Anthrotech

It's interesting to think of the school as a living organism - a beetle perhaps, with its clunky bricks-and-mortar exoskeleton. It's always easy to justify a bond measure to rebuild the school, because everybody knows how hard it is to learn in a leaky, unsecured building. Just the same, everyone knows that the school can't run without its living, breathing elements - namely, the students and teachers, and most people realize that the whole beast promptly becomes arthritic without a small regiment of janitors, administrators and bus drivers.

Now where does technology fit into this? How would I convince the city to allocate precious tax dollars to some software?

The interface between people and ideas is increasingly a digital one. Computers would be the dumbest idea ever devised, if knowledge really were a one-person endeavor. The reason we need them is so that Joe student and Jane teacher can access the world's knowledge database both as consumers and producers of content. Any school that realizes this can acquire a significant edge over any paper-based school, simply because it is connected.

While doing this Anthrotech assignment, I learned that at least at Sitka High, technology is mostly used by a small minority of teachers. I also learned that the opportunities for teachers to place content online are currently greater than the opportunities for students to place content online, even though the opposite seems to be occurring.