This year's annual conference of the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN) in San Francisco has had a decidedly international feel to it, highlighted by a closing general session on March 30 examining what might be the world's largest effort to transform instruction through the use of technology on a national scale in Great Britain.

In a session titled "Personalization and the U.K.'s Whole-School Reform Effort," Doug Brown, head of learning technologies for the U.K.'s Department of Education and Skills, described the scope of these efforts and the vision behind them.

The U.K. has pumped a tremendous amount of funding into educational technology over the last 10 years, Brown said. It now spends the equivalent of $1.5 billion a year on school technology alone for its 9 million students--and this figure is growing at a rate of about 5 percent, per year. The country also has made a push to install interactive whiteboards in its school, and though the decision to participate is left to each institution, the devices are now in more than 50 percent of the nation's classrooms.

By 2008, the country's goal is to have all schools using learning platforms, all students using personalized learning spaces, and "universal access" to technology, wherever and whenever students need it, Brown said. That could include laptops, personal digital assistants, Sony PlayStation Portables, tablet computers, or whatever technologies school leaders choose.

The goal of these initiatives is to personalize instruction, Brown explained, adding: "One size fits all isn't going to work."

Sir Michael Barber, a consultant on global public-sector practice and former head of the British Prime Minister's Delivery Unit, was the original architect of Great Britain's school-reform movement, which provides the context for that nation's ed-tech initiatives.

Barber addressed the conference in a pre-recorded video, saying, "Change will only happen if it is placed in the context of whole-school reform." It also will happen only if education leaders combine pressure with support, he noted.

Toward that end, high-quality leadership is key. Brown acknowledged that education officials made a mistake when their initial push to train teachers in the use of technology to improve learning didn't include training for school principals; that has since been rectified, he said.

How are these reform efforts working? There is some evidence that achievement gaps have been narrowed, Brown said, and literacy rates in the elementary schools are on the rise--but there is still much more work to be done.

'A new kind of conversation'

The "British invasion" at this year's CoSN conference wasn't limited to a discussion of that country's revolutionary school reform program.

Earlier in the show, Jean Johnson, project director of the UK's Notschools.net, showcased her project's efforts to re-engage students who have dropped out of the traditional school system through an asynchronous, online learning community that she referred to as "the absolute antithesis of what school is." (See story: http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/showStoryts.cfm?ArticleID=6959.)