Ted Kolderie points to the symptom of the stasis that grips public schooling—the unimaginative and under use of technology. His article, Growing advances in digital electronics reports on the tremendous advances in amount and lowered costs of digital technology. These statistics come from the report of the ITIF (Information Technology and Innovation Foundation):
• Moore's Law continues to hold. The computing power of a chip has doubled every 18 months for 40 years.
• The price of processing power has fallen steadily:
— $480 per MIP (million instructions per second) for the Intel 086 in 1978
— $ 50 per MIP for the Intel 386 in 1985
— $ 4 per MIP for the Pentium Pro in 1995
— $ 2 per MIP for the Itanium 2 in 2003
• The real price of servers fell about 30 per cent per year between 1996 and 2001.
• Hard drive storage capacity has doubled every 19 months and the cost of a stored megabyte of data has fallen 50 per cent per year. So the cost of storing one megabyte of information fell:• There are today about 100 million websites, adding content and becoming increasingly user-friendly.
- $5,257 in 1975
- 17 cents in 1999
- half a cent in 2002
- 1/10th of a cent in 2007
• All this permits Hewlett-Packard to sell its Media Vault, storing 300 gigabytes (150 movies) for $380 and for Google to provide 2.7 gigabytes of storage for a user of its Gmail service…free.
How much of public school student's learning today is no longer classroom-bound or tied to teacher control and assignment? How many teachers, courses, schools, maintain dynamic websites providing resources of the current topics of study? How many schools/districts warehouse data and make it freely available? How many maintain discussion forums, or use daily individualized interactions with parents, or provide daily learning schedules and objectives to families? How many use networks for efficient virtual management systems? How much of the learning program even appears anywhere on anyone's school computer?
