As senior vice president for Turner Educational Services, Gary Rowe
occupies an office at the heart of Turner Broadcasting, in the CNN tower
in Atlanta. Rowe guided Turner Broadcasting's 1989 launch of "CNN
Newsroom," a daily news program designed for schools, and he directs the
creation of video publishing ventures and new products and services for
television and emerging technologies to serve schools and libraries. In
1991, he led the launch of Turner MultiMedia, a video distribution and
development arm of Turner Educational Services.
Asked to talk about himself, Gary Rowe parries the subject: "To
talk about myself is to talk about Turner Broadcasting, because that's
what interests me. What is fascinating about Turner Broadcasting is the
way it's open to redefining what it is. I deliberately want to focus on
the word 'broadcasting' here, because when my career started,
broadcasting was all there was. We concentrated on accumulating as big
an audience as possible around a particular television event, and the
world was limited to only a few channels. But Turner Broadcasting's
business is both in the old broadcasting world and in the new, emerging
narrowcasting one."
Rowe has a clear idea of what the new, narrowcasting world will
look like: "What we believe is emerging is the possibility for viewers
to be more in charge of their own programming than ever before.
Certainly that is what narrowcasting has begun to do. Someone was saying
here the other day that if you had done focus groups to test the 24-hour
news network in 1980, it would have failed. Nobody wants to watch the
news all day long!
"But that wasn't the point, and no one got the point, because we
had never been accustomed to thinking about news in a different way--as
a sort of on-demand service.
"CNN is still limited because we do all the page-turning: you have
to wait until the story you are seeing now is over before you can get
another one. With the new interactive technology coming along, we are
beginning to address the possibility that people will be their own
newscaster, their own news director, and the like--not only in the kind
of on-demand, news-whenever-I- want-it way, but watching it my way,
whenever I want it. If I want to see political news or international
news or last night's sports scores, I can call it up."
Will narrowcasting shrink our daily intake of information?
"The printing press didn't make us narrower, so why should
television? In fact, the printing press has made a wider range of
information available to more and more people. Television, I think, will
only magnify that.
"Robert Lewis Shayon, of the University of Pennsylvania, back when
he was television critic for Saturday Review, gave a fascinating lecture
in which he compared the growth of television with the growth of library
circulation, number of daily newspapers (which we think is going down
but which is actually going up), growth of book sales, number of
different magazine titles, and so on. In other words, he would argue
that television increases the appetite and the curiosity--sort of the
'arousal'--that sent more people in search of information. I think
television now has that capability in ways it never had before, although
we are . . . at the mystical head end of this opportunity that will
allow people to be their own publishers of mediated information, and
nowhere is that going to happen more dramatically than in the schools.
That's probably the first place it will take hold."
When asked to differentiate between the "CNN Newsroom" and
Whittle's "Channel One" approaches to providing programming for the
classroom, Rowe maintains there's no comparison. "We say it is comparing
apples to oranges because Whittle's approach is the old broadcast model:
we'll make decisions at headquarters, we'll send it to you, you'll sit
down, you'll watch it in the linear way from start to finish, and that's
that--whether it means anything or not.
"On the other hand, our model is: here is a service; you can
conform it to your own needs, because our expectation is not that anyone
is required to view this program or required to use it in a linear way.
It is a resource--images--and if a teacher wants to use a single freeze
frame as the centerpiece for a lesson, that's fine with us. If the
teacher wants to time-shift a science report to next semester, that's
fine too. It becomes a way of seeing television as a user-based utility
for the instructional process of the school.
Of course, not all teachers are using it that way yet, Rowe notes.
Predictably, many teachers are still stuck in a traditional mind-set
about how to use television in the classroom. CNN is tackling the
problem at the grassroots level.
"We assembled the first members of what we're calling the CNN
Newsroom National Faculty. They are teachers who have become
enthusiasts, and we want to encourage them to become our representatives
at teacher conferences, state and regional conventions, and so on. We
feel that our job is best done when we collaborate with educators and
let teachers do the talking rather than us television people. These
people have, to a person, affirmed this kind of highly interactive
model, even though the interaction now is just a remote-controlled VCR,
not a computer, not the kind of sophisticated interaction we are aiming
for."
When asked about television's role in the schools of the future,
Rowe is optimistic: "I think that we will see television have a new
place in the school instructional process--a primary place, not a
secondary or supplemental one--and it won't be instructional TV the way
it's been around for many years now, like PBS and so forth, which really
does not give much control to the person in the classroom.
"The television screen, as image-based information, can be in a
sense, we believe, a replacement for the textbook. Now it's not that
anybody is out to dethrone the textbook, but the fact is that the
textbook is an increasingly defective tool. You can't add anything new
to it. It's out-of-date before it leaves the bindery. It requires that
learning take place in the confinement of silent reading. It does not
simulate or emulate reality very well. It is not very interactive. It's
a fairly good, cheap way to transfer information from one generation to
another, but it's missing all kinds of things for which people are now
perceiving a need.
"When Germany changes, we need the map today, not during the next
textbook adoption cycle. We know science is changing daily, weekly. You
can't be stuck with textbooks that are eight years old, and I think
television is playing an increasingly important role in conveying the
images of the world in very timely ways to update what's going on in the
schoolroom. We could also use the tremendous wealth of content that has
been built up over the years. Lots of it is junk, or 'bubble gum for the
mind,' as someone has said. But we have just done one on Gettysburg
that's historically authentic and could portray to a young student in
the classroom a sense of what it was like to be in that time and place.
"We also have an extraordinary amount of science material, some of
it going way back to the 1930s and 40s in the MGM archives. They did all
kinds of short subjects in those years, which we'd like to bring out of
the vaults and perhaps configure for teaching purposes.
"Now I want to add a qualifier here, because I don't mean to say
that television can be a substitute for the book. The new book, whatever
its binding--it may be an electronic binding or one that's composed of a
disk or plastic like a CD-ROM--will still have lots of text to go with
the images, because the images cannot convey a lot of the information
that a student needs to have. They provoke, arouse, dramatize, simulate,
and so forth, but images don't contain all the data that we need. But
this new textbook--whatever it is--instead of being 800 pages long, will
be 80,000 pages. So we think, as we look ahead, this new combination of
resources is going to be a central component of learning in the
schools."
Asked his opinion on the premise behind Lewis J. Perelman's
provocative book School's Out, which insists that conventional education
is obsolete, Rowe remarks, "I think he's onto some important and
creative ideas. I also think that the capacity of institutions to defend
themselves by adapting to new realities is something he underestimates.
We can't imagine, for instance, a world in which it is absolutely
unnecessary for . . . children to get on a school bus and go to a
central place to learn, if they can stay at home and learn over a wire,
a connection, using computers and satellites and whatever the new
technologies might be. We may discover that there are other reasons why
children may need to get together."
So, is today's curriculum "dumbed down" to accommodate the lowest
common denominator of student?
"I think kids are smarter in an entirely different way from the way
they used to be. I can't prove that, but I think we've, as a society,
begun to think in broader terms. Howard Gardner used to say that there
are several different kinds of intelligence.
"My generation may be the last to be predominantly verbal, to have
a strong visceral affection for books. We need a new kind of literacy
now to navigate in this new world as human beings. I remember a
professor at the Annenberg School, at a conference, said, 'We need to
create a generation of children who are able to perceive, decode,
understand, and use iconic information.'
"A case in point: We are facing a legislative battle of almost
unparalleled proportions in the Congress that's going to affect
everyone: health reform. And what we have seen in recent months is a
kind of news coverage that only strings anecdotes together. It does not
go beyond that. There's no thoughtful analysis on television. There's
almost an assumption that a string of anecdotes creates truth, which is
as wrongheaded and illogical as you can possibly get.
"Should we change the entire structure of what we call the industry
of health care, or the social structure of how we maintain our health,
because we are swept away by this notion that, gee whiz, my poor Aunt
Minnie is dying of cancer and the government ought to do something about
it? There's a kind of disjunction between what we communicate and how we
understand it as human beings--how we decode it.
"And God help us if our children don't learn, in the ways we did,
about the capacity of media to manipulate, to persuade, to falsify, and
to tell the truth. It's not one or the other; it's a critical challenge.
And I think we are just beginning to see the first glimmer of
understanding that it's something that belongs in our educational
system. It's something we need to take seriously."