In the opening session, Craig Mundie demonstrated an office of the future that brought together a pair of digital white boards, a MS Surface (so totally want), webcams for video meetings, and more. It was a fully realized holo-office for immersive design.

Imagine if you will, a fully integrated system that combines all the best features of Adobe Connect Now (desktop sharing with WebCam), Google Docs (for collaborative document editing), Smart Boards (for putting your white board notes into your computer), and add all the gestures you use on your iPhone to the white board and your desktop screen (which is literally your desktop). Then make all the software work together fluidly.

I saw this and saw a system that would facilitate remote collaboration in a way I have dreamed of and tried to kludge together using the above software. The thing is, while video conferencing and Google Docs are things I can generally get my collaborators to adopt, they generally roll their eyes at me if I try to add any additional levels of complexity.

But what I saw this morning was a demo of a future fully integrated system and it is something I would love to work with and build for.

But I’m at a university that can’t afford this type of toy, and I wilted a bit as I saw my dream platform and realized this is not something I can without significant sponsorship replicate in my office, my lab, my cross campus collaborator’s office, and the offices of my cross country and cross ocean collaborators.

Here’s the problem: Federal grants specifically say in one way or another “Thou shalt not request office equipment.” Grants ask what are you researching? What questions that are new and exciting are you answering? They don’t ask, “what toys do you need to improve your already functional work flow?” The professors with the coolest toys either designed the toys or have non-Federal grants or funding from their university to purchase the technology. While at Harvard, several of the faculty wowed me with their digital work spaces. Same with MIT. To a lesser degree same with U-Texas.

I currently teach at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. The students I work with are the hardest working students I’ve ever encountered and I’m there for them. The best of them are as good as the students I worked with at MIT and Harvard. They are there for a variety of reasons, ranging from High Schools that didn’t prepare them for Ivy League to just not wanting to move too far from home, to just not knowing how good they are. I love my students. They are bright and shiny and the ones I work with on my research team are building great things.

That said, my university sometimes exhausts me. We just don’t have the funding to do all the cool shiny things I want to do. And this isn’t just SIUE. Talking to colleagues, the problems we’re facing are common across state universities everywhere. As tax revenue falls, education funding falls with it. We reached a point last semester when there was no longer funding for office supplies. When there isn’t money for white board markers and the secretaries start keeping hidden caches of chalk, it is hard to say “Hey – can I have a few ‘K’ to better facilitate communications with my collaborators in the UK?”

One of the benefits that students at places like Harvard and MIT enjoy is the ability to immerse themselves in the latest technologies in the labs they work in and in the teaching labs they learn in. Their high tuition pays (in part) for these facilities, and endowments, corporate sponsorships, and donations pay the rest. The students who get into these schools aren’t all rich, but they all benefited from a high quality back ground (whether it be a private school or an inner city school) opened the door for a high quality higher education.

There is a digital divide in America. Looking through studies at the Pew Internet and American Life website, you can see that the poor, the rural, the minorities, the immigrants and the elderly aren’t online. They aren’t getting prepared in ways that require online and digital content consumption.

There is a digital divide between universities. My upper division students don’t all know how to use Excel. They don’t all know how to use a word processor. They don’t even all know how to use a mouse in a coherent manner. And I don’t have a way to wow them into being inspired that a George Jetson Holo-Office future is coming and they need to get with the digital now. The best I can do is invite them to wave at a colleague in Skype now and then. I, who live a virtual life, have a normal office with a normal laptop and a normal sized monitor living a normal, not particularly wow-ing life.

I want to take the next steps. I want to improve my work flow, to improve my communications with collaborators, to improve my way of interacting with data, and to improve how I distribute my results to the public. I want to adopt the technologies I’m seeing here.

And I will ask MS for help.

But looking around at the Ivy League, the Big State, the top school, the private school, and the generally prestigious school name tags, I wonder how many others from underserved universities are here to ask, “MS, will you collaborate with me and help me learn how to work better?”

I’m going to go for lunch, fund my students, and see what I can find.

Eek!

Today I have two hours to discuss all the ways new media can be a part of education.

Before launching into what all I’m going to discuss, I want to take a moment to say the field of education can suck in a lot of content you’d never think of as education. For instance, listening to the character of “Data” on Star Trek Next Generation blather about Dyson Spheres may teach you something. As someone whose passion is for informal education, I’m very tuned in to the fact that any moment in time that gives you new information you didn’t have before is an educational moment. This means that if you learn physics equations from FoxTrot, I consider the Sunday comics an piece of education materials.

When you expand your definition of “Education” to include public outreach, you are also making moments in time that inspire people to learn into educational moments. This means that if you’re watching the Star Trek and decide you want to look up an article on black holes or to Google if Tachyons are real, then Star Trek was inspiring learning and in that one instance it becomes public outreach.

Now, in general, Star Trek is not constructed purposely as a tool for education and public outreach. It is a money making source of entertainment. But why can’t I turn the Star Trek model on its head and purposely create materials where my goal is to teach and inspire people to go out and want to learn to more, and do it in a way that happens to be entertaining in the same way that Star Trek’s science advisors make sure that it sometimes educational. (Although, my goal would be to always be entertaining, rather than to sometimes randomly be entertaining.)

Okay, lecture over. Stepping of my “Edutainment is ok” soapbox.

In selecting new media to give teachers to stick in the intellectual toolbox, I want to give them new ways that will both help them convey content and that will help them inspire kids to want to go out and seek content on their own.

So, with no further blathering, here are the things I think every educator should know about (which doesn’t mean they should be fluent – but they should know they exist).

Blogs: Get content. Get it now. The best way to find the blogs you like is to follow the Carnival of Space and see who catches your attention and than subscribe to those people using your favorite choice of aggregator (I use Google Reader). Also in the land of blogs is twitter. Phoenix, LRO, and many other science programs have their own feeds that are fun to follow. (And I have one too)

Podcasts / Vodcasts: Didn’t see this one coming, did you? Seriously though, if you have a kid who likes astronomy, the videocast “Ask an Astronomer” is about the cutest thing out there. There is also a huge variety podcasts out there both being created and in the archives. This means you can find a content delivery style that meets the needs of any audience, from the sarcastic to the on-the-level, from the quiet stereotypical planetarium disembodied voice to the video with special FX. Just as you might recommend a book based on the personality of the reader, you can do the same with podcasts and vodcasts (and this is also a free source of content).

Webcomics: From stuff good for kids like the newly EPO’s Chronicles to things strictly for adults like xkcd, webcomics are good way to abuse science to encourage laughter.

Social Networks: Any of you who are in Facebook have probably seen groups that use peer pressure involve people in things that touch on science. I personally belong to “When I was your age, Pluto was a planet.” You also might have become “Friends” with different satellites, joined a group focusing on science like the “Astrobiology Club” or “attended” an event like a solar eclipse or solstice. MySpace has a lot of these same features, but it’s much more frenetic in design.

Social Sharing Networks: The Internet is a big place. A really big place. Don’t know where the coolest new stories might be or even what they might be about? Check out Digg! Now, admittedly, certain websites are unfairly represented. APOD is really cool, but does every image really need to get Dugg more than the typical Orbiting Frog article?

Virtual Skies: While Google Sky makes for a pretty terrible replacement for planetarium software, but it does allow for a new form of exploration that is totally cool in its own right. Within Google Sky images are merged and layered, comments are left, and you the individual and download and travel on tours. The Hubble Site even adds in their podcasts. I have to admit my Mac and I haven’t made it into the World Wide Telescope yet, but the demos I’ve seen are striking and it seems to easily allow multi-wavelength studies to be done. Hopefully, in the coming months we’ll begin to see a gamma-ray skin.

Virtual Worlds: Yes, I know that people with a real life don’t need a Second Life, but as someone who primarily lives a virtual life, I find a lot of value in digital worlds. Within Second Life I can gather and talk with audio to groups of people from around the globe, and sit down and share experiences ranging from public lectures, to streamed video of NASA events, to walk/fly through models of spacecraft, planetary surfaces, and even the solar system. By having “human” avatars embedded in the virtual world it makes the experience easier to get into, and provides an instant set of scale. Check out the SciLands.

I’m sure there is even more out there with new media, but this is where I’m going to stop for today. What’s your favorite new media (and Heaven’s Above and Clear Sky calculator are old media in my book).

Limited access to information (and the decision to actually access that information) acts in many ways to divide our society. It takes money to get the cable and satellite news feeds. Prolonged access to online content – the type of access needed to hunt down links and read background material – takes money or the right job. Knowing how to access information takes education, which is another way of separating the haves from the have-nots. And sorting through digital, video, and audio content takes that most precious resource of all: time. It takes effort to be informed, and one must choose to know what is going on.

With time and access often limited, many people rely on the main stream media to tell them what they need to know in 30 minutes a night (30 minutes minus commercials, minus special interest topics, that is). It scares me sometimes how much a person can miss by not having the time or desire to spend a few minutes checking the headlines on the sidelines: Bird Flu is back, China shot down a satellite, cows are starving in heartland snows, and citrus is suffering in the Sonoma ice. Sure, a lot of it doesn’t affect me. To make informed stock decisions, I don’t need to know the Oscar picks, but in understanding today’s transportation sector, it helps to know new laws now govern travel to neighboring countries and Virgin America Air was a US no fly.

So knowledge is power. We all learned that from School House Rock, right? So how do we get people to seek knowledge? And more importantly, how do we get people to be informed critical and skeptical thinkers? I have ~ 70 channels on my cable TV. I can tune my content to almost any whim. I can self-select to have people carefully “prove” the paranormal, demonstrate the power of prayer 24 hours a day, and show me ways to solve all the worlds problems with little magnetic bracelets. I can also decide to have the MythBusters demonstrate the scientific method as they take on the urban legends and old wives tales of US society. To get people thinking critically, we scientists need to somehow make people want to spend their time watching us. We need to make what we do cool and trendy. We need to make people want to be skeptical and think. We must somehow make people want to invest the time and resources necessary to be informed.

And I see this happening. The Skep Chicks and Skep Dudes calendars are showing that critical thinkers can be sexy too. Sex sells. The media is also letting scientists be more than thick-glassed geeks. The scientists in Numbers and Bones aren’t always the most socially adroit individuals, but they are sexy.

Its a start. Laura McCullough, a physics professor at the University of Wisconsin – Stout, told me that part of getting women into science is showing them an environment in which they can (and want to) see themselves. I think this is true for anyone. By making the faces that portray scientists and who inform about different science fields a little more hip, a little more fun, and a lot more charismatic, perhaps we can inspire more people to follow us into the trenches of science. Perhaps we can inspire them to get informed and get skeptical and get online and get hip to what’s hot in Nature (or at least on their free podcast).