education revolution in Russia, second year has 10,000 free dual screen E-OK tablets in 300 schools in 40 regions, Alexander Evgenievich Shustorovich, billionaire from Russia raised in USA, Wired.co.uk, James Silver: Rich Murray 2012.02.27
"An American national, who divides his time between Moscow and New York, Shustorovich reveals that, in the project's second year, there are currently about 10,000 tablets in almost 300 schools in more than 40 Russian regions. "And that's a very minimal number," he says. [ also a school test in China... ]" http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2012/03/features/classroom-disruptor?page=all Classroom Disruptor: the proprietary tablet PC that's changing Russian schools By James Silver 24 February 2012 Comments 1 This article was taken from the March 2012 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online. School number 1409 lies about ten kilometres north of Moscow city centre, in an exclusive enclave of gated communities. Through the rain-spattered windscreen, designer apartment buildings loom like an architect's brainstorm. One block of flats is shaped like a ship's sails. Another resembles industrial chimneys. A third, a crossword puzzle. The school overlooks the vast expanse of a disused military airfield. We pull up at a security checkpoint by the gates. Under the gun-metal Moscow skies, the building leaps out with its jumble of yellow and green façades, horizontal grey stripes and deeper grey zigzags. School 1409 is part of a hugely ambitious experiment devised by Alexander Evgenievich Shustorovich, a hugely wealthy Moscow-born entrepreneur with top-level political connections in both Russia and the US. On the surface, Shustorovich's project is a public-spirited attempt to bring Russia's education system into the digital era. In the 2010-11 academic year, around 300 year-six pupils from 11 schools in cities across Russia, from well-heeled Moscow to the rural Siberian city of Tomsk and the mining stronghold of Magnitogorsk, were loaned a portable hybrid e-book and tablet computer with which to learn, do their homework, revise for exams and -- soon -- order lunch from the school cafeteria. But this isn't solely a social experiment. Shustorovich, 45, wants to create Russia's next platform for digital interactions, one that his business controls. With every keystroke and swipe on his devices, he is building a giant real-time spreadsheet of personal data. Once millions of teenagers get used to learning, interacting and connecting via Shustorovich's proprietary system, then what need will this and future generations have for social networks such as Facebook? "Facebook is Facebook," he says. "But adding a social network on top of the [educational platform] will be very easy." The project is known as "elektronnij obrazovatelnij komplex" or E-OK, which translated literally means "electronic educational system". E-OK itself refers to the group of patents the company behind the scheme has secured in Russia (pending elsewhere) for cloud-based educational services. The devices used in the experiment were designed and built by the now-defunct enTourage Systems, based in McLean, Virginia, and marketed as enTourage eDGe -- "the world's first dualbook". Designed to be kid-proof, the device features interconnected dual touchscreens that open and shut like a book. The right-hand screen is a touch- or stylus-sensitive e-ink display for reading and writing, and the other is a colour LCD touchscreen for web access and video viewing. Its operating system is Linux with Google Android. Unlike other electronic classroom aids, E-OK isn't designed merely to complement books and desktop PCs, but to replace everything a pupil uses to study. Connected wirelessly (and soon via 4G) to the school's year-six and -seven curricula -- with years five and eight due to be added shortly -- the devices aim to reboot how children learn, teachers teach and principals run schools. By gathering data from classroom test scores, exam results and attendance records alongside statistics from mandatory school medical checks and even food ordered by the catering staff, the system creates a real-time data chain which loops from individual schools, through regional hubs, to the Ministry of Education -- right up to the Kremlin. Last June, prime minister Vladimir Putin signed a directive ordering Russia's ministers of education and communications to evaluate and report to him personally. Both ministers have since reported back "favourably", says Shustorovich, speaking in support of E-OK's implementation in schools. 6C's teacher, Irene Razuvaeva, introduces Sergei, father to Anastasia, one of her students. The device enables parents to monitor all of their child's in-class activities, from test scores to pages or videos viewed. "You have control," says Sergei, through a translator. "Also, the device has a video camera and microphone, so if my daughter is ill she can do her lessons at home." Provided free of charge at this trial stage, the device has proved an easy sell to schools. Not only do teachers have a digital tool for registration and marking but, in mixed-ability classrooms, pupils can move through the curriculum at varying speeds. The technology is already changing the way Irina Ilyicheva, 1409's head teacher, manages her school. The trial has shown her the project's huge potential: "The information flows from the child, to the teacher, to me and all the way to the district prefect." [ ...much more ] .....Shustorovich moved to the US with his parents, both scientists, when he was ten. His mother, Maria, was professor of mathematics at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf in Rochester, New York, where she was a specialist in the use of technology for learning. His father, Evgeny, was a chemistry professor at Cornell University. Shustorovich pulled off the stunning hat trick of earning a BA, a Juris Doctor degree and an MBA from Harvard University, Harvard Law School and Harvard Business School respectively. He built up a science publishing business while in his early twenties that made him a multimillionaire. But even that pales beside the role he played in a deal that The Moscow Times described as "the deal of the century, a harbinger of disarmament and the end of the Cold War". There is no better insight into Shustorovich's instinct for deal-making than his ability to cultivate, while still in his twenties, top-level contacts among US Republicans during the first Bush administration. This allowed him to become a pivotal player in the Megatons to Megawatts programme -- an $8 billion (£4.9 billion), 20-year agreement, signed in 1993, in which highly enriched or bomb-grade uranium (HEU) from decommissioned Russian nuc-lear warheads is being recycled into low enriched uranium (LEU) to produce fuel for civilian US reactors. Shustarovich moved in conservative political circles as his science publishing business started to grow, meeting a range of highly influential Republicans, including Max Kampelman, formerly chief arms talks negotiator for President Reagan. It was through contacts like these that the publisher became involved in Megatons to Megawatts. He says Kampelman brought the idea to his attention but "didn't have a way of getting it across to the Russians". He continues: "Max had the support of a lot of US companies as well as the government behind him. He and I brainstormed and I came to Russia and got everyone here, from the ministers, through all the bureaucracy, up to the president, behind [the deal]." .....An American national, who divides his time between Moscow and New York, Shustorovich reveals that, in the project's second year, there are currently about 10,000 tablets in almost 300 schools in more than 40 Russian regions. "And that's a very minimal number," he says. [ also a school test in China... ] Ultimately he intends that every child in Russia's 50,000 secondary schools -- some 16.5 million -- will have their own tablet. "[The situation's] so fluid right now. But if we continue to get the sort of traction we're getting, eventually we'll be in every school in the country." E-OK grew out of Shustorovich's core science publishing business -- New York-registered Pleiades Publishing Inc and its 11 subsidiaries including Akademija/Uchebnik, the division responsible for the project. The group is now the world's largest publisher of English- and Russian-language science books, journals and other education materials from the former Soviet Union, China and Japan. Pleiades publishes 2,000 scientific journals in Russian and the results of much of Russia's domestic scientific research in 200 English-language journals. With partner Springer Science + Business Media, the group has been distributing journals electronically since 2005 (and independently since 2003), and building an interactive and social-networking engine for university students at elibrary.ru. Shustorovich says that this laid the groundwork for the schools project. "We had three aptitudes which made us unique players," he explains. "A long history of being conversant with technology, because we produced a huge volume of scientific information. Second, we had the experience with dealing with internet products in a financial way -- our electronic sales of scientific journals and information for universities is in the high-nineties per cent [of overall sales]. And the third was that we knew how to develop school curricula.".....
