Dispatches from the school technology frontier
March 1997

Countdown to the millennium:
Can your computers handle the turn of the century?

Imagine: Centenarians pop up on elementary school rolls, brand-new maintenance equipment is scheduled to be scrapped, school board members' terms expire long before the board is even elected, and financial records are a complete mess.

The source of this potential chaos is a computational quirk called the millennium bug. It has to do with how computers will store dates in the year 2000--and what could happen if programming changes aren't made before the stroke of midnight on Dec. 31, 1999.

The crux of the problem is that many computers--in school district offices and government agencies--are programmed to read dates in two-digit numbers such as 96 or 99. As a result, 2000 will be read as 00, and computers might read data as if it were coming from the year 1900, not 2000.

Fortunately, many newer computers are designed to understand the century mark and therefore handle data appropriately. But many older computers do not, and that has technology experts scrambling to fix the problem. The Florida Department of Education, for instance, estimates it will cost about $2 million to reprogram its computers to handle the turn of the century.

Some local districts expect the changes to be costly, too.

Abdu Taguri, director of data processing for the Polk County, Fla., public schools, told The Ledger newspaper that it will cost his district from $2 million to $4 million in work hours to exterminate the millennium bug.

Taguri, who oversees a district with 140 schools and a bureaucracy with millions of date-sensitive records, told the newspaper the district is "in no position to say, 'No, we cannot [make the changes].' We have to do it, and I have a dedicated staff that knows the consequences if we don't do it."

Florida is not the only state where there are concerns.

In Washington state, Gov. Mike Lowry has requested $15.1 million in his new budget proposal to help pay for reprogramming state government computers to cope with the turn of the century. Lowry and other state officials say changes have to be made across the government because many agencies share data, and consequently, failure of one system could have a ripple effect on the others.

State government officials in Rhode Island are equally concerned.

"[The 2000 problem] is not a lot of hype," says Barbara Weaver, chief information officer for the state. "It is a serious problem, and it is becoming [potentially] more and more expensive the longer we wait to try to fix it."

johnhancock@signature.com

Miss Manners might prefer a handwritten note, but so many people communicate at the keyboard these days that the art of penmanship seems to be dying. Indeed, many schools have sharply curtailed--and sometimes even eliminated--the instruction of cursive writing.

An Illinois educator sparked a lively discussion on a listserv last fall when he reported that his teenage son was unable to "sign his name" to a document. The boy's explanation: "Dad, I don't write in cursive. They don't teach it."

"I was shocked!" the educator wrote the listserv. "Couldn't my son sign his own name? Should he print it or just make an 'X'?"

Others chimed in with similar stories. Council Bluffs, Iowa, teacher Joan Goeser reported that her third-graders spend an average of one day learning and perfecting each letter of the alphabet. But when kids move on to higher grades and class assignments are written on word processors, she said, cursive writing gets pushed to a back burner.

The shift from handwriting to electronic communication takes away a certain sentimentality that links people to the past, says Bob Whipple of Creighton University in Omaha. "A handwritten letter is a human-created artifact," he says. "The humanity of it seems to be lost when it's electronic. E-mail is less sentimental than a handwritten letter."

How d'ya like them Apples?

They're not bad Apples. They're just not state-of-the-art Apples. So rather than throw them away, let the library lend them out to students, teachers, and local residents.

That's what the Carrollton, Mich., board of education did after purchasing some new computers. Rather than scrapping the older Apple IIe and Macintosh computers, they made the machines available for borrowing from the Carrollton Elementary School Library. Now, students and adults can check out computers, printers, and software at no cost.

The school district replaced about 120 computers with 75 newer models, but school officials wanted ideas for what to do with the older ones. The board asked Harold Ellsworth, a principal of Carrollton Elementary school who is now retired, to draft a plan for some of the older computers.

"I would imagine that people would check them out for a longer period of time than a book," Ellsworth says. "It will all depend on demand."

Coming soon to a purchase order near you

If you think your school is on the cutting edge because you've replaced all your vinyl records and floppy disks with CD-ROMs, remember: Change is the only constant in the technology world. A gadget called the DVD (Digital Video Disc or Digital Versatile Disc) is poised to supplant your CDs, VCR tapes, and computer CD-ROMs. The new device boasts a far greater capacity as well as superior sound and visual performance.

But personal computers with DVD drives won't be on the American market until mid-year. And analysts expect it will take time for the new technology to catch on. "What could slow or even kill DVD among consumers is if people don't think it's worth the extra money for the extra quality," says Steven Edelman, a partner with Mesa Capital Associates in Portland, Ore.

Manufacturers had hoped to have DVD players and PCs with DVD drives ready for the lucrative Christmas buying season. But delays in agreement on technical and copyright protection standards postponed introduction. When they do appear, PCs with DVD drives are likely to cost at least $500 more than those with CD-ROM drives.

DVDs look like CD-ROMs. But while CD-ROMs can store 650 megabytes of data, DVDs can hold up to 17 gigabytes. The technology's greater capacity and faster retrieval of data will let developers put a couple of full-length movies on a single disk and make them interactive so viewers can choose alternate story lines. The developers of games and educational software will be able to make their programs more interactive and pack in richer sound and visual effects. And, DVD drives will be able to play old CD-ROMs.

"You don't have to throw anything out, and the new stuff is cooler," says Edmond Heinbockel, chief executive officer of Tsumani Media, a game developer in Oakhurst, Calif.

Cyberschool on the range

Middle school and high school students in rural Colorado have traded hour-long school bus rides for Internet access. Now the students, from grades 7 to 12, are studying on the Internet.

Don Wilkinson of the Monte Vista School District, who runs the two-year-old pilot project, says the program is the first of its kind in Colorado and one of a handful in the nation. Enrollment has risen from 10 students the first year to 40 this year.

"I like going to school over the Internet much better because it allows me to work at my own pace,'' says Garrett Pierce, 13, an eighth-grader from Lake City who no longer has to ride more than 80 miles a day to get to school. "In some ways [it's] easier because there are no distractions from other kids."

Teachers e-mail lesson materials to students, who send their completed materials back the same way. Parents or other adults supervise any tests. Most of the assignments are based on traditional textbooks at first. Then, when students feel at home in cyberspace, they surf websites to get information for projects.

To help create a regular school atmosphere, teachers ask students to post pictures of themselves on the Internet. The program's web page also includes a chat room.

Wilkinson says students from 10 different towns are involved this year. Most of the students are highly motivated, which contributes to the program's success.

And, he adds, teachers believe the kids get a good education: "We wouldn't do it if they didn't.''

As for Pierce, he likes the freedom of doing his homework when he feels like it. For his physical education class, he says, "I can do a little workout in the morning, then go ride my bike or ski in the afternoon."

And what about extracurricular activities? Says Pierce: "In my free time or on the weekends, I like to surf the net to find out about music groups and where they are playing."

Slowdown at Mars West

Kids from 14 Southwestern high schools touched the future last fall when they helped NASA try out a model rover on a patch of Arizona desert that had been turned into a simulated Mars landing site.

The venture did not have an auspicious beginning, however. After students at Greyhills Academy in Tuba City, Ariz., counted down to blast-off, nothing happened. The Marsokhod--Russian for Mars rover--continued to sit. As minutes ticked by, students, teachers, and scientists speculated about the delay.

"It's probably taking them a little while to learn how to get the computer to work," project leader Carol Stoker suggested.

Eric Zbinden, an engineer with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology of Lausanne, thought the delay imitated a real-life Mars expedition. "On Mars, we are not going to be able to send probably more than one command a day and to have one downlink a day," he told the students. "That means we're going to send a command one day and get the results 24 hours later."

The cause of the delay turned out to be a loose power cord.

Eventually, students were able to drive the rover--and explore the "planet's surface" for a while--by remote control over the Internet. But more glitches followed: For example, the "up" command kicked kids off the computer network.

NASA has plenty of time to work out the problems, though. Marsokhod is a prototype of a rover slated for a joint Russian-American mission, "Mars Together," tentatively scheduled for 2001.

Roll the tape--and pay for technology

Forget the library. Go back to the video store and rent "The Color of Money" a couple more times. It's more educational than you might have thought--at least, it might soon be in New Hampshire. That's because a state legislator there is proposing a tax on video rentals as a way to raise money for school technology.

Democrat Martha Fuller Clark of Portsmouth hasn't figured out how much money a tax of 5 cents per rental would raise. But, she says, based on the success of such a tax in Missouri and other states, it should be a considerable amount. Clark submitted the proposal after local school board members asked her to come up with ways to help pay for a statewide technology plan. Her bill would create a commission to administer the new tax, which would pay for installing and upgrading school computer systems.

"We're talking about giving schools Internet access and providing them with the hardware and software they need to be competitive with other schools across the country," says Clark. The new commission--which would be made up of members of the state Board of Education and individuals with expertise in technology--would decide how the money should be distributed to the schools.

Clark also is proposing a bill that would give communities the option of imposing an addition to the state's 8 percent "rooms and meals" tax. "It's the New Hampshire way as an alternative to the property tax," she says. "We let people who come to visit pay for what we need."

E-Wire is prepared with Associated Press (AP) reports.