Updates:

Arizona eLearningi [0] Task Force meets Monday, January 7th, 2008 from 10-12 at AZ Department of Education, room 417. 

From the December meeting:  Middle School eLearning Mathematics Pilot proposal review will start this week and the award should be made at the end of January. The draft application form to be used by schools when they apply to participate in the three year Middle School eLearning Math pilot will be finalized after selected vendor input. Representative Andy Tobin spoke to the task force on his legislationi [0] and expected support from Arizona eLearning enterprises to support the delivery of content via online learning to Arizona schools. Herb Dwyer gave a detailed report on the  Technology Assisted Project-Based Instructional Program (TABPI) consortium Report which had bee presented to the State Board of Education on 12/10/07. 

All meetingsi [0] are Open to the Public. You have the opportunity to address the task force at meeting’s end. 

eSATSi [0] 2008 proposed legislation that requests the Arizona eLearning Task Force to make recommendations to the legislature on eight critical areas. The intro-set is out gathering sponsorship from Senators and Representative. When the bill is dropped with a number, I will set you a copy. 

Huntsville with 1950’s Rocketry and Arizona with 2000’s eLearning 

The December 31, 2007 the New York Times published an article “When the Germans, and Rockets, Came to Town.  http://tinyurl.com/25rxsv [1] . It described how 118 German rocket scientists were moved to Huntsville by the Army in early 1950’s. By the end of the 1960’s they had put the first American satellite in orbit and were the innovative force that put astronauts on the moon by 1969. Huntsville evolved to city of 170,000 with one of the country’s highest concentration of scientists and engineers. The city has hi-tech giants like Siemens, LG, Boeing and a new biotech center. 

In 1960 the newly formed NASA invited me to interview in Huntsville. As a nascent propulsion engineer I was excited to get in on the ground floor. The visit was going fine until, during lunch, I inquired about furthering my engineering education at the local college. One of the engineers said, “You can’t go there. That’s a n______ school.” I immediately decided to accept an offer a company that is Honeywell gas turbine engine company in Phoenix.

Arizona is striving to be a Top-Tier-Tech State. The one sure way to gain this status is to some how be in on the ground floor as a new technology emerges – such as Huntsville and space flight. 

Arizona is a dominant ground floor player in technology driven eLearning industry with over $4 billion in enterprise revenues. The only problem is that the globally competitive economic game has new players and resulting gatekeepers since the 1950’s. Governance, industry associations, economic development organizations and legislators have taken on the role of driving economic development. For the past 15 years these Arizona organizations has been virtually ignoring eLearning as the leading growth nugget for Arizona’s high-tech future. 

Maybe 2008 will finally be the year of realization. One can hope.