TECHNOS—Ron Enger, President of NAMTC

July 27, 2008

Ron Enger, President of the National Association of Media and Technology Centers (NAMTC)

The National Association of Media and Technology Centers (NAMTC) serves its membership of approximately 300 K–12 regional media centers, university media centers, educational television stations, and public libraries around the country. NAMTC is a professional organization of the people that staff and operate those regional media centers. The organization represents about 20 million students nationwide, including students in public schools, parochial schools, and home schools. Corporate members, such as AIT, who produce instructional media, are also eligible for membership. Ron Enger, director of the Southern Oregon Education Services District in Medford, is president of NAMTC. Technos spoke with him recently about NAMTC’s mission and goals for the future of media and technology centers and about the effect of technology on education.

T: What is NAMTC’s mission, in terms of philosophy, for your membership?

RE: One of our main objectives is to support a system of regional centers across the country that provide instructional resources for schools. We’re committed to working with professional educators, for the most part in the school systems, in order to increase equitability for students in the form of learning resources.

How are the recent cuts in funding going to affect the regional centers? Are they all locally funded, or federally funded?

Most of them are locally or state funded, and a lot of them are part of a state network of services. For instance, here in Oregon, we have 20 Educational Service Districts (ESDs). They were originally set up by the state of Oregon, but each has its own local board of directors, just like a school district, and they are actually considered intermediate school districts. We work with local taxes, which flow to the state and are redistributed across the state to help equalize education throughout Oregon. Every state operates a little differently. For instance, Iowa, where I spent the first part of my career, has a number of Area Education Agencies (AEAs), which are the same type of regional geographic centers as in Oregon. New York has centers called BOCES; Michigan has Regional Educational Media Centers, or REMCs. So it varies with the name, but the function is much the same across the country. We’re an intermediate regional agency between the state department of education and the local school districts.

What are you finding is the most important thing—or the biggest issue—that these media and technology centers at the K–12 level are facing?

Well, I think you hit on one of the biggest issues, and that of course is funding. Many of the states are suffering cutbacks in overall funding. You mentioned potential cutbacks also from the federal government. It appears there are many technology dollars that are anticipated being cut at the federal level. These are often reallocated to media and technology centers across the states; if that is cut, that’s going to be a problem. Already, in Oregon, we’re hearing from our state department that schools might be funded only at the 1991 level by the governor’s announced budget. So we’re very concerned about any loss of dollars from the federal government or from local entities. That’s critical, certainly for us in the Northwest—Washington, Oregon, and parts of California. We were hit very hard in the last three or four years by the economic recession, and I think we’ve been slower to recover, especially in Washington and Oregon, where there are many high-tech industries. So there is more than just a trickle-down; there is a definite impact.

Do you see your organization being able to help with acquiring funding, perhaps helping with fund-raising ideas?

In a way, intermediate school districts or regional centers like ours are positioned to use the synergies of cooperatives and so forth in order to stretch dollars for districts. I see us as buying more of the resources, especially instructional resources that local schools need, because they aren’t going to have the dollars. Schools have already experienced some of that, especially in the Northwest. So the regional centers have tried to identify those things that mean the most to school districts and provided those resources and services. They have targeted those areas where schools have had to cut back.

Do you have a list of things that are needed?

Instructional resources in the form of video programs, DVD programs, and streaming digital products that meet with state standards and support national guidelines, and NCLB [No Child Left Behind] requirements are needed. One of the areas that a lot of the regional centers are working with now is video streaming, where we set up large servers and stream resources in digital format to schools. A number of regional centers across the nation have either been doing that already or are moving that way to help maximize resources across their regions.

It seems that video streaming is the wave of the future. Are you finding that more and more schools are able to use those resources?

Probably not as many in this state. I can’t speak for all states, but I think it varies a lot, state to state. It depends on the type of network backbone that the state or the district or the region has. Some states have invested a lot of money in large, high-capacity networks such as fiber—for instance, Iowa is a state where an extensive fiber network was installed all over the state. As a result, the schools benefited greatly. That hasn’t been done in every state. Oregon has not done that. It’s been left up to the individual districts to fund much of that network themselves. A few years ago, Oregon provided a T-1 Internet connection for every school building in the state, but that was a limited funding package that only lasted two years, and then the schools were expected to pick up the cost. But a T-1 connection doesn’t go very far in a high-technology world that education is supposedly moving toward. We have Statewide Electronic Testing in Oregon, and it’s expected over the next two years that all schools will be testing over this network. It’s an online testing system that about 70 percent of the schools are already using. But outside of the high-tech urban areas, where they have a lot of fiber, districts are having trouble even making it work because of the limited bandwidth for many schools. With this level of statewide testing over very limited capacity, school network video streaming is very difficult in many districts.

What about wireless technology? Wouldn’t that be a solution to this networking hardware problem?

It’s helped in some situations. I think as you look across the country, it’s especially popular in the Midwest, where there aren’t a lot of high geographic features, like mountains, to interfere with signals. But from the Rockies west, sometimes it’s a problem because the geographic features here make wireless more difficult. We have a few schools using wireless local connections, but we don’t see wireless as a total solution yet. It’s certainly one that a lot of districts are looking at deploying, but it isn’t the answer in every location. Plus, the bandwidth on most wireless systems is limited. Video streaming is a huge bandwidth consumer. Most wireless systems handle data well, but when you start streaming video, it takes a lot of bandwidth.

What changes have you seen in utilization in the last few years with the way that teachers and students are using technology, especially the Internet, the Web, and computers?

I think it’s been dramatic in the last ten years. We don’t have the blackboards and overhead projectors used nearly to the degree that they once were. The Internet, computers, and television have had enormous impact on education and how teachers are teaching. And that’s not to say every teacher is employing all of those things, but many are using at least one or two or maybe all three as part of their basic instructional methodology. Education is like any other entity—if you consider banking, retail, and medicine, they’ve moved considerably because of technology. Education probably hasn’t moved as quickly, because of funding limitations, and telecommunications are expensive. Obviously, the E-rate has helped that a great deal; I don’t think schools would have been anywhere near where they are today if it hadn’t been for E-rate and discounts. But it isn’t the total answer, either. Schools need support people and equipment that isn’t always available. I think education has come a long way. Teachers are teaching differently, more so every year as a result of technology, but I think we’re going to see even more dynamic changes over the next few years than we’ve seen in the previous 50.

One of the presenters at your annual meeting in September, Marina Leight [Director of the Center for Digital Education], mentions the "Millennial Generation," very tech-savvy kids who are coming through school now. If things have moved almost light years over the past 50 years, what can we expect in the next 50 years of this high-tech generation?

I think it’s going to be incredible. In fact, I think the changes we’ve seen in the last 25 years will probably be compacted into that many changes over the next five years. Technology is going to play a huge role in these changes. If you look back over the books that were written about such things, Alvin Toffler’s Third Wave [1991] and others, we’ve seen all those things happen. Kids can now take courses at home if they want to because of the advances in telecommunications. Distance is not the barrier that it once was for students to receive curricular content. That is just one example of technological change in education.

But so many school media centers or libraries are still using video and television. I’m just wondering: what can the media center director do to help with that?

There are a number of things happening. One is that we’ll see DVDs and videotapes around for a number of years because they’re good mechanisms for delivering instruction. I think what we are seeing is the conversion of that information into digital transmissions that allows this to happen over wires or wireless, where the networks exist. Currently, a lot of schools across the country don’t have the bandwidth to do that yet. So we’re still going to have collections of those resources in school buildings for a number of years, where that’s impossible or the cost is so high. I have some districts that have high-speed bandwidth and others that have a single T-1 connection. So, we’re going to have to provide those services in multiple ways to our districts: a mixture of the DVDs, videotapes, and television, plus the new digital versions. It would be a tragedy at this point to abandon those collections of resources, because many schools—at least half in my districts—wouldn’t be able to avail themselves of the video streaming technology. We’ll certainly see these instructional resources work side by side for a while. That’s pretty characteristic of most states and most regions across the country. Obviously, there are some exceptions, where some areas have large bandwidth and can move information back and forth without regard to capacity. But that’s not the case in many areas.

Do you think this high-tech phenomenon in education is being driven by the industry, or by consumers, or by the need for new methodologies for teaching?

That’s an interesting question, and many of us have looked at it and wondered where it’s coming from. Is it consumer driven, with all the new technological devices that have been invented? Things like cell phones, digital cameras, video systems, etc., that are digitally based? Is it the industries such as Microsoft, Dell, Oracle, and other companies that have invested billions of dollars in developing these products and made them available to the general public? I think it’s a bit of both. There’s also a need for technological opportunities that 20 years ago schools weren’t even thinking about. They didn’t realize what those new opportunities would even look like. I think it’s a mixture, especially in K–12 education, which is largely publicly financed, that makes it even more difficult. Because we see all of these things and the benefits of them, and see them happening in other institutions, but the tax dollars aren’t always there to support what schools would need to utilize them.

One of the NAMTC’s stated goals is to develop a set of standards recommendations for digital products. Can existing products be easily converted according to those standards, too?

That’s one of the dilemmas that both producers and consumers of those products in schools, libraries, universities face. They see an advantage to having some universal standards. Because when we purchase resources and make them available to our clients, it would work better for all of us if we had one system, rather than multiple systems, to access them. From a production and distribution standpoint, it’s also a complicated issue. You don’t want to isolate yourself on a process or on standards with a product that very few other people will use, or the industry doesn’t accept in general—especially after spending money to develop the product. There’s interest from both sides, producers and consumers, and that’s how we at NAMTC have been approaching the situation. We’ve been trying to bring both groups together to agree on some things that make sense.

What is the status of NAMTC’s standards groups? Where are these efforts headed?

Progress has been slower than we’d all prefer, but I’m not sure it could have gone any faster, due to the make-up of the group and the nature of the information that had to be shared to determine what the problems were and what needed to be done. I know there are some individuals working very hard on that, and I know that the former president of our organization, Tony Marshalek, in Ohio, has worked with that group a lot. He has reported on the progress and included some of the forthcoming recommendations [http://www.trumbull.k12.oh.us/neoimc/WorkGroupsOverview.htm]. I think you’ll see some things relatively soon. We have plans for a large meeting next fall in conjunction with our summit, and we hope to have these things clearly defined and presented to our membership then.

The next step is to get approval of these standards. You have a good cross-section of members in NAMTC. But how do you go about getting everyone to jump on board the standards wagon?

That’s a real challenge. I think we have some of the biggest providers and users of those digital products involved in the organization, with committees and subcommittees, to do that. Hopefully, if they all agree, I think there will be enough support for the standards that it will prove to be a model for the rest of the industry and consumers of those products.

Do you have Department of Education folks involved, at the state or federal level?

I don’t know how involved those people have been in this effort. It’s a grass-roots effort in which the people who are directly affected by it are working with it. And I don’t know whether the [U.S.D.O.E.] Office of Technology has an interest in that or not—I can’t speak for them, really.

It sounds like most of the funding for that office will be cut.

Yes, I understand that there will be huge cuts. They just released a technology plan from the Department of Education, which is accessible at their Web site.

If you could create and deliver a list of priorities for the instructional media industry, like AIT and others, what would that list include?

Good content is always No. 1—and content that relates to K–12 curriculum standards, both state and national. NCLB has been highly involved with requiring certain standards for schools, and they’re looking at most of the schools’ curricula now as a result. Things that are tested, in local districts and by the states, are critical—and those are the types of resources and materials we need to continue to have available for schools. We need curriculum content that meets standards that is going to be tested in schools. We’ve seen so much more of that in the last two or three years than we’ve seen in the last 20 years. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard teachers in local districts say: "If it doesn’t meet our content standards, we’re not going to use it. We may have the time to use it, or we would love to use it, but we’re so focused on the tests that we have very little flexibility anymore." That could be viewed positively or negatively, but that’s the reality.

What about professional development for teachers? Is that on NAMTC’s radar screen?

Our regional center, like most around the country, does a lot of professional development for teachers. That’s usually one of the elements or major departments in most centers. Certainly, that’s driven by the needs of the schools in our region. And again, a lot of it goes back to how well the kids are going to perform academically, and how can we work with teachers to make their classes and their instruction work better to help their students excel? It’s very focused, very targeted—again because of NCLB requirements and state standards.

I’ve been in education a long time and have seen a lot of changes Your questions regarding the last few years have been interesting . . . there have been some major changes, either legislated or due to changes in technology, and I think both of those areas have had a great impact on education. If you talk to teachers now, they often say that they don’t have the flexibility in the classroom they once had. They can’t share some education and learning that in the long term might have had a positive effect on kids when they become adults, living in society, and getting along with other people. We’ve seen so many programs cut that are no longer in the basic core of K–12 courses taught. Curriculum content has become so targeted and tested that many teachers have left education in the last two or three years. And yet we hope that academic gains for kids will improve as a result of some of these standard-based requirements. But I think the overall question is still out, whether it will make a difference or not.