Going from education, both as a student and a teacher, directly into the education technology space has been eye-opening. I work in an entrepreneurial incubator in the heart of Silicon Valley, surrounded by unbelievable technologists from the hottest tech startups in San Francisco. Out of the 20-plus companies launching amazing products, the one for which I work is the only one completely vested in education.
Techies do care about education. I would like to believe that at the core, everyone does. Bill Gates and George Lucas have been harbingers in initiating collaborations among educators, technologists and the media. Education news and updates often make their way into Hacker News, a forum for up-voting the latest start-up and tech news, demonstrating a general interest among the world of developers and entrepreneurs in education, but as Rafael Corrales notes, "the same exact content from 2-3 months ago reappears and gets pushed up to the front of the Hacker News community (and other online tech communities)."
Perhaps tech communities are becoming increasingly aware of the possibilities or happenings in the ed space, but what is lacking is a real drive among developers to change the status quo of education. Sifting through a few ed tech articles shows that technologists care a bit, but it does not mean they will apply themselves toward creating amazing products for schools.
Among educators and pundits, there seems to be a general sentiment that educational innovations should stem primarily from the education world. Here's one example from a recent tweet via @bryanwb:
"@learnboost looks like a neat tool, only thing worrying is that only person w/ edu experience at bottom of list of exec bios."
One of the fundamental issues that I have noticed when tech efforts come from ed-specific initiatives (as opposed to ed solutions coming from high-powered tech companies) is that people with little experience with tech see "Technology" as a panacea to problems in education. They aptly notice students engaging in virtual social networks outside of the classroom and jump on the idea of bringing it into the classroom. I have had professors that set up clunky chat room sessions when an in-class discussion would have benefited everyone involved tenfold -- all because they were trying to prove their savviness. To me, the tech solutions in academia resound very much like one's parents saying they are "jive with all the hip computer apps," trying hard, and even if completely appropriate, still awkward.
If there is any money in education right now, it's in ed tech. Government subsidized grants and privately funded awards for innovation outshine funding for individual academic and social projects. This may be because a thriving nonprofit academic support network already exists, whereas big donors notice a disconnect between technological advancements at large and those in education. In other words, it's easier to give large sums if there are relatively few innovators in a market. Especially when huge amounts of money are being allocated for forward-thinking ed tech products, we must keep in mind the basic law of comparative advantage: we want superb technologists working on technology (in education). We do not want education playing catchup with tech industry leaders, making shoddy replicas of influential, seemingly flawless tech.
As we move forward, the question to ask ourselves should not be "how many education companies are innovating on technology?" but rather "how many technology companies are innovating in education?" Only when framed appropriately can we begin to brainstorm ways to draw more innovators into the educational world.
Follow Meredith Ely on Twitter: www.twitter.com/@LearnBoost
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The failure is not the technology, but how it is used. In 8 years of doing this, I have discovered that the best approach is to start with low tech AND repeat the measurements with high tech.
Low tech forces you to use your brain. I mean, if the only things at your disposal are a stopwatch, a pencil and a piece of paper, you are forced to think about what you are doing. This is the foundation of learning. Simplicity. The High Tech stuff can then be used to tell the students "look there is more that can be done with fancy equipment".
Over reliance and misuse of technology is destroying the meaning of education. A professor of mine made a comment in class about being forced to use technology by the university. To satisfy requirements, he turned ON/OFF the projector and went back to the chalk board. Best class I have ever taken.
To round it off, I don't think the problem is between educationists and technologists. It runs far deeper.
On another topic, I learned a lesson early in my career that I never forgot. Sometimes it takes someone from the outside, someone with a completely different perspective, to come up with the novel ideas needed to really change things. I worked in technology and my boss hired a divinity student (good grief!) over the objections of everyone in the department. He turned out to be fabulous at the job, once he knuckled down and learned what he was doing, and brought fresh ideas that the rest of would never have considered. It changed all of us. As Kurt Vonnegut said in Player Piano, "you see all kinds of things from the outside that you cannot see from the middle."
Yes, most of the heavy hauling will be done by professional educators. But don't think for a second that someone from a completely different field has nothing of value to contribute. This is no time for turf guarding.
It's extremely rare to find this in an individual or within a single organization, so the question of whether its "how many education companies are innovating on technology?" vs "how many technology companies are innovating in education?" may be missing another practical challenge.
I'd extend that to ask how do we begin to develop these individuals who have a practical knowledge base from both sides of the fence? Or how do we build organizations (whether their core is ed or tech) that have the right people to truly develop ed/learning focused tech solutions as a core competency?
While both of these may be lofty goals, there is a third path that could quickly bear fruit: developing authentic partnerships between education orgs and technology companies/orgs? It's certainly easier said than done, but I'd point out some great recent efforts the Mozilla Foundation has done in this area. They're starting to work with many of us (iRemix.org) in the learning/ed space to tackle just what we're all describing here.
I do agree w/ you that there is certainly a broad disconnect that's slowing innovation..
I think this is a pretty informativÂe article (at least to me it is) I have always felt a good part of the IT population was/is very interested in education (most are very highly educated themselvesÂ) As far as the grant BS, I find it very hard to believe ANYONE could harp on this, especially after we just gave the 6,600 ultra rich families a tax break extension (costing America something like $600 billion dollars) and we gave billions of dollars of tax money to bail out Wall Street (I think it was $700 billion dollars)? The Fed charges something close to 0 interest to the banks borrowing money so they can loan it back to us for 4% or more interest?
With republicans set to slash funding for education at all levels and further restrict the abilities of those who actually do the educating on a day to day basis, expect to see both the enthusiasm for tech and money to sustain the weakened enthusiasm diminish even more. The irony is that the problem doesn't lie with tech, nor the teachers, who can only do so much with the clay they are given, particularly when the clay is constantly baking in the heat that society blasts the children of others, from violence in the home and in the streets, to parents who are too overwhelmed to parent, to tests that are design to profit testers rather than benefit children, to video games, to perversion, to forcing kids to submit to our failing culture and society before they are able to handle it so that they may be more quickly exploited for profit. Not only is the system broken, but republicans are determined to destroy it, since otherwise a truly educated public would never countenance the kind of manipulation they advocate.
I'm not sure I understand the main point, you seem to disagree that "educational innovations should stem primarily from the education world", and that teachers should leave it to the developers, the technologists. And I agree with the blog post you linked to that school districts shouldn't be spending tons of money trying to develop their own in-house grading systems and so forth when there are plenty of good and sometimes even free alternatives.
If we are talking about 'administrative' software, I guess I would agree - stuff like gradebooks and student information systems. But for educational software more generally there are still large gaps and overpriced alternatives. When you leave it to non-educational technologists, they tend to develop stuff that is behaviorist/traditional, like flashcards or drills.
Anyway, I appreciate the work by the folks at learnboost, especially how they are making tons of contributions to open source: https://github.com/LearnBoost
But more importantly, where is the e-based learning that is more interactive? My daughter is asked by her teacher to watch algebra tutorials online, but it's essentially a video-taped lecture--same material she's taught in class, just someone else doing the talking. And what happened to the notion of eliminating printed textbooks that go out of date so quickly? With the advent of Kindles and iPads, you'd think states would save oodles of money by having those books available digitally.
Regarding the tutorials online, another presentation on th subject could be useful. Sometimes a vocabulary word, a visual, or a different angle delivered by another teacher will trigger even more understanding on the subject.
****excellent
2.There are great interactive Maths sites on the web, maybe your child's teacher just has not found them yet. Here is a site that uses Google Earth to teach Maths, with projects such as measuring the volume of the Great Pyramid - http://www.realworldmath.org. The teacher might also have a specific reason for using 'lectureware'.
3. The textbook thing is happening, we get digital versions of our texts with interactive features and quizzes with our paper textbooks. The textbook publishers are making these digital features available, however, I must add that they do not reduce the price.