Written by [Prelude: Now that I live in Virginia, I MUST get to know Andy Roterham. He's a powerful insider in many educational policy circles, and he's been edublogging longer than anyone I know. His post today pointed me to the article about which I write below, so here's a tip-o-the-hat to Mr. Eduwonk]
You may be well aware of Clayton Christenson’s theory of disruptive innovations. It has received a LOT of attention in the last couple of years (deservedly so, IMHO) and quite a few researchers/commentators have tried to apply the theory to the institution of public schooling. Well, now Christenson himself has…in a pretty big way. THIS article appears to be a preview for an upcoming book called, Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns.
I have two thoughts before I ask for discussion via comments. First, I always tell my students to “consider the source” when reading “stuff” on the Internet. This article happens to appear in Education Next, the education journal of the Hoover Institution, a notably conservative think tank based at Stanford University. The mission statement of the Hoover Institution speaks to limited government (“Ours is a system where the Federal Government should undertake no governmental, social or economic action, except where local government, or the people, cannot undertake it for themselves”) so it should come as no surprise that his vision hints at privatization of education.
Second, as much as I respect Christenson’s work, I’m not sure how “disruptive” his ideas are. Consider the following:
| A student struggling with a certain concept, or her parent or teacher, will be able to log on to a web site where she can find a software solution that another student, parent, or teacher developed for that specific challenge. By means of such sites, students will teach students, parents will teach parents, and teachers will teach teachers. Parents and teachers, moreover, will be able to diagnose why children are not learning and find customized instructional software written to help students who closely match their child in learning style. As content is used over time, users will rate it, as they rate books on Amazon.com and movies on Netflix. That will not happen en masse until the technology has matured, but as it does, people will gradually link together various modules to form more comprehensive classes. And then end users will pull this content, rather than have school systems push it to them from on high. With users building the content and using open-source tools, the software will be far less expensive than if it had been commercially developed from scratch. |
Is this much different than, for example, the MIT Opencourseware project? I think what Chrisentson writes about will transform learning, but will it, as the title of the article states, transform our schools? It certainly hasn’t yet…
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