Printable Biography of Randy J. Hinrichs

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 First, I would like to thank you for inviting me to share our vision for next generation education. I am honored to take part in this conversation. More importantly, let me congratulate you for focusing on web-based education, as advances in learning science and technology are creating a great opportunity for enhancing the learning experience for lifelong learners. We support this national inquiry to help shape the policy recommendations that can enable the educational promise of the World Wide Web.

Our nation’s continuing economic leadership depends on maintaining and building a high-quality, educated workforce. Yet, the demand for post-secondary education in science, math, engineering and technology is outpacing our capability. Advances in information technology and learning science can make learning better, cheaper, faster and more motivational. In the absence of a sustained collaborative effort by teaching institutions, government and the private sector, these benefits will come too slowly. These efforts need to reach millions of learners, continuously improving over 10 to 20 years. They have to be systemic and open, transforming all aspects of learning, including integrated business processes.

It’s important to envision new learning environments that provide richer, more immersive, interactive content than possible before. We envision lifelong learners all reaping the benefits of powerful software providing authentic multi-dimensional measures of a learner’s mastery and equal measures of a teacher’s delivery. We need to build educational infrastructures that link people to people, offering better communication and interactions, better collaboration and exploration of rich content, and better achievement and assessment between learners, teachers, parents, employers, and support institutions.

Bill Gates recently presented testimony to the Joint Economic Committee outlining our Connected Learning Community vision and our commitment to teacher education, tools for schools, and programs that support transformations in education.

For example, on Monday of this week at Secretary of Education Richard Riley’s National Conference on Educational Technology, we released the third-year results of our Anytime Anywhere Learning research which finds that students who have full-time access to laptop computers at school and at home are better students and that their teachers are changing their teaching practices and becoming more confident in their classrooms. And, this evening, we are hosting a parent night for Microsoft’s Washington2Washington project, which connects the SEED Public Charter School in Washington, D.C., with Sequoia Junior High School in Kent, Wash., for a year of interactive, technology-enhanced Web-based learning experiences, which we also will evaluate.

In Microsoft Research, we are significantly investing our research in learning technology with many universities experimenting with new pedagogy and with next generation learning environments. We are designing a globally distributed computer science classroom with top schools; we are working with industry, government and universities to explore solutions to dramatically accelerate advanced research in learning science and technology education. We are dedicating a portion of our research efforts to discovering new user experiences, where language, vision, artificial intelligence, multimedia, collaboration and hardware innovations empower learners.

But this is simply not enough. If we want our social infrastructures to evolve as quickly as our digital infrastructures, we need to expand these efforts on a national scale, if not on a global scale. We need both the government and industry to implement a grand challenge-style research effort in learning science and technology that will allow us to work together to take on this challenge by devoting sufficient resources and manpower to make this transformation a reality.

Part of the answer to transforming education with technology is to entice the learners and teachers into Web-based environments supporting embedded continuous assessment, interactive tools, innovative hardware and software, sound pedagogy, exemplar content, and stellar learning management. I emphasize the creation of virtual, visualized spaces where all the participants can work together in sustained environments such as: Physics World, Biology World, Computer Science World, because I’ve seen a generation of children fall in love with rich, unprecedented interactive environments. I’ve seen the joy of discovery and learning by apprenticeship and mentorship in massive multiplayer action environments. I’ve seen the speed at which children move flexibly in these environments, learning at the speed of thought.

Building upon our own technologies, our programs, partners, and our research, we at Microsoft look forward to working with you to enable web-based education where all learners have the same opportunities and access, where no one is left behind and no teacher is unprepared. Together we are rising to these challenges. These are truly amazing times, of limitless possibilities, - and the best is yet to come.