Having just a few minutes ago finished William Gibson's latest, Pattern Recognition, in which the protagonist uses both a G4 Cube and an iBook in her travels through a wonderfully smart, readable, and resonant story (it's essentially a very sophisticated pulp thriller), I feel alert, alive, and good about the future. It's times like these when all seems right with the world, even if just for a few tasty late July moments.

Of course, to millions of young New Yorkers -- and millions of their kindred spirits around the country and world -- late July means it's almost August, and we all know what comes after August: Back to School. For me, back to school this year will mean back to working in a school full-time. I've accepted a job as Technology Coordinator at an elementary-level charter school up in Spanish Harlem. It's a great gig -- they've got good administration, good faculty, a technology plan that fits with and welcomes my vision of education, and generally speaking, a good thing happening. They also have one cart with 11 Windows laptops, no current technology staff (one of the finance guys did a great job now and then last year teaching the kids some things), and a big gaping desire-cum-need to get a technology program happening.

And, oh yeah, they've got little money to spend on hardware -- go figure. And in New York State, being a charter school exempts you from a lot of red tape, but it also exempts you from most funding opportunities afforded to "regular" public schools.

So my job officially starts just before Labor Day, but last week the school sent me up to Wakefield, MA to attend the 2003 Summer Insitute at a place called CAST. The Center For Applied Special Technology is perhaps most often associated with assistive technology for the physically and learning disabled. But CAST's philosophy of a Universal Design for Learning (UDL) extends well beyond helping those we traditionally think of as in "special need." UDL is a system of design principles engineered to leverage the flexible power of digital media to provide for multiple forms of access to learning materials to better suit the needs of all learners.

In other words, when the Gutenberg Printing Press was invented in the late 15th Century, a revolution began that eventually allowed for cheap, widespread dissemination of print materials. For the first time in history, the masses would have access to recorded information -- in written form. The Digital Revolution that is ramping up to full speed right now is extending that print paradigm of information transmittal into multimedia format. Text, imagery, audio, video, interactive rich media -- what we've begun to immerse ourselves in over the past decade is only the beginning of what's to come as bandwidth and computing power become cheaper, more plentiful, and increasingly mobile.

UDL grabs hold of digital multimedia and leverages it in the name of education. Some people react better to spoken words than to text on a page (or screen) -- maybe it's because they're visually impaired and so reading is physically difficult or impossible, or maybe it's because they process auditory information more readily than its visual counterpart. Same for imagery, still and moving. And rich media. And so on. UDL basically says, Why should we be confined to the printed word when technology affords us the chance for so much more at a relatively small cost? Technologies like Speech-to-Text make it easy for a learner to hear text read aloud. Digitized books can be formatted in HTML, distributed on the cheap via the Web, and displayed in scalable fonts (great for readers with impaired eyesight), read aloud via Speech-to-Text engines (also good for emerging readers, as many engines highlight words onscreen as the computer speaks them), or even automatically converted into audio files that can be burned to inexpensive CDs (think of an ESL student whose parents can't read to them at home in English -- now the stereo can ... think of yourself trying to learn a foreign language, for that matter -- many Speech-to-Text engines are multilingual nowadays).

UDL doesn't encourage anyone to sacrifice print literacy in favor of anything else. It's still important to learn to read and write as best you're able. But when it comes to teaching social studies, or math, or how to understand information of most any kind, people who have trouble decoding the written word need not be labelled as deficient thinkers just beacuse they struggle with print. CAST understands it, and UDL is a great place from which to start thinking about the joint roles of digital media and instructional design in education.

(Shameless self-promotion: You can read my in-depth thoughts on the matter in my forthcoming book on educational technology, to be published by Scarecrow Education early next year. Email me for more information.)

I learned a lot in my three days at CAST. I learned some about what "Special Ed" really means in our schools, I learned some new ways to use Microsoft Word to help teach the difference between verbs and nouns, and I learned a lot about three of my new colleagues I'm excited to be working with starting in a month or so. I also learned a little more about why Apple's once solid grip on the educational market is no more.

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