If buying $37 million worth of computers is Maine’s misguided flirtation with educational technology it’s going to be hard to hide those laptops in that big closet of stuff educators bought but never used. Rarely has an educational initiative generated such a maelstrom and understandably so – big bucks are at stake in a field with so many compelling needs and competing interests.

So what’s the opportunity in this storm of controversy?

This technology initiative creates a driver – a genuine force for change. This is something uncommon in education. We hear about the needs all the time: smaller class sizes, greater accountability and better facilities; yet the lack of deep and sustainable change in schools suggests that there are really very few genuine drivers for doing things differently.

The opportunity in the storm is the chance to answer the real question in this debate, which is: “What do we need to do differently in schools to take advantage of computers?”

The fusses about firewalls, pornography and games are the least of the problems. They are symptoms of a much bigger issue – a field (education) that does not really know what to do with information technology.

The bottom line is that education underutilizes promising technologies because it has been unable to use technology to truly serve what schools are all about – learning. Sure, teachers can get lesson plans on the web, kids will do lots of “gee whiz” projects with multi-media and we will all have email. This sounds great but it is simply automation; it will not transform the learning experience, nor will it yield the results we are all hoping for.

The book doesn’t get any better because you bought it on Amazon.com!

Why does education have such difficulty with technology? It’s all about Ambiguity. Ask 20 schools what they mean by learning and how to accelerate it and the chances are you will get 20 responses. This might not be a bad thing if each school told you about their toolbox of powerful teaching and learning techniques. However as numerous studies have found such a response would be rare, confined to a minority of teachers in each school at best.

Leading educational researcher, Michael Fullan, notes that when you ask the “what do you mean by learning” question in schools, the answers are frequently about vision, commitment, philosophy and concepts. These are all critical attributes for any successful school, yet they are a necessary but not sufficient condition to leverage the use of computers for more effective learning. Ask your doctor about how she will perform an endoscopy or an architectural engineer how the major supporting beams in your house were placed. They will respond with researched methods, techniques and strategy, not simply, vision, concepts and philosophy. In each case these professionals have powerful technologies at their disposal because their fields have clarified what they do.

To leverage technology you need more than a mission and a vision – you need a clear body of professional practice. You can’t build tools that will help teachers use effective teaching approaches, meet the needs of individual students and deploy powerful curriculum strategies with just a general philosophy or a concept of teaching and learning. Without clarity about what teachers do and how they do it educators are restricted to a “blunt instrument” approach adapting technologies from other fields to automate existing practice.

When learning technologies are built on a foundation of specific professional practice the outcome is truly marvelous! Teachers can have technology tools that help them to reach more students and teach more effectively. Students and parents can have tools that help put them in a learning partnership with teachers and schools. Technology can help make the immensely challenging task of teaching in this era doable. We desperately need it to do so given the overwhelmingly challenging job teaching has become.

If parents and teachers believed with confidence that adding computers to a school could result in clear and unambiguous academic and social growth, questions about fads and games and all the other “techno” hurdles would be placed in a very different context.

The catch: We have to get our educational house in order first. It would be much more poignant to read an editorial in this or any other paper where the headlines read:

“Teachers lose laptops – individual students suffer.”

“Student achievement at risk with technology cuts.”

“Home-school collaboration ends as plug pulled on software”

Headlines of this type would suggest that not only has a technology conversation been transformed into powerful learning solutions, but that schools have the capability to take genuine advantage of a powerful tool for learning.

The potential of Maine’s computer initiative will rise or fall on whether the technology hyperbole can rapidly evolve into a dialogue and then action about school improvement and reform. The true legacy of this storm could be missing a perfect opportunity to address the challenge of our time – creating more effective schools.

Make no mistake, computers are part of the solution; we just need to tell them what to do.

Alan Bain is the associate headmaster of Brewster Academy in Wolfeboro, N.H., and is the principal of The Endeavour Group, an international educational consulting practice. He has a decade of hands on experience in school reform and has worked extensively in school design in the United States and overseas in schools, systems, and for governments and industry, including Apple Computer.