Dispatch From the Digital Frontier: Volunteer for Your Schools; OS Wars

Does summer seemshorter than it used to? It’s as though global climate change has begun to affectschool schedules. Or maybe we’re just hedging our bets against a swine fluoutbreak yet to come. In any event, you would think the various budget criseswould shorten rather than extend the school year. But in my town, the opening schoolbell chimed on August 19.

Whenever that bellrings in your community, it’s likely to be as much a call for volunteers as itis for students. In California, for example, where the state’s education budgetcomes nearly exclusively from property taxes and where home values havesuffered huge declines, most districts have been forced to reduce, if noteliminate, “non-essential” personnel (e.g., school nurses, teachers’ aides,librarians, media specialists). Teachers are facing more crowded classrooms,and have their fingers crossed that members of the community will find the timeand the willingness to support them as they to try to teach our children.

Those of us withexperience or background in education have a special responsibility to comeforward. Although our over-burdened teachers don’t need our help in lessonplanning and teaching, they do need help monitoring group projects, mentoring,tutoring, and myriad other things. With our exposure to real-world and virtuallearning environments, we bring knowledge and understanding that can be vitalto a positive experience for students.

So, to borrow frompublic radio, let’s get off our good intentions. Pick a school in yourneighborhood or near your office, and call the principal. Heck, maybe a groupfrom your office could adopt a nearby school. Be prepared (everybody) to make afirm commitment of an hour or two a week. Adjust your lunch schedule so thatyou can be available during class time. You’ll be glad you did. So will yourcommunity.

Something veryinteresting is at play, and it’s bound to have an impact on the way we work andlearn. A new fight is heating up. Microsoft is preparing to release Windows 7,a major upgrade to its operating system. Google, in turn, has released a Betaversion of its first operating system, Chrome OS, after previously releasingAndroid, its operating system for mobile phones. Not to be left out, Applereleased iPhone OS 3 earlier this year, and will follow that with a dot-releaseof OS X this fall.

This isn’t going to belike previous OS wars. This time, these vendors aren’t going to be duking itout over who controls the PC market, or the cell phone market. This time, it’sabout how we access, use, and create content. Each vendor has a differentapproach to making this a powerful, efficient, enjoyable experience for itscustomers.

Microsoft is convincedthat the desktop PC will, for some time, remain the hub of our digital world.Their evidence? Beyond the fact that the Windows OS currently runs 91% of PCsin the world, Microsoft would also point out that most extant digital contentand tools are PC- and Microsoft Windows-compatible; re-writing them for new OSenvironments would be prohibitively expensive. Hardware advances makeever-more-powerful equipment available at ever-lower prices. Users continue toload their PCs with large applications that require significant processingpower, and to store their content files locally on cheap external drives.Obviously, say the Microsoft proponents, users want and need continued advancesto the PC operating system to facilitate processing PC-generated content.

Not so fast, saysGoogle. People want to be liberated from their desks, and data want to beliberated from their local hard drives. If data storage and data processing,content creation, and content access tools and files can all live reliably andconveniently in the Internet cloud, then users can be anywhere and still beproductive. Huge CPUs and massive hard drives are meaningless, becauseeverything happens on the Internet. So Google is betting that what users reallywant and need is a browser-based operating system that will make for easy accessto online tools, secure data storage, and powerful search and retrieval.

Then there’s Apple. In2009, Apple will have released upgrades to both Macintosh OS X and its Webbrowser, Safari. But the real news from Apple was the huge upgrade to theiPhone OS. Apple has always placed great emphasis on the user experience, andon how its technology can empower users in new ways. They see personalcomputing as of equivalent benefit to one’s personal and work activities. Theyrecognized the importance of communication early on, and have been drivingtoward a personal communications-and-computing device since the early 1990s.The iPhone OS 3.0 might be the next move toward a communicator OS.

The philosophicalcontest that is going to play out among these three companies and theircustomers will have everything to do with how people use information.E-Learning professionals have a huge stake in the outcome. In the near term,are current content libraries, development tools, and administrative systemscompatible with these new technologies? Will content have to be changed as aresult of impending system upgrades? It’s not too soon to talk with IT and yourtech vendors so that you can begin your planning now.

The real impact is abit further out. No one approach is going to satisfy everyone, every company,or every industry. Each approach will require different thinking by learningdesigners, because each operating system comes with its own hardwarerequirements and user types. What type(s) of content consumers and contentcreators comprise your learning audience? The way you think about content andusers is different from the way IT thinks – do you and your IT counterpartshave a meeting of the minds about user requirements? How would each of these OSenvironments help or hinder user productivity? How would each of these OSenvironments help or hinder user learning? How will this alter your learningexperience designs?

And, as your extracredit assignment: while you’re volunteering at the local school, give somethought to how this latest round of technology upgrades might be used byschool-age learners. Don’t worry – the kids will be happy to help you figure itout.