Figure 5 shows some diagrams of an elementary school classroom that we recently designed for the New York City School Construction Authority.  In each classroom there is a trellis that has the ability to conceal ceiling wiring and power and data poles can be dropped from any point. 
       Around the perimeter, all of the tack rails are surface mounted raceways.  So even though the school was designed at a point in time when the program only called for one computer in each classroom with the potential of adding one more, everything is put in place for both island and perimeter utilization of technology when greater levels of technology became available. 
       In keeping with the philosophy that I am espousing, the design provided for the ability to put in a computer for every student, even if you had to hardwire it.  The routes for power and data were all established in advance.
       In the meantime, the trellis provides a means of hanging student work and other displays, so that the ceiling becomes another educational work surface.  
       Bringing services to classrooms is very much like choreographing dance.  As different learning approaches develop, the framework of the classroom and school should support these changes, with minimal expenditure, as a good theater would support different choreography over time.
      This kind of an approach, I believe, is more and more important since it is very difficult to predict how technology is going to change and to identify what funding might be available.  We have not yet reached the point where the school districts have gone back to the computer manufacturers and said, “We want laptops.  But don’t give us what you make for businessmen to carry through airports and travel miles.  We want to go from a recharging station a maximum of thirty feet.  We assume that we’ll recharge them in the evening off of the lighting system when it’s not in use.  And we want other kinds of attributes.  And by the way, we are interested in buying five million of these a year.  Would you make one?  Oh, and it has to sell for under five hundred dollars.”
      The leverage that the educational disciplines have with respect to getting tools that would facilitate what they are looking for is very large.  These tools could provide the ability to work in ways that makes sense for each subject area and activity.  Groups could range from a cooperative team of six for one activity, or in another area a large group of half the class could work as a team.  In another case students could work totally individually and so on. 
       You have many permutations and if the furniture and fittings permit desks and other things to move, you can then relate the layout of the classroom to the subjects that are being learned.  Now the key is that there is a need to look at what is it that is required in terms of curriculum. 
        I would like to go through a couple of stories in order to segueway into this subject, because I believe that what we have seen in terms of change with technology only scratches the surface of the flexibility that is going to be needed to accommodate changes in curriculum. 
       The first story I’ll like to tell has to do with the first high school that I designed.  At that time, one of the spaces called for was the biology classroom and I initially thought that we would be designing a biology classroom for a mode of teaching that was the same as when I was taught biology.  That was when biology was the study of death.  Everything was pickled and you dissected.  We started to design the school and met with a biology teacher, who told us “oh no, biology is the study of life.  We have live animals in the classroom, we have live plants,” and so on. 
       We went back to visit the school a couple of years after its opening and I found out that the teacher was very excited about what had happened there.  There had been some live births of some of the animals in class time.  It was very exciting.  Word of that rippled through the entire school. 
       Today with Nova, in half an hour you can get the entire life cycle of any animal.  If you watch the life cycle of an animal on Nova, however, do you fully understand what an animal is?  The caring, the feeding, cleaning up after it and so on...  There are things that you learned in real time that you can not learn in fast time.  
       When you begin to use real time experience to lay down a foundation, a core, and then when you see many other animals in fast time, you will be able to digest the information in this fast time manner because of the foundation, or core, knowledge. 
       From this story, one of the things that we have discovered is that the ability to have, in any given classroom, the opportunity to be able to mixe real time and fast time learning is essential.  You shouldn’t have specific places that are for the computer or specific places that are for lecture and so on.  These different activities have to be related to one another.  They need to become suffused into a classroom learning situation. 
       The next story I’ll like to tell is one from when I served on a long span structures committee for the AIA after there had been some catastrophic structural failures about ten years ago.  Leslie Robinson, who was the structural engineer for the World Trade Center, also served on this committee.  In speculating why the failures were occurring at that point in time, he indicated that when he studied structural engineering, students would design five buildings in their entire university career.  Each was designed with a slide rule.  Each member was sized by hand. 
       Students who learned by this method developed an understanding of what that member size should be to handle certain kinds of loads.  Today, he said, all the engineers that he  employed had come out of colleges and universities where they had designed sixty buildings on the computer and they could tell you whether a steel, pre-cast concrete or a post-tensioned concrete building would be more economical. 
       But in school they had not designed the individual structural members; the computer designed the members.  If the member size isn’t right, there is no internal trigger that says this isn’t what it should be.  
       From that discussion I picked up another message, which is that different learning media, facilitate learning in different areas.  One of the things Leslie said that he wanted to do is to hire students that have done three buildings “long hand” and twenty on the computer.  But, would you believe that there isn’t a single university in the United States that teaches structural engineering like this? 
       To return to relating the different kinds of learning to different tools, we need a multiplicity of tools calibrated to provide optimal learning of the specific types of information.  If we can’t achieve this it is like asking why an elementary school student should learn multiplication and division when they could just use a calculator.  This approach might work fine, as long as they don’t plug in the wrong numbers.  Students need to understand what to expect as a result. 

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