INTERVIEW:
Question 1
What educational projects is Apple currently working on?
Answer
In education, Apple Computer believes that the successful use of technology is about much
more than just computers. So we sell hundreds of thousands of computers to US schools
every year but we also sell lots of software, educational software, multimedia software,
Internet-based software. We sell training and staff development as well as professional
services to make the installation of the computer successful in schools. I'm responsible
for all of those other "solutions and services", as well call them. There are
about 116,000 US schools in the K-12 (kindergarten to 12th grade) marketplace in the
United States. Apple Computers sells computers to every one of those schools. Almost every
school in the United States has at least one Apple computer. Many of them have thousands
and thousands of computers. Apple calls directly on those schools with salespeople. We
have over 700 people across the United States, and we work with many other companies and
third parties to sell our products, and our solutions, and our services. We sell directly
to the schools and we advertise directly to the schools. Schools pick up the telephone and
they call Apple, they ask for advice and consulting service, and we provide them
information about our products, about how to use technology in the schools. Then they
place and order and send it directly to Apple Computer. They don't go to another reseller
or any place else. That is a direct business for us. The advantage of that for Apple is
that first we get to deliver the lowest price to US schools, our absolute lowest price of
any of our customers in the United States is offered to our schools. And secondly, we have
a direct relationship with our customers, so when they are upset, they call us up and they
tell us. When they're happy, they call us up and they tell us too. So we have with our
direct business the ability to provide low-cast solutions as well as have a direct
relationship with our customers. What we also do is we provide a unique set of products to
our K-12 customers. Our all-in-one computer has the speakers and the microphone built in,
because schoolchildren tend to knock the speakers off the desk or they lose the
microphone. So we pioneered having a built-in set of speakers and a built-in microphone.
We pioneered having a monitor that tilts and swivels, because some of the children are
short in kindergarten and first grade, and some of the children are taller in middle
schools and high schools. So many products like that we've built specifically just for
schoolchildren. Our E-mate 300 was designed specifically with the input of K-12 teachers,
students, principals and administrators. So to make a long story short, we have a very
unique business in the United States around our K-12 customers in that it is a direct
business with a product line specifically designed for K-12 customers. We sell not just
the computers they need but also the software, the installation services, the consulting
service, and the training, so that they can integrate the technology into their
curriculum.
Question 2
Apple Computer invented the icon interface. What's the future for this type of interface?
Answer
If you want details on the interface of the future, you'll have to ask Steve Jobs. What we
know is that Apple invented the graphic user interface. Apple invented the concept of
computers that are easy to use. You could look towards areas like voice recognition for
the future, where you simply talk to the computer and the computer calls up the program
that you want, as possible areas of development. But you can be assured that Apple
Computer will be building interfaces specifically for the needs of the students and
teachers in US schools and around the world, for that matter, that will be easier to use,
to set up, to install and to service and to support and take care of, easier to network
and do all the things that you have to do to make technology successful at school.
Question 3
I'd like your opinion about information for children and teachers. What do we need to do
to enable someone to use a computer? Are there different programs written for teachers?
Answer
President Clinton made an announcement in 1996 - his Technology Literacy Challenge - where
he challenged the teachers, administrators and business people of the United States to
make technology in schools more successful than it has been in the past. He talked about
four "C's". His four "C's" were: first computers, and he said we were
doing a pretty good job with computers - Apple and IBM and Dell and the others sell
hundreds of thousands of computers . The second "C" was content: we're not doing
so well at getting multimedia, robust-rich content into our schools. Much of the software
that's used is the old "drill and kill" practice software, which is important
for rote memorization but it doesn't move us into the area of content creation, publishing
on the Internet, and that sort of thing. So President Clinton's second pillar, as he
referred to it, was multimedia, robust, full content. The third "C" is
connectivity and that refers to the Internet. President Clinton challenged American
schools to provide Internet access to every classroom in the United States, as well as to
the homes of the United States. The fourth "C" is the most important: competency
or development and training of the teachers to take advantage of the technology that they
have in the classroom. If you have computers, connectivity ,and multimedia content, you
still need competency on the part of the teachers, the educators. In many classrooms
across the United States the students are more adept and used to technology than the
teachers. We need to spend a lot more time bringing up the capabilities and the competency
of our teachers to teach them how to integrate the technology into what they do on a daily
basis, so that when they're teaching creative writing the technology and the computers are
there as part of the class. When they're teaching mathematics, they're using multimedia
geometry software to teach mathematics, when they're teaching publishing, it's not just
the publishing of a newspaper but it's publishing to the WWW and showing the content and
the capabilities of the students on the WWW. Many of our teachers are not able to teach
the kinds of skills that we need. Apple Computer plays a significant role in helping
teachers, through our staff development courses, create knowledge workers of the 21st
century. Those are students who can publish to the Web, create multimedia output, use
communications and collaboration software over the Internet, and have the skills that they
need in order to be successful in the 21st century.
Question 4
How is the Internet involved in the project of education and educating students for the
future? What's the relationship between education and the Internet?
Answer
The question of objectionable content is a very sensitive one. Apple has no total position
on this subject. We believe it is up to every school district to create their own
policies. Some school districts believe that it's important to have no censorship and
access to all information on the Web. Obviously, in that kind of situation parental or
teacher supervision is very important. Other schools believe that there is a role for
filtering software that allows Web pages to be held together in the school and only a
certain set of Web pages to be accessed by the students. One of the things we're working
on at Apple we call the Learning Interchange. That is a set of educational content Web
pages or home pages, an intranet, if you will, an educational intranet that collects all
the best educational content and curriculum on the Internet and leaves it in a protected
area on the Internet where students can access it without the concerns of the other
objectionable material on the Web. Overall, the Internet is becoming a critical piece of
US education. The access to information from the Library of Congress, to NASA, to all the
great universities and libraries around the world, the great art treasures of Italy over
the Internet is becoming available now to every student in every small community around
the world. That changes how education is conducted, that fundamentally changes how
learning and teaching take place in every classroom. The challenge is to teach the
teachers, to help teachers to integrate that information access, into their curriculum.
The Internet also provides great opportunities for collaboration around the world, so that
students in Washington, DC can collaborate over the Internet with students in Rome. Given
the language problems, we would have to deal with that, but there's no reason now why
world-wide collaborative education projects cannot involve students from around the world,
and in many cases actually do. So information access, collaboration across the Internet,
these are ways that students are preparing for a 21st century world that really is nothing
like we had when we were growing up.
Question 5
Girls are usually less attracted to computers. Do you think we need a different project to
attract girls?
Answer
That is a really complicated topic. Most of the data shows that boys tend to be more
attracted to computers. They use the Internet differently, they are attracted to some
software more than girls are. What has been taking place over the last year or two in the
United States is a booming industry for girls. I have a ten-year old daughter, as a matter
of fact, who uses the computer quite a bit, but there are new educational software
companies that are growing up that are specifically targeting girls as a submarket that
has not been spoken to directly in the past, whereas boys have lots of shoot'em up games
and more active kinds of games. Different kinds of software and different kinds of
computer usage appeal to girls. I don't think the industry has been as successful at
finding those software packages and those artifacts of technology to attract girls as well
as they have done with boys. It's a different market so it needs to be addressed
differently in some ways and lots of exciting new companies are beginning to do that and
are finding a very good return on their investment by doing that. Purple Moon is one of
the more successful girls' software companies that I'm very familiar with. In fact, my
daughter has asked for some of their software for Christmas.
Question 6
Do you have any special projects for the mentally impaired and the handicapped?
Answer
Apple has been committed to providing software/hardware technology to people with various
disabilities from the beginning of our history. Apple is one of the largest suppliers of
educational software to US schools right now through our "solution bundles". We
have about fifteen different software packages with middle school math or high school
science or first and second grade language and literacy. In every one of those software
bundles we provide an extra set of tools specifically for teachers of students with
disabilities, so that if a disabled student is in a high school mathematics class, for
example, and the teacher buys Apple computers with Apple software for it, the teacher
finds within that package special instructions and special curriculum specifically
designed for children with disabilities around teaching of mathematics; the same thing
with science programs that we offer, or language and literacy programs that we offer also.
Question 7
Is there any project for distance learning?
Answer
The topic of distance learning is a very hot topic right now, especially with the
Internet, as you can imagine. The need for remote learning and distance learning has been
with us for some time but now that almost any home in the United States has access to the
Internet, the possibilities are growing. The Learning Interchange , the education
intranet, is an opportunity for us to provide learning materials, teaching materials,
content and curriculum to any student no matter how remote they might be from an expert or
an expert teacher. So for example if I am a teacher in a small town and I don't have
access to scientists from NASA, the National Association of Space and Aeronautics, I can
go on the Internet and bring that expert to my students in a small town in Montana who
would never have access to that sort of teacher before. Home learning is a very big growth
area in the United States: more and more parents are making the decision to teach their
children at home, to take them out of the school system. The father may go off to work and
the mother stays home and teaches the students. It's perfectly legal. Collaborating over
the Internet and communicating with experts and accessing expert information and great
works of art, will only stimulate more and more home learning and distance learning
opportunities.
Question 8
There are a lot of people who cannot afford a computer or the right software. Is there any
special project for giving the same opportunity to everyone?
Answer
Apple has been committed to providing the lowest cost computers to education since Steve
Jobs and Steve Woszniak founded the company twenty years ago. We've always provided the
absolute lowest cost to schools because we wanted pervasive computing in as many
classrooms and computers as we could around the world. Over the last year Apple has been
taking the lead in driving the cost down even further with our E-Mate 300, which is a
low-cost mobile computer that we sell in the United States for less than US$700. It is a
computer that is small and lightweight; it's three and a half pounds. We also sell it in
Europe. We sell it world-wide to schools. It has within it word processing, spreadsheet,
e-mail, Internet access, Web browsing capabilities. It doesn't have a full multimedia
robustness that a desktop computer has but then, it costs less than US$700 in the United
States. So our intent is to build the best products we can that meet the needs of the
largest possible audience at the lowest possible price for K-12 schoolchildren around the
world. Let's talk about the Power of Ten for a moment. This is a program that was
introduced into the United States recently and we may well expand it to other countries.
The idea is to tap into the parents of the United States who may well be buying computers
for the Christmas season, for example. If a parent or a community member buys a computer,
this holiday season in the United States, they can designate a specific school to which
their children might go or, if they don't have children, to a local school. Apple Computer
will donate ten percent of the cost of that computer that these people have bought to that
school. So that school, if they accumulate enough dollars, can go and order computers or
printers or any other products from Apple Computer.
Question 9
Do you want to add some new projects for 1998?
Answer
I think that the most important thing that you have to understand about Apple Computer and
education is that Apple thinks different. Apple thinks different about education and about
technology and education. Whereas many computer companies simply sell computers to
schools, Apple Computer thinks differently about the way teachers and students use
technology in schools. We think about the content, the software, the Internet access, the
networking capabilities, as well as the staff development and the training that has to go
along with it to make this a successful experience in the schools. Apple is first and
foremost an education company. Education is a very big part of Apple's business and it
always has been and it always will be, because we work directly with the schools, we
listen to those customers, and we understand that those education customers are very
different than business customers or people in homes. They have very different needs. And
we treat the education customers differently, we build different products for them, we
offer them different services, and we market and sell to them differently too.
|
 |
