Political, philanthropic, and educational decision makers want to measure what software is used, and to what effect, to guide (control) technology purchases. But this common sense interest raises common sense concerns. We have observed unintended consequences: in the name of accountability, educational systems become more top-down, standardized, sterile, didactic, redundant and irrelevant.
Since digital systems have the advantage (and disadvantage) of easily facilitating measurement of learning, there is a danger that this ability to generate use and effects data for decision makers may push us toward curriculum designs and learning experiences that are immediately measurable. Such a curriculum would continue the unfortunate tradition of covering content at the expense of discovering and applying powerful, fascinating, and beautiful ideas.
By standardizing curriculum to focus on accountability, we often cause teachers and students to feel that they are the means to bureaucratic ends--with higher test scores reflecting a cost-benefit. But we know from experience, management, and learning sciences that people learn, work, problem solve, and grow most happily and efficiently when they are not subject to tasks that are purposefully aligned to performance reviews.
The danger, then, is that education would become a series of smarter digital interactions, more efficient in conveying set information and providing practice in set thinking procedures to meet preset measureable objectives. Where the systems are digital and adaptive, we call them personalized. But such systems may further make knowledge more extrinsic, rather than intrinsic; devoid of a felt sense of purpose.
The price we pay for our well-intentioned obsession with accountability is that education is reduced to consuming measureable modules. This exacts a price. We retreat from
exploring and creating interactions that facilitate important dimensions for human development. These dimensions focus on self-knowledge and happiness--trust, curiosity, questioning, initiative, identity, purpose, ethical behavior, service, stewardship, self-expression, and collaboration.
This kind of learning emerges from a felt sense of personal, social, economic, intellectual or aesthetic purpose. It improves as a function of community and transcends most textbooks or formal curricula, though textbooks and lectures can be integrated into such learner focused experiences.
A very different way of looking at digital systems has an enormous role to play in creating these kinds of personal, community, and project-based learning experiences, even though our science of measurement and accountability has not caught up with these more open and human approaches. This more openly personal and social alternative views the computer not as the medium of delivery, feedback, and accountability; instead, the digital systems become mediums for facilitating social interactions (matching people by compatibility or complementary skills), providing facile means for communication about ideas and curriculum designs; identifying problems and opportunities, and storing a working history.
Where in one case the technology is used to close the system, in the other it is used to open it to human concerns and creativity. In time, this kind of open design and publishing medium naturally facilitates a focus on improvement, on adapting content presentations and interactions for ever more diverse populations of students and teachers. In a diverse and multicultural society like the United States the value of facilitating these capacities is beyond the bounds of measurement.
Digital textbooks transformed into adaptive learning systems are here to stay, but we definitely want to build complementary digital systems. One excellent way to do this is to use technology to support schools and classrooms as Research & Design Studios, as Labs and Learning Communities. Education within Learning & Design Communities is very different from education as pre-established/machine adapted content and tested teaching and learning.
Where technology is used to facilitate Community Design and Learning, we can facilitate the creative problem solving and culture making processes in people. Inquiry becomes purposeful, communication sensitive, efficient, aesthetically pleasing and powerful. The outcome is building something new and/or evolving something old. This is problem solving by design and building. It is STEM and STEAM transformed from academically taught disciplines to relevant problem solving that combines purposeful work and learning.
When knowledge is applied to make the world a better place, at least for one other person, academics can become an important part of giving people an enhanced sense of power, pride and identity . When people gain the power of belonging to a compatible group with shared purpose and effort, the results for all involved increase dramatically.
The challenge for our technology/education communities is to NOT cut off our human communities--which already are far too isolated from our schools. On the contrary, we have to discover how to use our technology to facilitate warmer, richer, more meaningful learning, work and design communities in and around our classrooms. This will benefit education, and it will benefit our communities whose at-heart purpose is the protection and development of the next generation. Education needs the same urgency that we see in ants carrying their eggs from a disturbed nest.
We should work to create better fitting and inspiring mentor relationships (face-to-face and virtual, local and global) for students and teachers. We should employ our technology to build and facilitate ever more inspired and talented curriculum designs processes enhanced by cross-discipline teams. We should build an infrastructure for facilitating learning by working in apprenticeship situation and in service and stewardship teams in our communities.
Great gains can also be made in research if we view technology's measurement capacities in system wide ways. Instead of thinking in terms of the normal curve in response to manipulating one or a very few variables, we can think in terms of the diversity of students and the multiple factors affecting where they are on that curve. Thus we can greatly refine our definition of experimental and control groups, and how we analyze the data coming from each. This means that many researchers can use the same parameters (data sets) and we can begin to drill down to N of one understanding.
Ultimately we will discover that we can design unobtrusive and transferable data gathering systems to support system-wide research that provides insights into the diversity of students' in terms of their learning within online and off-line contexts.
One use of technology is not necessarily better than the other. The adaptive learning and other delivery mediums serve important purposes. But that delivery process, because it more readily fits accountability measures, should not outweigh using technology to deepen our design, research, and service communities that are rooted in human interactions that technology now can facilitate.
Our research should shine light on how to refine both systems to meet people's deepest needs--the needs of different types of students and teachers at different stages, in different contexts, and learning for different places for different purposes.
Ultimately, we need to act from the knowledge that there are two common cores. The current academic curriculum should be viewed as second, or as developing in parallel with the first common core, which is Self-Knowledge and Social Emotional Learning.
Ironically, by placing academics ahead of self-knowledge, and even ignoring self-knowledge, we have put academic learning in jeopardy, particularly for our most at-risk and gifted students. Thus, our current curriculum is not very successful at inspiring students and teachers to realize the richness of their individual and collective histories and cultures or their uniquely unfolding selves.
This means we should use technology to help us redesign the Academic Common Core in two ways. One by machine delivered interactions. The other by computer facilitated human interactions that promote both self and academic learning. In other words, technology will realize it's potential when Learning, Design, and Research Communities organize stakeholders around continuously improving their learning through all kinds of technology and human mediated interactions.
Self-knowledge, or The First Common Core, naturally has to be much more personalized. This is the Common Core of self-awareness, introspection, and self-regulation built from the idiosyncratic processes of discovering and expressing one's self. It develops through and expresses identity. It is well exemplified by people like Socrates, van Gogh, and Thoreau, and by our best business, science, political, spiritual and artistic leaders. Its principles are well documented in developmental psychology.
These two systems, the Personal Introspective/Purposeful Social and Creative and the Academic/Technical are not separate. Each, if well designed, should nourish the other, and either without the other will perpetuate a dangerously failed education system.
A sound-working hypothesis may be that when the Common Core reflects the best of our cultural knowledge, which is an amazing legacy, we will see a coming together between self-and cultural and academic knowledge. Then we will know that we are building a great curriculum--a great learning community for human, social and economic development.
But the further apart self and academic-cultural knowledge remain, the more we know our educational designs are failing our human and societal potential, and that measuring what's most successful in a failing system perpetuates failure and unhappiness--especially if accountability measures are so sterile as to ignore teacher and learner purpose, identity, and happiness.
Political, philanthropic, business, and administrative leaders will want to tread lightly when considering narrowing our human potential by reducing education to what publishers and technologists can monetize and the Internet can readily deliver, adapt and measure. They also will want to consider the exciting, subtle and profound ways to use technology to rebalance education by deepening the capacities and insights that technology can help us to facilitate in communities devoted to service, stewardship, design, problem solving, and research.