STSD Curriculum & Technology Update

Regular updates and musings on curriculum and technology in the Salisbury Township School District in Allentown, PA.

New Format for Curriculum and Technology Updates

Welcome to the 2007-08 school year! During the summer, there has been much activity in our district - from curriculum planning to Summer Academy offerings and technology upgrades. As time takes us through this coming year and things start to shift, there will surely be much more to share. Last year, you received a weekly email titled Instructional Technology Update. This year, regular updates continue, including information tied to both curriculum and technology initiatives. Louise and I will be posting items of interest as well as highlighting instruction in Salisbury classrooms. We look forward to communicating with you in this manner throughout the year. If you have suggestions for articles or have ideas on how we can best use this form of communication, please feel free to email Louise or me.

Over the summer I shared this article with some of our staff: Ray Kurzweil: Computers Will Extend Human Lifespan. Here are some of Kurzweil’s expectations for the future:

1. Doctors will be doing a backup of our memories by the late 2030s;
2. By the late 2020s, doctors will be sending intelligent bots, or nanobots, into our bloodstreams to keep us healthy, and into our brains to keep us young;
3. In 15 years, human longevity will be greatly extended. By the 2020s, we’ll be adding a year of longevity or more for every year that passes;
4. In the same timeframe, we’ll routinely be in virtual reality environments. Instead of making a cell call, we could “meet” someone in a virtual world and take a walk on a virtual beach and chat. Business meetings and conference calls will be held in calming or inspiring virtual locations;
5. When you’re walking down the street and see someone you’ve met before, background information about that person will pop up on your glasses or in the periphery of your vision;
6. Instead of spending hours in front of a desktop machine, computers will be more ingrained in our environment. For instance, computer monitors could be replaced by projections onto our retinas or on a virtual screen hovering in the air;
7. Scientists will be able to rejuvenate all of someone’s body tissues and organs by transforming their skin cells into youthful versions of other cell types;
8. Need a little boost? Kurzweil says scientists will be able to regrow our own cells, tissues, and even whole organs, and then introduce them into our bodies, all without surgery. As part of what he calls the “emerging field of rejuvenation medicine,” new tissue and organs will be built out of cells that have been made younger;
9. Got heart trouble? No problem, says Kurzweil. “We’ll be able to create new heart cells from your skin cells and introduce them into your system through the bloodstream. Over time, your heart cells get replaced with these new cells, and the result is a rejuvenated, young heart with your own DNA”;
10. One trick we’ll have to master is staying ahead of the game. Kurzweil warns that terrorists could, obviously, use this same technology against us. For example, they could build and spread a bioengineered biological virus that’s highly powerful and stealthy.

And if you think these expectations are off the mark or too far in the future, check out this short video on how far we’ve come in developing new prosthetic arms. Fascinating!

Through using this weblog format, it is our hope to engage you in dialogue about the various items we write about. This is a great opportunity to share some of the reading apprenticeship strategies from the past few days and make your thinking transparent. What did you connect with; what questions do you have?

To start participating, fill in the form below. If you’re more comfortable being anonymous, create a pen name and fictitious email. Because of spam appearing on this blog, comments will be “moderated” but will be posted in their entirety.

Thanks for reading this week!

Comments

I am looking forward to the joint venture of dialoging about technology/curriculum integration and the ideas teachers are trying out in their classrooms.  I am also looking forward to hearing from administrators as they work to support teachers in their classroom efforts.  I am anticipating a successful and new school year full of growth!  Louise

This is fascinating and so Orwellian.  (I can use this in a lesson when I teach 1984.) Let’s hope our government will find ways to solve the current health crisis so the medical technology in 2020 and beyond will benefit all citizens and not just those who can afford longevity.

The rate at which all of this will happen is truly amazing.  We really do need to keep all of this in mind as we prepare children for a world that is in constant change.
I am excited about the 07-08 school year and how technology will assist us in our communication with each other.

After reading the selection, I anticipate the advancement of technology in the sciences, yet remain grounded in the reality that politics and money may hinder the progresses referenced in the article.  It is of utmost importance to remain in the forefront of technology implementation in education to keep our students “pushing the envelope” in scientific advancement.  I am looking forward to a great year and will reference this article in my classes.  Cheryl

I chuckled upon reading the comments b/c the first thought that popped into my mind after reading Kurzweil’s prognostications was, “How very 1984!” Such is the world of English teachers, right, Rick? While I’m intrigued by Kurzweil’s predictions, I find myself skeptical that many these markers will be reached by the predicted dates. If Kurzweil is right, we’re in BIG trouble in terms of overpopulation and the problem inherent to overpopulation (i.e. scarcity of food / water, rampant spread of disease, etc.). His predictions about “rejevenation medicine,” however, already loom just around the corner with stem cell research, cloning, etc.

These kinds of “predictive” statements are also GREAT ways to jumpstart thinking in class. Using the “check-in” strategy we used during our RA training, we could easily use these kinds of sentences to have students write down a reaction or response, OR make predictions on their own. For more questions/implications try http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18664322/ a recent story by NBC on the future of technology.

I find all of this mind-boggling.  I agree with Heather in that along with rejuvenation comes all the problems mentioned.  There is also something to be said for being content with who we are as we age.  I am all for finding cures for illnesses, etc, but all that rejuvenation stuff is not with life’s plan.  I would be interested in a modified #5--I’d be happy if the person’s name would just pop up since I am finding it harder and harder as “I age” to come up with names quickly.

Kurzweil’s golden line is provocative: “In just 15 years, we’ll begin to see the merger of human and computer intelligence that ultimately will enable people to live forever.” Like Rick and Heather, I re-envision Orwell’s predictions.  As my external schema activates, however, I reflect on upper grade school (no middle schools then) when I stumbled upon Karel Capek’s 1920 drama, R.U. R., or Rossum’s Universal Robots, the text that coined and popularized the term robots. In the play, the line between the real and robots (and robotesses) blurs as humanoid replicas with artificial intelligence evolve indistinguishable from humans.  Summarizing Kurzweil, Randy’s fourth point comes to life in R.U.R., merging real and virtual reality environments, a forerunner perhaps to avatars and Second Life.  His readers’ responses made Capek the founder of the Czeck science fiction movement, and that genre activates my connections and questions. 

The leap from Kapek to Flash Gordon and Ursula LeGuin triggers a shift from science fiction to speculative fiction.  While both terms imply re-/deconstructionist world building, the virtual locations, curriculum vitae, and technology integration differ drastically as the genre continues to evolve.  When I was a child, when my father read Capek’s play to me in Czeck and then translated it to English, I asked him when science fiction became science fact.  His answer was basic: when fiction became fact.  Today’s technology occurs so exponentially that while we ponder, shift happens before we can digest the developments and fiction becomes fact, in real and virtual time. 

I agree with Cheryl that politics and money may hinder” the emerging field of rejunevation medicine.” But stem-cell research and cloning, as Heather references, added religion to the mix.  Rick’s point of extending medical technology in 2020 to all citizens, “not just those who can afford longevity,” touches moral and ethical concerns involved in the economics of who benefits—or not.  Randy’s tenth point, for me, is the sum of all fears, and I agree with Heather that overpopulation through longevity intensifies global issues that may lead to future wars.  Heather P. invites us to predict, and of all the think-aloud techniques, prediction relative to this article seems eerier than my first read of Capek or LeGuin’s Earth Sea Trilogy (although I really think her Carrier-Bag Theory is spot on).  But here goes.  In June, 2003, I gave my Honors class an exam question that asked them to apply their knowledge of Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies to an article by Thomas Barnett, US Naval War Academy, that appeared in Esquire’s March, 2003 issue.  You can read a brief summary of his book at this link: http://www.thomaspmbarnett.com/published/pentagonsnewmap.htm.  Compelling about the article was Barnett’s theory of globalism and commerce.  Barnett’s prediction was simple: unless we integrate non-core countries into the global market economy, we will continue to go to war.  My prediction aligns with Barnett, but I also fear a civil/economic war within our own population.  The gap in our own country between the haves and have-nots continues to widen, and government seems stalled in ameliorating this problem.  Instead, we off FHA help to owners of million dollar homes who default on their balloon mortgages.  I predict that if we do not resolve home front issues, we will likely be unsuccessful in implementing many of Barnett’s strategies.

Like all my colleagues who have posted so far, I too look forward to a challenging year, one in which we all move forward on district initiatives, merging best 21st century practices to curriculum integration of Academic and Technological Literacies.

Staying ahead of the game, keeping up with innovations, and appreciating the advancements in technology can be incomprehensible, but when we reflect on the advancements over the last twenty years, Kurzweil’s article on extending human life will unfold. I was personally impresssed with virtual reality environments. I look at his discussion with conferences and meetings and step them up with opportunities for our students - for us!!!!

My concluding thought: “Global society will need to stay ahead of the game as biological terrorism could wipe out civilization.” We must heed this warning!

Let us prepare with our collective responsibility of technologically integrated academic literacy and moving forward one step at a time.

Bobbie

Fascinating indeed!  These predictions immediately reminded me of a tidbit I share with my AP US History kids from the Ladies Home Journal in December of 1900.  The predictions from our last century included that by the end of the 1900s there would be:
1.  500 Million People on Earth (slightly off the over 3 billion we have) and the U.S. would include Mexico, Nicaragua and eventually the rest of Latin America.

2.  There will be no C,X, or Q in our alphabet—not used everyday so we’ll get rid of them.  We will be spelling by sound and the newspapers would begin this move.  English will be the predominant language on Earth followed by Russian.

3.  Hot and cold air will come from spigots that are regulated in our homes—AC anyone?

4.  Automobiles will be cheaper than horses.  There will be automobile hay-wagons, truckwagons, plows, harrows, and hay-rakes.  Children will ride in automobile sleighs in the winter (snowmobile??).  There will also be automobile hearses, police patrols, ambulances, and street sweepers.  (No mention of the impact on the common man here....)

5.  Everybody will walk ten miles a day (Is this a Wellness goal???) Gymnastics will begin in the nursery to strengthen muscles.  Exercise will be compulsory in school.  Any man or woman not able to walk 10 miles in a stretch will be considered a weakling.

6.  Aerial War Ships and Forts on Wheels:  Giant guns will shoot 25 miles or more and will hurl shells exploding and destroying whole cities (ICBMs????).  Fleets of air-ships, hiding themselves with dense, smoky mists thrown off by themselves as they move, will float over cities, fortifications, camps or fleets.  They will surprise foes below by hurling upon them deadly thunderbolts.  Huge forts on wheels will dash across open land making a “cavalry charge”.  Machines will dig huge intrenchments.  Rifles will use silent cartidges.  Submarine boats submerged for days will be capable of wiping out a whole navy.

7.  Man Will See Around the World:  Persons and things of all kinds will be brought within focus of cameras connected electrically with screens at opposite ends of circuits.

8.  Strawberries, raspberries, and blackberries will be as large as apples.  One piece will suffice for the fruit course of each person.

How things have changed???  With the rate of technology and innovation at all levels we have certainly turned the world on its ear since the last century celebration.  Looks like we will double our efforts in the next century.  But I am with Heather and Cathie, what do these changes, particularly in the longevity area mean for our social structure.  Frankly, I don’t want to live to be a burden to anyone—including the health care system.  It just doesn’t seem to be the “big plan”.  From a political edge, what becomes of social security in this scenario?  SS’s original withholding formula left retirees with enough money to extend 18 months beyond their retirement.  This formula has not worked because people have lived much beyond their 18 month allowance.  What happens when we start living 40-50 years beyond retirement?  Who picks up that bill?

Nevertheless, the implications for how we will learn and work are remarkable and some are very exciting.  I hope I remember all this when I am really old.  It will be fun to share with my descendents.

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