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In the name of efficiency and accountability, Colorado and a number of states are creating electronic networks for circulating student records. But the networks--which could be accessible to schools, social services, law enforcement agencies, colleges, and even employers--have some people worried that student privacy will be sacrificed for administrative convenience.
"When you start tracking people from district to district or place to place, you have a point of intrusion in people's lives that I would have difficulty with. It starts to smack of Orwell a little too much," says Dick Weber of Colorado's Association of School Executives, regarding the proposed "Automated Data Exchange Project" now under study by the state.
Some members of the Boulder school board agree, saying they might not comply with the proposed student data bank. "I have seen the most egregious misuse of data," says Boulder school board member Janusz Okolowicz, who lived under Nazis in Germany and Communists in Poland and Russia. "Anything that smacks of Big Brother is a no-no for me."
The information available on the networks could run the gamut: the details of emotional, physical, or mental disorders that result in student placement in special education programs; participation in gifted-and-talented or remedial programs; histories of expulsion or suspension; type of schools attended; and any time spent in mental health, correctional, or detention centers.
Student names and identification numbers would allow a central computer to track individual students from year to year, from school to school, and from district to district. Among the advantages of such a system, according to Colorado Education Commissioner Bill Randall, is that it would stop duplicate counting of students in state and federally funded programs and allow more accurate calculation of dropout and graduation rates.
Colorado education officials say the risk of infringing on student privacy could be lessened and data made more secure by "encrypting" or scrambling the information before sending it over the Internet.
Individual student records are protected under federal privacy laws and cannot be made available to the public without parents' consent. A student's disciplinary records, however, may be shared with officials in other educational institutions without a parent's OK. In addition, school officials can release student records without consent to another school, school district, or postsecondary institution where the student was enrolled or intends to enroll; to agencies in the state's juvenile justice system; and to state education officials.
Among the warnings sounded over potential abuse of the networks is one from the consulting firm that recommended a centralized data system for Colorado. That group--CTMG Inc.--warned that using Social Security numbers to identify students carries the "potential for developing a database that contains massive amounts of information, making individuals subject to computerized matches and searches without their awareness or consent."
Microsoft Corp. has issued a public apology in Spain and Mexico for offensive words that popped up in the Spanish-language version of the thesaurus for Microsoft Word version 6.0.
As synonyms for the word "Indian," the software offered "savage" and "man-eater." Other insulting synonyms included "vicious" and "inverted" for homosexual and "pervert" for lesbian.
Reports of the synonyms caused a minor uproar in Mexico, where local radio stations and newspapers publicized the story.
"Those who made this dictionary of synonyms are imbeciles and cretins," journalist and historian Fernando Benitez told the Mexican newspaper La Jornada. "The synonyms that describe Indians as savages, cannibals, primitives--these are falsehoods of a racist character."
Microsoft apologized in a press release and also took out newspaper ads in Mexico and Spain promising to make new software available for free. But first, says Microsoft spokesman Howard Barokas, the company will search "every word in the . . . thesaurus to make sure there are no more offensive terms."
It's not much of a chore to turn American kids on to American music, but using technology to get them excited about music from Russia or Ireland or China is a real accomplishment for an Albuquerque elementary school, where kids are using the web to zero in on the music of foreign countries.
"We found a band in Ireland named The Chieftains, and they've created music for a lot of movies like 'Rob Roy' and 'Treasure Island,'" says an excited Mike Winterink, a 9-year-old third-grader at Albuquerque's Hawthorne Elementary School. Ten-year-old James Vigil thinks it's neat learning that "Russia has a rock band named BS34, and also rap, jazz, and classical music. And it's neat finding out that they spell and write in different ways."
Mike and James are two of 10 Hawthorne students who stay after school for 90 minutes once a week to participate in Global Perspectives on Music. It's part of a University of New Mexico (UNM) program called Immersion in Music, which is funded through an Albuquerque radio station and a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
The $26,000 grant bought five computers, software, and supplies for Hawthorne and paid for the expertise of UNM faculty and staff. Using the Internet for world music was the brainchild of Allison Druin, a researcher in UNM's computer science department and a doctoral student in the college of education.
"By using the tools of technology, we can bring music to kids who wouldn't necessarily have the chance to explore different kinds of music," Druin says.
Case in point: the music of China. JoAnna Glaser, a 9-year-old third-grader, says she downloaded a number of pictures that represent China's culture, including the Great Wall, a dragon, and a pagoda. She's also seen someone play a wooden Chinese instrument she says has "bells on each side. You bang it with a stick. It sounds weird."
"The [Global Perspectives] project has gone beyond music," says Angela Boltman, Hawthorne's technology resource teacher. "It explores art, history, culture. It's blossomed into something more than what we anticipated."
Use of the web is increasing in popularity--especially among American women--but users still report problems with navigation, including the amount of time it takes to download information. These are among the results of the fifth annual WWW User Survey, conducted by the Graphics, Visualization, and Usability (GVU) Center at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.
The survey, which received more than 11,700 responses, found that 31.5 percent of web users are female, compared to 68.5 percent males. According to GVU, that's a "moderate increase" in female users since last year, when 29.3 percent of users said they were female, but a "significant jump" from the year before that, when only 15.5 percent reported being female.
But female web cruisers are apparently more common in the United States than in Europe. Of the European respondents to the survey, only 15.2 were females who said they used the web.
When asked about the problems encountered in web usage, most respondents cited the lengthy process of viewing or downloading pages. Nearly 81 percent of respondents said slow speed was the big issue for them (compared to 69.1 percent who chose that answer the year before), in spite of the fact that 1996 respondents said they were using higher-speed modems. (Sounds like network congestion and overextended web servers might be likely culprits behind that finding. -Ed.)
Other findings of the GVU survey:
* The average age of the web user is 33.
* 43.6 percent of respondents say they use the web from one to four times per day, with men using it more often, on a daily basis, than women do.
* 36 percent of respondents say they make a daily decision to turn to the web, instead of turning on the TV.
* 35.2 percent of web users consider themselves liberal or very liberal in their political views. Just over 30 percent consider themselves moderate, and just over 21 percent consider themselves conservative or very conservative.
U.S. kids might have more access to computers these days than ever before, but they don't have as much access to sophisticated computers as some reports have suggested, a new study says.
The study looked at multimedia computers--that is, Macintosh computers or PC compatibles with a 386 or better processor capable of supporting CD-ROM drives and/or sound cards and video cards. And for these high-end machines, the national average is 35 children to one computer, according to the study from Quality Education Data (QED).
That ratio differs dramatically from the 10:1 ratio given in other studies, including one from the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Technology Assessment.
"The difference is significant," says Jeanne Hayes, president of QED, an education research firm in Denver. "When we talk about competitiveness worldwide and about student access to current technology, including the Internet, a multimedia computer is the tool that students need."
According to QED, the U.S. Department of Education recommends a 5:1 ratio of kids to multimedia computers. The QED study cites five states as having ratios closest to this goal--North Dakota (15.1:1); South Dakota (15.4:1); Georgia (16:1); Colorado (16.3:1); and Wyoming (16.5:1). But the study also notes that significant gaps still persist between computer-rich states and those that have fewer per student.
The five states with the most students for each multimedia computer are Louisiana (88.8:1); West Virginia (81.6:1); Mississippi (62.7:1); Ohio (61.8:1); and Delaware (53.9:1).
Other findings in the QED study:
* When it comes to computers that are not equipped for multimedia, South Dakota and Wyoming tie for top place, with six students per computer. North Dakota comes next with 6.8 students per computer, followed closely by Alaska (7 students per computer), and Kansas (7.3 students per computer). Louisiana, California, Hawaii, Delaware, and Mississippi have the highest numbers of students per computer.
* The five states in which schools have the highest CD-ROM capability are (in descending order): California, Texas, New York, Illinois, and Michigan.
* The five states in which schools have the highest number of modems are (in descending order): Texas, California, Ohio, and Michigan and North Carolina, which are tied.
The QED study involved 14,201 school districts and 84,851 public schools in the United States. For more information on the results, call (800) 525-5811.
People living in Western states might soon have the opportunity to take college courses on their home computers. The feasibility of establishing a "virtual university"--which would enable those who live far away from institutions of higher learning to nonetheless earn college degrees--topped the agenda of a summer meeting of the Western Governors Association in Omaha, Neb.
The 18 governors who belong to the association--which takes in states from California to Nebraska and Texas to North Dakota--were to decide this summer whether their states would participate in the electronic university.
Each participating state must pay $100,000 in 1996-97 to help with start-up costs for the school, dubbed Western Governors University.
At press time, David Powers, executive director of the Nebraska Coordinating Commission for Postsecondary Education, said the structure and programs of the university were still under development. Likewise, the costs of establishing the school had not yet been determined, he said.
The idea behind the virtual university is to improve access to education in the Western states, which are large in land mass but small in population, says Jean Lovell, director of Nebraska Gov. Ben Nelson's policy research office. "We see this as enhancing, not replacing, existing universities," Lovell says.
Opponents to the plan, however, say they don't see the need for such a radical change. Many universities, they say, already are developing computer technology on their own.
Lovell says she thinks concerns will fade when several questions are answered: "Yet to be decided are ways to give tests, develop courses, and accredit them," she says. "The ease of solving those problems depends on the level of participation among existing colleges and universities."
Over the next year, 15 cable companies have pledged to provide 3,000 schools in 60 communities with free Internet connections. The plan--called Cable's High Speed Education Connection--is part of a new industry-wide program that aims eventually to hook up all elementary and secondary schools in the United States.
Under the program, participating companies will install a cable modem into at least one site in each of the schools. The cable modem allows people to connect their computers to the Internet and other computer networks via coaxial cable at speeds considerably faster than possible by a standard modem over existing telephone lines. But technical and financial hurdles still need to be resolved with this emerging technology, and business analysts have mixed reviews about its prospects.
Cable giants Tele-Communications Inc., Time Warner Inc., and Continental Cablevision are among the companies experimenting with the technology and are among those that plan to provide cable modems to schools in their service areas.
Other industries, such as telephone companies, also are offering Internet connections to schools. AT&T Corp., for example, pledged last October to spend $150 million over five years to help connect schools to the network.
The cable industry's program builds on an existing one called Cable in the Classroom. Under that voluntary program, more than 8,400 cable companies and 32 cable networks have invested more than $420 million to wire and connect 74,000 schools to cable TV at no cost to schools.
When Congress passed the Improving America's Schools Act of 1994, it called on the U.S. Department of Education (ED) to come up with a long-range plan for education technology. And this summer, ED Secretary Richard Riley unveiled that plan.
Called "Getting America's Students Ready for the 21st Century: Meeting the Technology Literacy Challenge", the plan covers the benefits--and costs--of technology; the characteristics of successful school technology programs; and how the federal government, states, communities, higher education, and business can promote effective uses of educational technology.
Four "best practices" characterize technology-rich schools, the report says:
* "Concentrated, conscious, and explicit planning" to create "learner-centered" environments.
* Clearly articulated goals and standards.
* Restructuring the school to support the learner-centered environments and the standards.
* Near-universal access to computer technology.
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