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National School Boards Assocation T+L Conference
Denver, CO
I missed the first 10 minutes of the Project RED presentation, but was immediately engaged by the slide displayed when I walked through the door. More than half of survey respondents (62%) reported that ubiquitous technology in their schools increased high-stakes test scores, and 48% reported a reduction in disciplinary action.
You can participate in the survey at Project RED Deadline: November 16, 2009
Project RED is the research project of Jeanne Hayes, the Hayes Connection; Tom Greaves, the Greaves Group; and Leslie Wilson of the One-to-One Institute. Through surveys and interviews, the group seeks to show the true financial benefits of education technology. They have focused on two key issues: student achievement and the financial impact of technology on state budgets. To my knowledge, no other group is making a research-based financial connection between education technology investment and state economies by analyzing cost savings, cost avoidance and revenue enhancements to state budgets with investment in educational technology.
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The primary insight in the Long Tail is that by moving the inventory way in or way out, Long Tail businesses achieve a whole new economics. By aggregating book inventory into key warehouses with technology for fulfilling orders quickly, Amazon.com transformed retail. They can offer more book titles than any book store, satisfying all reading needs from the most mass market to the most obscure.
With schools, aggregation really matters. Read more »
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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.
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In 2006, Chris Anderson defined a transformation in business with his book The Long Tail. We’ve invested billions of dollars in technology as well as time and talent into improving education in this country. But the tail of our learning curve keeps getting longer. If we continue to teach to the masses with interventions for the most common problems, we will never meet the needs of the millions of students falling into the niches. They are teaching themselves and each other in social networks and game sites. How can we increase the wisdom of the crowds by delivering a sound education to the long tail learners?
