1. AF: Question 1: Has your country ever had, and does it now have a policy framework guiding the use of information technology by students in all curriculum areas?

2. DM: As in Australia there is no central control of the school system. In the USA about 19% of funding comes from the Federal level, but it comes in terms of chunks of money for special education, and so on. It is allocated by formula, so it can impact on children in several ways, and there are strings attached to it, so it doesn't allow schools to vary its use. That doesn't mean the Federal government doesn't put a fair amount of effort into trying to shape technology education.

3. So we had a report back in 1983 called 'A Nation at Risk' which was drawn up by a blue-ribbon panel of education experts. It made the pretty controversial statement that if our educational system had been inflicted upon us by a foreign power we would have revolted against it. It was terrible. That report had a fair number of statements about technology, and made the recommendation that kids that graduated from high school that were college-bound would have a happier course in technology and more successful careers. In some sense it was the start of a fair amount of school reform in this country.

4. If you look at it really historically, it was a contracting education system, it was sort of built in 1900 early 1900s, and it hadn't changed a whole lot during the subsequent 50 years or so. And it was an education system built for an industrial age society. There are several definitions of what industrial age means, but by the mid-1950's the number of people in white-collar jobs exceeded the number in manufacturing or blue-collar jobs. And now only about 18% of the workforce are in blue-collar jobs, and the rest are 'something else'. So an education system that was built to serve the country in the industrial age would not be adequate for a time when technology was beginning to change the world substantially. We'd had Sputnik. So from then on out, in some sense, the Federal government has been trying to support technology in schools in different ways. And they have different ways in which they can do this. For example one of the very big Federal programs in this country is called Title 1. If children are scored fiscally below a certain level, they have a definition of what they're allowed to get for free in terms of free lunch or subsidised lunch and so on. If more than 20% of the students in a school qualify for a free lunch, the money the school gets can be used for technology, and if more than 50% of the students qualify, the technology can be used by everybody at the school. In recent years they have been starting to put quite large money into technology. By far the largest comes from the E-RATE, where essentially they have required the telephone companies to give some of their money to a pool which is US$2.25 billion a year which is given to schools, libraries and so on to wire the schools, maintain the connectivity and so on. Well, $2.25 b a year is more than a third of the money in the whole country going into computers in education, at pre-college level. So there's a lot of political maneuvering going on, in so far as much as this money is not paid directly to Congress, as a tax, but the telephone companies have to pay this money. But that's a fairly large grant.

5. Then there's what they call the Challenge Fund grants. These were up to $2M a year for up to 5 years, so these were typically $7M grants, competitive grants, and they've awarded 82 of those or so. They go to the state level, or a bunch of school districts. The idea is to make something happen in a particular area, with the hope that something will trickle out. They put quite a lot of money into research and evaluation of these project areas. ISTE for example is evaluator on one of these projects, and is writing a summative report on another. Well, if you think of about $7M over 80 or so projects, that quite a lot of money being put into this area.

6. They've got a smaller project going on right now, aimed at teacher education colleges, called Preparing Teachers for Technology in Teaching (PTTT). Colleges of Education can write proposals at three different levels. We've got one here: for one year, for $120,000 - up to a 3 year, $400,000 project to improve your college of ed, ISTE got onto the third level, where you're looking at the national educational technology standards project. So we're on a three year project, which counting the matching funds which have to be lined up with various companies and so on, comes to about $1.5M a year, for 3 years, to work on National Standards. Where does all the money come from? Well with a small project came from $50,000 of seed money from NASA, the space people, and then some private money from various companies, $200,000 grant from the Department of Education at the central level, some more private money, and now a big chunk of money which is coming from the Feds. If you look at standards projects in other curriculum areas, it turns out that most of them had a large amount of federal money in them. The National Standards movement has been going on since the early 1980s, which just maybe happens to coincide with the 'Nations at Risk' report I was telling you about earlier.

7. So when you look at what the Federal Government can do, it can fund projects and people to do projects that have national impact. Another examples is .. we have another program going on at the national level called the Expert Panel. They picked five areas they wanted to emphasise with, to pick projects that need publicising. Math/Science was one, Technology was one, ... so I'm on the Expert Technology Panel, we started about a year ago. The Federal Government is putting hardly any money into it, but they bring together all these experts, that then advertise around the country that 'we want the best projects' and we define what constitutes a good project, something that can transfer to other places, something that there is research evidence that it has been successful. In the first year 136 proposals came in, and we'll meet a week from now to pick the final projects which the Secretary of Education will open out to everyone, saying here are some exemplary projects that are good and make good use of technology. That's a Federal initiative that makes a significant difference.

8. So what's going on here is that the Federal Government is committed in some sense to every school being on the Internet, to every classroom being on the Internet, fostering projects, funding projects, which have the chance to make a difference on a large scale. There are also projects at the State level. Each state is putting computers into schools, working on professional development programmes for teachers, and so on. There is a clear Federal push for better use of technology in schools in the pre-college areas, and several other activities going on for this at the college and University levels also. So you can see they are at it in all sorts of subtle ways.

9. One of these things is a web-site called 'Free' I wrote an editorial about it. But in essence, the word came down from the Presidency, that he wanted each federal Agency to create a web-site that supports education. And now there are several hundred pieces in this web-site, with really good stuff on it. It's a way to use Federal money to create web-sites with stuff that is of use to teachers, to kids.

10. AF: You've indicated all these Federal projects to support Technology. What about the Mathematics Standards - have they been adopted widely by States and schools?

11. DM: That's a good example, because my background is in Mathematics. It's a bit different. The Maths standards project started back in 1985 or so, where they brought together Maths leaders from all round the country, in a sequence of meetings. It was good to rub shoulders with great names. The first Standards that came out then were in 1989, the National Council for teachers of Mathematics said, with its 100,000 members, that whenever anyone wrote an article for them, they tied the article to the standards. After about ten years or so, when you talk to teachers and ask, well, what difference did it make, to change the knowledge of a set of teachers in such a way that they do things different, is .. I don't know how to put it.. is nearly impossible. So, you can change all the text books, the Standards have lead to commercial publishers changing their text-books, the text books are now aligned to the Standards, and teachers who are teaching from the text books based upon the Standards are able to say their courses correspond to the Standards. As to whether the teacher actually has knowledge of the Standards, and can talk about them... well!

12. AF: Are you saying those Mathematics standards were quite widely adopted?

13. DM: Well, they get adopted in several different ways. This is relevant to technology. You think about it. Here .. let's back up a little bit further... Maths has been developing for 5000 years. We have 5000 years of history in that one subject. Lots and lots of people are continually researching the field, so the amount of knowledge is going up exponentially. But the brain's ability to learn Math hasn't change appreciably during that time, and a fair amount of research has shown now, for instance your Howard Gardner, has Maths as one of the thinking abilities. But to learn to know and do Math, at a reasonable level, ... takes several years before you go on to College, and some people never get very good at it. It's a hard area. So it's easy to write down things people ought to be able to do, you get all those expert people together, and then you get adoption by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, the supervisors of Mathematics, each state department of education, each State says in its requirements the link with the Standards. That happens in a kind of natural manner. In that sense it is a small, sort of top-down approach. But the bottom-up implementation....

14. Let me switch over to Technology. If we put together this concept of national standards, well if you put together a lot of effort by a lot of people, lots of meetings, different lots of town-hall meetings, state-wide discussions in lots of states, e-mail messages and lists, groups of people brought together to talk, others meet up at conferences, and we get these all done, and ....now I get a whole lot more specific.

15. Right now I am teaching people who are in an elementary education programme. This particular programme is a five year programme to get them their teacher certification and a specialism at the same time. During that fifth year they specialise in something so all of them in that five years get the regular Education certification, and special education certification and some speciality area. 21 of them this year have technology as their specialisation area, so I have a class of 21 very bright technology oriented students. In their freshman year they got a course very like the one you described in your freshman year (Personal and Professional information technology in education), and they get a fair amount of technology integrated into the various subject areas in the subsequent years. So I take this group of people, and they take a couple of classes of technology. And you hold up these Standards, and you say 'look at these and say if you can satisfy all those for the Grade 8 students'.

16. AF: What, you personally?

17. DM: Yeah, right the students themselves, can they do all the things in the grade 8 levels. There they are, about to be an elementary teacher, the brightest and best, technology oriented, just finishing school, .. and the answer is they can all find some of the 8th grade things they cannot do. They look at the 12th Grade stuff, and there's quite a lot they have not done. Most of them feel they satisfy the elementary school requirements. If you take the other batch, the ones that are not taking the technology specialist classes, it's going to be a lot more shaky. So..what happens is that the standards get developed, the standards in maths and in every area, they are developed in good faith, but the reality is that they aren't what ordinary humans can achieve on average. Our high school maths program has sections such as geometry, algebra and so on. So it means that most kids get about a year on geometry, and a year on algebra in 9th or 10th Grade. Take these kids when they are freshmen in University, and ask them to name and prove a theorem in geometry. They can't. The concept that you concentrate on the high level skills is not there - they don't integrate the two areas.

18. So we have standards that are well-thought out, but the teachers, even the best in teacher education programs, they're not qualified to meet the standards themselves. Well, I think that is fairly representative of standards in all areas.

19. AF: The UK publish scatter tables of % student achievements.

20. DM: I think there are deeper difficulties. It is fairly easy to measure whether a person can keyboard a document. Standards in fact tend to suggest that you can do fairly mundane things. Let me give you a couple of my classical examples. For about 20 years or so now we have had software that can essentially solve all the problems in Maths that people normally learn to solve. In algebra, calculus, linear algebra and so on. And we have got research that says in you use that kind of software in for example a freshman calculus course, the kids learn the concepts of calculus equally well, and proceed at about twice as fast as otherwise. There was a proper study in Ohio state University on this more than 15 years ago.

21. Well, we have got the exponential growth of the totality of Mathematics, we have got tools that can change the way you do Mathematics, so that I can put the conceptual ideas in my head, and the machine can do the hack work. Well, there is virtually none of that implemented in the standards. We are missing out on some of the most significant possibilities that technology can offer education. Let's take an example from applied mathematics, a different one. In science, the Nobel prize for Chemistry last year went to two computational chemists. What is a computational chemist? This is someone who is modelling chemical processes. So now we have theoretical, experimental and now computational chemists. It's a whole new way of knowing and doing the discipline. Are we preparing our teachers to teach in an environment or are we preparing the kids to work in an environment where there's a whole new discipline?

22. AF: It's almost time to be going to some later questions. Question 2: What is the current form and jurisdiction of this policy?

23. DM: NETS is only Federal, and has no direct jurisdiction. Most States have some kind of statement about what they want children to learn in technology education. Some of it is very explicit, some of it is buried in the science or social sciences, and so on. But almost in every state there is some awareness, and some states have very strong requirements such as 'you don't graduate from grade 3 until you pass a computer literacy test'. [which states?] North Carolina I think has such a thing now, Texas had such a thing 15 years ago, I don't know what became of it. Again the difficulty is you can make up a requirement, that is fairly easy to measure and most everybody can meet. I think about 10 -15 years ago, Florida had such a requirement, They had an excess of PE teachers, who they gave a 2 week summer programme in technology. From my point of view, what can they do? The answer is they can teach the nuts and bolts, of types of technology, but in terms of higher order things, think again.

24. Many many states have said that technology is important, we'll put up a great lot of money to wire the state's schools, or to put computers into them, and they do it in different ways. South Dakota is a kind of a rural state, didn't have a lot of money, and the Governor knew this, so the governor authorised the day release of prisoners from the state penitentiary, so you saw prisoners going around the schools wiring them, running fibre into every school.

25. AF: Washington was supposed to have been wired by students in the schools.

26. DM: We had NetDay come out of California, where firms and parents donate materials and time to wire schools. The state of Washington has one of these computer literacy Challenge Grants, out of the Gen Y package. The idea is that over 15 years teachers will train kids to help them, based on some standardised training packages. It's hoped that by the end of the project over 10,000 school or a tenth of the schools in the country will have been cabled by this cascading method.

27. AF: Teachers feel intimidated by kids that know more than they do.

28. DM: The idea is to get them used to that, to work alongside each other.

29. AF: To what extent have states referred to or based their objectives upon NETS, or is it too early to tell?

30. DM: Sometimes it is too early to tell. When you look at the documents (from each of the States) there's a strong overlap in a lot of places. But it is a chicken and egg thing. States developed their own guidelines and standards before NETS, and the people that were doing this were involved in the development of NETS.

31. AF: Do you think there will be a time in the next three years when the states will be referring to the NETS document?

32. DM: Well, they do now. Well, let me look at it another way.

33. ISTE has done two different things with Standards. One thing is standards for kids, the other is standards for pre-service teachers. In this country there are various accreditation agencies in teacher education. There's only one that is nationally authorised by the government. That's the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education(NCATE). NCATE, some number of years ago, moved from being a close knot group to allowing professional societies to join in. Well, ISTE joined NCATE as a professional society. Well, as a professional society, you can help to shape their standards in two different ways. One is, you can recommend standards in your area of expertise, in the case of ISTE, the area of computers in education. Well that wasn't really what we were about, as we wanted to get in on the question of what standards do all teachers need in the technology area. And we gradually got that built in to the unit standards for all teachers. Well, we've worked with that for about eight or nine years now, and we've gone through several cycles of revision of our material. And we've made some progress, in determining that every teacher education programme that has been certified, should provide in terms of facilities and faculty (staff) and training when preparing the pre-service teachers. So the goal was that if you graduate from a teacher education programme, you are prepared to help your kids move on. That is, if you are a seventh grade teacher, you are prepared to take kids that have met the fifth grade requirements, and move them on so they can meet the eight grade requirements.

34. So some of the States are looking to the NCATE standards to be applied to the in-service teachers, IDAHO for example, say, look we're going to test all of our in-service teachers to the pre-service standards, and give them professional development if they don't meet them.

35. AF: Question 3: What were the political, policy and administrative forces operating on the process of its gestation?

36. DM: We've changed in some sense from education, being a not particularly political thing, to at both the state level and the federal level people say, well, I'm an Education President, or governor. There's political advantage in the last 6, 8, ten years to being a spokesperson for education. If you go to our current vice-president, Al Gore, he's technology-savvy. For example, at the National Computer Education Conference, quite a few years ago, he was the first politician I had ever heard who knew what he was talking about when it came to technology. So, he has to some extent as vice-president, to earn part of his reputation as the technology education vice-president. So that's a sort of answer to the question. So if you are the governor of South Dakota, you say we are a poor rural state, and we want to compete with the other states and so on, you say we need to fibre-optic cable the state, we need computers in the schools, we need to have teachers trained, and for a little state they've put big money into seeing these things happen. And it is often a Governor initiative that has made these things happen. One person can make a lot of difference.

37. AF: Who was that one person when it comes to NETS?

38. DM: She was Lejeanne Thomas, who is an education professor at Louisiana City university. She was one of the Presidents of ISTE. Let's go back to 1990 or so. She became familiar with what NCATE could do, and how we could tie in with NCATE. She pushed for ISTE to become part of NCATE, and put together significant people. She gathered together the people to create the NCATE standards. After that was quite successful, she started working on NETS.

39. AF: It goes back that far.

40. AF: Question 4: In your opinion, what were the objectives, both stated and covert, of the bodies which constructed, endorsed and authorised the policy?

41. DM: I guess the way I would interpret the answer here would be to say, if this was coming as a top-down from a politician sort of thing, then there would have been political objectives. It came in some sense as a grass roots bottom up thing, by people who are teachers who were separately dedicated to quality education. As an example of the bottom-up nature, they were saying "we understand this technology ourselves, we understand how really important it is, we think it can change the nature of education, and we are devoting our lives to doing that". There may have been the occasional person involved who's said 'well, this looks like a great career path or path to promotion for me', but there's been nearly none of that . They've been good-hearted people, dedicated to professional careers, and who want something good to happen for kids. Very, very refreshing.

42. AF: Question 5: When was the policy authorised at the highest relevant level in your country?

DM: NETS was published in June 1998. When we tried to put a budget together for the standards project, we had some experience on other projects, and we figured it takes $6M and 3 or 4 years to do a standards project. So what was laid out was, what could we do with the little bit of money we had, seed money to get it started, to get the big money leveraged.

43. <missing...>

44. So, then, when you develop standards, in a field in which there may be major technological breakthroughs, then it is hard to write the standards, from that point of view. But the widespread implementation of a major technological breakthrough takes a long time. So we are moving from Internet I to Internet II. In the United States, they say that Internet I is in about half the classrooms. In 10 years from now, we may have Internet II in a good proportion of the classrooms. So you're writing standards, and there are certain kinds of things you can do in terms of solving problems, and your ways of knowing and doing the discipline in terms of on-line research, will change in the order of a factor of 1000 reflecting the speed of your connectivity. So you need in that sense to have revisions to your standards, that are based upon, that there are things that you can do that are substantially different because of the changes in technology.

45. The second fact is we've put forward these standards, and we have watched as people try to implement them, and we see where we are going wrong. The NCATE standards have quite a lot of emphasis on the facilities that are available. It's just as easy to have standards that say the teachers are supposed to know this, to be able to do this, but the Colleges of Education might not have been able to show that, and we would not have accomplished what we wanted to accomplish. That's why there is the emphasis on facilities. I can imagine some time in the future, that says in terms of the NETS standards, it will say 'all kids will be facile in dealing with multiple sources of information, some of which is self-contradictory, and given a topic will go out and find twenty sources of information relevant to it within 17 minutes.

46. Well, the whole flavour of these mundane things - all kids should know how to use multi-media - well what does that mean? I mean what does it mean at a higher level? So the basic thinking may well be right, or they may be faults in the thinking of the teachers and the technology may change, but what it means is that you have to have multiple revision provisions.

47. AF: But you've not got that built in?

48. DM: Well, you've got it for the first time! But what we know is, that by the time we've got it done, we're going to have to start over again. Let's see, what was the cycle for the Maths sequence - it came out in 1989, and the next standards are due out in 2001.

49. AF: So the next revision of NETS will be a whole new initiative

50. DM: Yes. That doesn't fit well with the concept of continuous change which is our hallmark. It's a model, you know, these documents, paper, not a model... Take a web-page I'm fiddling around with for a course I am teaching. I make some changes, then upload the page, thought about it, and think I forgot to put this in, and 15 minutes later I change it, and upload the new page. So I can publish, change, ten times in one day if I want. We don't have an education system that knows how to deal with that in teacher training. It's just a different paradigm in terms of publication. In terms of representing standards, the same thing exactly could be going on - it just doesn't work with the current system as a whole.

51. AF: Question 11: Can you comment as to whether teacher professional development initiatives have in general preceded or followed related curriculum strategy announcements?

52. DM: NCATE standards preceded NETS, but they are unlinked. Things like this go back a lot further. In the mid 1980's for example we invited the people in pre-service technology education to put in a course unit. That wasn't unusual I think. Go back further. We had a Master's degree here in Computer Education in 1970, the second such program in the country. The Illinois Institute of Technology in 1969 had a Master's degree in Educational Technology. It's been 20 years roughly. We've gradually reached the stage where they have stopped such programs in this state. There's actually been a decrease in that kind of specialist program.

53. AF: Question 12: Are there particular schools, documents or other resources you can recommend I refer to as examples of what you have told me?

54. DM: In terms of teacher training or in terms of what?

55. AF: NETS

56. DM: So, are there places where NETS is being implemented really well? I would say that I don't know. ISTE has published a list of exemplary sites, and other people write books on good places to visit or exemplary sites. By and large these tend to be places where they have got a lot of money and they get more technology in education than other places.

57. Did you get in Australia an Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow project?

58. AF: Yes

59. DM: In 1997 a book came out summarising the research. My wife and I visited one of the sites in a city school in Ohio. A multi-story school, mostly minority population, half the students did not graduate. When the teachers give out a homework assignment, only 10% of the students return it. Things like that. Well, a piece of that school was an Apple Classroom of Tomorrow. The kids in that were not selected, so it was a reasonable experiment. The teachers got the training, the kids got the computers, and essentially 100% of those kids were graduating and going on to college. If the teacher gave them homework assignments, they were handing them up, scores on tests were good, and so on. The Apple Classroom of Tomorrow provided a change in the school culture. Teachers and kids were, you know, project-based learning, more cutting across disciplines, that was held up as showing that technology can make a whole lot of difference. But what tends to happen is, if you are going to try and find places to visit, is not visiting ordinary schools and ordinary teachers, but you are visiting places where a lot of money went into it, and one teacher, or early adopter, came in and made a significant change. The other end of the scale, is really wide.

60. A doctoral student here last year look a good look at a local schools in Eugene. In one she visited, she described what was going on with ... a swear word? Not worth shit? The kids used computers for instance for word processing, they could play games if they got other work done, they sent kids off to computer labs and the teachers stayed back to grade papers. So, what is closer to reality is that at the implementation level, on average what's happening in this country, is terrible. The national average of 1 computer per 5.9 kids or 5.7 kids, something about that, we have networking - lots of money going into that. Some States have put state money into computers in education, like Florida, where they put 30% of that money into staff development, whereas nationally that proportion is more like 15%. The implementation is poor in most places. So, when you find a place where the implementation is good, it tends to be because of very good leadership, or a particular person, or a whole lot of money, or something akin to that. It's not necessarily replicable.

61. AF: Question 13: There is an interesting distinction between IT literacy and IT integration... DM: Tell me! Getting kids to use computers, versus getting them to learn through computers.

62. DM: Learning through computers has two meanings. Computer Assisted Instruction and Project-based learning are both examples. Those are two hugely different things.

63. AF: OK

64. AF: Question 14: Does NETS also cover the use of computers for self-directed learning (eg, Independent Learning Systems, drill & practice, etc)

65. DM: Well, if you read NETS carefully, you see some words in there 'becoming independent, self-sufficient lifelong learners',

66. AF: Yes, but it kind of disappeared after that

67. DM: The people who put NETS together on average are anti-computer supported instruction. They were careful to not give that a lot of weight. That's my opinion.

68. AF: That's interesting

69. DM: If you take the teacher point of view, they don't buy into the concept that computer assisted instruction is as good or better. No amount of research has convinced them.

70. AF: AEU in Tasmania advocates 20% of school time should be on computer

71. DM: Does not say how they would be used.

72. AF: No

73. DM: If you try to look to the future ... here's a draft of an editorial that is coming out... [it looks like a Bill Gates video..] From my point of view, researchers know a lot of things about improving education, so translating research into practice has emerged as one of the major, major issues in education. There's an understanding of this at the central level, so a huge amount of the Title 1 money for example, they took a $125M of it, (out of $6-7B), and they said it was only for schools that would implement research-based innovation .... still, where the rubber meets the road, the individual teacher can say, well, there are thousands of research studies produced every year that are relevant to what you are doing. Along with the Maths standards, the Technology standards, and so on, and guess what - nobody claims to implement them. Well, there's no way that a human individual can know and implement these things. So, well, we get a cycle of implementation based on what textbook the teacher decides to use, and then there are 6 or 7 years, and then we will require you to take 2 or 3 days of training per year. So it took you 4 years to become kind of a competent as a teacher, but 2 or 3 days a year will keep you competent.

74. The model is not right, part of the answer is to look and say, what parts of research can be imparted through technology. In computer assisted instruction over the years, it was shown that you can implement some of this at a level that causes people to learn faster. And causes some of them to learn a bit better. There's lots of research to back that up, and your Birmingham example is along the same lines. But the implementation of the theory into the software can do nothing but get better, because it's always built on the best you've got so far. The best research, faster computers, and so on. So, gradually what can be done through computer assisted instruction is it will get better than one teacher in front of a class could. Not like an average teacher working one on one with a kid, but better than a teacher with 30 kids. And we are there now in one area...

75. AF: Maths

76. DM:... so eventually it may get implemented in all schools, Or even in the home or the shopping mall, or in the tutoring school. And gradually the school itself has to do something about it. Well, we are kind of there now. Politically we have had things like the state of West Virginia, a poverty-stricken state. Close to ten years ago, the governor said, 'we don't score well in national tests and so on, we are going to put computer-assisted instruction in every elementary school in the state. Each school had the choice of two different systems, and two years ago some long-range studies showed that scores had gone up and so on.

77. AF: A success?

78. DM: Depends if you think the goal of education is to score high on tests. If you believe in the tests.

79. [SENTIS discussion]

80. AF: Question 15: Is NETS designed to improve current educational methods through the use of educational technology, or to provide an incentive for a radical change in the purpose of schooling?

81. DM: I spend a lot of my time considering the phrase 'changing the purpose of education' and I find that not many people that I interact with can do this. I try to slant people in this direction. We're in a kind of transition I think, between the technology as a, not quite a goal in itself, but if we can just get people to get these basic skills, teachers can turn on the machines and do e-mail or whatever it is, and the students can do the same thing, with the word-processor becoming like a type-writer, they can make a power-point presentation, that's a major achievement. In terms of technological innovation, changing the world as we know it, this is a first order change. Higher or second order uses of technology I would describe as for instance in Mathematics, where the technology changes the discipline. It changes the way it's going, the discipline is transformed. There is some realisation at the Federal level of this. There is a project called 'distributed intelligences' which distributes about $35 M a year in $1M grants where 'me and my machine' can solve inter-disciplinary problems. How do I educate people, and what kind of software do I employ so that you can really show them how to take the power of the computer and solve the hard inter-disciplinary problems so that they can do something they couldn't do before? It's our hope that distributed intelligences will help here.

82. We are working on a second major publication with the standards, which is due out in about 10 days or so, and it is integrating or tying the standards to the standards of the other areas of the curriculum. The 50 or so people involved had devised some exercises or activities which tie together two different disciplines. It's about 250 - 300 pages long - that's the plan. It's an attempt to tie the stuff together. Again I found in working with that group that the vision I have been describing is not there. These examples are practical, down to earth. They say, 'Dave, you're so far out..!' They want to support the existing curriculum or at best make minor modifications of this. So when they come up with a really neat idea for using it in the classroom, I say, 'where does it really use the power of the technology?' The new Apple G4 has the ability to do 1 billion floating point operations per second, and is advertised as a 'supercomputer'. Well, I read an article the other day. One of the supercomputers of the weather bureau of this country, came in 1994, so its 5 or 6 years old now, there was a fire in the building and it appears that weather forecasting in this country is going to be passed around to other supercomputers. Well it did 16 billion floating point operations per second, so this new G4 is one sixteenth of a 5 year old supercomputer. Well, when you put that kind of computing power into the hands of students, what could you be doing? [Predict the weather for at least a state, if not the country] Well, yes, but not if you don't have the kind of education that says part of the way of knowing and doing science is computer simulation and developing models, or of doing social studies is knowing and doing simulations of populations and so on. So I don't see much of that going on although I get a glimmering of hope from when I read the summaries of the minutes of these meetings from the National Science Foundation. Most of these initiatives I have talked about, from the Department of Education, but the NSF is sort of the research arm of government and they have funded many many of these projects that we will identify as technology in education projects. They pick out things that show promise and pour money into them. A couple of the types of things I have described they've put money into. [hopefully this will expand this concept]. In my more wildly optimistic moments, surely yes.

83. To take a kind of ordinary teacher, saying, how am I going to function in that big world, I'm a fifth grade teacher and I can teach my kids how to subtract, add, multiply and divide mixed numbers. My goal in 5th grade maths education is to get the kids a bit better in long division. That is so far removed from the level of knowledge and skill from a novel case.

84. Well, now, I back up a bit. I've worked with technology for a lot of years, with innovative, bright students. They've spent hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours in pre-service education. Now you're asked how much in-service education can you lay on teachers. We've had national surveys to ask how much time teachers normally spend in in-service education. The average was about 12 hours in-service in technology last year. Twelve hours - that's a pretty impressive number. But what can you learn in twelve hours? And the answer is you can learn to.. e-mail, or use a word-processor, but you can't learn to move to this higher level.

85. We have assessment tasks. That is there is a national assessment regime that can be used to drive things. You have a standard college entrance exam around the country, which the central government controls which leads to fairly uniform standards around the country. If you look at the research into equality, that's what people put money on in terms of widening the gap between the rich and the poor.

86. AF: equity may hold things back. cf home computers

87. AF: Question 16: To what extent does NETS include an understanding of micro-electronics, control technology etc?

88. DM: Ah, during the time that NETS was being put together, ISTE had a project being funded by Intel. This was a project called 'The Journey Inside'. A kit of materials got developed that had transistors and wires and batteries and a set of lesson plans that could be used in three modes. There was a video that goes along with it, and essentially you could just show the video, or you could stretch it into a few weeks or a month. It was aimed at kids in grade 4 though 8. There was a teacher training video, a kids video, 300 booklet with detailed lesson plans. Each lesson plan was designed to teach the teacher something about the topic. The whole focus was a kind of hardware orientation, what goes on in the machine. Not quite the focus you are asking the question about, but vaguely related to it. So, as if I had a chance to shape the standards just a little bit, I tried to shape them so there would be some flavour of knowing what was going on inside the big black box.

89. So you'll find if you look through there a little bit of that. There's not a whole lot. You mentioned students, maybe of advanced technology, looking at methods of maybe LOGO and so on. Well, most of the leaders working on NETS would have come from a background in which they would have run into LOGO, proved they were familiar with logo-based mechanical turtles, and mostly would have rejected that philosophical approach to the world. There's a really good deep philosophy in the ideas of Seymour Papert and his followers, but in terms of getting widespread implementation, the knowledge and skills it takes on the part of the teacher, seems to prohibit it happening. So, what it comes to, when kids grow up in an environment where they are allowed to use computers and so on, learn to use computers in process control, and in that kind of scientific environment and so on, it's not in there very strongly. Some thinking toys, what we call micro-computer based laboratories, roughly at junior high school level, the concept is that the science course that you take has some laboratory stuff in it, probes, data gathering, measurements etc, and they build those into the science courses. There's an awareness of this.

90. AF: I understand where you are. In the UK they go for a universal understanding of micro-electronics, maybe for economic reasons.

91. DM: It could have been in there (NETS), but there's that one Intel project. They built 100,000 kits and distributed them around the schools of the country and it's been going on for five years or more. It has process control, robotics. It's more used where the teacher has a particular understanding.

92. Let me give a different piece of an answer. We (ISTE) have a responsibility for national technology education, and then we have another national professional society which is sort of oriented towards what we call TECH-PREP, what we call Technology Preparation, job oriented, vocationally oriented. It grows out of the curriculum which... Kids who are in high school, they go in two directions. One is the vocationally oriented curriculum, and there would be a college oriented curriculum. The people in the country that put together the short courses in mechanical drawing, the whole curriculum that is oriented in that direction, eventually, as their field defined, put together a professional society, and sought national standards and so on. The national standards that they defined, that they would have produced, come closer to fitting this. We're studying national standards that overlap, or could easily overlap, in some sense. We don't clearly distinguish ourselves from this other group, which means there are areas that could go in one or other of the technology groups.

93. AF: What are the other group called?

94. DM: Ohh --- I'll have to find out... .. That name of that association is probably some thing like the International Association for Technology in Education (IATE).

95. AF: Question 17: NETS items 3 and 4 both include publishing. Is there a difference?

96. DM: Is process-writing part of the standard vocabulary you use? So we have the Bay Areas Writers Project, in roughly 1975 and the realisation that writing consists of:

* Think about what you're going to write about

* Get something down

* get some feedback

* re-write it

* eventually get it in a form for publication, sort out the spelling and grammar, think about the form for the audience.

97. The whole thing is about a 4 or 5-step process, which we call process writing. [Right] So research suggests that this is a really good way to teach writing. Over the past 20 years or so, we've understood that technology can contribute to the whole process of process writing, but process writing has its own research. As we wrote these things down (into NETS) we had a realisation that writing the process and publication - desk-top publishing or whatever, is in a different compartment. Now you go further, and you say we also have publishing, project based learning, which follow the same exact pattern as process writing. And so some sorts of research, some sorts of project-based learning is good, based upon constructivism, motivational theory content is strong, kids pick their own projects, work on things as a member of a team, they get co-operative learning, a whole lot of things. So now you've got this model where, quite often in project-based learning you don't produce a written product, you produce a product or a performance, presentation or something or a web-site, an electronic slide show, Power-point presentation, or something. So now we've got two different ways to think about publication. One is print publication, the other is electronic publication, where electronic is a hyper-medium or soft. And I think, though I'm not sure, that these are the two things you are seeing in NETS.

98. AF: Question 18: In America, how old is a Grade 5 student?

99. DM: About 11 years old.

100. AF: They have their 11th birthday whilst they are in grade 5?

101. DM: They have a cuttoff date in mid-November. I was born on November 3rd, so that meant I was eligible to start 1st grade. If I had been born a month later, then I would have had to start 1st grade a year later. To start Grade 1 I guess I would have had to been 6 years old by the 15th November of that Fall. So I could have been 5 years old when classes started in September, but I turned 6 pretty quickly, in the November that year. So starting Grade 5 when I was 10 years old, but quickly turned 11.

102. AF: Question 19: To what degree in America is there some confusion between technology - the subject I just described (including woodwork etc) and information technology as it affects every single subject?

103. DM: I think there is both confusion and rivalry. South Dakota that I have mentioned several times, provides a good example. There's a state where the TECH-PREP is very strong, so in a typical high school there you might find that the advanced placement of courses, that would be college prep oriented or vocationally oriented, and the flavour of the courses would be substantially different. A person that excels at , that person , .. kids in that school kids are not getting the educational view of the world that matches the way I view the world, <inaudible> ..... bridges the gap. Kind of hard one with the political issue of what are school to do. The Feds have special sets of money, to give the down states re-interpretation money to set up TECH-PREP intensive programs.

104. ISTE has....

105. AF: So there is confusion....

106. And in conversation with John A. Vaille, Ed.D., Chief Executive Officer, ISTE

107. JV: The NETS documents took about 3 years to bring together, and about $4,000,000. ISTE itself invested about $5,000 per year, and other contributors put in for the rest - Federal, State, University, Research, NASA and the Milken Exchange.