 Maen nhw'n John Cook. I'm the co-chair of the conference with Sujata Mitra. I'd like to welcome you for the second time we all get together. Tomorrow we get together for another keynote. But later on we get the second keynote in the series from Karen Cater, who's coming in abroad from the USA because she had to have some meetings at the White House and things like that. Maybe we'll hear more about that in a minute. Karen, my apologies, is the director of the Office of Educational Technology at the US Department of Education. Previously, head of Apple's leadership and advocacy efforts in education where she focused on the intersection of education, policy and research and emerging technologies and the needs of teachers, students and managers. The title of Karen's talk is Transforming American Education, Learning Powered by Technology. So, I really look forward to this talk and it's over to you, Karen, if you're ready. Thank you very much. So first audio check, can you all hear me? Wave, say hi if you can. Very good, love that. Love it when technology works. Nice to see all of you. And thank you one and all for your patience and understanding and flexibility with presenting from this lovely Hampton Inn in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I called, asked what color the picture would be on the wall so I could match my shirt to the picture and such. But really, I'm really happy to be here. Very happy that you allowed me to continue and chat with you from abroad. Really interested in the work that you all are doing and your conference. It's really aligned with many of the things that we're thinking about as well around innovation, around evidence and data, around personalization, the kinds of things you've been talking about. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to spend about 20, 30 minutes just going through some things on slides and then hopefully we will have the most of this time for it. And it's actually great. I can see, I don't know if you see what I see, but I can see all of you kind of in the audience it's panning back and forth. So, again, really happy to see you all. So, I'm going to go ahead and be kind of moving through these slides. So, I do know it says transforming American education here on the slide. But what I've definitely learned over the last two years that I've been, as I've learned, lots and lots of things in the two years that I've been in government. And actually, let me digress for just a second. It's funny when people look at bios, they get a little tired after the second line, which I don't blame anybody, but I'm going to shorten my bio to basically three things. And that is two years of government right now, prior to that, 12 years in corporate life at Apple, and prior to that, which is usually what people don't get to, 17 years in public education. So, kind of have that, the feel for the ground in the classroom, in actual real schools and try to carry that with me through my work. The other thing I've learned here in government is that, when the White House picks a date or announces something or says what's happening, there is not flexibility around that and we go with the flow. So again, that's why I'm not actually with you in person. But the other thing I've learned is that all of this, everything we're talking about wherever I travel, whether it be throughout the United States or abroad in other countries, I definitely hear the same themes, the same things that people are talking about, and it definitely gives this sense that we can, working together, kind of raise all, what I wanted to talk about were kind of three things. One is, why is this education internet moment, which is what we've been telling everybody, this is education internet moment. So investors start investing, entrepreneurs desktop, your very best ideas, researchers publish, create, design, and teachers, students, everybody kind of hold on to your hats, as they say. The second thing I'm going to give you is just a very highest level overview of the national ed tech planet that we published in the United States with hopes that it's helpful other places, but then I really want to tell you kind of some of the things that we're actually doing and trying to accomplish that we would like to in fact accomplish with the rest of the world. So first of all, this is a little bit of a digression, a little bit of US popular culture, but every February we have the Super Bowl, and for those of us, you know, millions of people who are actually not football fans, but end up with the Super Bowl streaming into our living rooms, we watch it for the commercials. For about the past, oh I don't know, 25 years or so, the commercials have actually been the most interesting part and there are Super Bowl commercial contests, et cetera, et cetera. So for those of you who know about the Super Bowl commercials, I'll give you a sense of kind of what happened this year. This year was kind of a transition point, an inflection point with Super Bowl commercials, and I promise I will tie it back to education. What people do when they play a Super Bowl commercial, they spend $30 million for their 30 seconds to play, sometime during the Super Bowl, and that many people during the commercials will actually not be looking at the TV, but they'll be wondering off to get something to eat or whatever. There are about 100 million people who watch the Super Bowl, but this year they ended up dubbing it the Trans Media Bowl, because this is what happened this year. People looked at this as a multi-media opportunity, a multi-channel opportunity, and believe it or not, these people who create commercials for products talked about it as a deeply social experience. So, what happened was they had their 30-second commercials, but their entire design was focused on how they get attention prior to the Super Bowl, after the Super Bowl, and how they can turn their 30 seconds into many, many more seconds and minutes and hours, and how they can leverage all of the social media sites to get more eyes on their products, on their commercials. Actually, it was quite successful this year. So, for example, every year there is a chip maker company, Doritos, who has a Super Bowl commercial contest, and they allow people, they crowdsource the commercial, and then they vote on them, and then they play the winner on the Super Bowl. This particular commercial is one that was created by a gentleman who spent about $500 making this commercial, as opposed to the $3 million that companies spend, and ended up having a great commercial that was quite popular, and people watched over and over and over again watching the action. This was a commercial for the movie, the feature-length film Rio de Janeiro, and for those of you who might play Angry Birds, are there any of you in the audience who play Angry Birds? Just now I can see if you're actually still... Yeah, there you go. I can see that you can at least hear me again. For those of you who play Angry Birds, the key to this commercial was that you stopped the commercial partway through, and you had to find, you had to phrase-frame it, to find the secret code to a special level of Angry Birds so that you could log that level of Angry Birds into your phone, and then you were actually entered into a drawing to attend the premiere in Rio de Janeiro. So, on this screen you can see hiding in the background are two little Angry Birds, and they are in fact holding a secret code for the folks. So, here they turn their 30 seconds into, I don't know how long it would take people to freeze-frame through the 30 seconds to actually find the secret code, and then on and on and on. And then finally, this one was a commercial with this adorable young Darth Vader trying to do things to the dog, to the washing machine, to lots of things around the house, and finally the punchline is that the father starts the car remotely from inside of the house, and the child is convinced that he actually started the car with his force. So, what was interesting about this one is the online version of this commercial was not 30 seconds, it was 90 seconds, and when you saw it on the TV screen you would be like telling everybody, come watch this, it's really cute, etc. And they played it for weeks ahead of time. So, they had many, many more eyes than were actually on the commercial. So, all of this is interesting, right? And it's fun, but what I think it is, it's very instructive, and I think that if the companies that are creating commercials can figure out how to increase and improve engagement, I think that there are some things that we can also learn. So, another interesting thing is there are webcams all over the world as you know, and this year there were these baby eagles that were in a tree high above the place in Iowa, Decora, Iowa, and these birds, these little baby eagles got more attention online than most popular websites. And what was interesting about this is when you think about it it was an entire science experiment over several months where the parent eagles, the mother laid the eggs, we watched them, they hatched, these little babies grew from these little tiny eagles to large eagles in a very short amount of time, several, a couple months, and then you could watch them fly away. And the kinds of things that you can do with technology that you cannot do without technology are astounding. And this is a perfect example of one of those kinds of things. And then one last example just to pull from outside of traditional education is when the earthquake and ensuing tsunami hit Japan all of us were suddenly placed right in the middle of the tragedy that was happening on the spot because so many people had flip cameras, they had phone cameras, they had cameras in their pockets, and they could in fact show the world exactly what they were feeling, what they were seeing on the spot. We saw so much footage, including the joyful footage when this rescuer found this baby a few days later, fully alive and well. And these are the kinds of things, again, that we can build this much more improved and increased global understanding. So these are some of the background kinds of things that we think about and the kinds of things we think about when we created and launched the National Education Technology Plan. We said there is so much happening outside of education that is instructive. We're seeing lots of different things. We're seeing mobile, obviously. I'm sure every single one of you has the entire internet in your pocket all day every day, right? So you carry around the internet in your pocket. It is 20% and many of our students and learners of all ages have that as well. There are social interactions for learning. The places people get together online, whether they're learning to knit or learning to cook or learning to fix the faucet in their kitchen, whatever it is, there are many places that people learn together online, the best possible social interactions. There's digital content improving every single day. One of the things that's gotten a lot of press is this whole Khan Academy and what happened when a single individual decided to start explaining how to do math problems to his cousins and it has become, again, it has taken off as a website that people can use to learn things of all different sorts. But better and better, more highly produced digital content allows us to access experts. Finally, I think the most misunderstood and misused and the nascent in education practice will be that practice of understanding. If we think of what all of the consumer companies and other folks are doing with big data and truly personalizing the advertisements that you see on your screen, all of the different things that people know about us from our Facebook social connections, LinkedIn social connections to what we search for, what we look for. The notion of leveraging big data and understanding how to use that to fully engage and personalize learning for students is something I think that in the next several years we'll see more and more of and something that we're really interested in understanding. We in education are incredibly data poor. We don't have good data. We don't have very much of a manual practice and I think that we can combine the best possible interactions with students and teachers with tools that will allow us to use data and understand much more about how students are learning. What we're talking about is this inflection point that we're at transitioning from a predominantly print-based classroom to a digital learning environment. Many people kind of stop and say, well, do we really want students reading their textbooks on a screen? When we talk about digital, as you know, we're not talking about simply textbooks on a screen, but much more powered up learning environments that include visualizations and simulations. It's funny, actually, I was talking to someone this weekend and they're saying that the Harry Potter newspaper, when they get their newspaper and there are people that jump out and start talking with them and that kind of thing. I mean, we're not actually that far from having the kinds of textbooks in interactive environments, the guiding interface that is somewhat like the Harry Potter newspaper. It's actually interesting to think about. But other things including increased feedback loops, the opportunity to publish, the opportunity to access experts from afar, visualizations and simulations and all of those kinds of things that you can actually build into online interactive environments. We're actually interested in launching sort of a global challenge and can we create an interface that will in fact teach people to read. As we like to say, we don't mean read badly or read with training wheels, but really teach people to read. Can we look at the best research on teaching reading and can we create interfaces that actually guide a reader and improve their ability to read independently. Education is an internet moment. We do think it's here. We do think we are going to see this transition from predominantly print to a digital learning environment. We launched the National Education Technology Plan last November. Hopefully you've seen it. If you haven't, you can download it. The website will be at the end. There are five sections. There are six sections to it. The first chapter is all about learning. It's about personalization. It's about reaching all learners, meaning that learners with disabilities or special needs or language learners or gifted, whatever the needs are of students, we truly should be able to personalize and bring in that long tale of experience. Rather than trying to have everybody do the same thing and shutting down prior experience and personal stories, how can we bring that into the learning environment and truly leverage that? The thing about the learning chapter was we focused on grounding it in basic research so that it didn't come across as, number one, fluffy and, oh great, this will happen someday, and also didn't come across as old and tired. We really wanted to hit that sweet spot of being visionary, being out there, but grounding it in actually what we do know. That's what we, I think, accomplished with the learning chapter. The teaching chapter was very much focused on how can we augment human performance? How can we make sure that every teacher is as connected to all of the data, content, tools, resources to each other, to the experts, maybe back to their college of education, to their mentors, whoever? How can we create an entirely interconnected teaching profession in order to help education professionals have the information and the help they need every single moment that they need it rather than waiting to possibly take a class in the summer or take a class on a given-in service day? We really want to power up the teaching profession. Not that I'm a fan of military analogies, but in the military they talk about technology as a force multiplier, and I think that that's actually an interesting term when we think about the teaching profession and thinking about technology as a force multiplier. We don't see technology replacing teachers, we see it as powering up their ability to meet the needs of every single student. The assessment chapter was all about increasing and improving feedback loops. I think probably everybody knows everything there is to know about that in terms of, you know, right now, again, we're data poor, we want better and better information and feedback going directly to students, teachers and parents. So if you buy that broad vision of a learning teaching and assessment environment that's powered up with technology, the infrastructure chapter says, okay, what do we need to have in place in order to make this happen? So the infrastructure is very much about what we call the cyber infrastructure for learning and it's about the broadband access at home, at school, in the community, so that the school can become a node on the network of learning. So the school is one place that students can learn, but they take with them outside of school the materials on a mobile device or whatever, so we have an infrastructure that actually supports 24 by 7. And this infrastructure also includes the people that are capable and makes it possible for this to happen. The people that can support this kind of system, that can build this kind of system and this has required very much of an interagency effort here in the United States. So we work with our Federal Communications Commission with the Department of Commerce that has spent billions of dollars on broadband projects throughout the country and our Department of Agriculture that has done the same for broadband projects that are in rural areas. So we're very focused in building out the infrastructure to support access to the opportunity to learn. And finally, the chapter on productivity was all about how can we make sure that every single student, every single learner has what they need at that point of learning. So that isn't organized based on the calendar or based on time, but rather based on building competency, improving performance, making sure that we're keeping people at their peak performance. That's between frustration and boredom. So how do we make sure that we're actually leveraging the best possible, most efficient and effective methods possible? And we think all of this, increasing data, increasing connections, improving access, making sure that people have what they need when they need it. We think all of these things actually will vastly improve the productivity of our education system. And when we talk about education system, we're talking about learners of all ages. So that is the National Education Technology Plan in the U.S. Much like what I've heard from people across the world thinking about, and then we had this bonus section that we called the Grand Challenges, the research and development, and focused on what needs to be invented. Where are the places that we really do need intensive R&D in order to make this plan actually come to fruition? So education is at that moment, the National Education Technology Plan, and now let's give you a quick sense of some of the ways that we're thinking about this space. You know, kind of call it an ecosystem for learning technologies. So there's kind of three quick things. Talking about basic research, and I have been alluding to basic research, talking about then taking that basic research and developing products and services and the kinds of things that actually will take it from the laboratory into an actual development phase of course, multiple feedback loops, and then to implementation. What happens when it reaches the classroom and can we get better and better evidence about what's happening when these products are actually put to work for the purposes of learning. So this is an eye chart and I'm not going to expect you to read it, but I put it in here just so that when people think about basic research, they say, so what exactly are we referring to? What's happening? And I know many of you in the audience are also focused on different kinds of things that different research questions that you're working on. One of the things that we're really interested in is can we build a transparency layer? Can we make it much more understandable to many more people the kinds of things that people are focused on in basic research? So when we think about how do people learn, can we build algorithms? What are the algorithms that give us better information from data that we see? What are the best ways of finding things and sharing things and producing things? Can we create systems for problem solving? Can we create cognitive tutors? What does a cognitive tutor look like? How do people learn when they're sitting next to an adult? What are the ways that we see people learning to read and what is the role of the person and what kinds of things could in fact be potentially created in an online environment? So all the kinds of things that we see happening in basic research we're incredibly interested in making transparent and then connecting that to the people who make products and services so they can ground the things that they're doing in basic research rather than having kind of an interesting idea because they went to school one time. There are all different kinds of products and services being designed and developed at this moment. Some of them inventive and innovative and some of them kind of automating old practices and some of them just being maybe not that helpful. So these are the kinds of things that we're thinking about in the basic research, how to make it incredibly transparent so that many more people can access those. So one of the reasons that I couldn't actually fly there is we are about to launch a new initiative called Digital Promise, the National Center for Research and Advanced Information and Digital Technologies. We're actually going to change that long name at some point but this will be a non-profit organization that we're starting it up. We have a board that was selected with the help of our Congress. This will be kind of this new national center for focusing on learning technologies and the kinds of things from making basic, mapping out basic research to focusing on the marketplace, the demand side making the opportunity to interact with people who actually use products much more possible for start-ups and small companies and all the way to the demand side we want to create a smarter consumer. Schools have been primarily focused on buying textbooks and maybe some supplemental materials but what we want to do as we flip to digital is create a much more intelligent demand cycle so that people know what they actually are looking at and have a sense of how to tell whether it has evidence that it would be something that would help their students learn. Same thing then on the supply side, making the supply side better. Focusing a basic research, making sure supply and demand in the marketplace are improving day by day and then finally on the implementation side making sure we're connecting into the implementation layer. So the implementation layer is very much about evaluation and use. We want to learn from the very best possible schools we can learn from. We want to build a much broader base of evidence. One of the things that we talk about in education is again where data poor, we don't have much evidence. When we do try to get evidence many times it's connected to a highly rigorous scientific study that needs to strip out implementation and context and what we want to do is bring those things back in. So we're very focused on building a new framework, a new way of thinking about the gathering of evidence and again to raise all boats to help everybody understand much more about what works. We're also focusing on building competency-based practices rather than seat time and you probably also have been thinking about and working on the whole notion of badging or badges. You know that comes from the gaming world leveling up and earning badges which are of a competency-based system. And finally we're building this whole area of online communities of, oops, sorry, online communities of practice will in fact improve the exchange of information, technical support, emotional support, social support, build role models, build again people can earn badges by producing more, publishing more, supporting other people, observing, sharing, collaborating and then co-developing. One of the interesting things we've been thinking about in the community is a practice space and the notion of a persistent profit you could take with you from the very first part of your education experience all the way through and as you go you're adding competency, you're adding badges, you're adding to this and so if you all meet each other at a conference and you quote-unquote professionally friend each other, you could see each other's professional profile, you can see the places that they are connected, what they're thinking about, where they've published, what communities they're part of and so on and build this kind of notion of a persistent profile that stays with somebody over time. There are a lot of things that are close to that now so this isn't like a giant far-reaching novel idea but it is one of the things we've been thinking about in terms of how to power up the teaching profession and better connect people to what they need. So finally our president has absolutely focused on education as a moral obligation, as an economic imperative and we have support at all levels bipartisan for creating the best possible learning environment for every student in the country and that is what gets us up in the morning and keeps us awake at night and we're really anxious to learn with people throughout the world about how to actually see this big vision come to fruition. So with that I'm going to stop talking and we have about 25 minutes for interaction and questions. Thank you. That was great Karen, thanks very much for that. So what we're going to do now is just to remind everyone that the PowerPoint slides are in crowdvine they're in there twice, we do it in duplicate in alt and there's a bit of a time lag when you ask questions so just to pause colleagues in between the interactions between questions just for it to make sense and get through to the other side of the Atlantic and don't forget colleagues if you... Well I've switched it on. Beyond that I can't really... Have you got a roving mic you can give me? Roving mic? Is it on? Thank you. No it was behind me. It was behind me Karen. Sorry just to say so there's a bit of a time lag when you're asking questions guys say who you are and just to say we're here at the Association for Learning Technology we've particularly found your talk fascinating and we're glad you came in because we've been in dialogue with Business Innovation and Skills Government Department about evidence seeking questions we've been with it I'm the chair of the research committee for alt and we've sent things over there and we've got ongoing dialogue there we've been in dialogue with Michael Gove about the consultation about the national curriculum and there's a report going on that and dialogue going on and we'll certainly report back to the government departments if they'll listen to what you're doing and your excellent work so I'm going to now and don't forget colleagues there's questions coming in externally which Matt is going to I'll go to Matt some point to try and get some indication of what's going on though so first of all I'm going to turn my back on you excuse me Karen there's a lot of questions anybody have any questions? I can see one up there so if we go there and can you start putting your hands up so that I can get the other mic on so there's one up there Nigel anyone else? Well let's get ready Hi Karen my name's Nigel Ecclesfield I work for the Learning and Skills Improvement Service here in England and we're a public agency working for government around improvement in further education two very short points one of which I was very taken by your term leveraging big data and like a lot of colleagues I'm concerned with the process of changing data and information into knowledge to quote Richard Noss here in the UK so I'd like your comments on how you see those mechanisms are going to be put in place not to just store the data but to turn it into useful knowledge and the second one was later on you talked about making people better consumers of the technology I'd like to pick up a term from a colleague in the US Caroline Haythornthwaite about learning for production as well as consumption I'd like to know what your thoughts are on that so thanks for the presentation and it's just those two points certainly and just again somebody stop me if you can't hear me, I assume you can yeah so first of all the turning data into information is kind of the holy grail because we can have lots of data in fact I talked to companies that say they have so much data that they've been collecting for years a company data about what time students interact and when they seem to be doing better or whatever there's so much data but we have no idea really what to do with it so part of it, as I've been talking to people is trying to marry the psychometricians with computer scientists where the computer scientists go they're going to the consumer companies they're going to the places where their skills at creating algorithms and turning information or turning data into information are actually highly valued and so trying to figure out how computer scientists can actually begin to leverage and understand the kinds of data and then begin to turn it into something that's interesting for folks that's one thing the second thing is I think that we can we're thinking through how to create put data sets online and make them transparent so this is at a whole different level but if we can in fact anonymize and aggregate data so that we protect privacy are there ways that we can put big data sets online so that we can crowdsource interesting applications of that data interesting visualizations of that data interesting mashups between data sets and the like so that's the second thing but the third thing I think is actually the most sort of interesting as we go forward and that's the notion of creating electronic learning records and I apologize for not knowing I believe that Europe in general I know Germany for example is well ahead of the US in terms of and I mean this as a competition I just mean it's more evolved in terms of health records that travel with the person so health records that travel with the person mean that if you get in an accident or if you go to the doctor whatever you have the doctor that's going to help you or to the radiologist or to whoever you need to see if we think about electronic learning records it's the same thing except for the learning data travels with the student so if we did something like that and if students took for example a big test that is sent off and scored elsewhere if we had as a requirement when they send that data back it's not just back to the school district but it's also back and the requirement to deposit the learner's data into their personal electronic learning record these kinds of things will bring the data and information much closer to the student so that the student when they have a teacher, change schools have an after-summer parents whoever is helping them they have the information with them instead of saying here's what I got to do today here's what I don't get and the person trying to help them has no idea what's come before or what will come after so that's that's another kind of notions we're thinking about this notion of electronic learning records and there are some big companies that are working on this problem we have I'll say one more thing about this we have data sets that the school there's this top-down notion that the school district has data and sometimes they even talk about giving it back to the teachers giving it to the teachers and it was like well the data originated in the classroom why is our data so far away from the learning moment is another part of the part of the big question to answer so there's lots and lots of things about the use of we need to leverage transparency and we need to get the data much closer to the learning to the learning moment and there's a couple of examples in terms of learning for consumption or learning for production absolutely I mean we know so much about engagement and what engages people is when they're actually doing something they're leaning forward, they're interacting they're producing something they're adding their own value they're telling their own stories and we have example after they may be disengaged from school publishing online and in other places and producing isn't just about publishing it's also about producing new ideas producing being engaged in solving complex problems lots of really interesting things you can do when you can get students again out of the kind of industrial model and into a much more productive and engaging and interesting and powered up learning environment that was a long answer that was a great answer I think this is working now thanks Karen, that's an excellent answer we've got a question from our keynote from yesterday, Miguel Brekner over to you Miguel hi Karen, my name is Miguel Brekner I run the program Seiball in Uruguay it's the program by which we've given a laptop to every child and every school teacher and every teacher in the country you were talking about personalisation and talking about infrastructure do you have any plans on getting to every student with either a laptop or a tablet or being able to work together so that the teacher knows what's happening with him and he can get directly access to all the digital information absolutely, so first of all I want to absolutely congratulate you I was actually talking with the secretary of education last weekend Arnie Duncan and telling him about your country about what South Korea has announced by 2014 and he was incredibly interested in what you have done you are stepping out as a leader across the world so first of all, thank you very much I think you're showing kind of what's possible and you're powering up learning for every single student so we're very interested and we're also interested in what you're finding in your practices, how long it takes to actually transition in the United States we have kind of 50 little countries when it comes to education so there are states that are looking at saying by 2014 or whatever we will in fact be like your way and provide every laptop so we definitely are very interested in following your work and many people in the country are also saying hey, we should be leaders we should also lead this effort so as we go, we definitely want to learn from you and follow in your footsteps the personalization part of it is not a given as I travel and visit classrooms where all students have devices of any kind many classrooms are still in lock step having every student do the same thing at the same time stay on the same screen it's a habit and a practice that's going to be incredibly hard to break I think one of the things that we need are better products we need better content better interactive environments better interfaces that guide the learner and take them where they are rather than the previous question rather than thinking about the learner as a consumer and providing them the information to consume one last thing I'll say one of the things that we're really interested in an online website where people can work together on this but creating more and more compelling assignments for students not fluffy projects not cute assignments but really come deep assignments that engage them that get students working together that's very participatory that allows them to access experts that allows them to to think deeply about things and bring their particular kind of angle or expertise to potentially solve complex problems so this notion of creating more compelling assignments that is something that I think we can engage all educators in doing so that they aren't kind of snapping back to their what's comfortable and that is controlling and managing and making sure that every student is kind of staying with them so again thank you for for the leadership that you're showing across the world thank you very much great thanks Karen although we've been experiencing some of difficulties particularly for remote colleagues we have got some questions which Lingard is now going to pose one of them for us to Karen go ahead Matt hi Karen it's Matt here I hope you can hear me for me quite a strong theme at the conference so far has been collaboration and we've had a question online from Jack82 I'm not sure who that is but he's interested to find out the level of collaboration between institutions in the states it's all over the map and a continuum I kind of you know I think of things sort of where are we along a continuum and as a system and then as an institution and then as individuals and I see individuals that are fully collaborative and fully interactive working with each other I see institutions that have practices in place to connect the work happening in their institution with other institutions and I see kind of a growing understanding about the need to collaborate fully one of the things that we know in every other industry is that it takes kind of complex teams to solve complex problems so we are in education again trying to move from this kind of solitary isolated practice to building teams the work on communities of practice and persistent profiles and connecting communities of practice with each other that is really important so there's some technical solutions another sort of technical solution for those of you who are techies in the audience is something called a learning registry that my colleague Steve Midgely has been leading you can look at it at learningregistry.org if you're interested there's a technical solution that will help us better connect the environments the content and the conversations and the collaborations in one place with those who are complementary in another place another thing that we're really looking at is this notion of what we call regional innovation clusters so trying to figure out how within a region so say where I am today Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Carnegie Mellon is here lots of intensive R&D research happening here trying to figure out how to connect that regionally so in the same area with innovators and entrepreneurs and investors right so you make we're trying to make that connection and then also connect them with some of the cutting edge and leading edge schools in the area so that they have places to interact directly so building collaborations at every level transparency of basic research so that people can see who else is working on what they're working on connections between the different levels within the kind of ecosystem and the research and development chain and then connecting individual practitioners with each other and with groups that's great Karen we've got time for at least two more questions so I've got one here for Bob Hi Karen, my name is Bob Harrison I run a community of practice called the Toshiba Ambassadors we met before at Graham Brown Martins gig in London last year I spent some time in the summer with Larry Cuban and I was interested to read the New York Times article at the weekend you're shaking your head now because you know there's a question coming why is it that there's at best a flatlining of test scores in all those states that have invested heavily in technology we are particularly interested over here because our secretary of state is driven by the PISA tables so what's the relationship between investment in technology and scores in international and in fact localised tests so the answer is we don't know why I was shaking my head about the New York Times article is I think that it dusted off a lot of old ideas including Larry Cuban's ideas about evidence and statistics it dusted off a single school district and found the worst examples of practice it sprinkled technologies throughout the article with all kind of equal levels of clarity so it sprinkled interactive boards and laptops and basic skills software powerpoint it was just kind of this it was an interesting article and he told a story but his storyline was the same storyline that we've been hearing that we've been hearing for a long time and it's the storyline that makes me rather crazy at the moment because here's the thing when we ask the question does technology work or should we buy technology the answer is it depends obviously asking that question is kind of like saying does a school work does a library work does a book work and the answer is it depends it depends on what's inside it depends on the interactions it depends on how the thing is designed it depends on who's supporting it it depends on so many things and so to bring back, dredge up this question about does technology work is a crazy question so we need to improve we need to ratchet up the intelligence of the conversation by asking questions like so if you break it down it's like it depends and then you can say let's see does a word processor Mr. Journalist help you do your writing or do you write manually would you like all of our students to continue to learn to write manually will that in fact help their ability to write competently going forward into the future right would you like students to continue going to the library and writing their research papers out of an encyclopedia or would you in fact like them to begin to build inquiry skills to build questioning strategies and to understand how to work with the vast wealth of research and information on the internet so this question of does technology work and should we spend money on technology is just a a crazy question so my particular quote in there were probably about four hours in total and I had a single sentence that I'm sure he couldn't wait to publish and I said something about that the current tests we have this once a year single test single point in time that is not that is completely inadequate for understanding the kinds of complex interactions between students and information students on each other students in collaborative environments all of those kinds of things it's inadequate so that's what I was pointing out so then he's you know you can tell I get passionate and I talk about these things but I didn't I didn't actually I don't know if I said it or not in the context of the conversation it said something about if test scores remain flat in the beginning of an intervention that actually is not a horrible thing because there are all of these other kinds of things that are also taking place the test does not test whether they can ask good questions or research on the internet or collaborate effectively or communicate with other people the tests are completely inadequate for measuring what we need to know about the most important things that students need to know and be able to do going forward I fully believe that technologies also can help students do better at basic mathematics and computation I think that's technology can do better at helping students become better readers and more effective interpretive information as they read so I'm not saying that we shouldn't you know use but we need much better assessment instruments again the data getting much closer to the learner one other thing since you brought up Larry Cuban the one thing that I'd love to ask him and I should do so the one thing that there's not a name for but if you think about it there's no way of testing what would have happened had we not done this intervention you can't go back and have a control group right so if you do a big intervention there's not a way of going back and testing and seeing what would have happened otherwise big case in point if you think about the giant global financial crisis that we're in right now we can't go back and see what would have happened had we not invested heavily in some of the things we invested in a few years ago it's part of the kind of evidence conversation that falls flat so Larry Cuban is very interested in evidence and specific data not opposed to that but we need much more diligent data and we need much better questions thanks for bringing that up that was we had some passion yesterday from Miguel and now we've got some real passion here I love it we've been as I say the altar been involved in the debate with evidence seeking questions from the government department BIS and we were quote quoting in particular Seymour Papart on his take on all those things and go read it guys it's a great read we have time to probably have one question which we have you got the microphone over there did you put your hand up there we are yes sorry oh hello there my name is John Shailer I work at the University of Chester I also have a couple of teenagers who just started back to school here and what my worry is that I think our education system our school education system is further on than yours and that we have got a more innovative use of computers in schools but I do worry that some kids bring home and what if they don't have resources at home to support that have you been thinking about that and how it might be addressed that is probably the key thing that I and my colleagues at the Department of Education are thinking about right now and that's this whole equity question how do we make sure as we move to a digital learning environment that we're building equity and supporting those students who otherwise didn't have that at home part of my issue with that previous question and the story in the New York Times also it did not even touch that so for rich people and I rich as in people who have technology at home and they know their students will use this those are many of the people who are like when my students go to school I want them to simply not have technology I want that I want you to turn off screen time at school right so that when they come home that's when they can get their screen time this question of equity is gigantic and it is probably the most important thing that we need to solve because we do know that the opportunity to learn the opportunity to learn if you're in a very rural remote space if you're in a city and you don't necessarily have access to all of the the resources that somebody else might have if you're in a poor community those are the places that we need to empower up in order to improve the opportunity to learn so we're looking at lots of things we're working with the FCC about the broadband adoption rates we're identifying those places in the country that there may be broadband access but there's not adoption we're trying to figure out all of the ways to ratchet up the literacy of the adults in the situation so that they have a sense of why would I want to be connected things like access to health information, access to government services the opportunity to have a voice and fully participate in a growing online environment these are all things that we see as incredibly important and things that we're working on we're actually interested in one of the things that's happened in this country Comcast and NBC merged and as a result of that part of the agreement was that they would provide low cost and in the United States the low cost is $9.95 per month for broadband access at home so those students who qualify based on their economic metrics qualify for free lunch and they're in the Comcast footprint they will be able to access broadband at home but what you point out is incredibly important we have increasing conversation about the inverted classroom where students go home and they're doing the problem sets and they're learning the things with the teacher online and then they come to school and at school is where they interact with the other people, they get help from their teacher and it's much more personal as you probably have read about this, the Khan Academy and those kinds of things are starting these examples of inverted classrooms as we get to an inverted classroom we have to make absolutely sure that every one of those students has full access at home and that we're not making them go find it in a community center go find it at a library stay after school but in fact we're making sure that it's in that student's backpack as well as all of the other students one last thing we also think that there are practices that we can leverage the kinds of things that students already have at home so if parents have already purchased or are willing to purchase something for one student so the system can then purchase the kinds of things for the students who otherwise don't have access so we're trying to leverage an all hands on deck strategy some of the devices parents might purchase some the school might purchase some from philanthropy some from businesses, whatever so we're trying to figure out the practices so that community by community by community they can make sure that they're focused on equity so it's not just those students who have the benefits of the best opportunities to learn with new digital tools Karen, that was perfect timing great presentation and excellent dialogue I've really enjoyed it and I think my colleagues have and I'll say goodbye to you and we'll thank you in the traditional manner I think send you off on your way thank you very much