Rethinking Human Capital in Technology-Based Education

New technologies, from gaming to personalized instruction to social networking and online tutorials, hold extraordinary promise, but equal attention -- if not more -- should be directed to the human capital implications required for any "innovation" to increase student achievement. New technologies are not solutions. They are mechanisms that have been shown to help some kids do better in one classroom while gathering dust in another. To help students in measurable ways, new technologies depend, inherently, on the web of human relationships that govern their use. That is the idea behind Blue Engine -- an innovative national service model that channels human capital (with teams of tutors) to high-need schools.

Two challenges come immediately to mind on the human capital front. The first is the impact of new technologies on teachers. Do they want them? Will they use them? Can we use technology to make the job of teaching more sustainable by helping teachers teach and spend less time on busywork? Technology holds power here (IMPACT in New York City and, more recently, Drop the Chalk), but as a former teacher who used a pencil-and-paper grading book (in the 21st century) and whose row of shiny Mac Pro desktop computers sat idle at the back of the room for the year (I didn't know what I should be doing with them), I would like to see tech evangelists grapple as much with behavioral economics -- the science behind why people do what they do -- as with the gadgetry behind the next big product.

The second challenge will involve rethinking how human capital is deployed in schools. Technology cannot just exist and create change in a vacuum. Some of the most promising and talked-about technology innovations in education -- including School of One and Rocketship Education -- all require reconfigurations of human capital. At School of One, teachers still teach, but they are supported by a range of other actors including teaching assistants and tutors, both online and in-person, and software-based lessons. All of these actors support the system together and make it run. Rocketship Education is a non-profit elementary charter school network that is creating a hybrid school model, combining a traditional classroom setting with tutoring, both online and offline, and online technology. Like School of One, these tutors are the human capital "glue" that helps Rocketship's innovative financial structure fly.

If the goal is to accelerate academic performance for all -- or, more realistically, to achieve dramatically greater good for greater numbers -- then we must find ways of moving beyond the current, industrial, 30:1 student-teacher ratio in brick and mortar classrooms. Instead, the national conversation is focused on ramping up our use of technology in schools, aligning private-sector incentives with market opportunities in K-12, and boom, learning outcomes will spike nationwide. There was little mention of actual teachers, teacher training, professional development, and the political will required for new technologies to benefit real kids in real districts in real classrooms.

Technology and human capital innovation are not opposing concepts, but we must do more to integrate the conversation. Only then will students benefit from the "promise of technology" that we've been promising for so long.

 

Follow Nick Ehrmann on Twitter: www.twitter.com/theblueengine

Comments

[umbrarchist]

01:48 AM on 08/20/2011

Books are technology. To a certain extent language is technology.

But long before we had cheap computers our educators could have suggested creating a National Recommended Reading List. Have they done it? so what does that say about the human capital?

Is the primary function of students to create jobs for teachers? Could to many students learn too much from a really decent selection of excellent books? I have read plenty of books that were a lot less boring than some teachers I had.

So if cheap computers can provide access to some of those books for free...

All Day September by Roger Kuykendall
http://www.feedbooks.com/book/2295/all-day-september

THE YEAR WHEN STARDUST FELL by Raymond F. Jones
http://winstonscifi.blogspot.com/2010/04/synopsis-for-year-when-stardust-fell-by.html

Eight Keys to Eden by Mark Clifton
http://www.xenodochy.org/ex/abstract/eightkeys.html
http://www.onread.com/book/Eight-Keys-to-Eden-6514/

The Fourth R by George O. Smith
http://www.onread.com/book/The-Fourth-R-17950/

Black Man's Burden by Mack Reynolds
http://www.feedbooks.com/book/4826/black-man-s-burden

[bcbailey64]

06:54 PM on 08/18/2011

OK, I'll be a little harsh here. If you, as a teacher, don't know what you should or could be doing with technology, then FIND OUT. Technology enables more choice but it's up to you the teacher to find out how to apply tech appropriately in the classroom to benefit your students. Don't be lazy - do some research on the internet, take some courses, talk to your more tech savy colleagues, take charge of your pro-d. Your students will be living in a world that is even far more tech dependent than today's - you need to be preparing them for that world. The world you grew up in no longer exists and is increasingly irrelevant. If you want to gain traction with your students, be influential. You can not be influential with your students if you are irrelevant. If you are not integrating tech into your classroom, you are increasingly irrelevant. You have every right in the world to crawl into a cave and not use technology. You just don't have the right to drag your students in there with you.

[J R M]

06:10 PM on 08/18/2011

I think that the schools will eventually move to some form of hybrid model (at least for middle school and above) with teachers / tutors assisting students working on mastery-based learning, with much if not most the material being on-line. This would allow students to move at their own speed and would allow us to eliminate some of the inefficiencies of our industrial classroom approach. But as was noted in this article, this will restructure both the classroom and the teaching profession and its skills.

One thing that such an approach will make magnify is the difference between students who are disciplined, prepared, and who work hard from those that do or are not. Hopefully, such an approach will successfully engage the smart but bored students who are ill served now.

[blindhog]

12:43 PM on 08/18/2011

Ya know Nick, the wealthy stockholders, maybe the ones who want to see this country fail, have given us "computer" based schools that cost alot of taxpyer money in the form of unpaid loans and we get a whole population of students with bought degrees that have little or no substance---smart students who would have been served better with trade school, or on the job training, but no we have given those jobs to aliens "with papers".

[chaulagupta]

11:57 AM on 08/18/2011

Great point! Technology is not a silver bullet - products and tools by themselves will not close the achievement gap. It's critical to design innovative technologies but it's more important to think about how they will be used and get them in the hands of the right people.