• Generate knowledge; schools—be they primary, secondary, or universities—are in the business of generating knowledge; whether a student writing a paper at her desk or a professor researching a chemical anomaly in his laboratory, schools constantly create, repackage, and output new information;
• Keep knowledge; universities in particular have long served as repositories of vast amounts of knowledge; libraries, individual scholars, and archives possess some of the world’s most significant academic information;
• Disseminate knowledge; the most obvious purpose of any school is to share knowledge with the students that attend.

The Internet has surely changed the specific nature of these three purposes.  Knowledge is increasingly generated not by scholars concentrated on single campuses, but by diffuse networks of many thoughtful minds around the world.  Knowledge is kept less on the shelves of great libraries, and more and more on the millions of Internet-connected computers worldwide.  Finally, knowledge is no longer available solely to students in classes, but rather to the Internet world at large.  If nothing else, these fundamental changes ought to provide motivation for educators to adopt new technology so that they may adapt to the changing knowledge networks of the world around them.
Policymakers, administrators, and educators are challenged—given these three core missions—to implement technology applications that create value in these areas.  A good test of success for any new program is to determine if it improves either the ability of schools to generate knowledge, store knowledge, or share knowledge

Several years ago in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, the local school system faced two problems. The first was that many students were graduating high school without any desire to continue their education, and some lacked the technical skills to enter the workforce. The second problem was that the schools’ computer systems were a disaster of unfinished local area networks, aging hardware, and abysmal technical support due to staffing shortages. Fortunately for Berkeley Springs High School, County Technology Coordinator Curt Heldreth had a plan. Over the course of several years, Heldreth built a first rate IT training program that provided instruction and A+ Computer Technician certification to students while turning the thirty or so kids he taught in any given year into the county’s dedicated computer staff. Students quickly embraced every project as their own, and technicians-to-be have been spotted throughout the school system for years now as they pull wires through ceilings, troubleshoot computers, design web pages, and even help to lead faculty development sessions.

To call Berkeley Springs’s program a success would be an understatement. Not only did the district save hundreds of thousands of dollars on IT costs, but individual students from all walks of life have become successful in their own rites. One of the first graduates of the program joined the Air Force, where he graduated at the top of his electronics school class, and found himself helping to teach some of those Air Force classes himself. Another student became the subject of an article in Newsweek about kids from rural areas who go on to prestigious universities; he is currently studying electrical and computer engineering, computer science, and business at Carnegie Mellon. Yet another program alumnus enrolled at the College of William and Mary, started a business, and became intimately involved in the technology world.

The lesson from these stories is clear: empower students to learn and grow beyond what traditional education is able to do, and those students will return dividends more substantial than what any pre-information revolution educator could have ever dreamed.

Article about Megan Kennedy’s project

One does not require statistics to see that the information revolution has had a profound impact on the lives of America’s youth. Students (and adults) have logged onto MySpace and Facebook by the tens of millions, Apple’s iPods have become one of the era’s defining cultural icons, and cellular telephones have proliferated. But as change in youth behavior has become a social consequence of the information revolution, many schools have seen technology not as an opportunity to be embraced but rather as a threat to be guarded against.

Cell phones are now in the hands of most Americans; Apple computer had sold 49,818,000 iPods by the end of second quarter 2006. Many of these portable devices are in students’ hands; a recent study showed that users between the ages of 18 and 24 spend 22 hours per month, compared to the national average of 13 hours per month, using their cell phones.

While students spend more and more time using technology, schools spend more and more energy devising ways to keep that same technology out of the classroom. A simple Google News search for the query “school bans cell phones” uncovers a plethora of articles accounting many different school systems’ decisions to restrict student use of the devices. Similar measures, such as the one taken in Anderson County, Tennessee, have restricted use of iPods and “other electronic devices.” Higher education institutions have taken a dramatically different approach, however, as Duke University, for example, in 2005 initiated a program that provided iPods to all incoming students so that they may be used for instructional purposes.

Students’ use of new technology in their daily lives, however, runs much deeper than telephone and iPod gadgetry. Many in America’s 18-25 year-old population keep a profile on the Facebook Internet service. Facebook, like its cousin “MySpace,” is a leader in a new breed of Internet services known as “social networking” or “social computing” defined as “The application of computer technology to facilitate interaction and collaboration.” I decided one morning to monitor the Facebook page for an upcoming campus event at the College of William and Mary. My anecdotal findings were quite phenomenal. The event—a concert and party held by a local band and fraternity to raise money for children in Honduras—began the day with a single host and a handful of guests. Throughout the day as I checked the page several times, I saw that more event hosts were added who, according to the site, did not even all know each other. The guest list, meanwhile, grew at a shocking rate. By the end of the afternoon, a handful of party hosts from different social circles had managed to promote a benefit concert that had 75 confirmed guests, 75 possible guests, 34 guests that would not be able to make it, and 245 students that had yet to RSVP. After corresponding with the event planners through e-mail, I learned that the venue’s occupancy was 150 people, with room outside for about another 150 to listen.

On the surface this may seem unremarkable. I, however, had just seen a single person start planning a benefit concert, seven more strangers decide that they wanted to help, and nearly the entire venue be filled by word-of-mouth communication in a single day. And, even more remarkably, these students had managed to accomplish the task, one that years ago would have taken weeks of planning and countless hours of work, using nothing but the Internet.

Similar stories of social networking technologies working their way into the daily lives of students and institutions can be found elsewhere. In mid-April 2006, Police in Kansas used MySpace to foil a planned school shooting on the anniversary of the Columbine High School massacre. The plot would have involved five plotters and a lengthy “hit list” of victims, but authorities found guns, knives, and ammunition in the possession of suspects thanks to leads obtained online. Lives of students and teachers were saved thanks to information obtained on a website that did not exist three years ago.

Yet, despite the rapid spread of social networking services in students’ private lives, concerns about privacy, bandwidth consumption, and in-class distractions have led many school districts to ban these popular websites.

Students, for their part, have been adept at developing countermeasures to administrative restrictions. In November 2005, for example, a high school sophomore in Oregon was able to connect to his home computer from a school computer lab, pulling MySpace.com through the Internet via his home Internet connection. The school had responded to the perceived threat of MySpace, but students were able to effectively trick those school filters into allowing unrestricted access to the “off-limits” website.

These examples of student culture (surrounding technology) at odds with schools’ administrative reactions illustrate the conflict between technology and established educational norms. Social organization—the ways that students interact with one another and live much of their lives away from school—has been made much more nimble and mobile thanks to the Internet, but yet many schools have thus far been very hesitant to adopt these technologies in a manner that enhances the educational process. Schools are challenged in one respect by the distracting and revolutionary influences of gadgets and new web services, while they simultaneously work to leverage cutting-edge technologies for legitimate educational purposes. The fundamental challenge is for educators and the courses that they teach to stay relevant. Students are increasingly growing up with ready access to new communications technologies. These resources are an intrinsic and natural part of their life and, as such, resources that students expect to interact with in the classroom. To not integrate technology with instruction, and to cling to old methodologies is to risk making certain academic pursuits less relevant within the broader context of society.

Instead of becoming technology innovators, many schools have become technology resistors, and have passed on a wonderful opportunity to enhance the quality of their instruction.