It seems wherever I travel, educational publishers, learning theorists, and teachers of all kinds bring up the concept of learning through interactive games. It’s an idea that’s been picking up steam over the last few years, and why not? Research from the PEW Internet and American Life Project last year found that 98% kids ages 12 – 17 play video games. Organizations like the MacArthur Foundation have been funding a small number of projects to test out new ideas for using interactive games with learning in mind. A few months ago I came across a great article in the Economist about a new public school opening in New York City that uses gaming principles to teach its students. At the recent Breakthrough Learning in a Digital Age conference held at the Google headquarters, I had the opportunity to speak with Katie Salen, the visionary behind this initiative. You can view a short video of my interview with Katie on the Cooney Center YouTube channel or read the complete interview below. Portions of this interview were edited for clarity:

QUICK QUESTION PICKER:

Tell us about your new school, Quest to Learn.

How did you recruit teachers for your school?

Was it hard to get teachers around the concept of teaching from a game design perspective?

How are the students working with the teachers who apply this teaching model?

How do you divide up the class day?

Is it your intent to open up more Quest to Learn schools?

INTERVIEW:

Scott Traylor: Tell us about the work you’re involved in with the start of your new school, Quest to Learn.

Katie Salen: I run a nonprofit called Institute of Play. Two years ago we started work on a new school with an organization called New Visions for Public Schools. Our new school is called Quest to Learn. The MacArthur Foundation gave us a two year planning grant around the school. The work that we’ve been doing at the Institute of Play centers around the idea of games and learning. We’re really interested in the idea of how we can develop a school that doesn’t necessarily use games in the classroom, but does use game design principles in learning spaces. Our idea was to design a school from the ground up built on those ideas.

We opened Quest to Learn this past September. It will eventually be a 6 to 12th grade school but we started with just the sixth grade this year. Next year we will roll in another grade, continuing to add an additional grade each year for the next six years.

Today we have six teachers and 79 students. We’re located in New York City, in Manhattan. It’s a district two school so we could recruit kids from a specific geographic area in Manhattan. (Return to Question Picker)

Traylor: How did you go about recruiting teachers for your school?

Salen: We think the way we recruit teachers is actually very interesting. Our process is one in which anybody we bring into the school needs to be immersed in our model. We held a series of four-hour workshops on Sundays for teachers that were interested in our school. They come in, we put them through a learning problem that kids would have and then they do some work with us around assessment. From the list of interested teachers we narrowed it down to a smaller group and then took them through a series of interviews. We also do direct observation in our classrooms.

We had some really specific criteria for the teachers we were looking for. First, teachers had to be content experts, they had to really know their content. Next, the teachers we looked for have to be really good collaborators. Teachers didn’t necessarily have to be technology people, and a lot of them weren’t necessarily gaming people either, but they were able to work in teams or had come from schools where they worked in teams. They had to have a very good sense of how to enable kids to be innovators. This was very important to us. And finally, teachers had to have done project-based work before, our curriculum includes project-based work in it. Those were the three criteria that we looked for. (Return to Question Picker)

Traylor: Was it hard to get teachers around the concept of teaching from a game design perspective?

Salen: You know, when you begin to explain to a teacher how a game designer thinks about the design of the game, and we’re able to show them a one-to-one parallel with how they think about teaching students, they say “Oh, it’s the same thing.” Then they realize “Oh, maybe it’s the words that are different” and so it’s about helping them understand and translate between something like the term “core mechanic” in games, which talks about the primary activity of the player, and the learning design, because the curriculum is the basic activity of the lesson. It’s a learning curve for everybody. Game language, as with any other language, can feel very specialist, but the concepts aren’t so new. That’s our whole argument. Games actually model good learning and good teachers are immersed in good learning all the time. (Return to Question Picker)

Traylor: Quest to Learn has only been in operation for a short while now. Any observations this early about how the students are working with the teachers who apply this model?

Salen: Well the interesting thing is that the kids are so excited to come to school every day. We have parents saying this is the first time that their student has ever come home excited to tell them about what they’re doing in school. This is the first time that their child gets up out of bed and wants to go to school. So that’s great just from an engagement perspective. It’s a place where kids feel safe. It’s a place where they feel excited about coming which is no small feat for a new school where kids are coming from many different neighborhoods. (Return to Question Picker)

Traylor: How do you divide up the class day?

Salen: When you design a school from the ground up, you attend to every detail. One of the things we spent a lot of time thinking about was the daily schedule. A lot of schools use the Carnegie Unit, classes that are 45 to 50 minutes long. We don’t believe good learning can happen in 45 minutes. From the beginning we wanted to use block scheduling which are extended periods of time.

The main classes we offer, domain classes, last 88 minutes. In a typical day a student will take two domain classes. Since we have an integrated curriculum students will take a class that’s an integrated math/science class and an integrated math/English language arts class. They may be dealing with three or four subjects in a day, but only in two full classes.

There are shorter classes called annex classes, which are extended enrichment and literacy periods. There’s also a gym period for 50 minutes.

For elementary school kids it’s a bit of a shift to be in a class for 88 minutes because they’re used to changing topics with every 45-minute class period. Because our students are working in a problem-based way, the time goes by in a second. (Return to Question Picker)

Traylor: Looking to the future, is it your intent to open up more Quest to Learn schools?

Salen: Everyone always asks us about scale. To be honest, it’s not the first thing we’re thinking about. We’re still in a fact-finding stage to understand what’s working about our model. However, our curriculum is modular. We piloted it in schools before we opened Quest. Everything we produce is open source and online. Any teacher can take what we’ve created and use it right now. The professional development program we have is something that could be used by any school. Our vision is not to make a hundred or two hundred Quest to Learn schools. Over time maybe other organizations will be inspired by the ideas we developed and seek to build schools that share a similar model. (Return to Question Picker)

If you’re attending a conference on forward thinking ways to help kids learn, or maybe an event on learning through video games, chances are you will be listening to thoughts offered by James Paul Gee. Dr. Gee is a noted expert on the topic of video games and learning. He is the Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies at Arizona State University and is a member of the National Academy of Education. His work has been published widely in journals in linguistics, psychology, the social sciences and education. Dr. Gee’s recent book, What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy argues that good video games are designed to enhance learning through effective learning principles supported by research in the Learning Sciences. His new book, Women and Gaming: The Sims and 21st Century Learning, written with Elisabeth R Hayes, will be available this coming May, 2010. At the recent Breakthrough Learning in a Digital Age conference held at the Google headquarters, I had the opportunity to speak with James. You can view a short video of my interview with Dr. Gee on the Cooney Center YouTube channel or read the complete interview below. Portions of this interview were edited for clarity:

QUICK QUESTION PICKER:

What successes do you see in the learning games movement?

Why do you think games are not perceived as effective learning tools?

Would a funding approach that is similar to public television be a good model for the learning games industry?

What excites you when you see kids developing their own games?

How are learning games best used to accelerate learning?

INTERVIEW:

Scott Traylor: Where do you think things stand today with the learning games movement? What successes do you see?

James Paul Gee: Successes have been slow in coming, much more slowly than I would have thought, but they are coming. What I’m seeing is the beginning of noncommercial games for learning.

Looking back on the gaming industry, developers made products that were expectable, products that were designed by baby boomers and made by principles of instructional technology. These games didn’t break the mold, and didn’t break out of a pattern. They were not good games and did not include good learning. Today we’re beginning to see games being developed by young game designers who understand learning and understand game design. They’re making good games, and they are making things that work. Over the next few years we’re going to see a real explosion in better products. Some of this has to do with the appearance of the independent game studios. In the commercial world the independent games community has been very slow to develop. For a while there really was none, but now with downloading services across all major platforms, you’re seeing many independent games being developed. Games like Flower and Braid, made with relatively small budgets, but they are really top games. Independent games like these are doing as well as many of the commercial games out on the market, and they’re setting the standard for so called “serious games,” games that have the ability to teach. If we can make commercial games that are as good as Flower or Braid for a modest budget, we certainly can make games in the learning sphere that are equally as good. (Return to Question Picker)

Traylor: Why do you think games are not perceived as effective learning tools?

Gee: I think the major reasons are cultural, along with the slow development of an independent game industry, but also the power of baby boomers. People of my age, baby boomers, have theories and are in relatively solid positions in institutions. They get to call the shots, but this is a changed world. We’re talking about learning and using technologies that people under thirty know a lot more about. It’s not surprising when they apply our theories and do a better job than when we applied our theories. I think that’s all good, we need to release that creative energy.

The other thing you touch on, and it’s a very serious matter, is that we really don’t have many new business models. Think about it. We’re trying to make things that do social good, but if the social good is done for free, it dies when the grant ends. Right? We now realize we have to think about how to make products that can go on for a long period of time, and at some level earn enough money to sustain themselves while still doing social good. Lots of people are now thinking about how we can create new and innovative business models so that everybody wins. Models that allow people to make enough money and at the same time spur new businesses, new enterprises to open up, models which will help everybody benefit. Until we really get that down, what you’ll end up seeing are products that are made on government dollars that die the day the grant is over. The same is true with academic research, the day the grant money stops coming in the research stops. (Return to Question Picker)

Traylor: Would you suggest a financial approach that is similar to public television? Would that be a good model for growing a learning games industry?

Gee: There’s going be a whole new set of models. Open source, the public sharing of programming resources, is one very important area. A public television model around games that would include both design workshops as well as giving out products, and also encouraging consumers to make products, would certainly be one model. We just have to have new models for new businesses. There are going to be “double bottom line” businesses; businesses that are committed to social good by solving our educational problems but these same businesses would be committed to making money. Making money not just to enrich individuals, but to also keep the social good going. There are a number of models we can think of for that. As is true of many academics, we didn’t think that business models were important. Now people are starting to see that business models are needed to bring about long-term impact. (Return to Question Picker)

Traylor: What excites you when you see kids developing their own games?

Gee: I’m excited that so many young people today are taking gaming beyond gaming. They’re not just playing games. They’re making games. They’re designing things for games. They’re setting up discussions and guilds and websites around games. They’re learning new software, software that contributes to these sites and discussions and products. And very often, they organize themselves into learning communities to do all of this. Their passion for learning in these communities grows beyond their passion for the games themselves. In other words, it’s a trajectory towards learning communities, and towards thinking like a designer, and producing, and not just consuming, that some of our best games give rise to.

The video game Spore is a great example. Spore is designed so that you play, and then you design, and then you play, and you join a community, and you get the products you have designed to appear within the game, and then you design with others collaboratively. This game provides very good tools to do that. Anyone, from the very young to the very old, can play.

Another great example is the game Little Big Planet. There’s a whole bunch of products coming out that say why don’t you see playing and designing as things you can do together in a game. These things are integrated together, so the game becomes as much your product as it is ours, and becomes a community event and not just an individual event. The lessons here for education are massive, because it means we’re going have to start designing, not just pieces of software, but ways for people to set up learning communities that they’re productive within. (Return to Question Picker)

Traylor: So the perception that learning games alone will result in really good learning outcomes, is not the full story. What you’re saying is that learning games, supported by learning communities, are really the combination that accelerates the learning opportunity?

Gee: Those of us who study learning games make the distinction between a game, which is just the software, and the game with a capital “G”, which is the whole set of social learning interactions built around the game. We used to argue, if you’re going to use games for learning, you have to have a community of learning built around the game. Now the commercial industry realizes you won’t make money if you don’t build a learning community around the game. It’s an integral part to gaming, to participate in a collaborative community around the game.

My work has never been that of an advocate to put games into schools. That’s a fine thing to do, but that’s not what my work is about. It’s about putting the learning found in games into schools, learning that’s centered on problem solving and collaboration.

In school students get a bunch of facts and information. You can’t solve problems with it, so you get nothing. The interesting thing is if I make you solve a problem, and I really design the experience of that problem, guiding you and mentoring you, which is what good game design does, you get problem solving and you get facts and information, because you have to learn that in order to solve the problem. I will also get you to collaborate in a community where you might even innovate. You’re going to design new things and do new stuff. I want to see that model go into schools and that model doesn’t have to be a game. We can do that in the world in many different ways.

The other thing I really want to stress about games is that, in my opinion, it’s not a good idea to try to teach a whole curriculum through games. Industries are building up to try to do this. It’s too expensive. We want to learn in many different ways. Games are particularly good for preparation for future learning. If you want to motivate somebody in an area like chemistry or physics, a game is an ideal way to not only motivate that learning, to get learners to see why you do it, what is good about it, why it would be a turn on to do it, but it also prepares them to get ready for learning in the future. That future learning doesn’t have to occur in games. We tend to get obsessed with one platform, but just like in the world where kids don’t just game, they also go on the internet, and they write fiction, and they mod games. They do a whole bunch of stuff. We want our curriculum to be a whole bunch of stuff as well. (Return to Question Picker)

Over the summer a relative who had just completed her first year of teaching came by for a visit. She was excited to share all the news about her classroom experience. My spouse and I are both teachers so we were excited to hear her news. She’s a smart, energetic and tech savvy person who, during her last visit, shared that she had found a great teaching position in the DC area. What she didn’t know until she started was that she would be the first teacher in her school to receive an interactive whiteboard. Not only was she thrilled to use this new technology, she said her students couldn’t get enough of it.

“What was it about the whiteboard that made your kids so excited?” I asked. She responded “The kids love to get up and interact with the board. It’s really empowering. Even students that show little interest during classroom time wanted to participate.”

“Not only that,” she continued, “I also received ‘clickers’ with my whiteboard, so I can conduct in-class polls and interactive quizzes in real time. Using the clickers with an interactive whiteboard (IWB) allows me to know who is participating and who is not. Who gets it and who doesn’t. I’m so lucky to have both pieces of technology available to me. Other teachers in the school often poke their head in to see what all the fuss is about. It’s really cool!”

Immediately I thought of that old Chinese proverb:

“Tell me and I’ll forget;
show me and I may remember;
involve me and I’ll understand.”

Could it be that interactive whiteboards have the potential to re-invent and re-invigorate education in a way never experienced before? You bet, but that journey has just begun and there’s a long road ahead.

While following a recent House of Representatives discussion on the Future of Education, I learned more about the successes of interactive whiteboards in the classroom but was surprised to find out that only 16% of classrooms in the US were using interactive whiteboards whereas 70% of UK classrooms were using the same technology. Why was the US so far behind in implementing IWBs into classrooms? This number will most definitely rise in the US, in part due to the ARRA stimulus package that recommends schools invest in interactive whiteboard technology, but still there are more issues at stake here than just universal classroom access.

This past spring, I was surprised to find many education publishers scrambling to figure out what their interactive whiteboard product response would be. They all wanted to be a player in this fast moving ed tech arena, but it felt that not enough serious thought was going into how best to use this new medium. I could hear the publishers thinking out loud; What new products should they consider making? How should they be developed? What states should they target? What relationships need to be formed? It’s clear that there’s huge opportunity here in the IWB product space, and proof could be found in many places. Testimonials from satisfied teachers, IWB visibility at this year’s NECC event, ed newspaper and magazine articles, the projected 700,000 IWB units to be sold in 2009. However, not all IWB solutions are destined for immediate classroom success.

In the same way that there are differences between what makes a textbook successful and what makes for a great online learning experience, publishers need to pay close attention to what makes an interactive whiteboard applications succeed. Simply converting static text pages into static PDFs is not the answer. That may work for overhead projectors, but doing so turns an interactive whiteboard into a very expensive overhead projector, a huge waste of technology dollars. Instructional specialists need to exploit the opportunities presented by interactivity and student participation. Instruction changes dramatically when you make the shift from linear print or “sage on the stage” lectures to interactive engagement. The IWB products that will succeed are ones that understand this small, but very important difference. It’s a vital component that traditional editorial experts might miss.

Media expert Marshall McLuhen, father of the phrase “The medium is the message,” quoted years ago that when communication changes as a result of new media technologies. “It is the framework which changes… not just the picture within the frame.” Publishers might easily focus to closely on the content that appears within the frame at the expense of the entire framework. Having an intimate understanding of the framework is what will lead to “frame” successes with interactive whiteboards. Until this concept becomes universally understood by creators and publishers of IWB materials, schools might easily end up purchasing products that will do little to benefit and involve students effectively. The same can be said with any new technology, not just interactive whiteboards.

So, if interactive whiteboards become commonplace in all classrooms and IWB products include meaningful interactions that students can benefit from, our education future looks bright and rosy, yes? Well, almost.

The last piece of the puzzle that will push interactive whiteboard success over the top involves teachers. The language and method of teaching in an interactive manner may prove a challenge at first for some teachers. Not because new technologies introduce technical hurdles that are too big to get over, though that can happen. The delivery of instructional content that is interactive is different. The teaching process can change when you invite student participation and interaction though IWBs. Interactive instruction can include many more two-way conversations, involving students at a deeper level of understanding than through traditional methods. This is a great opportunity, and one that needs to be supported with professional development. Those comfortable with the language of interactivity may thrive whereas teachers who are less familiar making a connection through such interactions with technology will need guidance.

I’m excited by the opportunities that lie ahead for schools that embrace interactive whiteboards. Our young relative is too. She’s eager to return to the classroom, having just accepted a new teaching position at Virginia school that has an interactive whiteboard in every classroom. “That’s fantastic!” we exclaimed! “Yes, it is,” was her somewhat somber reply “but friends of mine who are just now accepting teaching positions in other areas the country are not so lucky. Many of them are going into schools that have yet to invest in interactive whiteboards. I can’t imagine doing that after the success I had in my own classroom.” I said not to worry. “They will have their chance. This is a change that is moving quickly. If they don’t have whiteboards available this year, I’m betting they will soon, and I’m sure the IWB hardware and software solutions are certain to be even better next year.”

A new high school is being built near my office. The old high school had served its function well over time, but in recent years the level of maintenance necessary to keep the school functioning translated into diminishing returns. School committees, planning committees, state and city officials, community members, and advisory groups came together to define a new future for the students of this city. Their passionate debates about the new school’s physical construction mirror discussions that are taking place on a national scale about how best to teach our students inside these structures. Our educational practices are showing their wear, with its own version of peeling paint, cracked walls and leaky ceilings.

Being a former teacher and having spent the last 20 years running a digital learning company that specializes in media creation, I see the potential for a revolution in education through the use of technology. Learning games, social media, mobile technologies, virtual worlds; all of these advances in computing offer greater opportunities for student engagement and improved literacy learning. What is clear to me and my colleagues is that there are many vested interests in the education world that don’t see this moment quite as clearly as we do, or if they do see it, don’t know how to advance its cause.

Let’s take a look at the kids we’re trying to reach today. They are the first generation that will have never known a time without the Internet, Google, or mobile phones. They are connected to the world through a variety of different digital, gaming, and communications tools. They are comfortable with many aspects of media creation. Every day they are presented with an unlimited menu of informal learning opportunities by simply following their passions online and choosing tools that suit their learning styles. How can schools compete with a similar level of engagement and interest through digital media inside the classroom?

Teachers and teacher training are certainly a critical part of using technology to support improved outcomes, but what elements outside the classroom influence the successes we wish to create inside the classroom?

Administrators and superintendents play a key role in purchasing decisions that impact schools. How do these leaders learn what technologies are best to bring into their classrooms? Should their ed tech purchasing decisions be driven entirely by the requirements established by policies such as No Child Left Behind? How can their purchases instead address a variety of different learning styles? How can they anticipate which digital media will appeal to the interests of their students?

Pulling back the curtain to shed light on the business of education we discover two areas that impact the quality of ed tech for schools, the first being new product creation. Publishers who create instructional materials for schools are, by and large, traditional media businesses that rely heavily on print. Most publishers are eager to play a part in the digital age, but historically their development efforts are driven by an editorial process that understands linear communication through the medium of print better than two-way communication and interactive engagement through digital media. How can these professionals better address the needs of a transmedia framework?

Secondly, the process of how new learning products are approved for school usealso has great influence over the quality of ed tech products that are marketed at the state level. Publishers often find their biggest opportunities selling instructional materials to states through what is referred to as an “adoption.” During the adoption process state advisors review educational materials to see if they meet state learning requirements before these materials are blessed for purchase by schools. Could it be that the adoption process itself, or the interest of publishers, places greater emphasis on print media than digital media because it is a business they understand? These adoption processes are very competitive, and not easy for smaller and more digitally advanced companies to compete with. The large publishers who vie for a state’s adoption often include sweeteners to convince adoption boards to select their materials over another, often times giving away the technology component as a free incentive. If a technology product is given away, it usually means it is not supported financially within these organizations during development thus reducing incentives to create real breakthroughs in digital learning. How can publishers shift their business practices to treat ed tech as its own successful, revenue generating profit centers? How can states adoption boards be encouraged to place greater emphasis on learning that is facilitated through innovative technologies?

And finally, what sort of commitment should we expect on the side of government? States rely on federal dollars to help with teacher training and the purchase of technology products. One specific area within the No Child Left Behind mandate offered to accelerate the use of technology in schools is a section of the law called Enhancing Education Through Technology (EETT, Title II, Part D). Since its introduction in 2002 funds earmarked to support this commitment have declined. What is the true commitment of the federal government through this arm of NCLB?

Other federally-funded opportunities, such as Department of Education and National Science Foundation grants, have a hard time keeping up with the rapid pace of technology change. The process of reviewing a grant request, awarding and completing a grant, can take years. How can the entire grant process, from review to completion of a marketable product, be accelerated to keep up with the rapid advancements in technology? Can some amount of these grants also be directed towards smaller, more nimble, for profit ventures that are better able to chase a moving target?

Aside from the efforts described above, a long-standing opportunity to advance digital learning may be found in the promise of the CAMRA Act, also known as the Children and Media Research Advancement Act. The thinking behind CAMRA is that the federal government would fund research related to the use of electronic media to better understand its benefits to children. This bill was introduced in 2005, passed unanimously in the Senate in 2006, and has been stalled in the House ever since. Wouldn’t it be great if all organizations interested in using digital media for the advancement of children’ learning had a solid body of research to best guide not only new product development decisions, but also purchasing, implementation, and best practices of ed tech in the classroom? Wouldn’t the passing of CAMRA also put a spotlight on the need to bring together many disparate federal agencies interested in the research CAMRA would facilitate, and promote a more coordinated research agenda for the benefit of all? Combined with a sizable appropriation for the National Center for Research in Advanced Information and Digital Technologies, the passage of CAMRA would help realize the long awaited formation of a central oversight group for the advancement of digital media and learning research.

If we could in some small way address these questions in each of these areas of education outside the classroom, we would begin to see a new version, an enhanced version of education that would drive classroom success. Much like that new high school being built next to the older one, the visual difference between the two structures is striking. Maybe it’s easier for all parties involved to demonstrate a greater commitment when a clear vision of the new is offered alongside the old. The choice would be immediately clear to most. The time and effort required to make such changes may be greater than what many are willing to invest and there is comfort in keeping the status quo, but to ignore defining something new comes at our own peril. Key sectors must work together in earnest to provide us all with untold opportunities for the learners of tomorrow. Let’s start building that new structure, the future of education, and let’s place that Education 2.0 cornerstone down right now.

Can you imagine using video games as an effective tool to improve a child’s mind and physical well being? Can you also imagine video games that do more than just passively entertain and become media tools to improve a child’s life? These ideas no longer live in the domain of fantasy, and the researchers at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, a non-profit organization named after the Sesame Street show’s founder, are exploring how new kinds of video games can help promote learning and healthy lives for children across the globe.

Yesterday at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington DC, the Cooney Center released its latest policy brief entitled Game Changer: Investing in Digital Play to Advance Children’s Learning and Health. (Note: Video of this event will be available soon on the Joan Ganz Cooney Center’s YouTube channel.) The paper was shared with a crowd of thought leaders specializing in the areas of education, public policy, research, television and video games. Game Changer defines a number of recommendations for a new framework related to learning games and games for health. After the event, which include a panel discussion from a number of pioneers in the learning games and games for health space, I had the opportunity to speak with Ann My Thai, one of the Cooney Center’s lead authors on this paper.

Scott Traylor: Your Game Changer report covers two sizable topics; learning games and games for health. Why one report and not two?

Ann My Thai: This was something we really struggled with because learning games and games for health are both large areas. Learning encompasses all types of content areas, be it literacy, math, programming, or 21st century learning skills. Health on the other hand has a certain kind of knowledge and a certain rigor in the medical field that doesn’t exactly map out in the same way to learning research, especially when you talking about educational intervention research, an area which created a really big challenge in writing this paper. In the end we decided we wanted to stay to the Sesame Workshop philosophy of the “whole child,” or in other words, the many areas of a child’s overall development, not just one area of development. We felt it was important not to ignore one or the other but to present both topics together. There’s strong research that shows learning and health are closely connected in young children. It’s important to address these challenges in both realms when talking about digital media. We suspect these are the areas within digital media that provide the greatest benefits. They can help bridge the gap between home and school as well as provide tailor-made learning for children, areas that are really important in health learning and learning in general.

ST: In your report you cite that the health-based gaming industry is estimated to be a $6.6 billion market. How big is the learning games market?

AMT: That’s a hard question to answer. Defining what is a learning game can be tough to begin with. On one hand you have organizations that are developing learning games in a research-based way, to make games intentionally educational. On the other you have companies who are making games that are fun first, but sometimes accidentally provide great learning opportunities to kids. Financial data exists for the gaming industry generally but I’ve yet to find anything specific that defines the market size of just learning games.

ST: In your report you touch on Henry Jenkins’ Digital Media Literacies Project, a body of work that could provide valuable insights for integrating digital media in the classroom. What do you think it will take for the points defined in the Digital Media Literacies Project to find its way into the classroom?

AMT: I think it’s going to take a complete paradigm shift with everyone who is involved with educating children, from parents to teachers, to school administrators, to reasearchers like us. There are so many ways that learning can work better for students. We need to completely re-envision what it means to be a school. For example, the area of parental involvement with children’s learning alone is huge. There’s a big disconnect between what happens at school and what children do at home. Digital media can be a really powerful tool in this regard, but it won’t happen if there are calls for cell phone bans in schools because news reports claim students are cheating in school by texting with cell phones. I don’t believe this is the response that will keep kids engaged. Kurt Squire, a leading learning games researcher from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, recently said that kids pass notes in class to one another all the time, notes that have been created with pencils. We don’t ban pencils in the classroom. Pencils are a neutral medium, just like cell phones and other technologies. We need to spend more time exploring the benefits of these technologies, instead of banning them for what potential harm they may bring.

ST: Studies find that Nintendo Wii Sports players expended significantly less energy than children playing “real-life” sports. Would you say exergaming is more about behavior change than it is about physical exertion during game play?

AMT: That’s a good question, and one that reminds me of a comment made by Alan Gershenfeld, founder of E-Line Ventures, during today’s panel presentation. Alan wonders if the success of Guitar Hero has inspired children to want to learn how to play guitar. Wouldn’t it be great of we could track increases in guitar sales as as a result of Guitar Hero’s success!

I think behavioral change is one part of it. I also think about communities that may not be safe for children to go outside and play. As the exergaming pioneer Dr. Ernie Medina mentioned in our interviews, exergaming may not necessarily be better than going outside. However, if children are inside and they are playing games, playing games that require children to be physical active are a much better alternative than playing sedentary games. It’s all about a balanced media diet.

ST: How best can we achieve a coordinated effort to improve research related to learning games and games for health?

AMT: Certainly programs like the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Pioneer Portfolio national Health Games Research program is a good start. A good first step would be to get people who are developing games to communicate with others across a variety of other important disciplines. Game Changer calls for the government to conduct an inventory to determine what games research is being funded and by which agencies.   This would organize the current research and help accelerate collaboration across silos, which is already starting to happen. The government also needs to create incentives for people to work and play in the same sandbox. The way that academic research is currently being conducted is very much driven by individual researchers. There are not many opportunities for researchers to cross pollinate. This is something that digital media, as well as any other media, requires.

Researchers also need to have more communication with practitioners and people who are using these digital medias as part of their research. There needs to be more incentives to drive and encourage these sorts of collaborations.

ST: Are you hearing any feedback from policy makers about your report? What are they saying?

AMT: People are talking about these issues. This is a really pivotal moment in Washington in terms of setting an agenda for education and health. We hope that policy makers will read this report and see that if children are playing video games for hours a day, why not provide options that are not only entertaining and engaging, but also helpful with improved health and can teach children something as well. We have a briefing coming up with the Office of Science & Technology Policy. We know they have been looking at some of these barriers to multidisciplinary collaboration. We hope that our recommendations will give them some concrete ideas for how to lower those barriers.

It’s often been cited that if one were to go back in time 100 years to visit a classroom one would see no difference between that classroom of yesteryear and that of a classroom today. While indeed there are many similarities between the two classrooms, there are some major differences. First, a difference that cannot be seen is the many bits and bytes floating in the air of classrooms today thanks to wireless computing technologies. Second, the surfaces within a classroom are turning into interactive screens. As many technologists within the ed publishing space are certainly aware of, the interactive whiteboard is growing in popularity. I see a trend that has yet to occur related to these new interactive technologies that can be seized on today.

Currently, interactive whiteboards (IWBs) are being used at the front of a class for instruction that just a year or two ago occurred on a blackboard or with an overhead projector. Could you imagine a classroom where each student had their own netbook on their desk that could interact with an IWB in real time? Also, looking one step beyond netbooks, recently SMART Technologies announced its new interactive surface product, the SMART Table, which could very easily lead many similar manufacturers to convert student desks into interactive desks within a few short years. How can publishers take advantage of this opportunity that is almost visible on the horizon?

A number of new products can be defined to not only take advantage of IWB instruction, but to facilitate learning through two-way conversations between IWB and interactive desktop. Such functionality could result in the next “must have” learning product. Such products would allow all students to participate in the digital instruction, alongside the teacher, in real time. Also, if every student could interact from the comfort of his/her own desk, teachers could also monitor student progress from afar either in real time or after the class day has ended. Teachers could also scan student efforts from the IWB, and project a student’s work in much the same way Timbuktu technology allowed years ago, displaying a student’s interactive table on the IWB for everyone to see.

Another yet to be explored opportunity by publishers relates to classroom use of IWB altogether. For some instructors, the art of teaching can be a linear process and for the most part, delivered as a one-way conversation to students. Interactivity begs for participation. My greatest fear with IWB materials is that teachers will use the technology to deliver content in a similar manner to using an overhead projector. IWBs allow for an interactive opportunity that is a two-way or participitory conversation, or at very least, a one-way conversation that can branch off in many directions based on student needs. What publishers are doing today with IWBs is similar to when radio professionals tried applying their expertise to television in the early days of the new medium. Content creation sensitivities for radio did not automatically port to television, and as a result, many mistakes about how best to use the medium were made. It wasn’t until the invention of the three-camera shoot and many additional “formal features” that the medium of television began to succeed as a means to communicate. What happened in these early days of television is also occurring today with IWBs and most surface computing.

What I’m noticing while my own company is defining and developing IWB products for publishers is that experimentation, user testing, and research are areas soon to evolve in this fast growing space of ed tech. Simply converting print material into PDFs as a solution for successful IWB products doesn’t fully exploit the interactive teaching possibilities that can be found with these new devices and doesn’t create the best value for the classroom dollar. True product successes will occur when publishers think outside the blackboard and outside the overhead projector to create a product that has more to do with the language of interactive engagement and less to do with that of linear print.

Over the last year I’ve worked on a presentation to suggest a few of the difficulties in creating effective learning games. The video included below is of a presentation I delivered this past November at the annual Dust or Magic Children’s New Media Design conference, though some version of it has appeared in a number of other presentations I shared with others in 2008. After taking a look, let me know your thoughts; What is important to think about when developing video games with learning in mind? What products do you think achieve success in this area? Which ones miss the mark completely? Where do you look for inspiration? Enjoy.

For an audio recording of this interview, click here.

Cathleen Norris and Elliot Soloway are both pioneering educators who are defining the future of technology and learning.

Dr. Cathleen Norris, a former high school teacher for over 14 years, is currently a professor in the Department of Technology and Cognition at the University of North Texas. Cathleen is also the past president of ISTE and the past president of NECA, the organizing body for the country’s leading technology and education conference, NECC.

Dr. Elliot Soloway is a faculty member at the University of Michigan. In addition to teaching at the university, Elliot is involved with a number of grant initiatives for the development of middle school science instruction through technology. His research also involves working with many different school districts to define technology-based curricula.

Together Cathleen and Elliot have authored and published over 100 different research papers on a variety of different learning technologies through the professional organization the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM). They are also founders, partners and collaborators of the handheld software company, GoKnow.

Late in 2008, I had the opportunity to interview Cathleen and Elliot on their thoughts regarding mobile technologies and this platform’s ability to deliver educational content to students.

Scott Traylor: Cathleen, Elliot, could you share with us how your university work and the work you are involved with at your company, GoKnow, have influenced your thinking regarding technology use in the classroom?

Elliot Soloway: Well, Cathie and I have worked together for about 15 years. A bunch of years ago we took on the task of trying to understand why is it that technology has not impacted K-12 education in the same way that it’s impacted basically every other aspect of human endeavor. We conducted a survey called the “Snapshot Survey” and as we went into that survey we thought, “Oh it’s going to be something about the teachers. There’s something about the teachers that’s problematic. If we can just figure out what that problem is, then we could address the issue of why computers and technology have not yet had an impact in the classrooms.” What we found in the survey results was that the issue was about access and wasn’t about teachers at all. It was about the fact that there was such a limited amount of access. 65% of the classrooms had one computer or less in their classroom. We found 60% of the kids were spending less than 15 minutes a week on a computer because there weren’t enough computers or there weren’t any computers. So why hasn’t technology had an impact on K-12? It’s because there hasn’t been enough technology available, so the kids couldn’t use it. And if they couldn’t use it, they certainly weren’t able to learn from it. That was a startling realization. The fact that it is about access was sort of a necessary condition.

Cathleen Norris: In the survey that Elliot was talking about, we surveyed more than 10,000 teachers across the country; from Santa Clara, California to Florida, to New York. We had a really good mixture of teachers. When we found out there was this access problem, we decided that if we were going stay on this path we’re on, which was to provide laptops to all students as the solution to the access problem, then the technology solutions we were looking to achieve were simply not going to happen. The amount of laptops needed, and we were talking about 55 million children in the United States public schools at the time, was a solution that just didn’t scale. Elliot and I didn’t really believe that this was the right answer to the technology access problem.

So five years or so ago Elliot was in a meeting with Roy Pea, a leading professor on education at Stanford University. Shortly after this meeting, Elliot called me and said “We’ve got to start developing for the Palm computer.” This was just after the Palm first came out. He said “Roy’s convinced me this is a real computer.” At that time we were working on an NSF grant. We decided to take what was left of that money and try to develop educational applications for the Palm. In other words, let’s take this low cost, easy to use businessman’s device and retrofit it so that it could be used in schools.

During that summer we had a group of very bright and enthusiastic undergraduate students working with us. We asked them to help define what Elliot called the “cool dozen apps.” We talked to teachers about what kinds of things they did in the classroom and what kinds of ideas the students had for what they would want if they were students in those grades. We didn’t quite come up with twelve apps but we did come up with and develop quite a few. Almost immediately we had more than a hundred thousand downloads of these apps once we offered them online for free. The only problem was that after Palm changed their operating system, our apps didn’t work on the new Palm operating system. People started calling us saying we have to redo these apps so that they work on the new operating system. We said “Excuse me but free is free and we are professors. This is not what we do,” but these calls continued to come in. We thought that maybe we could hire a programmer, one of the original people we worked with us on these apps, and maybe we can just fix this problem. Anyway, long story short, we ended up spinning a company out of the University of Michigan. We licensed the applications from the University and then started to maintain them. This was the very beginning for us in doing anything other than our professorial work. This was how we got into the software business.

ES: Traditionally NSF gives out all this money to researchers. Researchers publish papers, and that’s really great, and they get their tenure and such, but really nothing happens. At the time, NSF was asking “How do we transition research into commercial ventures?” So basically what Cathie and I did was do what NSF wanted; to take the research and make it real. Now we were naïve in the sense that we could easily start a business. No big deal, right? The University of Michigan was very supportive and helpful as we started it. I was the CEO thinking “No problem!” We had absolutely no marketing. We thought people would simply call us up, we’d answer the phone, and we would send off the software. We really had no idea how to do this as a real business. After a while, people started helping us because they realized what we had was valuable and the Palm at that point was really in it’s ascendancy.

We also realized that if people were going to use Palm computers with kids in schools, then they needed our software. For example Sketchy, which is a drawing animation tool we developed that allows students to create animations, is not just a paint program, but a tool that can be used as a sequencer. Kids could illustrate how to do long division with Sketchy. They could use this software to demonstrate long division. They would show the math and write English to explain it. Teachers have shared with us that they can teach long division in half the time when we use Sketchy. So we hit something, we hit a nerve that really made a difference with early adopters.

At the same time Cathie and I we were doing research in Detroit along with some other folks to look at the impact of handhelds on learning. We had three teachers, each of which had four classes. Two of those classes used Palm computers, the other two classes didn’t use Palms. This was a controlled study, paid for again by NSF. At the end of the second year of the study, once the teachers finally understood how to take advantage of the technology, the children who were in the classes that had the handhelds showed a 13% advantage over the children who didn’t use the handheld, using the same test and the same curriculum.

What this study did was confer an advantage in using these devices. It was a difficult study to do and it cost almost $600,000 by the time we were finished with the research. But in the end, we had a control study to support the anecdotal story, which is pretty cool. Today, Cathie and I continue to do research at the universities, publishing papers, writing, because that’s what you do at a university, but also trying to figure out how to make this company into a viable force in K-12.

ST: What year was this when you started?

ES: We developed the applications in 2000 and then by 2002 we were a small little tiny company.

ST: So GoKnow, as a business entity, offers instructional content via the Palm or other handhelds for K-12 use?

CN: That was the way it started, but as of the last year handhelds have converged with telephony. While there are still some companies that make standalone handhelds, many of them are now cell phone computers as opposed to simply handheld computers. We are starting to see the implementation of cell phone computers into classrooms.

ES: Let’s take one step back. What happened was Palm started to back away from the K-12 market and all of a sudden Dell came into the picture. They offered low cost pocket PCs. We ported our software over to the Windows mobile platform when there was an uptake on pocket PCs. But then, that too stopped because of this idea that no one would want to buy a non-telephone handheld device. Everything was going towards this converged device.

Parallel to this was the one-to-one laptop programs as Cathie mentioned earlier. The results from those programs were “They’re not really working.” Why weren’t they working? One reason was there wasn’t enough educational software available for these laptops. A second reason, teachers weren’t receiving any professional development on how to use those laptops in the classrooms. They could show technically how to use the computer, but the bigger issue was how do you integrate the laptop into the classroom. And third, the costs were such that it was not sustainable. You couldn’t keep buying and buying laptops, it just didn’t work. So that laptop thing, it’s still going, but the momentum has clearly died down.

ST: I know we had spoken about this before Elliot. That the business of how computers are sold on the consumer level, with upgrades and operating systems that are updated every 18 months or so, seems to work against trying to create really successful learning software because schools purchase equipment that outdates itself pretty quickly. Schools can’t necessarily repurchase again to keep up with whatever the state of the art is in computing.

CN: That’s exactly right. We had a school district that we talked to just this week that said they were ordering a device, a laptop, and the hardware was changed three times before they received the device.

ST: Well this leads in nicely to my next question. I think it’s clear what the challenges are related to laptops and workstations in the classroom, that there are financial incentives to computer-based businesses that require OS and hardware upgrades. Computer obsolescence seems to occur faster than a school’s ability to pay for upgrades. Do you see similar challenges with handhelds in the classroom?

ES: Well, again, let’s take one step back because there is this new opportunity with these low cost, mini laptops that was started by Nicholas Negroponte and the One Laptop Per Child initiative. While GoKnow was going out and selling its handheld software, people would say to us “Why should we buy a handheld? We can spend a $100 and get a whole laptop computer.” We used to say “Well if you can buy a laptop for a hundred bucks, go buy it.” As you know the OLPC device came out around $200. What also happened was that Intel, Asus, and now Dell, all came out with a $300 – $500 mini laptop, and we’re seeing schools moving pretty quickly to buy those laptops. They’re not buying the $1,000 – $1,500 laptops, but the lower cost laptops are an exciting opportunity. Now they still run XP and you still have problems with these devices turning on or off instantly. There are still all kinds of headaches and the operating systems are still complex, but the price point is really low and that’s very exciting. Handhelds are still in the $250 – $350 neighborhood. Double that and you can get a full laptop.

On the market today you have this mini laptop movement and then you have these converged devices that have a lot of functionality. Everybody has an offering in that space and the prices for those devices are not unreasonable. So now the question is how could K-12 take advantage of this opportunity. Remember, our study stated that access was the problem. Now it seems that access is no longer the problem. It is within the grasp of schools to give every kid a computer. It could be a cell phone computer, it could be a mini laptop computer. The conditions necessary for computing to have an impact could actually be achieved, and it’s only been in the last 6 to 12 months that that vision has been recognized in the community. But now there’s another problem that has raised it’s head.

CN: The biggest single problem now, if children do indeed have access to technology, is the problem of how teachers integrate this technology into the classroom. Up until now, technology is either the focus of the instruction in that it’s an instructional technology class (they’re teaching children about Word and Excel and that sort of thing) or it’s an add on to a lesson (here we’re going to be doing a lesson on the Civil War, let’s look at this website that deals with the Civil War,) but it’s not an integral part of the lesson. We determined that it couldn’t be an integral part of the lesson because there weren’t tools available that easily allowed teachers to create lessons around the technology. There are products like Blackboard or WebCT or Moodle and I can understand why teachers aren’t authoring their lessons everyday in these tools. It’s like asking them to program in HTML. How good are they at that? I would say many of them don’t even know what HTML is, especially when we see elementary education majors who are only required to take one three-hour course in technology. They don’t know the difference between “Save” and “Save as” and we’re going to ask them to create their lessons in something like Blackboard? Well we know that’s not going to happen and so what we did was create what we call the Mobile Learning Environment. The mobile learning environment is a tool that runs on top of Windows Mobile, Windows CE or Windows XP. It allows teachers to easily take whatever applications they normally use, be it Inspiration, or a paint program, or some type of drill and practice program, and it allows them to build a cohesive lesson in a very short amount of time with very little training.

ES: What Cathie’s explaining is that schools have existing curriculum that they have to teach. They bring that pencil and paper curriculum to the table and set it down next to a computer and say “How do I take this pencil and paper stuff and integrate it with the technology?” School districts across the country have specific things they have to teach. Some companies try to replace the curriculum through a new computer-based environment. These companies are saying “You adopt this technology, and with it, you also adopt this curriculum.” We feel that this doesn’t work. School districts have existing curriculum they teach with, you can’t tell them to change the curriculum because of the technology. So then the question becomes how to integrate the technology with the school’s existing curriculum.

ST: Let’s say that technology and hardware, because it’s coming down in price, is not the issue. The problem then becomes software that attempts not to undo lessons and materials teachers have been preparing in an analogue way for years. Software that tries not to tell teachers to chuck all that they know aside and start anew with whatever this latest and greatest software product tells you to teach. The issue is about providing tools that work in addition to and complement side by side with the teacher’s instructional materials they’ve been using for years.

CN: Yes, that’s very well put.

ES: If you go to a situation where the computers are one-to-one, where every child has a computer, be it a cell phone computer or a mini laptop computer, then all the learning activities, all the learning resources are on that device. It becomes the conduit then for the curriculum and for the artifacts the student creates. In some sense it does replace or certainly augments the paper and pencil materials. As Cathie pointed out earlier, the problem was that the computer was used as an add on. The major part of the lesson was still done on paper and there might be one activity that you did on the computer but that activity wasn’t integrated with the rest of the pieces of paper. The computer wasn’t playing an integral role to the lesson. But with one to one, it becomes possible for the computer to play an integral role.

CN: Which is the way it is in business. Most business people do the majority of their work on their computer. Pencil and paper tends to be an aside or an add on for notes. When we start talking about teaching children 21st Century Skills, teaching them how to use the computer for the bulk of what they do is certainly a 21st Century Skill.

ST: Certainly, so long as it’s not just teaching the technical means to do a PowerPoint presentation or write a paper. It’s about the critical thinking that goes on.

ES: Right.

ST: I’ll come back to that point in just a moment. I’ve heard it expressed by business leaders involved in creating educational materials that handhelds present an opportunity to empower student learning in a way we’ve never before imagined possible, but it could come be at the expense of teacher control. Can student empowerment and teacher control coexist in the classroom?

ES: Absolutely.

CN: The teachers who are out of control when students have handhelds are the same teachers who are out of control when the students have pencils and paper. I was a classroom teacher for 15 years and back then the threat was that computers were going to come in and replace all teachers. All of the good teachers felt that any teacher who could be replaced by a computer should be. There is always room for and a place for good teachers. In this case the role of the teacher is different. It’s not necessarily a role of handing out the information. You don’t open up students’ heads and dump in the information. Rather, teachers provide direction and contextualize things for students as they do their lessons. Students are not sitting there like little birds waiting to be fed. To create autonomous learners you must contextualize things for students as they find them or as they run into difficulties trying to fit pieces together because you’ve structured the lesson for them.

ST: You’re singing my song. One of the things we often say at our organization is that a child is not a vessel to be filled, but a flame to be kindled. What you’re speaking to is how do you create that spark and engage that 21st Century Learner.

CN: Exactly.

ES: We saw that spark and the leveling of the playing field when we were working in Bedford-Stuyvesant in New York City with handhelds four years ago. This was when pocket PCs were just beginning to be available to K-12. We would go into these classrooms where children are physically and sexually abused, they live in homeless shelters, it’s 100% free and reduced lunch. This is a very intense school. You bring in these pocket PCs and they could do anything, they could do everything. If you looked at the work and said “Who produced this?” you wouldn’t know that it was a child from Bedford-Stuyvesant. It could be a student from an upper class suburb. The work stood on it’s own merits. The children there were not successful with the paper and pencil. They didn’t like it. It didn’t meet their needs. It wasn’t part of who they were. But when you gave them this technology, it kindled that flame and they then had an opportunity to produce in the same way that the other kids had. It was astonishing to see.

ST: So it’s your belief that 21st Century Learning Skills can be addressed properly with handhelds?

CN: Yes. The way we learn and what we learn is changing, and that is really the majority of the issue around 21st Century Skills. Children need to learn how instead of what. How do I find this information? How do I determine from this Internet what is valid information? How does this fit into everything else that I’m reading? How does this merge with my textbook? It’s the how. Again, it’s helping the child take the wealth of information that’s out there, assimilate it, and determine what’s a valid source, what’s real information.

Photo of 5th grade students from Singapore using computers that are tethered to desks.

ES: The 21st Century Skills are about teamwork and the “soft skills” kids gain when working and collaborating together. If you watch classrooms with big desktop computers, the kids are sort of sitting hunched over looking up at the machines. They’re not talking to each other. They’re not sharing. They’re just staring at the screens with headphones on. But when you put mobile computers, handheld computers, in a classroom the kids are looking at each other, talking to each other, putting the handhelds in front of each other’s faces. They’re working together. They’re actively engaged in teamwork. It’s a completely different flow in the classroom.

Photo of 3rd grade students from Singapore using mobile computers in a conversational manner.

The smallness, the immediacy, the ease of use of these handheld devices is exactly what is needed to support the 21st Century Skills, where your dynamic workgroups change over the course of a day. If different children work with different kids on different problems, no problem! That’s what happens with these handheld computers because you’re not tethered.

CN: We have some excellent photos of that when we were in Singapore last month. We were working with researchers there at the university in Singapore. They’re implementing a project where they will follow third and fourth graders who are using cell phone computers, pocket PCs, for learning activities in the classroom. We observed great diversity in the entry points into lessons, even on the part of second graders. One such lesson was on prepositions. Teachers gave them pocket PCs and sent them out into the school yard, over to the Koi pond, into the central office in groups of three to take pictures that were illustrations of the preposition “in”. You know, the fish are in the pond, the basketball is in the basket, things like that. They gave them a series of prepositions they had to photograph and then they came back to the classroom and wrote sentences explaining their pictures. Then they shared their pictures and the sentences that went along with it. We saw eight different ways that students could complete a lesson. In the end, they all got the assignment done but they were all able to do it their own way, the way that suited them best.

ST: That really speaks to the empowerment for students. One of the things I wonder about for a greater acceptance of handhelds in the classroom; do you have any thoughts or insights into what professional development should be in place to help this succeed?

ES: When companies that really understand the role of technology in the schools work with the teachers, they realize it’s not a one shot deal. You can’t just go in and only show the teachers how to use the computers. That was the failure of those laptops programs, the lack of ongoing professional development with the integration issue. We stress this when we work with a school district. There are districts that say “Well we don’t have the money and we really can’t do professional development” and Cathie and I just sort of grimace because we know there’s going to be trouble. The teachers and administrators are not going to understand how to use the technology. When the bumps happen, and there are always bumps, they’re not going to know how to deal with those bumps. Professional development is not just having experts help the teachers, it’s also having the teachers talk to each other and work together with children to get over those bumps.

ST: It’s great that schools can invest in the technology, but just buying the equipment and any additional software to benefit the instruction is only half the solution.

CN: That’s exactly right. It would be like buying a new car. It really helps if someone walks you through all of the features of the new car. Otherwise you’re driving but you’re not really taking advantage of all of the bells and whistles that a new car has. A lot of districts think that if their teachers know how to use a computer that this skill translates into knowing how to integrate it. In fact that’s something that they don’t teach in school. Most of the colleges of education don’t have tools to be able to teach prospective teachers how to do that. Teachers who have been out there in the field certainly don’t have that information.

ES: So if we could summarize. One of the first challenges we saw to getting technology to have an impact on the kids was the access problem. Today we feel that the access problem, while it’s hasn’t gone away, is certainly addressable in a scalable, sustainable way. The next problem is this issue of how do you integrate existing curriculum with the technology. That requires professional development, it requires software that helps the teachers in doing that integration so the technology scaffolds in some sense so teachers can create coherent, cohesive lessons. Professional development also scaffolds the teachers in creating coherent, cohesive lessons that integrate the technology. Now that we have access addressed, we have to deal with this integration problem, and it’s integration with existing curriculum.

People say, and I’ll be honest I’m guilty of it too, that we need to have a new curriculum. Technology enables us to do new things. That’s easy to say but it doesn’t address what schools have problems with today. The curriculum will change but everything is not going to change on day one. You have to start where the teachers are, with their existing curriculum, and help them understand how to integrate it using tools like what Cathie suggested along with professional development.

ST: If I could branch off of your comment there. Classrooms have the potential to see beneficial change as a result of technology. Today there are so many different ways of interfacing with these new technologies, be it classroom technologies like Tablet PCs or Smart Boards or consumer technologies like the Nintendo Wii or Apple iPhones. Are you seeing any technology trends that are important to watch in terms of learning?

ES: I think the smallness issue is really important. The cell phone computer is not simply just a smaller laptop computer. We’ve spent years learning how to design interfaces for laptop computers. You can’t just use all those same techniques, scale it back a little bit, and apply then to cell phone computers. Designing for mobile machines with a small screen is different than designing for 15 – 17 inch screens. We have to think about what is the essence and what’s really important. It will require a change in how we think about designing our software, how we design our web pages. Companies that simply take their 17 inch or 15 inch technology and just try and repackage it for the small screen will lose out. People will not buy that solution because it is not effective on a small screen.

ST: That seems to be a common occurrence with publishers, that is if they have a successful program in one media format they simply port it over to another. And that is not the best solution for addressing mobile computing or any other kind of platform for that matter.

CN: Exactly.

ES: It might make instant business success but they won’t have business success with that simplistic model. We’ll see. The proof’s in the pudding. It’s too early to say. That’s our opinion, we’ll see.

ST: Well that’s true. One of the things that I worry about with Smart Boards is people are just porting all of their book based content into static PDFs to be displayed on Smart Boards. There’s nothing engaging there about that solution.

CN: Right. Children are simply watching something bigger. We were in Mexico and we saw that Mexico had adopted the Smart Boards in all the classrooms. At one meeting we attended, they demonstrated how they were going to be using the Smart Boards in the classroom. A teacher had a book opened, displayed on the Smart Board, going through the lessons with the book on the Smart Board. It was just a bigger book, the children are still being passive learners. They simply watched her as opposed to engaging with a technology that fits them, moving up and around, it’s a completely different learning environment.

ES: This was a very powerful learning experience for both of us. Here is a country trying to move into the 21st century. They were going to equip their classrooms with all these expensive, electronic whiteboards. All they were doing was the same thing that they had done with books in the past and that wasn’t particularly interesting to the kids. Displaying the book a little bigger is not going have any impact whatsoever.

CN: We were laughing. We thought “Is this just telling you the same thing, but only louder?”

ST: Andy Warhol had a saying, “If you can’t make it big, make it red.” So maybe that’s the next step.

CN: That’s right.

ES: That’s good.

CN: That’s not to say that some people aren’t doing innovative, imaginative things with Smart Boards, because they are.

ST: Very true. I don’t mean to be down on Smart Boards. I’m excited by them but I get disheartened when I see its use in such a way that it’s really not forward thinking to benefit the instruction with the great medium that’s available to them.

ES: Historically, new technology mimics old technology until you figure out how to take advantage of the new. A classic example is when the movie camera came out people simply photographed the theater because that was the thinking of how you viewed theater. Then Hollywood came along and defined this experience as a new genre, a new medium, one that can tell a new kind of story. It wasn’t immediate. It took a while to figure it out.

We work folks at SRI and they are doing some wonderful things with whiteboards, with the clickers, they’re really trying to go beyond the obvious things that you could do with those devices and be much more engaged, much more imaginative.

ST: Let me ask both of you; whose work are you watching these days? Who do you think is doing neat work with technology and learning that would really benefit students everywhere?

ES: Outside the education world, I think the folks who are trying to develop apps for mobile computers, people who are grappling with how to use multi touch, how to display information, those are the folks that we’re looking at. The range of location-based apps that people are coming out with now, with GPS built in, those are very, very provocative.

We’re going to see new interface conventions generated. Phone companies have opened up access to lots and lots of applications, not just the three or four products that come with the phone when you buy it. You can download and install whatever applications you want. Cell phones are full blown computers. Cathie is intentional when she uses the term cell phone computers. Just like you have desktop computers and laptop computers, you have cell phone computers. The emphasis is on the computing part, that it can enable all kinds of applications. What do you build, how they work, ease of use; these devices have to be ready to go and intuitive from the moment someone picks them up. That’s a real challenge.

ST: I sometimes wonder if the difficulty with technology in the classroom is in how it is defined, semantically. A cell phone in the entertainment industry is portable entertainment or portable gaming device. That terminology doesn’t work in the classroom. I like how you’re framing the conversation, that these are cell phone computers, they’re not cell phones, they’re not entertainment devices, they’re devices made for learning.

CN: Yes. We had a discussion about this just yesterday, about what a cell phone computer should be or not be. In Singapore they’re not enabling voice. They’re only paying for data plans for the third and fourth graders. They will have 24/7 access to the Internet which really levels the playing field because it doesn’t make any difference if you have an Internet capability at home or not. You can still have access to all of the information, no matter where you are because of your cellular capability. But someone in a parents group yesterday said “Do you really think it would make a difference, and what difference would it make, if you did indeed give them voice in addition to it?” We have moved away from the term acceptable use policy of devices to what we call responsible use. As educators, we believe that we need to make all of these users responsible for what they do with their technology. It’s not that we’re dictating what is acceptable and what isn’t. It’s about being responsible and maybe that means we do give them voice. We also encourage schools to let children put a few tunes on the mp3 player, or to let them download a game or two because we want the device to seem personal to the children as opposed to it just being another school device. If it’s personal to the child, then they’re going to take better care of it, they will make sure that it’s charged, because is theirs. It’s their personal device. What’s important to you are those things that are personal to you.

ES: We see a trajectory with this issue of one-to-one computing. The entire notion of one-to-one is going to change. The term is inappropriate. It’s a dominant term now because it comes out of the laptop world. It still focuses on the technology as opposed to what the kids are going to do with the technology. I think over the next few years, the notion of one-to-one as a term will disappear. What’s going to happen is that it will be a given that all the children will have a computing device. It probably is going to happen faster than most people think. Right now, a large percentage of schools in the United States, ban cell phones. But once this dam breaks, when schools see that kids are already bringing computers to school and schools don’t have to pay for those computers, the light bulb within administrators will light up. Administrators will begin to notice that one child brings a Motorola, another brings a Nokia, and yet another brings an iPhone. The solution? You just put a layer of software on top of the phone that makes all those non-homogeneous devices homogeneous with respect to the teacher and the learning activities. Just like a Dell and a Sony and a Gateway. They’re different computers. You put a layer of software on top of them and now they’re all the same. That’s the same idea that will happen in the cell phone computer world. And when this happens, we think it’s going to happen very quickly. Not in five years, more like two to three years.

Advances in technology suggest that some day soon classroom instruction powered by low cost computing devices could be a real possibility. When Nicholas Negroponte, founder/chairman of One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), announced his vision of a computer so inexpensive that every child on the planet could own one, many of us wished that such a vision could come true quickly if the benefits to education were real. Just after the first low cost XO Laptops were coming off the assembly line at a cost that was under $180 a unit, other large computer manufacturers announced that they too would be developing competing low cost computers. The race for the student laptop had begun. However, to date, no other computer manufacturer has yet been able to beat the XO laptop price. What the world had failed to appreciate by the OLPC initiative, was that a new age of computing is upon us.

A place where many technology enthusiasts go to watch the future of computing unveil itself is on a Website called Gizmodo. It’s a favorite to inventors, technologists, and even toy manufacturers. Just this past March, a new learning product for classroom use was announced and claimed a low price tag of a mere $50. This handheld device that looks like it might be a distant cousin to the Game Boy is called the TeacherMate. Could this be the next low cost classroom innovation to keep an eye on?

The company that developed the TeacherMate is called Innovations for Learning and is located in the education rich surroundings of Evanston, IL. This not-for-profit company was founded over 15 years ago by former technology lawyer Seth Weinberger. Seth started his company out of a frustration for trying to find meaningful and effective educational software to use with young children. Since he couldn’t find what he wanted from the marketplace, he decided to start developing reading and math software on his own with a small team of talented educators. But developing effective software for classroom use was only part of the problem. The larger issue was that schools had ineffective technology solutions in place; PCs that were outdated or not working at all, varying degrees of Internet connectivity, and many other commonly heard complaints about technology that was just not ready to be used at any moment’s notice by teachers.

Innovations for Learning began the search for low cost, hassle free, ready to use technology solutions to bring into the classroom. After an exhaustive search that spanned many years and included a number of complicated licensing and development agreements with multi-million dollar businesses, the company made a bold decision; it decided to make its own educational hardware platform.

When I received a TeacherMate to evaluate, a few things stood out immediately. In addition, its small size, the backlit color screen, and game like interface, it had a USB slot for transferring files and information as well as an SD slot for additional file storage. When I looked under the hood I was amazed. The device had a 500 MB hard drive and used a GNash player on a Linux system to play back Adobe Flash files. This meant that the platform was an open system, something almost all other portable computing devices are not. This speaks volumes about its possibilities for developers and publishers.

Once the TeacherMate was off the drawing table, Innovations for Learning began to port its learning software to the device, and this past March began a two-month pilot program in 15 schools with 450 students from the Chicago area. In addition, an education research heavy, The Spencer Foundation, also expressed interest in the TeacherMate and funded its own research effort alongside the rollout. This study is reported to be close to completion and should be available on the Innovations for Learning Website soon. Today, the TeacherMate is being used by over 8,000 kindergarten and first grade students across 250 schools on the west and south sides of Chicago. By the end of the year a second grade software product will be ready for use as will other grades in future years.

The current business model of the TeacherMate is to offer a subscription package, complete with all the hardware and software necessary to use in a classroom setting, at a cost of $50 per student per school year. Included in that price is all the training and support necessary for teachers to succeed. It also comes with a TeacherMate docking station and simplified Learning Management System so when teachers collect TeacherMates from students at the end of a classroom period, they can dock the devices in one location, download all of the student progress data to their computer, and review the results. Teachers can also review audio recordings made by students on the device from reading software and even define the next lesson for students through the LMS. Currently the only software available on the device is by Innovations for Learning, but founder Seth Weinberger states that publishers are exploring the device as a solution to their own learning software problems.

Here’s the bottom line for forward thinking publishers, administrators, and teachers: We’re currently at a place where it’s now possible to conceive, create and manufacture low-cost, powerful and engaging technology products. We can pick and choose a-la-carte features of such technologies, and do so for a price that is below that of traditional PC workstations. The dreams of yesterday for low-cost and reliable technology products for classroom use are the realities of today. The TeacherMate is evidence of this new computing age. While the XO Laptop was the first step in this new era, the TeacherMate is the next step. The promise of what’s possible with technology in the classroom is at our doorstep and yet, there are more businesses, innovators, and devices still to be imagined to finally bring ed tech into the 21st century.

Just eight years ago, before the Internet bubble burst, colleges were scrambling to offer as many web development classes as they could. The future of the Internet seemed clear. At the time, I was a computer science teacher, and any class having to do with web programming, interactive development or digital communications had lengthy waiting lists to get in. I considered the growing interest in Internet development skills to be mainly for adults; however, a few years later I was surprised to see students latching on to the Internet as a medium for expression, using the web as their own personal sketch pads to share artwork, writings and ideas with the world.

Today, a similar parallel within the technology world is emerging through gaming. Forward thinking universities are offering game studies programs, with degrees that focus on the world of video games, and for good reason. The video games industry is thriving. In 2007, the US consumer-based video games industry expanded by 43%, growing to almost $18 billion. In 2008, year to date sales are 26% over last year’s record-breaking numbers. Unlike the Web 1.0 past, the video games’ world is ready to grab hold of every new graduate coming out of such programs. Could it be that in just a few short years, students will start creating their own video games as their next digital sketch pad to share their ideas globally? Or could it be – as I believe – that day has already arrived.

In fact, while critics debate whether children today spend more time playing interactive games than watching television, a growing number of kids are already experimenting with digital authoring tools that allow them to express themselves through the creation of digital games. A new darling in this tool chest is a program called Scratch, developed out of MIT. Others similar tools are also available as well: tools like Alice, Squeak, Star Logo, Kerpoof, and yes, even Flash.

With these newly available tools, game creators could fuel a whole new literacy movement based on an intimate understanding of what elements are necessary to make a compelling game experience. For example, a student might choose to play a short “casual” game to learn more about how federal budget decisions play out in the US economy over time. Playing such a game might take 20 minutes to complete and result in an overview understanding of the topic. But the time needed for a student to create that same game would span many weeks. This process would include a lengthy research phase to thoroughly understand every aspect of the federal budget in detail. Only then could the internalized knowledge gained from the topic be applied to create an interesting and compelling game. Can you see future class projects where the assignment turned in at the end of a semester is not a paper, but a game?

This opens up a whole new way of looking at games. To date, a small number of older commercially available video games have been used to facilitate learning in the classroom. Generally, these games were not created intentionally as games that were meant to teach. I refer to this category of games as being “accidentally educational.” However, with the growing strength of games in the consumer world, new and unique genres of games are emerging every month, including games that are developed with learning in mind. These are games that can be used for health-related training, games with a social agenda, games for behavioral change, games for corporate use and yes, games for direct classroom use. I call this new direction in game creation games that are “intentionally educational.”

To understand how the gaming world is evolving, consider the following quote from a few years ago by Henry Jenkins, Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT, a pioneer in games studies, popular culture, and emerging digital technologies.

“Historically, educational games have been a bit like a spinach sundae – not very tasty and not very good for you, either. That’s because a lot of educational games have been made either by educators who don’t know much about creating compelling game play or by game designers who distort the educational material. As a result, most of the ‘edutainment’ games on the market have all the entertainment value of a bad game and all the educational value of a bad lecture.”

Today, the elements of change are in place to help minimize future spinach sundaes. Many new teachers entering the classroom grew up with video games and have a comfort using new technologies. A recent report from the PEW Internet and American Life Project states that 97% of kids between the ages of 12 and 17 play video games, with 50% of that audience saying they played a video game yesterday. There’s also a growing body of gaming companies interested in bringing to market successful products with defined learning objectives. New channels of communication between content experts, pedagogy experts and game designers are being forged. Games that result in strong learning outcomes are a result of complementing the needs of each of these professionals, without any singular voice overriding another. It is a difficult and challenging balancing act for all, but one that will determine the future of games developed to be successful, intentionally educational experiences.

As my company, 360KID, continues to explore the intersection of games and learning, I find myself coming back to an observation about today’s games movement. Games, very much like books, are a medium for expression and communication. Books are not inherently educational, but they have the potential to be a vehicle for learning. There are books that succeed in facilitating learning, and there are those that don’t. There are books that are controversial, and there are books that are accepted and welcomed into every classroom in the country. Books are a medium, and like books, new technology platforms that play video games are also a medium, though still very young comparatively.

Does this mean that games are good and they belong in the classroom? Yes and no. Like a fine textbook and an excellent teacher, a good game can open up a world of learning possibilities. As publishers and developers of intentionally educational games experiment, fumble, and find successes, only time will reveal their true effectiveness. One thing is certain about the future of digital games: the train has left the station and it is moving fast. There is room for many different disciplines and industry leaders on this train. The question is not if you should jump on the train, but when.