and still you have to get the students motivated to read all those e-mails because English majors are pretty wordy and 20 of us writing three pages each, there's no way you're going to read that along with the 200-page novel for that week. I just think these are some of the concerns especially on the university level with teaching and education and the Internet.

Burbach: Thank you. Bernard Robin has got a Power Point presentation he's going to work from, so take over.

Bernard R. Robin: Thank you, Hal, and I certainly am thrilled to be here. I have to start off by apologizing. You've heard a lot about the tremendous rate of change on the Internet and so some of the slides that I show might be outdated by now. I created this on Wednesday . I want to talk a little bit about the challenges of new technologies in education, a theme that's been running through all of the sessions, I think, that I've attended and I'm going to echo some of the things that Brooke and Bethany have said.

Things are changing very rapidly and if we look at historically what's happened with technology diffusion, when new inventions have occurred, they've taken a certain period of time until they reach mass use which is defined as being used by 25% of the population, and if you look down at the bottom, you'll see that the worldwide web is the shortest amount of time, actually developed in '91 and reached mass use within seven years, and so what we have is we have a rate of change that's so quick that it's difficult sometimes for us to look at how to answer these complex and challenging questions because we don't have the expertise that's built upon experience. We don't have the long years of experience that we've had in the past to deal with new kinds of technologies.

A statistic that came out recently that just boggled my mind-- Some of you may remember as kids when your parents asked you if it would be okay if you gave them a penny right now and doubled it every day for a month and you said sure, that'd be great, because a penny's not very much money, and the thing is if you get out your calculator and do the math, it's over a million dollars. I haven't done this one yet, but I did this one--38 new web pages a second is what was estimated in a recent Newsweek article talking about the perfect search engines and I thought, well, gosh, that sounds like a lot because I remembered back to that doubling a penny every day thing, so I got out my calculator and I found out that 38 new web pages a second is more than 2,000 a minute which is more than 136,000 an hour which is more than three million a day, which is more than one billion a year, and that's just at the present rate.

Now, admittedly, that many web pages--in there, there's a lot of garbage. There's a lot of trash, there's a lot of stuff, there's probably some repeats and all sort of things we don't want to have to deal with, and as Brooke was saying, and Bethany, both, the challenge to education is how're we going to deal with this much information? How are teachers going to deal with it? How are students going to deal with it? So, what I'd like to do is try to address some of the things that I see are happening and talk a little bit about some of the trends that I think also will start to happen.

What we've seen is that through computer-based technology the learning environment is different today than it was in traditional classrooms. Everybody talks about any time any place. We talk about wireless devices. We talk about instantaneous access. There's no doubt that we have easy, quick and almost ubiquitous access to technology tools that's almost mind boggling. Actually, it's not almost, it is mind boggling. What we need in education is the ability to teach students to perform meaningful tasks that mimic what they're going to have to do when they get out into the real world and we have to teach students that there are more than one way to answer questions or to solve problems and one of the things that I see happening is students working together collaboratively because that's what people do out in the real world when they have jobs. It's too much information for any one person to deal with, I believe, and so this working collaboratively, even remotely, so that people who work for companies might videoconference or e-mail conference or whatever, use different technology tools to work with people who aren't necessarily in the same office with them but are scattered throughout the country or the world.

I think what we need to see is project-based learning in classrooms replacing drill and practice. I used to love flash cards when I was a kid, but I don't think that's really how I learned geography or English. I think it's more important and more appropriate for students to ask real questions in a real environment developing real world skills. I think that cross-disciplinary perspectives are necessary. I've been working for the past three years with math and science teachers who are using technology to develop integrated lessons and it makes sense, but we need to pull in language arts people and art people and music people and everything else, and there shouldn't be the, I believe, the distinctions that we have right now in content areas.

As far as teachers, teachers need to be students. Students need to be teachers. Everybody talks about the weekend workshops or the summer institute and that it doesn't work and that's pretty much been proven. It doesn't work. Teacher training needs to be ongoing and it needs to be collaborative.

A very popular thing that's going on right now in K-12 schools and we're part of this where I am at the University of Houston in our program is working with middle school students. That's who I'm working with this semester, who are learning technology and then going out and teaching their teachers. There are a number of adult teachers (I'm sure you've seen this) that kind of have that deer in the headlights look when a students asks them about some technology. Teachers didn't learn technologies, many teachers, most teachers today, did not learn technology when they went to school but they feel like somehow they're not as a good a teacher as they could be because somebody's going to ask them a technology question. Well, empower them through working with their students. Students love it.

I was in a lab about two weeks ago with 20 12, 13, 14-year-old kids who had been taught Power Point in the morning and this was in the afternoon, and they're teaching all these pre-service teachers how to use Power Point and it's amazing. The kids love it and the adults love it and it works, so I think the bottom point here for me is the bottom line. We need to change the way we think about technology from some thing that needs to be implemented to a process that needs to be learned.

And one more slide that I think has a lot of really important items on it--Glenn Bull who's sitting over here in the audience was my advisor when I did my doctoral work and Mabel Kinsey was my advisor when I did my master's work, and I keep hearing echoes of things that they taught me when I was here that are so true. The word scaffolding. I don't know if any of you have heard that. That's a term that Glenn used a lot that allows students to create foundations and frameworks using technology tools to build a perspective, to build understanding, to define goals, to select activities, to design and manage projects. It's a really important concept and it empowers people as they learn.

Obviously, the technology's going to help students send, receive and store electronic documents. We're already doing that within our graduate IT program. I refuse to accept anything on paper any longer. I don't accept floppy discs any longer. I don't accept zip discs. All they do is accumulate on my desk which I can't see the bottom of anyway, so I have them-- We create accounts. They use FTP. They use whatever. They submit their assignments electronically. I submit my feedback to them electronically. It works well.

In terms of what's coming down the pike, intelligence agents, simulations, virtual environments, these things called MUVEs (multiusers virtual environments) are getting a lot of attention right now where you can share applications around the country, around the world. You can add audio and video. Access to experts, just like in the case of having experts from the business world, you can have them from wherever. NASA scientists, geologists, volcanologists. It doesn't make any difference.

I have probably a lot more slides than I need to have, but let me just run through this quickly because I think it's important. There's been a big survey that came out just a few weeks ago from Education Week where they surveyed thousands of teachers on areas of digital content; 97% of the teachers use computers at home and/or school for professional activities. One of the misconceptions is that teachers don't use technology, but if you think about those guys, the men and women, who were giving the panel discussion this morning that was so interesting about when we need this user base and we need access to all these people, teachers are those people. Teachers are included in all those people that use technology to buy things on line, to send e-mail. What they're not doing is they're not incorporating it into their curricula because nobody has taught them how to do that, and that, to me, is a fundamental problem.

Here's another misconception. Everybody says new teachers are going to use more technology than old teachers. No. Wrong. Teachers who have been in the classroom five years or fewer are no more likely to use digital content than those teaching for more than 20 years Well, that's if you believe surveys . I happen to believe that.

I'm going to go on to one other slide. I talk to real teachers. I mentioned I've been working for three years now with these math and science middle and high school teachers pairs. Here's what they tell me. They want more time like that, working with other teachers. Being a teacher, being a faculty member. It's been a kind of a isolated experience. You go into your office or your classroom and you do it by yourself and you don't even know whether you're doing it that well if you've got like eight-year-olds you're doing with, so they want more time to spend to get feedback, to share ideas, to do all of those things. They want more time and equipment and support. Obviously don't we all, to practice. They want better integration in not just content areas but cross discipline areas and content areas, and I think the last bullet is the most important. They want to be able to take chances when they use technology and not fear that whoops, I just hit the wrong key and my lab top exploded , or I just destroyed Cleveland or whatever . People who aren't comfortable with technology worry that they're going to do something bad and something wrong.

Anyway, lots of experts are saying a lot of things and the ones that I think are somewhat relevant, it's not how much you use computers that matters. It's how you use them. If you went to this morning's session, you heard over and over and over again we need more devices. We need more access. We need universal access. We need ubiquitous things. Sure we do, but you can fill up any room in the world with as many computers as you want and if you don't know what you're doing with them, that's not alone enough. I think people are starting to discover that students learn better with technology than from technology. Somebody talked about computing rather than computers. Anyway, predictions, and I left off some of the really ones that I think are too farfetched but I'm going to mention one in addition to these, but some of these are so obvious that nobody's going to doubt it.

Well, two million digital cameras will be sold this year. That to me is an amazing thing because digital cameras over the last 5 or 10 years, as they've slowly evolved, have never been as good as regular cameras and now they almost are. In fact, some people are saying they are and we just ordered our 2.1, 3.1 million mega pixel whatever that dices, slices, and takes pictures and adds audio. It didn't come in. It was supposed to be here yesterday; it didn't come in, so I haven't used it yet personally but I think it's going to give me-- And I was a professional photographer in an earlier life, and I think these cameras are going to replace those cameras and the pictures are going to be just as good and the fact that students can go out and document their surroundings and their world and their lives is fantastic. Technology and what it means educationally, and being able to-- I mean, people are selling digital cameras now with a button that says put it on the web, send it out e-mail. Print it to CD-ROM, whatever.

Wireless--obviously wireless is going to be very big.

Pocket organizers--I've got one right here in my pocket. I know Glenn and Gene, they're probably beaming each other right now while I'm talking. We're going to see so much new technology that it's impossible, again, so when you look at it, what does it all mean? We've got thousands and thousands of new web pages every minute of every day. We've got new devices coming on line every single day. We've got smart chips, smart objects. Computers are going to go inside our bodies. It's not just going to be that 1968 movie with Racquel Welch where the little submarine's going inside bodies. It's actually happening. At Rice University down this street from where I live, they're growing chips in test tubes. Hewlett Packard has demonstrated that they can do it.

I love to tell the story about the paint that you're going to be able to put on the wall that'll have microchips embedded in it and if you decide you want to change the color, you flip a remote and it changes the color of your paint, but that's only the beginning. It's going to be a TV screen on your wall. It's going to be a computer screen on your wall. You can talk to objects. You can talk to things. It's going to fundamentally change how we deal with not just education but our lives, not just our lives but education. It's all life-long learning. Another buzz word you hear all the time in education. It's true. It's true.

I tell my students that I am the luckiest person in the university compared to them. They come in, they spend a year and a half for a master's degree or three or four years for a doctoral degree. I'm in my seventh year now. I am getting the best education of my life. I have this wonderful post-doctoral fellowship and they pay me, not enough , but enough. Anyway, I'm going to leave you with what I think about making predictions. This is a quote I found from Wilbur Wright. Some of you will remember him. "I confess that in 1901 I said to my brother Orville that man would not fly for 50 years. Two years later we ourselves made flights. This demonstration of my impotence as a prophet gave me such a shock that ever since I've distrusted myself and avoided all predictions." I just think that's great, so just be careful what you're predicting, but I think it's all going to come true and it's going to become faster. It's going to become much more comprehensively and the challenge for us, is how do we deal with that?

Burbach: Thank you, Bernard. John--

John M. Unsworth: Batting clean-up. It's always challenging. You don't know whether other people will have done your work for you. One of my favorite books on the subject that we've been talking about is the Education of Henry Adams which I recommend as a thoughtful treatment of the impact of an increasing pace of technological change on the business of education, at least in some of its chapters. It's really quite poignant. He traces in terms of the evolution of mechanical force the increasing pace of change and the increase in the forces that humankind controls and he wonders at one point how a person educated in the 19th century is going to educate someone who will have to live in the 20th century and he's standing right at the turn of those two centuries, and that's a question that in 1999 and given the things that we've just been talking about reverberates very strongly and the increasing pace of change that he's talking about has, in fact, predictably only increased since he talked about it.

I think one answer to this question is trying to understand what it is that we teach and whether it is, for example, a body of content or whether it's a set of skills and I'd say our chances of being useful teachers are better if it's a set of a skills than if it's a body of content because as Bethany pointed out, the content is changing very rapidly so anything that I teach you today, especially on a subject like information technology or information culture, is going to be out of date tomorrow. Better I should teach you how to find information which was a problem that Bethany was also talking about and teach how to find it, maybe not only in electronic sources but also in traditional library sources, and wherever it can be found, whether they're resources that we think of traditionally as reference tools or not.

I think the point that Brooke made about giving teachers professional development time is extremely important, even if we think the business that we're in is teaching students not what to know but how to learn. Even in order to keep up with that task of teaching people how to learn, teachers need continual updating themselves.

I very much agree with remarks made earlier about the experience of collaborative work being an important part of what we teach our students and that what I think of as the post-modern condition, that is condition in which you know that you can't know everything that needs to be known in order to do what has to be done, and that's a condition of knowledge that enforces collaboration and it can be uncomfortable. Someone in Henry Adams' tradition was used to knowing what could be known and that's really no longer possible in any part of the culture, not even, I would say, in the humanities which might have been the last holdout there.

One of the things that hasn't really come up is the sort of counterpart to the opportunities that new technologies give us for bringing new teachers into the classroom and that is the new audiences that it opens up for those of us in the university. I find that anything that I put on the web for research purposes or instructional purposes has all kinds of readers that I didn't intend, and that's a very interesting experience. I'm convinced that the Internet is entirely populated by high school students and they all need help with their home and they're frequently writing and asking for expert help with their home but there really are a lot of readers of material you just wouldn't predict.

One of my vocational activities is editing an electronic journal called Post-Modern Culture and I remember getting an e-mail one day. It's still filed away somewhere because it's one of my favorites, from a guy, just a guy out there reading the journal, and he said, "I am a teamster living in Vermont and my local library is very good but it has nothing on Jameson, nothing on Baudrillard, nothing on Derrrida. Your journal is a real Godsend," and I thought, okay , ergo all my preconceptions about who's reading this journal . You get in arguments with people about why are you talking in jargon. Why don't you speak in language that people can understand. I'm out here reading you. I want to understand you. It's the kind of thing that just wouldn't have happened without this technology and the kind of sense of immediacy that it gives people on both sides. The worry about computers replacing human-to-human contact, I think, is the wrong worry. The right worry is actually that it will intensify human-to-human contact to such an extent that we will have to work very hard to have any privacy at all from our colleagues, from our students, from anyone. It's going to be very difficult in the future, I predict , to have any thought that takes more than about five minutes to formulate.

The other prediction I'll make is that libraries, in fact, while they might be reformulated are not going to go away and the kinds of things that people, especially in the humanities, have been training in for hundreds and thousands of years will becoming increasingly important but in a world in which everything is at your fingertips, boy, do you need a librarian, and the problem of organizing information and finding information is going to become, is already becoming, I would say, much more acute than it ever was. We're being overwhelmed with information and we need people who understand how to organize it, how to present it, and how to think critically about how it organizes us and that's what people in the humanities do.

I'm going to give you a couple examples of the way information technology and particularly the network has changed my teaching in closing. One was an experience that I had in 1990 which is sort the other end of the spectrum that John Griffin started by talking about. I'm taking you back in time now before we had video on the Internet, and that was an experience in teaching composition at North Carolina State University to two classes of engineers who were also double majoring in the humanities. Benjamin Franklin Scholars, they called them. And I will admit up front that teaching composition is not what I feel I was put on earth to do, and I needed to find a way frankly to make the class interesting to me. I stumbled into Lambda Mu which was before MUVEs was MOO which was MUD object oriented. MUDs were multiusers dungeons games used for planning "Dungeons and Dragons" on the networks and Lambda Mu was an interesting and very large community and I looked at it and wandered around for a while and thought it might be interesting to teach composition in this world and I had the two classes of students organized into groups that were writing white papers on policy issues involving the Internet because at that time, in 1990, I wanted them to be able to do research on the Internet and the Internet was really only a good source of information at that point about the Internet, so that sort of dictated the topic. It wouldn't now.

The students adopted fictitious professional specialties at the beginning of the semester so they were sociologists or lawyers or librarians or other specialties and they researched in the literature of that discipline the policy issues that we were going to work on and they wrote those papers collaboratively and they also had roles within the group as reference person or editor or task master, whatever, and they produced a document that read as though it had been authored by a single person and they competed with each other, these two classes, and the winning paper got into a packet which we sent to Al Gore at the end of the semester and I don't think he ever read it judging from subsequent policy decisions, but it was an excellent class. Students really wrote very well. They worked well together.

I would come into class and half the time we had classes in the MOO. The other half, we had time in a physical classroom. I would walk into class and I'm not making this up. I would walk into class and students would be up on the board outlining things-- The class would already be going five minutes before the class was supposed to start, and I would just come in and sit down and I became kind of coach, resource person. They were running the class and if somebody wasn't doing their work, they didn't come to me and says somebody isn't doing their work. They came to me and said, well, we thought you'd want to know we disciplined this person because he wasn't doing his work . The whole class thing was very different.

In retrospect, when I thought back about that, I thought, well, the MOO was interesting and anonymity was important in certain ways and the kind of role playing aspect of this course was very important but I probably could've done all that without computers. The one thing I couldn't have done in that class without computers is bring in outside speakers. I had John Perry Barlow. I had Wally Gasoway. I had experts in various problems that we were talking about coming in because they could do it from their office desk in 45 minutes, and that was excellent, but a lot of the other parts of the class, I needed the technology to make me rethink my pedagogy, and I guess that's my closing remark, is that one of the most important things about this is that it has the potential not only to bring you new audiences and to bring you new teachers and to put new tools in your hands, but the new tools occasionally have the potential to make you think differently about what you do and to do it more creatively. Thanks.

Burbach: Thank you, John. We have time for questions now and I'd like to just open it to the audience and invite your comments, reactions, questions, whatever comes to mind, so why don't we just open it up or members of the panel who want to address a question to someone else or a comment.

Griffin: Actually I have a comment, because a lot of people-- We're talking about how teachers need to be students and students need to be teachers and I think this is a really, to borrow a word from Tim Koogle, a cool concept , and I think we often lose track of that in our busy lives and everything else about the nature of education is we're all constantly students and we're all constantly teachers and I think-- If I could give some concrete advice to the teachers who are here, a saying that they could maybe take home and use is, is think about what you'd like for your students and who maybe epitomizes outside the academic community some skill or if it's a some great writer, a great architect. I'm going to try and bring a great investor, and I'd say contact that person and see if you can get them involved with your class, with your students, with your research, with whatever's going on and I think you will find that because, five years ago, I think the person would say I'm sorry I don't have time to come down and give a speech or I'm sorry I don't have time for this. I think today with the new tools that are available through the e-mail, the videoconferencing, and the Internet and the web site and the community rooms you can set up, I think you can bring aspects into the classroom that can just enrich the students.

In my class, one of our students just e-mailed Tim Koogle. Each student had to come up with their own investment and she put in the subject line a humble request from a UVA student, okay. She just e-mailed him this because she was researching Yahoo! as an investment. Within five minutes, she got an e-mail back, what's your phone number? I'll call you. He gave her this long half-hour interview, directed her to the other sites, gave her other people to call, and I'm convinced that one of the reasons he was so anxious to come back was because he actually, he liked that experience and he liked interacting with the students, and I guess my point is that everyone can find something to utilize these new technologies to bring in, and if you're not a teacher, there's a great site that we actually started at Blue Ridge where we put together inner city students in New York with mentors. We call them e-mentors or i-mentors and the URL is imentor.org and basically we give old-fashioned advice on careers, on education, on getting into college, on SATs, etc., and it's all done over the web site through a curriculum and I think that's another example of being able to teach through the web.

Burbach: Great. Thank you. Questions from the audience.

Audience question: I'd just like to make an observation. There are two models of electronic instruction. One is the videoconferencing where you have the sage of the stage, and the other is __________ and John talked about this-- the guy on the side __________ different ways __________ application __________ but there really __________ as John was saying __________ They really are totally essentially different models of pedagogy going forward in the Internet age. I'd ask for your comments about that.

Burbach: Thank you. Any one want to respond to that?

Unsworth: I think that's true but I do think they can be combined. I think you can have class time devoted to the sage and then also have assignments that are structured to encourage collaborative work in the other kind of model.

Audience question: Which one will produce more learning?

Robin: I have comment. I think I have a comment on everything. Sorry . One of the things that I noticed as a teacher is that it's very difficult to sit in a room and watch people work and they're having a good time and you're sitting there. It frightens a lot of university faculty who are fairly robust individuals and have a good sense of themselves, but I do that. I go into a room. I show 15 or 20 minutes of something. This is what I want to demonstrate to you tonight in class, okay. Now, I want you to try it and I step back. Now, granted I'm teaching instructional technology so it's different for me than if I were teaching world history or phonetics or phonics or whatever, but I show something on a computer screen using a computer and a projector and a screen and I demonstrate this is what I want us to do tonight. We're going to learn how to add a sound clip to an authorware file or whatever, and I encourage them to work in teams because I think that--

Well, I'm going to show my bias here. I'm a believer in what I call the Beatles principles. John, Paul, George and Ringo never accomplished individually what they did together, in my opinion, so I like to see people work together. It's harmonious to me.

Unsworth: We also call that the Keith Richards principle.

Robin: Even better, thank you. But it's humbling and it's scary as hell to say I'm not going to do anymore. What I end up doing is I walk around and some of the groups say, well, now that you're here, let me ask you about this and some of the other groups don't-- They act like they don't even want me to be there, so I just kind of crawl back away from them. I let them do what they want to do, and so then I always have to decide what's the right amount of time before I say stop, let's talk about what you've done, let's ask questions, let's share our experiences, and then I say, okay, well, if we've all conquered that little mountain, let's move onto the next thing, and it turns out that I run out of time. I end up going into class with a list of like here are the five things that I want us to do tonight. Most of my students teach or work in business and industry, and we have our classes in the evenings and so I never get to number five. Sometimes I don't even get to number three, but it changes how we perform education, I think

I don't know that every professor or every K-12 teacher, and again, well, let me just stick with higher ed. I don't know that every faculty member at my university, at this university, at any university, wants to do that. Wants to say, okay, I'm going to show you something, now you try it and I'm going to sit here and you ask me questions if you have them because we were all taught we know something that you don't know and we're going to tell you what it is and then you're going to know it, and then you can go out and tell somebody else, but that's just not the way the world is today, or has it changed while I wasn't looking. So, anyway, I'd be interested to hear how other people feel about that, but I know, for me, it's still uncomfortable but I have to kind of bite my tongue and sit on my hands and just let it happen. And the students, boy, they love it, and they say gosh, this is so good to have a chance to try things out. I love being able to have hands-on time. I don't, and for technology especially, people don't usually learn technology by watching other people talk about technology that they already know how to do. They have to try it.

Burbach: Mr. Van Yahres, do you have your hand up?

Mitch Van Yahres: We heard this morning that, and you were saying also, that change is moving at the speed of light and all these things are looked at by a lot of people __________ changes in education philosophy but that __________, we also hear that. We also have the public, the parents out there, who I think rebel against team teaching because they all believe in the competitive world. They want their son or daughter to be graded in relation to other children and here you are putting forth keeping people together, or whatever into teams and they 're looking at it as my child is making that child get a better mark. How do you respond to that?

Robin: In Houston, we have this thing called rain forest backlash movement. It's like if one more parent finds out that their kid is spending three months learning about the rain forest and all these collaborative multidisciplinary things they're going to set fire to the school . They hate it, because that was a real big trend about two or three years ago to do these integrated curricular units and it seemed like everybody picked the rain forest. Okay, so no more rain forest, but it's a challenging question that you're asking and I'm not going to pretend to have the answer.

In fact, one of the things that I think before I try to answer the question is I need to throw out a disclaimer here. There aren't any simple answers to these questions. All the questions that are generated at a conference like this are complicated. Well, no. The questions are simple; the answers are complicated and they're multifaceted and they're interconnected, so it's real easy to say what are you going to do about this, and not be able to say I'm going to do X.

What I would say to that parent-- I would invite that parent into the classroom and I would have them watch and observe those kids or even young adults, working together and then I would have the parents talk to those kids about what they're learning and have them demonstrate what they've done. I keep coming back to these 12-year-olds that are teaching 40-year-olds and 30-year-olds and 25-year-olds how to deal with technology and you know that MasterCard commercial or VISA. This costs this much. This costs this much. This thing is priceless. I mean, that's what it is. You can't put a price on the value of kids' eyes lighting up and sparkling when they feel like they've learned something and they are proud of that. I mean it sounds kind of corny , but it's true and I think it's fabulous.

Graham: I would say it would be difficult if a parent came into your classroom one time and watched that and I don't know that they would be convinced at one time. I think it's a process that a teacher can see throughout a school year of students learning how to work in groups and learning how to problem solve and seeing them make those gains and so I'm not convinced that coming in one time would sell them on the idea. I think it's really a reconceptualization of learning and what we value in the work place even. This morning we heard a lot about collaboration and I think that's really not what we think of when we're getting into college or getting a job. We don't think, well, I've got to prove I'm a great collaborator. How does that come across on a resume or grade point average, so I think it's really a whole reconceptualization. I think maybe the force of that needs to come from the business world which is if parents are concerned about their child's competitiveness, that's really kind of their overall goal is where is my child going to end up--

______________: If it's their kid, though, I think it'll make a difference even one time. I agree with you that it's an ongoing process. That's what we've all been saying.

Audience question: It seems to me there's a much bigger problem here in terms of reconceptualizing education. We've talked about two different ways of learning and people want the either/or choice. It really ought to be both/and or trying to sell that idea. People in general are very resistant to change. They dig their heels in. It's human nature. Beyond that, when it comes to education, for all we have the standards of learning and any number of other things, we never developed a community consensus as to whether those skills represent what the parents, the community or the politicians want kids to know, and until we get some of that done, all of these other problems however many tools we have to bring to bear on how to help children learn better, if a vast majority of the parent population says the way I learned is the only way to learn and when I went to school, they had supervised study halls and my children did not have to bring work home and my parents did not have to help me with schoolwork, and I hear that in my community, so many other things can't happen when that kind of thing is going on and no matter the technology, the curriculum, the quality of the information, the quantity of it, or how you present it to kids, and those are very much bigger societal issues that impact on education and we sometimes forget derail the whole process __________ the educational issues.

Burbach: Thank you. There's a question here and then one over there.

Audience question: I have a question for Brooke Graham. Henry Kissinger said that you have to organize the world so that ordinary people can run it. Can technology help ordinary teachers succeed in teaching from __________ more difficult?

Graham: I think it can, but I think it's extremely overwhelming right now and I like the point-- I forget whose point about we need these librarians. We think of all these ideas that libraries are going away. Well, they're not and I thought that was really good. I think a librarian is a person who sits and organizes books, but they organize information and I think that that's excellent and I spend a lot of time on the web and I feel like I'm relatively computer savvy and I find it extremely overwhelming and that's why I think we need people, maybe not classroom teachers should spend their time digging through the Internet and digging through software, but we need people who are kind of a layer in between, who can go out and say, well, this is a great web site and that's kind of what some of the work I do at the Curry School is--looking for great resources for, say, my emphasis is social studies, so I spend time looking for social studies web sites and K-12 teachers, in particular, are very practical oriented people. They have every-day concerns. Every morning you wake up and you're entertaining students from 8:00 to 3:00 and you've got students who have a lot of different demands and need their attention captured and you've got standards of learning, different pressures on you, so I think teachers are very practical oriented and I think the idea of going out and spending two hours searching the web at night is unrealistic, and I think teachers grade papers and teachers have families and teachers prepare lessons and I think that we really do need some librarians or some people as an intermediary stage, or that teachers take a sabbatical for a summer or a year or a semester and have time to really go out and spend continuous day-to-day time with technology, but I really do believe that it can help us do our job better and allow us to do things we couldn't do but it doesn't come from being handed a CD-ROM or one web site.

Audience question: I have a question. This question has been addressed __________ __________ by some of the comments made by the panelists, but I wanted __________ to synthesize what we're talking about. It's clear that a collaborative environment works much better for some of the issues we've talked about, particularly the use of technology in teaching, and learning how to use computers to create critical __________ and create content that is academic and also useful for teaching and so forth, but what in your opinion, what is the greatest institutional hurtle that we have to surpass in order to be a fully collaborative teaching and learning environment?

Robin: You already answered that question. It's societal and political and __________ expectations.

______________: Yes, that was a nice answer.

______________: And parental expectations.

Audience question: __________ the way that __________ ultimately-- How everything is done through a specific __________ discipline and how some students who are interdisciplinary in their interests really find terrible barriers to be able to proceed in their studies because of this?

Robin: I don't want to try and tackle the higher ed issue, but let me just mention one thing about K-12. I'm from Texas and--. Well, I'm not from Texas, but I live in Texas and Texas has this big test for K-11 students called TAAS, Texas Academic Assessment Skills test and every student in grades three and five and seven takes it and you can't graduate from any public school without passing the TAAS test and the thing about technology though is that the skills that it teaches are not the skills that are being measured by that test, and so what we're doing is we're creating schizophrenic teachers saying you need to make sure your students pass the TAAS test and, oh, by the way, you need to integrate technology into your curriculum, but they're not connected and that's a problem, so a lot of enlightened, intelligent, informed people are calling for the radical redesign or the removal of the TAAS tests.

Audience question: And in Virginia, you've got technology as a part of the Standards of Learning test. We've got a failure rate in our schools where children don't use computers at home, it is __________ times in the wealthier family and school accreditation should not end up being based on how much money do your parents have, but because again, the accreditation is not a matter of passing the majority. Every school system has to pass every single one at a certain level and if it's socioeconomic it is the dividing line between which schools are passing and which schools are failing you've got a disaster almost.

Burbach: Let's this be the last question and we'll try to honor the time fight. Go ahead.

Audience question: A question for Mr. Kunkle. It's basically called the digital divide. What are companies like PSINET doing for that type of thing right now? Do you have any initiatives how to address that?

Kunkle: We would like to. What we're doing right now is trying to get into the various places in the globe so we can make it happen. We're fairly young, fairly new. Expanding at over 100% a year, so the fact is we're providing the kind of activity for you folks to do what you need to do. Wish we could do more. We will when we can. In the meantime, we're fighting certain rear guard actions against a lot of things that happen to be aimed at us from let's call it regulators of the government, things that would inhibit the growth of the Internet, and you can call them anti-porn crusades, you can call them anti-gambling crusades. You can call them taxation of the Internet. There're a lot of things you can call them, but those are all designed to slow it down. We're fighting those and trying to push this out just as far as we can, just as fast as we can.

I understand the issues with standardization and education. I grew up in that just like we all did. It's irrelevant and the more time we spend worrying about standardizing it, the more behind our schools and our students are going to be, because in our world, once they get out of school, once they come to us, none of that is relevant. None of it. What's relevant is how fast you can make a decision, how well you can make a decision based on less than adequate information, how willing you are to make a mistake, and then to learn from it and change so that the next time you go and restart-- I think Tim was saying that this morning, our company works the same way.

As highly educated people through whatever schools and I went through law school which is one of the most difficult disciplines in terms of boxing you in in how you approach education, our CEO is fond of saying, look, don't do A+ work, okay. We haven't got time for it. You are all taught, I was taught, to do A+ work. That's what we got stroked for in the academic environment. Forget it. If you can do B work, that's good enough. Things are moving along so fast we haven't got time for A+ work. That's all there is to it. And it's true. And that's what's made the Internet and this technology what it is.

We can go out perhaps afterward. I've heard a lot of things about technology today this morning in here. I'll make a prediction that all it's wrong . It's going a lot faster. It's going a lot further than any of us can imagine. I was at the White House a couple of weeks ago and one of the fellow in our industry was talking about how your refrigerator will call you up and tell you the milk is out of date. We can do that today. This is not joke. We can do that today. So the point is, forget what you learn. Learn how to learn and then let's go do it quickly together.

__________: I'd have to get an unlisted number so my appliances can't call me .

[Burbach]: Just one reflection. I took a course in graduate school called "Understanding Media," and one of the themes of that course is that a medium, a dominant medium of communication changes the way in which society's organized, changes culture, changes your psyche. Some of if it comes from McLuhan which has been debunked over the years, but one of the quotes I remember from that course was-- Quoted someone, I can't remember whom, but it was that he wasn't sure who discovered water but he was pretty sure it wasn't a fish , and what he meant by that was that it's the people who are least likely to understand what a dominant new communications medium will be like are not those that are living it and we're still in the early stages of that. At the same time, we can't not try to understand that and that I think is the great challenge before us and my hope is that today inched that along a little bit. Thank you all for coming and we look forward to seeing you in the morning.