RE: Technology in Education

CD's???

I started developing multimedia CD-ROM foreign language lessons in 1990 at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey. I then supported publishers worldwide producing cross-platform CD's with all kinds of content. But since 1997 or so the advantages of network delivered (Internet) resources captured the No. 1 position and there is no realistic way to deploy curriculum resources spanning all subjects and compliant with the Curriculum Framework in California as well as the Master Plan EXCEPT via the Internet. For all intents and purposes, CD's are no more useful than floppy disks today.

If you read carefully, the phrase "no more useful" acknowledges that both floppies and CD's have "some" value. But I suggest that the reason educators today still refer to CD's as a curriculum distribution method is because they haven't seen a genuinely effective and comprehensive Internet-based solution. And they haven't seen that because the California Department of Education hasn't made it "interesting" to vendors to abandon their obsolete textbooks based "profit-mills" which siphon off billions of California dollars for near useless, overpriced and out-of-date paper products.

And the Californian Department of Ed hasn't done that because educators haven't joined together and screamed bloody-murder at the lack of effective support trickling down to the classroom teachers from any major "initiative" taken at the state level.

I know starting from a technical topic like "CD's vs Internet" and jumping to politics reveals more about my psychological state than anything; BUT if public discourse on the subject of how to effectively use technology in education is almost strangled by our collective ignorance of the cutting-edge of technology (which happens to be XML Web Services linking multiple-databases from foreign servers into one coherent and intuitive lesson plan optimized for each individual student) then maybe prayer (if it were legal) is the only real solution.

Phil