I call it my National Bring a CEO to School Idea. I spent the summer
emailing CEOs in computer industry on it and presented those results
to The White House on 9/4. On a scale of one to five, it's coming in
at 3.83. Not bad.
I want the president and vice president to pick a day in the spring
and challenge all five million CEOs in America (yup, there are that
many when you include all the small businesses) and join them in
spending one hour at a local public school visiting with the
principle.
The president/vp would challenge the CEOs and principals to begin a
bilateral mentoring process where the CEO would mentor the principle
on areas of accountability and com-petitiveness (two areas schools are
critiqued for) and the principal could mentor the CEO that there is
more to life than quarterly market share, profits etc...American
busi-nesses are not good bootstrappers.
The president would encourage the CEO to take a tour of the school
facility and ask him/herself these ques-tions....1)Could MY company
compete with the type of com-puters I see here at this school, 2)could
MY company com-pete if 9 workers had to share one computer (the
current student to computer ratio in America), 3)could MY company
compete if every office didn't have at least one phonejack (yes, most
schools have telecomm access but most of it is confined to the
computer room or admin offices).
Is the state of technology on the public's mind?
Yes, the just released Horatio Alger Association report
(http://www.horatioalger.com) reports that "55% of the re-spondents in
its just released report agree that their school needs to be more
technologically advanced".
Oh, the $1.25 billion idea....that's easy...IDC reports that in 1998
American businesses will spend over $250 bil-lion on computers,
software and peripherals.
As a final touch to National Bring A CEO to School Day, the president
encourage all CEOs to consider a tax deductible contribution of one
half of one percent of their firm's 1998 technology capital equipment
budget to a national edu-cation technology trust fund to be
administered by the United States Tech Corps. This equates out to a
$500 con-tribution for every $100,000 to be spent on technology by a
company.
{If you're interested in participating, contact Gary at
gary_beach@idg.com --MOD.}
From the early 1960's until about 1990 when I put in the last piece of
the puzzle, I had a hobby which was designing a high-technology
educational system. During the early 1980's when by then I had a
fairly good idea of where I was heading, I predicted that computer,
video, networking, and communications technologies would not be
advanced enough to really make such huge networks practical until the
mid-1990's. I think I came pretty close with my prediction when I
notice this year that the MMX-enhanced Pentium microproc-essor along
with such auxiliary technologies as high-bandwidth fiber optic cables,
computer/TV monitors, and Internet-related technologies may finally
offer everything I have been looking for.
During the winter of 1992, with the backing of the Clark County School
District (vicinity of Las Vegas, Nevada), I submitted to the New
American Schools Development Corpora-tion (NASDC) a proposal for
developing a prototype fiber-optic school network. The NASDC was an
offshoot of Presi-dent Bush's America 2000 program. Funded mainly by
dona-tions from large corporations, the NASDC was a private com-pany
chartered to fund the development of radically differ-ent schools.
We did not win a contract. There were 685 other competitors for 11
awards. Afterwards we received short descriptions of the winning
proposals. None of them appeared to be anywhere as good as my design.
Sometime afterwards, the Las Vegas Review-Journal newspaper had an
article which raised the suspicion that one reason for our not winning
was that Ne-vada was not important to President Bush's re-election!
Yet I have been authoritatively told more than once, al-though not
recently, that no other design is close to mine, and may be the only
one that has a genuine chance to break the organizational logjam
hampering our schools. All the other designs I have ever come across
have flaws that my design doesn't have. In fact a few years ago I
came across an article claiming that educational computer experts have
come to a dead end trying to make computers more useful in the
schools. The basic systems engineering obstacle, which I believe I
have surmounted, is that the answer lies in a completely different,
complicated system which can not be arrived at in piecemeal fashion.
The proposal (approximately 180 pages) included a develop-ment
schedule which was tailored to the requirements as set forth by the
NASDC. But I had felt uncomfortable with their schedule. It was just
too fast. It would have skipped first spending a year or so doing
several prelimi-nary research projects which would examine the design
from different angles. My intention was that since building a
full-scale network for a metropolitan area would cost well over
$100,000,000, once the small projects were finished, we would all then
have a better understanding of the costs, capabilities, and
limitations of the design.
Assuming that equipment costs continued to come down, and that the
pilot program worked well, the next step was to expand the pilot
network into a prototype full-scale ver-sion. The engineering was to
be done during the third year of the pilot program. It would then take
at least a year to build, and another two years to fully make the
conversion from the conventional system in all networked schools.
At the end of the development period, a cadre of experts would have
been built up in the Las Vegas area well-versed in all aspects of
engineering and using school networks. A potentially
multibillion-dollar business could then have been spun off to market,
configure, install, and maintain school networks around the world,
each network averaging $100 million.
An interesting reason for developing school networks is that they
would supply a very large captive market for a combination of
communications and computer equipment with high-definition television.
The key advantage is that the huge scale of the school networks would
allow fledgling HDTV companies to gain production economies of scale
in isolation from commercial broadcasting for a few years. My original
intention was that it would have been in our na-tional interest to not
allow the future high-definition television industry be taken over by
other countries such as Japan by default. Well, the future has come,
and the FCC is now in the throes of plunging the United States into
digital television _ perhaps at an unnecessarily high cost.
Attached is a summary of the proposal.
Does anyone out there have any suggestions as to what I should do with
it?
Gary C. Vesperman
Vice President and COO
Film Funding, Inc.
1700 E. Desert Inn Road Suite 100
Las Vegas, NV 89109
702-735-1922
Fax 702-735-0094
vman@skylink.net
SUMMARY
FIBER-OPTIC NETWORK OF COMPUTER-BASED SEGMENTED COURSES
One dozen to four dozen junior and senior high schools in each large
metropolitan area are to be linked with fiber-optic cables into a
single network with an average cost of $100,000,000. The Clark
County School District is proposed to be the site of a small-scale
prototype network of three junior high schools and three senior high
schools with a budget of $11,897,400. Younger students would be
trans-ported from nearby elementary schools for experimental classes
in order to research their capabilities for inter-acting with the
increased complexity of the school network.
The network's three-layer computer system would comprise of a network
coordinating and scheduling computer as the top layer, an
administrative computer in each school as the middle layer, and
personal computers as the bottom layer. The network's customized
software would include network management and coordinating functions
for the system man-ager, two layers of software for the teachers to
support 100 different functions, and 25 different functions for the
students, only one of which is CAI. Each personal computer would have
a monitor capable of also displaying telecast or recorded classes.
The typically huge scale of a school network would economi-cally
justify the simultaneous teaching in parallel of all week-long
segments of each course year round with no sea-sonal constraints.
Segmented courses would still include the standard features of
conventional courses such as classes, graded examinations, and
academic load standards. Short quizzes on each segment with pass/fail
grading would provide quality control. Other nonstandard features of
segmented courses include modified versions of the project management
tools PERT and CPM, unique statistical tech-niques for selecting
series of two or three lo-cal/televised classes for weekly
scheduling, nearly unlim-ited self-pacing, student interest groups,
and optimum utilization of the superlearning technique.
