DARPA and the English Language Learner

Battelle presented its Competing with Talent – High Technology Manufacturing’s Future in Greater Phoenix study (www.maricopa.edu/workforce/hightech.php) at Thursday’s Governor’s Council on Innovation and Technology. This work, sponsored by Salt River Project and Maricopa Community College, focused in the rapid changes needed in technician talent pipeline.

While thinking about how we generate this “technician talent pipeline” my mind drifted into the image of computer adoption over the past ten years in K-12 education. In the mid 1990’s there was about one modern, multimedia computer for every 15 students and most of these were in isolated computer labs. By 2000 the School Facilities Board had wired Arizona classrooms and brought modern computer ratio to 1:8 with some migrating into classrooms. Today these computers and operating systems have aged toward obsolescence, and cannot even run current computer based tests. Then the image – what if this situation continues for another ten years?

There will be no reason for training and educating elearning savvy teachers because they have no place to practice their new expertise. The potential cost savings from eLearning will vanish. Costly but less effective legacy enhancements will continue to push up education costs while academic performance lags well below expectation. But the biggest loss will be the inability to exploit emerging digital curriculum and automated formative assessments.

Three years ago I was asked by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to participate in a workshop to write specifications for an eLearning research RFP. I found myself in a group of the nation’s top language learning experts. The result was a DARPA contract to University of Southern California’s Center for Advanced Research in Technology for Education http://www.isi.edu/isd/carte/proj_tactlang/index.html.

I met with the DARPA group leader in Mesa last month and he was enthusiastic about how even he was able to learn Arabic in his busy schedule with the tactical language trainer. The training system enables learners to communicate directly with on-screen characters using a speech recognition interface.

If Arizona had stayed on the computer system adoption march from 1995’s 16:1 to 2000’s 8:1 to 4:1 in 2005, we could have been 2:1 in 2010 and reached 1:1 by 2015. I am pulled to frustration by what physiologists call cognitive dissonance. I have a clear vision of what is and will be coming with emerging digital curriculum for our K-12 students. This tactical language trainer is only tiny piece of what will be available.

I also have a very clear image of how Arizona children could be mired in legacy lecture, recitation and seatwork education for the next ten years. If we stay this course where is our technician talent pipeline? Looks more like a few tanker trucks with flat tires! If we stay the course global competitive advantage opportunities will slip so far away that we won’t even know they existed.