Beyond Binary

Microsoft, Intel, and Cisco plan to announce Tuesday that they are working together to help ensure that proper standards are created for measuring digital literacy.

Microsoft VP Anoop Gupta

(Credit: Microsoft)

The three companies aren't coming up with the assessment criteria themselves, but rather bringing together a group of education leaders and academics to identify the characteristics that should form the basis of global standards.

While such standards have emerged for math and science, they are also needed for other kinds of 21st century skills, Microsoft Vice President Anoop Gupta said in an interview last week.

To head the effort, the troika has tapped professor Barry McGaw, currently the director of the Melbourne Education Research Institute at the University of Melbourne, to serve as the project's executive director.

Gupta, who heads Microsoft's emerging markets effort, said that although leading companies are often advocating for similar education reforms, their work is often done solo.

"Today we often speak in different voices," Gupta said in an interview last week. "That confuses the decision makers."

Microsoft itself has been pouring millions into its emerging markets programs, including its Partners in Learning effort. Gupta said education remains a focus for Microsoft, but declined to say whether any cuts in his budget were looming amid the troubled economy.

"Certainly for us, like any company,...we are evaluating," he said. "We are being wise in how we manage the spend."

Overall, he said, there should be more dollars heading to education, particularly in the United States, where incoming president Barack Obama has outlined plans for major spending on infrastructure, including schools.

"Then, in fact, when we emerge out of this, suddenly the schools are truly wired for broadband," Gupta said.

Redwood City start-up NComputing, whose technology uses the power of a single PC to power up to seven computing terminals, is set to announce on Monday that it has started the process of equipping 5,000 schools in India with its technology.

NComputing will provide about 50,000 students with access to the Internet as part of the deal, which will use two PCs in each computer lab to power 10 terminals at schools in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. The deal itself is part of a $100 million effort that includes operating and powering the lab for five years, as well as all the needed gear. NComputing's chunk of that is about $2 million.

CEO Stephen Dukker said in an interview that his company is proving that virtualization doesn't have to be technologically complex, noting that of the more than 1 million seats his company has sold, 60 percent are in the developing world.

"Virtualization, which arguably is the most advanced state of the art, does not have to be this complex mix of acronyms we seen," he said. "What we've shown is it can scale down to some of the most economically challenged environments in the world."

Dukker said that by using two PCs in each computer lab, the set-up in India helps provide some redundancy. That helps address one of the limitations to NComputing's approach--because one PC powers several terminals, if something goes wrong in that PC, a whole classroom could find itself offline.

"When you share a PC you do have a single point of failure," Dukker said.

Last month, NComputing announced it had recruited longtime Microsoft executive Will Poole to serve as the company's co-chairman.

At its Government Leaders Forum in Berlin on Wednesday, Microsoft plans to announce that it is reinvesting in its Partners In Learning program, a global effort to provide software and training to teachers, students, and schools. The company is committing to another five years of the program.

In its first five years, Microsoft said the program reached 90 million people in 100 countries. The company plans to spend $235.5 million over the next five years, bringing its total investment to $500 million, but reach twice as many people in the next five years as it did during the first five.

Among other efforts, Partners in Learning provides training and certification for teachers, as well as an online gathering place where teachers can collaborate and share new curriculum ideas.

"We believe it is really the cornerstone of economic opportunity," said Orlando Ayala, senior vice president of Microsoft's emerging segments unit, dubbed Unlimited Potential. "Our software has been an important enabler of economic wealth."

Ayala highlighted several programs as recent highlights, including a Swedish teacher who partnered with a school in Madagascar to do a joint education project on biodiversity in Africa, and a robotics project in Malaysia where students created a mock disaster and used robotics to examine public safety issues.

In Colombia, Microsoft has a program in seven schools where students essentially do independent study on a laptop, using a curriculum that can move at exactly the student's own pace. The program was quite controversial when it began five years ago, Ayala said. "Today those students are scoring better in the national tests than traditional (students)."

In the U.S., Microsoft is sponsoring the Philadelphia School of the Future, where students use tablet PCs instead of textbooks.

Partnering with local governments and nonprofits is an important component of the program, Ayala said. "We know that no single model is going to fit everybody."

It also makes good economic sense, he said, noting that a greater level of partnership is what Microsoft believes will allow it to reach twice as many people in the next five years while actually spending slightly less than it had in the previous five.