For Thursday, March 16, 2000 Drummer Column, Gibbs, 699 words

Palm pilots

I'm home from Palm Springs and sitting down. Now I can give a more relaxed description of the Tech Ed 2000 conference I attended.

If I had to sum up the central focus of the conference, I would say it pushed heavily in the direction of online education. Many of the booths and presentations were e-college, e-training, e-learning, virtual college, virtual classroom, webcentric collaboration based. Even Will Kleindienst, the mayor of Palm Springs, spoke at the opening session to tell us all about the new virtual city college; he then suggested we eat and shop downtown.

I was never sure if these online courses being promoted were designed to replace traditional brick and stucco campuses and universities, or simply to supplement them. I believe both motives were at work.

The Internet provides a definite boost for traditional commercial correspondence courses. Think of all those old-method mail-order courses that involved having books and worksheets shipped to your house and manuscripts and term papers sent back by certified mail. Now enrollees can log on, read the materials online, email their papers, pay their tuition, even take quizzes and exams online. Perhaps even the diploma will be delivered as a .PDF file.

Colleges are using the online courses to help students out doing field study in medicine, geology, archeology to stay in touch with their classrooms. Colleges are also formulating collaborative efforts among teams of students through central web sites containing research links, message boards, email lists, findings, reports, and easy access to the instructors.

I attended the conference with three other people -- teachers Siretta Tuttle and Phil Greene, and our lab technician Annette Fewins. Most days we fanned out after breakfast and attended different workshops. Then we got together over dinner and discussed the highlights.

We all agreed our favorite sessions were the hands-on workshops where we got to sit at the keyboards and learn software. Combined, we learned how to use Adobe Premier and Photoshop and Macromedia Fireworks and Flash. Annette even won a 50-site 90-day license for all Macromedia products: Director, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Flash, and Freehand.

John Warnock, CEO of Adobe, spoke at the opening session. He talked about how the Internet is bursting with information, yet it is difficult for authors to protect their intellectual properties -- in other words, it's hard to publish the content of books on the Internet and turn a profit.

It is sadly ironic, said Warnock, that we still must purchase paper-and-ink textbooks and literature and have them snail-mailed to us in our homes when digital downloads are a global reality. If a novel's words were made available online, they would be freely duplicated and distributed, much to the financial detriment of the writer and publisher, much like how the ubiquitous MP3 music files have financially dented the recording industry.

He closed by saying his company has recently developed a process whereby a book could be purchased digitally and opened ONCE and LOCKED onto whatever medium it happened to be opened onto -- say, a Zip Disk. Once on a Zip Disk, the book could be passed around just like a real paperback book, but only one copy of it. This technology, he believes, will greatly expand the online access to authors' works.

That is, until someone develops a crack.

After hours: We ate downtown. Palm Springs restaurants are pricey, but the food is excellent. We had delicious meals all week, eating at a new place every night. On our last night, we even used our Ramada swimming pool. And Siretta took us all shopping at Ross.

We have returned home with refreshed ideas. We have assimilated a lot about dealing with the digital transition of high schools. I hope we can put those ideas to use.

We took pictures. If you have Internet Explorer and a high-speed connection, you can see highlights of our trip online at http://members.xoom.com/gibb0/ppt/te2000/

I am grateful for the support of the forward-thinking school administrators and the East Bay Community Foundation that sent us to this conference, even if they did book us on Alaska Airlines. By surviving the flight, we were placed exactly where we needed to be to understand the general trends in educational technology.