IMS Global: Perhaps a good place to start is to define for us what is the Digital Promise Project? What exactly do you hope to achieve?
LG: Digital Promise began in 1999, before the nation had any public policy or serious discussion about how to exploit the great potential of the new information technologies to serve the public interest, especially in education, skills training, and lifelong learning. A group of major foundations, including Carnegie, Century, Knight, MacArthur and Open Society, were concerned that in the approaching digital age, the rapid advance of new information technologies was revolutionizing the commercial segments of our society - in communications, business, banking, finance, entertainment, and manufacturing, to name a few. But the nation's nonprofit and civic institutions - our schools, libraries, museums, universities, and other public institutions that serve the crucial centers of our society were being left behind in the emerging digital age. The foundations asked Mr. Minow and me to direct a project that would develop recommendations for what should be done. We agreed to take on the job on a pro bono basis. After extensive research and interviews throughout the nation, we concluded that the U.S. had an overwhelming need to launch a new, federally financed R&D trust fund that would do for education, lifelong learning, and skills training in the digital age what the National Science Foundation does for science, NIH for health, and DARPA for the military. We called our proposed trust fund the Digital Opportunity Investment Trust, or DO IT, and urged that it grow eventually into a billion dollar a year fund to transform the nation's learning and training through intelligent use of advanced information technologies.
IMS Global: Is the Digital Divide in this country growing wider?
LG: The term Digital Divide usually refers to the disparity of access to computers and the Internet by the affluent and by inner city, rural and economically deprived segments of our population. That disparity continues, although in most parts of the nation it is diminishing. Increasingly schools are encouraging and subsidizing the use of computers by students. The great majority of today's students, even in poor communities are "digital natives," at least when it comes to the hardware. According to the most recent Department of Education report, 97% of high school students today have access to computers. Most have some experience using the Internet. The real deficit we see today is not in the hardware as much as it is in the development of educational and training software and content. The real opportunity and need is to transform education, lifelong learning and training for the digital age by the application of the remarkable new advanced information technologies that are being developed every day.
The federal government funds substantial R&D that translates into advancements in key U.S. industries, and those investments pay off handsomely in improved productivity. Unfortunately there is no such R&D model for education. U.S. taxpayers invest nearly $1 trillion per year on K-12, higher education, and skills training, yet we invest relatively little to explore the application of technology for learning. And what little is spent goes to the Defense Department, which is making extraordinary advances in training troops through information technologies. But what they're learning is not available to the general population. Most formal teaching and learning still use 19th century methods: reading texts, listening to lectures, blackboard exercises, and the like. Firms and industries with higher IT intensity have higher levels of productivity growth. In education today, low IT intensity yields low, in fact diminishing productivity. A recent Commerce Department study of 55 industries found that the education and training services industry has the lowest IT-intensity of the industries studied, even though education is arguably one of the most knowledge intensive industries of all.
