Many months of feverish rumours and speculation reached a peak this week when Steve Jobs unveiled ‘The Next Big Thing’ – Apple’s iPad.  The most widely circulated rumours proved to be so accurate that many commentators felt Steve Jobs’ announcement was somewhat anticlimactic.  In the words of one tweet I received, the iPad was “too much iPod Touch, not enough MacBook”.

Oddly, Steve Job’s own hyperbole may have contributed to this reaction.  Impressive though the potential of the iPad is, labelling its features “magical and revolutionary” was probably an over-statement, even by Steve Job’s standards.  A cartoon in Friday’s ‘International Herald Tribune’ showed Steve Jobs on stage holding an iPad and claiming “it’ll simplify a lot of tasks you never had to do before”.  If that is so, then perhaps it IS destined to follow in the same footsteps towards commercial success as the iPod and the iPhone that so elegantly seemed to reinvent portable music, music purchasing and mobile communications.  The potential is certainly there to do so through the use of e-books and enhanced mobile newspaper and magazine reading browsing if nothing else.

While many commentators have dismissed Steve Jobs’ contention that the iPad will reinvent personal computing in a “magical and revolutionary” way, I think I can understand what is meant by his claim – which I sense refers NOT the iPad device itself but to two aspects of the thinking behind it.

First, unlike Apple’s existing computers, the iPad uses a chip made by Apple themselves – not Intel, not AMD, not IBM, nor any third party company.  That addition provides Apple with an almost unique level of control over the hardware, the software, and the marketing (both retail and online), ensuring quality control on one hand (as well as secrecy of course!), and reducing the reliance on external suppliers on the other.   This quest for total control is the reason that Flash will not be supported on the new iPad; ubiquitous as Flash is on the web, it remains a proprietary code (owned by Adobe) and is therefore outside Apple’s (or anyone else’s) control.  Compared to other IT companies, Apple’s high level of vertical integration is a revolutionary approach, although for Apple it is more of a progressive evolution than a revolution.

The second, and to me far more significant feature of the thinking behind the iPad is that the operating system is designed to be hidden, to be used by people who need to know nothing about the system’s structure or processes.

In the grim old days before GUIs (graphical user interfaces), using a computer meant meticulously entering lines and lines of cryptic programming code.  I still remember writing thousands of lines of code in Fortran when I was at university to perform the calculations required to analyse the data gathered for my PhD research.  GUIs and proprietary applications shifted the focus from programming computers to using computers.  I think the iPad takes this to the next level – the way the iPad integrates data with applications strikes me as having the potential to reinvent the personal computing experience in a similar way.  Just give it a few years to mature and I think you will see what I mean.

The IT analyst, John Gruber, who writes the Daring Fireball webpage (http://daringfireball.net/), seems to agree, likening the reinvention of the iPad’s operating system to the difference between driving a manual and automatic car.  To quote a little from his posting on 28th January:

1. It “used to be that to drive a car, you, the driver, needed to operate a clutch pedal and gear shifter and manually change gears for the transmission as you accelerated and decelerated.  Then came the automatic transmission.  With an automatic, the transmission is entirely abstracted away.  The clutch is gone. To go faster, you just press harder on the gas pedal.
   

2. That’s where Apple is taking computing.  A car with an automatic transmission still shifts gears; the driver just doesn’t need to know about it.  A computer (such as the iPad) running iPhone OS still has a hierarchical file system; the user just never sees it.
   

3. That’s not to say there aren’t trade-offs involved.  Car enthusiasts (and genuine experts like race car drivers) still drive cars with manual transmissions.  They offer more control; they’re more efficient.  But the vast majority of cars sold today (in the US at least) are automatics.  So too it’ll be with computers.  Eventually, most will be like the iPad in terms of the degree to which the underlying computer is abstracted away.  Manual computers, like the Mac and Windows PCs, will slowly shift from the standard to the niche, something of interest only to experts and enthusiasts and developers.
   

In a similar vein, prominent software developer, Joe Hewitt, is quoted as saying the following on his website (http://joehewitt.com/post/ipad/):

1. iPad is an incredible opportunity for developers to re-imagine every single category of desktop and web software there is. Seriously, if you're a developer and you're not thinking about how your app could work better on the iPad and its descendants, you deserve to get left behind.
   

If John Gruber’s and my predictions are accurate, then the iPad is really a pointer to the imminent reinvention of personal computing.  While media commentators are focussing on the device’s shortcomings such as lack of multi-tasking, no Flash rendering and no USB ports, I think they are missing the maybe-not-“magical” but nonetheless “revolutionary” bigger picture, which is nothing less than the reinvention of mobile computing.

This theme of reinvention captured my attention in another way this week as we celebrated UWC Day on Wednesday, followed by an outstanding Thursday evening GIF (Global Issues Forum) presentation on “UWCs – what should be changed?”.  The GIF discussion was fuelled by some wonderfully thought-provoking presentations by Alice (UK), Amr (Iraq), Pedro (Nicaragua) and Mr Magan Savant (Head of Block 1 and Physics teacher).  These presentations subsequently stimulated two hours of animated discussion, questions, comments and reflections from the dozens of students who had chosen to give up their Thursday evening to attend.

I found the discussion especially stimulating, spanning as it did the breadth of the UWC experience, from recruitment by National Committees, the study-activities balance, the mission and values of the organisation, connections between Colleges and with alumni, financial aspects, geographical distribution, and lots more.

As always in such discussions, many students felt that the reality of their UWC experience differed from their expectations – sometimes better, occasionally worse, but inevitably different.  For many students, this was a reflection of the information they had been given (or not given) by their Selection Committees before enrolment.  For others, the challenge was to try and achieve the multitude of expectations inherent in the (perhaps unrealistically) lofty ideals of the UWC mission statement – after all, how many other schools aim to change the world, bring about world peace and promote international understanding, as well as advocating and practising sustainability in all its forms – environmental, financial, personal?  To be only slightly sardonic, such grandiose aims seem more familiar in the context of campaign speech for a Miss World competitor than for a school.

I think the ambitious nature of the UWC mission statement can actually become an obstacle for many 16 and 17 year olds, especially those who are accustomed to achieving whatever it is that they set out to do.  On the other hand, an element of stretch is needed before anything worthwhile can ever be achieved – if it was easy to change the world, promote world peace, and so on and so forth, then everyone would be doing it!  As I often challenge myself and others by saying: “If you aim for the stars, you might still reach the moon.  If you just aim for the moon, you might only reach the front gate.”

There was an interesting discussion thread in the GIF about a possible new exit credential, known for the time being as the UWC Diploma, either to supplement or perhaps even replace the IB Diploma.  Most of the students who spoke about this seemed not to feel especially attracted to the thinking behind the UWC Diploma proposals (especially the idea of reducing the IB’s six subjects to four, and replacing those two with an expanded individual research project).   On balance, our students expressed a preference to engage in a wide variety of subjects.

Another interesting (and related) discussion thread was the perceived tension between the academic goals of the IB and the all-round aims of United World Colleges.  To be frank, and speaking personally, I think this is a false dichotomy.  To begin with, the IB Diploma was founded by staff from the early UWCs (plus a couple of other pioneering international schools) and the IB’s structure thus mirrors many UWC priorities.  That is why the non-academic and non-gradable CAS component is such a significant component of the IB Diploma, why Theory of Knowledge (ToK) is compulsory, and why students must study subjects in both the sciences and the humanities.  The way I see it, the IB is a sub-set (and a very important one) of an authentic, wider UWC education.

If they are to make a difference in the world, United World College graduates need to be able to formulate and articulate well-reasoned positions on a wide variety of issues.  These perspectives must be firmly based on reliable and balanced information such as sound facts and accurate data that reflect a variety of viewpoints, and they must be filtered through rigorous processes of analysis.  That is why the academic component is the cornerstone of the UWC experience – it provides this firm basis for knowledge, skills, understanding and wisdom, as well as a foundation for further tertiary level studies and (thus, hopefully) a lifetime of meaningful leadership through serving others.

So, what does this have to do with ‘reinvention’?  United World Colleges are wonderful places, but they are not perfect.  We should always be careful to avoid institutional narcissism, and remember (as I often say) that ‘the good can often be the enemy of the excellent’.

Do United World Colleges need to be reinvented?  My personal viewpoint is perhaps predictable for a ToK teacher – yes and no.

No-one wants to lose the great and unique features that have made United World Colleges the hallmark of best practice in international education.

Nonetheless, I think it would be useful to re-examine some facets in a co-ordinated way, such as the geographical distributions of students in the various UWCs.  At Pearson UWC in Canada, they pride themselves in having over 100 countries represented among their 200 students.  At LPCUWC, we have ‘only’ about 80 countries among our 256 students.  Other UWCs have considerably less national diversity but a stronger regional identity (especially those colleges in Singapore, Netherlands, Swaziland and Bosnia-Herzegovina).  In that context, we could ask ourselves whether we might be more financially and environmentally sustainable if we placed less emphasis on bringing students from as many countries as possible, and instead each UWC adopted a deeper responsibility for meeting the needs of students from its own region, focussing on encouraging greater diversity from within closer countries.

There is, of course, a very serious and obvious shortcoming in this idea.  It arises from the reality that Europe seems to be over-represented in its number of UWCs while Africa and South America are under-represented.  As a consequence, regional specialisation as described above would inevitably widen the gap in opportunities for access to UWCs by students from poorer and wealthier continents – UNLESS it was seen instead as an incentive to establish new UWCs in regions that are presently under-served!  Whether or not this ever happens, however, we do need to acknowledge that unlike the time when UWCs were first established almost 50 years ago, national boundaries may no longer be the best measure of student diversity (it is a ‘good’ measure, but it might not be an ‘excellent’ one).

Without wanting to make this blog too long (yes, I know, I have probably already broken some obscure internet protocol about limiting the number of words on one page), there are many other reinventions that could and should be examined.  For example, wonderful as they are, UWCs represent a very expensive model of education, and the financial sustainability of some of the Colleges is sub-optimal to say the least.  The issue of financial viability needs to be addressed head-on, and dramatically.

I think we also need to focus more on alumni relations and promote graduates as appropriate role models for current and potential students.  After all, an important measure of the quality of any school is the calibre of its graduates.

Our voluntary National Committee system is sometimes quoted as one of the UWC’s greatest strengths - on other occasions it is acknowledged to be one of our greatest shortcomings.  The huge diversity in strength, efficiency, composition, viability, performance, perspectives and practices of National Committees in over 120 countries and regions is arguably a philosophical dream but an organisational nightmare.

I think we need to re-examine our processes of College evaluation and accreditation.   

I think we should be looking at devising a model (and perhaps even an institute or a curriculum centre) for teacher training and ongoing professional development.  I see this as serving both to support the high quality of teaching in UWCs and to provide an additional resource pool of great teachers for schools all around the world, thus spreading the impact and influence of the UWCs beyond their present narrow confines.

And there are many other possibilities…  But while all these ideas would represent significant – and in some cases radical – changes, they nonetheless fall short of reinventing international education in a similar way that (for example) the iPod reinvented the delivery and use of portable music.

Is international education ripe for reinvention?

I believe it is.

Images from this week’s Doonesbury copyright ©2010 G.B. Trudeau.  http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/dailydose/index.html