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On April 23 at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, Tim O’Reilly had the audacity to read a poem by Rainier Maria Rilke, The Man Watching, imploring the entrpreneurs, technologists, investors, and marketing professionals in the audience to use these new technologies to address the really big problems that we face today. If you win or if you lose, MAKE A DIFFERENCE. There are big ideas and powerful tools being shown here that could transform our learning process. We need big ideas and innovation to help all the students in our schools today achieve their potential.
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At the CoSN conference in March 2008, I led a birds of a feather discussion about Long Tail Learning. Our discussion hit on trust, student privacy, and school district liability. We came up with a list of barriers/challenges:
The classroom model of traditional education: 1 teacher, 25-30 students
The Carnegie units system of measuring learning by time and place
The ability for students to self identify
The lack of data back to teachers and students
Defining effective learning
Lack of social acceptance of year-round schools
Parents who want children to be educated in the same way they were
Liability concerns about privacy when aggregating information.
We also considered some of the solutions or ways that we could overcome these barriers:
Centralize resources: teachers, lesson plans, students
Enable customers to do the work, students to select preferences
Enable more access to more tools for all users
We have to make the “learning” the constant, everything else should be a variable
The system has to recognize and reward initiative
Aggregate and distribute, see the Omaha Public Schools system
When we started to think about massive aggregation and distribution, we kept hitting the wall about how existing organizations could do this with all of the legal privacy and liability requirements. Practicing Patients, an excellent article by Thomas Goetz, March 23, 2008, NYT, highlights patientslikeme. This Web site allows patients with incurable diseases like ALS and AIDS to build social networks and share information. Unlike most sites, they have developed sophisticated data aggregation and analysis tools that quantify patient information and display it in graphical format. Because it is an opt-in site and patients have complete control of their profiles, they are not under HIPAA rules. Perhaps there is a model here for an opt-in student learning web site that aggregates profile data and provides analytical tools for students to learn about their own learning.
