Book Review: Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology – The Digital Revolution and Schooling in America

The book is written by Allan Collins and Richard Halverson. I went through this book after my wife had to read it as one of the main references within one course of Arizona State University’s Masters in Learning Sciences, which she is currently studying.

The overall vision of education in this book is structured around the idea of lifelong learning. Lifelong learning requires moving away from highly structured schooling institutions and instead acting as participants in a wide variety of learning experiences. Learners will need to develop the skills to judge the quality of learning venues and the kinds of social networks that provide guidance and advice.

I really enjoyed reading this book, since it presents key concepts and ideas connected to my every day work and professional career in higher education. These are the main takeaways that I got out of this book:

• After the invention of printing, memory ceased to be the key to learning and learning ceased to be a journey across places in palaces. Instead, knowledge was deposited in books and transmitted in school rooms. The invention of school is among humanity’s greatest and most successful inventions. It has outpaced the old Greeks and Romans in making education more equitable and accessible, while nonetheless severing the ancient tie of learning to imagery and journeys. Just as the Greeks and Romans added memorial content to places, they powerfully added myth and stories (some epic) to give deep ancestral and historical meaning to everyday people, places, and events… Today, however, young people regularly go on magical journeys in modern “memory palaces.” The loci now are physical, virtual, and imaginary locations.
• Affinity spaces – connected spaces where people with a shared interest or passion journey to learn and grow, which can also be called “distributed teaching and learning spaces…” Today, people, if they have access, help, and mentoring, can use such journeys to learn and master if they wish almost anything: game design or media production, citizen science or journalism, social activism of all different sorts, robotics, mythology and the history of ancient civilizations, and many other subjects… It is worth to mention that the authors are not by any means arguing that teachers or schools should go away. Rather, they are saying that they should open their doors and windows, connect to other real and virtual places, be crucial tour guides, and send their children on flights of fancy through our modern memory palaces. Of course, we don’t fully know yet how to do this.
• Who will we all benefit, ultimately, in the aftermath of this revolution? In America there is a commercial push to sell educational products to consumers who are looking for an edge up in the race for success. This means that technological products and services are popping up all over the American landscape. Education, once viewed as a public good with equal access for all, is now up for sale to those who can afford specialized services and computer programs.
• The key linkage made over the past century has been the equation of education with schooling. They think it is time that educators and policy makers start to rethink this equation. Education is now a lifelong enterprise, while schooling for most people encompasses only the years between ages 5 and 18 or 21. Even when students are in school, much of their education happens outside of school via new media technologies. We all know that technology has transformed our larger society… The central challenge is whether our current schools will be able to adapt and incorporate the new power of technology-driven learning for the next generation of public schooling. If schools cannot successfully integrate new technologies into what it means to be a school, then the long identification of schooling with education, developed over the past 150 years, will dissolve into a world where the students with the means and ability will pursue their learning outside of the public school. The authors’ goal in this book is to show how schools became committed to an older generation of learning technologies, to describe how new media technologies have unlocked exciting pathways for learning for all children and families, and to consider what schooling, learning, and education might look like in this new world.
• People around the world are taking their education out of school into homes, libraries, cafés, and workplaces, where they can decide what they want to learn, when they want to learn, and how they want to learn. These stories challenge our traditional model of education as learning in classrooms. These new learning leverages new qtechnologies to enable people of all ages to pursue learning on their own terms… Over the course of educational history, the success of universal schooling has led us to identify learning with schooling. Passing through school, from kindergarten to high school to college, has become a badge of success for countless Americans. The pervasiveness of schooling leads us to overlook the fact that the identification of schooling and learning has developed only over the last 200 years… The authors see the question of where education is headed in terms of the uncoupling of schooling and learning. They are not predicting the collapse of your local elementary school. Young people will not be forced to retreat behind screens to become educated. Rather, the authors see the seeds of a new education system forming in the rapid growth of new learning alternatives, such as home schooling, video games, online learning, new workplace learning, web communities, and distance education, which are supported by the new media technologies. These new alternatives will make us rethink the identification of K-12 public school with the process of education, as children and adults spend more time learning in other venues.
• Now we are going through another revolution, on the same scale as the Industrial Revolution. It is variously called the Information Revolution or the Knowledge Revolution, and it is fueled by new media technologies such as computers, video games, the Internet, tablets, smart phones, FitBits, and artificial intelligence. While the imperatives of industrial-age learning technologies can be thought of as uniformity, didacticism, and teacher control, knowledge-age learning technologies have their own imperatives of customization, interaction, and user control. Knowledge-age technologies emphasize access to allow people to pursue their own interests and goals. Instead of accessing knowledge through visiting physical locations such as schools and libraries, people can find information on practically any topic and communicate with others wherever they are. They also can participate in games and activities that provide immediate feedback on their performance. The promise of new media technologies is to provide rich, social learning spaces for people to learn what they want, in a community they select, and to become the kinds of people that they want to be.
• At the same time that the school system has become more focused on basic literacy and math skills, typically learned without the support of new media technologies, out-of-school learning has been capitalizing on new media tools. If we look carefully, most changes in the way that people acquire information are occurring outside of schools. Children interact with YouTube, social media sites, tablets, mobile devices, and video games for hours every day. The number of parents who are schooling their children at home, supported by online learning tools, has exploded over the last 35 years. More and more parents are contracting for online and in-person tutoring or enrichment activities… Home computers and smart phones are almost as popular as microwaves and televisions, and in many homes, children lead the way showing their parents how to use computers for gaming, research, and networking… schools have kept new digital technologies on the periphery of their core academic practices. Schools often provide computer labs, tech prep courses, computer literacy, and afterschool programs, but they do not try to rethink basic practices of teaching and learning. Computers have not penetrated the core of schools, even though they have come to dominate the way that people in the outside world read, write, calculate, and think… Paradoxically, technologies that can create more equitable opportunities for learning may also reinforce social segregation by guiding users toward like-minded communities that shut out the alternative perspectives necessary to spark reflective discourse. The challenge of technology-driven learning opportunities rests on questions of access and use. More and more people with means are able to purchase the computer technologies that lead to new media literacies.
• In this book, the authors strive to neither advocate nor oppose new technologies. Rather, they observe what is happening, taking a historical perspective on the relation of schooling, learning, and technology. How new technologies will affect education is not in any sense inevitable. In fact, it is at critical times of change that the actions of particular individuals and groups have the most impact. The advent of the Industrial Age opened a window for Horace Mann and his contemporaries to shape the American education system of today. We again find ourselves at such a window of opportunity, where there is a battle raging between conventional and revolutionary venues for learning. There are many educational visionaries alive today. Not all their dreams will succeed, but a few of these people may capture the moment with the right idea and the right approach to change the future of education.
• The technology enthusiasts argument – there are two arguments that technology enthusiasts make about how new technologies will revolutionize schooling. One is that the world is changing, and we will need to adapt schooling to prepare students for the changing world that they are entering. The other is that technology gives us enhanced capabilities for educating learners, and schools should embrace these capabilities to reshape education. Enthusiasts have argued that embracing these two ideas will radically transform the way that schools educate students.
• Just in time learning – the notion of just-in-time learning is that whenever you need to learn something to accomplish a task, you can find out what you need to know. The most basic example of just-in-time learning is a well-designed computer program help system, which gives the advice that you need just as you are engaged in a complex task. For example, you can learn to invest in the stock market by taking a web-based mini-course on the stock market. If you need to use a spreadsheet for a task that you have to accomplish, an online spreadsheet tutor can get you started and help you as you do the task. If you want to buy a car, dozens of websites offer prices, reviews, comparisons, dealer locations, lease rates and trade-in values. These examples illustrate how just-in-time learning can come in big or little chunks, depending on the learner’s needs and desires… Enthusiasts argue for just-in-time learning as the counter to the school strategy of trying to teach everything that one might need to know someday. Many Americans spend 15-20 years in school learning things that they may or may not use later in life. In fact, we have been extending schooling gradually over the last 150 years, so that what is taught is becoming more and more remote from the time when it might be used in some real-world context.
• Customization – one of the major effects of technology proliferátion has been the ability to cater to individual preferences. People can download the music that they want to hear and the movies and videos that they want to see from the Internet. They can find almost any information they want on the web. More and more, websites such as Google, Amazon, and Netflix use sophisticated data tools to offer people access to what they might want next in terms of what they have already chosen… While major media sources still exercise significant control over what we see and hear, the Internet has loosened the hold of radio, television, and publishers on our information options. If technology knows your interests and abilities, it can provide help when you need it, choose news and information of interest to you, and explain things in terms that you will understand. This kind of personalization of network technology is in its infancy, but it will become more and more expanded as new technologies mature… The web has expanded to include crowd-sourced advice, information, and opinion sites on almost any topic imaginable. Google Maps (and Yelp) will help you find a restaurant you might like or a store likely to have what you need, along with reviews by past customers; Lyft and Uber will find a person to give you a ride; and Airbnb will help you find a nice place to stay at a reasonable price. The explosion of blogging allows anyone to publish personal and topical thoughts on the web, as well as providing a platform for people with mutual interests to share information. Cable and telecommunication companies are scrambling to create viable systems for downloading whatever books, music, or videos you may want.
• Learner control – enhanced learner control is the counterpart of customization. New media technologies are moving control away from centralized sources toward user production and engagement. This is sometimes referred to as a shift from broadcasting to narrowcasting. In the era when companies such as Time, CBS, and the New York Times, controlled the production and distribution of media, content could be controlled al the source and distributed widely, so that most people were reduced to media consumers. However, as sources of knowledge are becoming distributed, many people become both producers and consumers… In election coverage, for example, sites such as fivethirtyeight.com, politico.com, buzzieed.com, and realclearpolitics.com bring together news from many diferent sources, along with their own views. These blogging/news sites open up new possibilities for participant-controlled news coverage.
• Interaction – the interactivity of new media technologies provides a number of capabilities that can enhance education. As is evident from the popularity of computer games, interactivity can be very engaging. Even practice games, such as typing tutors and ABCLearning.com, can entice children to learn content that otherwise they might consider boring. Enthusiasts believe that by providing even more sophisticated dynamic interaction, computer-based learning environments are likely to make education much more engaging.
• Multimedia – bringing together print, video, and audio into multimedia presentations provides a new opportunity for communicating information. A number of writers have characterized the shift that occurred with the invention of the printing press as society moved from a traditional oral culture to a literate culture dominated by the printed word (Eisenstein, 1979; Olson, 1994; Ong, 1982; Postman, 1982). Universal education was a product of the printing press; hence, education is centered on the major products of literate thought, namely reading, writing, history, mathematics, and science.
• Communication – student work in schools has always faced the artificial barrier of being legitimate only within the confines of the classroom. When student work is seen only by teachers, students do not experience the authentic feedback that results from exposing their work to a real audience… Insulating learning from external critique may make sense while initially learning a subject. But enthusiasts believe that as student work matures, students need opportunities to demonstrate their learning in legitimate contexts outside the classroom. The development of the Internet makes it possible for student work to become much more widely available to the rest of the world. The web is the first mass medium that has open access, so that anyone can publish work in a place that potentially gets a worldwide audience. This can provide a powerful motivation for students to produce substantial works that are meaningful to the community.
• Barriers to technology use in schools – cost and access; classroom management; what computers can’t teach; challenges to instruction; authority and teaching; among others… Incompatibilities between schools and technologies – uniform learning versus customization; the teacher as expert versus diverse knowledge sources; teacher versus learner control; standardized testing versus specialization.
• The skeptics vision of schooling – one way to think about the difference between the goals of schooling and the goals of technology is captured in a catchphrase: School fosters just-in-case learning, while technology fosters just in-time learning. Schools are designed to teach us everything that we might need to know in late life. But perhaps this is a fool’s errand, given the virtual tools that now give easy access to so much of what is known… New technologies, on the other hand support an entire different proach to learning. Learn what you need when you need it. What will it take for our society to change its concept of what it means to be educated?
• The development of American schooling – there are many reasons why school, as an institution, hasn’t accommodated new technology, as the skeptics argue. However, as the enthusiasts argue, information technologies are becoming central to all life-for-learning and for everything else. The authors think that this means that school will become less and less important as a venue for education. The historical identification between schooling and learning will begin to erode as other legitimate venues for learning develop, first for adults, then for K-12 children… Such a systemic transformation of education is not unique in history. There was a transformation in education in the first half of the 19th century, much like the one we are experiencing now, from a system based on apprenticeship to universal schooling.
• The seeds of a new system – Schools as we know them will not disappear anytime soon… Schools were prevalent in the era of apprenticeship, and they will bet prevalent in whatever new era of education that comes into being. It is important that schools persist as institutions that offer equal access to learning opportunities for all students and families. But the seeds of a new system are beginning to emerge, and these seeds are already beginning to erode the identification of learning with schooling… The new seeds are growing mainly in the areas of entertainment, information, and social media technologies and have yet to make much progress influencing the core practices of schools. As new seeds germinate, education will occur in many different, more public, and less disciplinary venues, and schools may well become responsible for a narrower range of learning.
• New media technologies are opening up access for more people to choose pathways to learning academic content, and the resulting increased market for new pathways is pushing technological innovation. Anya Kamenetz (2010) describes this as the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) movement in education. Choices over learning environments and pathways plus new tools amount to an emerging market for education technologies. The end result is a vibrant world of seeds for a new system that both questions the capacity of the existing school system and opens doors for new possibilities… Like Khan Academy, Pinterest provides educators in and out off school access to an incredible variety of resources to support academic tearing. Also like Khan Academy, there are obvious limitations to Pinterest as a stand-alone resource. Relying on user curation can be an unreliable measure of resource quality. While some teachers are compensated for shared resources, most engage in a sharing economy that relies on a community organized around the free-labor contributions of users. If Pinterest is seen as a complementary resource for educa-fion rather than as the core practice of professional development, it is clear how this model of open-network resource sharing can open new possibilities for reshaping education in and out of school.
• Interest-based learning environments in the wild – Surveys show that 92% of American teens go online every day. More than 75% of teens use mobile devices to get online, communicate, socialize, play games, and (sometimes) study. The demographics of online use show that 85% African-American teens get online via smart phones, compared with 71% of White and Latino/a teens. Most of these teens (66%) use Facebook at least daily to connect with peers, although SnapChat and Instagram are gaining fast – especially with middle and upper-middle-class teens. The attention that teens pay to virtual interactions has resulted in reduced time spent with traditional television and music products. It also seems to have resulted in increased teen anxiety and depression… Most American teens are growing up in a diverse digital world that has infiltrated every aspect of their lives. This virtual transformation of adolescent lives has happened within the last generation – actually within the last 10 years… The expansion of the virtual world makes adolescents the authos and regulators of their interaction, consumption, and, more important, production.
• Youtube: watching, making and sharing videos for everyone – YouTube is the biggest video-sharing site in the world. Started in 2005, it allows users to view videos, but it also provides free, easy-to-use tools for uploading content and maintaining user accounts… YouTube has been part of Google since 2006, and like Wikipedia, it has become a widely used noun and verb. Most of the videos on Youtube are available for free to any users, including Khan Academy and other play scenarios… More than 400 hours of content are uploaded to YouTube every minute, and 1 billion hours of content are watched every day on the site… The viewing habits of young people have created star built on the number of subscribers and likes on Youtube.
• The three eras of education – the seeds of a new system are thriving as we enter into a new era of education for lifelong learning. Having experienced the apprenticeship and universal-schooling eras, the technological advances that formed the seeds of a new system are bringing this new era into being. These three eras differ in many aspects. In some ways, the lifelong learning era seems to reflect elements of the earlier apprenticeship era… As we moved from the apprenticeship era to the universal-schooling era, changes took place in a number of different dimensions: who was responsible for children’s education, what the purpose and content of their education were, how students were to be taught and assessed, and what we expected them to learn. There were also changes in the location of where the learning occurred, the culture in which learning occurred, and the relationships between teachers and learners. All these aspects of education are changing once again as we move into the era of lifelong learning… In the present lifelong learning era, responsibility for education is shifting away from the state and back to the parents (for younger children and to the individual (for teenagers and adults). This movement reflects the emphasis on customizing education to the particular learners’ needs, interests, and abilities. We see this in the growth of the seeds of a new system… More and more parents are taking control of the education of their children through homeschooling, using supports such as Khan Academy and computer tools, by teaching them values that they think are important, and by investing in summer camps and afterschool activities to support their interests. After the college years, increasing numbers of adults pursue opportunities to advance their careers and develop their deep interests. This movement toward Do-It-Yourself (DIY) learning is beginning in the teen years, outside of high school. Bill Gates is famous for spending many hours during his high school years programming computers. While high schools offer some choices, technology makes it easier for teens, as well as adults, to pursue their individual passions in affinity groups, often accessed online.
• The pedagogy of the lifelong-learning era is evolving toward reliance on interaction. Sometimes this involves interacting with a rich technological environment, such as a tutoring system or a video game, and sometimes interacting with other people, by means of a virtual network… The pedagogy of computer tutors echoes the apprenticeship model in setting individualized tasks for learners and offering guidance and feedback as they work. This type of guided pedagogy extends beyond computer tutors. For example, discussion-board interest groups can provide specific, task-level advice about how to solve a video game puzzle, Whether to make a fantasy baseball trade, or how much stock should be purchased to balance a portfolio. As another example, a distance-learning teacher might monitor how a group of students are progressing on a project that they have been assigned to carry out.
• From home to school to anywhere – in the apprenticeship era, most work was done locally. The ability to travel far from any farm, town, or village was prohibitively expensive for most people. As a result, apprenticeship focused on the work available in local households and domestic industries. Children learned to carry out adult tasks from parents or relatives at home. In towns and cities, children might be sent to school for a year or two, but the demands of maintaining the home or local industry typically would draw children into the workplace as soon as they were able to take on work. The main venues for education were the home and the farm or shop attached to it… Now education is moving into many different venues, where learning materials can be accessed from computers and the web. In-person interpersonal interaction continues to have significant value in all forms of learning, and it likely will never be replaced com pletely by virtual learning. Still, the ability to access learning environments online is greatly expanding the concept of where education takes place. Lifelong learners often use new media technologies, such as smart phones, to access their learning environments and com-munities. Many towns and buildings are providing wireless connec tions, and this connectivity is spreading rapidly. We are approaching the era when people can engage in just-in-time learning anytime and anywhere.
• What may be lost – in Thomas Jefferson’s and Horace Mann’s visions, public education would prepare people to be good citizens and assimilate them to a common culture. Mann was very concerned about how democracies would induct immigrants into American society so they would develop a common sense of citizenship and social cohesion. In the 20th century, public schooling became a favorite vehicle to address Mann’s concerns. A public schooling system that would accept all children, from all families, into programs that would correct the disadvantages of social class and allow access to opportunity for all learners was the original dream of education reformers.
• The promise of education depends on the identification of schooling with learning – if we place our hopes in improving schooling as the key pathway to a better life, then we can, ideally, maintain some control over our ability to progress toward a brighter future. Private and religious schools, charter schools, and homeschooling have eroded the ability to focus social attention on a single point of contact for improving education. The advent of interest-based, technology-driven media has dramatically fragmented the identification of schooling with education.
• Interest-based education fragments the current system by creating alternative pathways to achieve the outcomes of the current education system – new technologies invite parents and individuals to assume the responsibility for learning core subjects like math, science, and reading. For example, parents can enlist private tutors or enroll in learning centers to supplement the instruction their children received in school. In Ontario, Canada, about 24% of parents with school-aged children have hired tutors, and 50% claim that they would hire tutors if they could afford them (Davies & Aurini, 2006). Students can also use Khan Academy or sign up for courses on EdX or Open University to develop alternative learning certifications. Tutoring, learning centers, and online courses amplify the learning for their participants… However, when students who are able to participate in these supplemental programs compete against students who are limited to the resources provided by school, this creates an alternative path to learning that undermines the power of the school to provide an equitable learning environment for all students.
• How schools can support new technologies – we are in the midst of a great opportunity to redefine the relation of education and schooling. New media technologies are creating new pathways to traditional academic goals, as well as forging virtual communities of production and exchange for interest-based learning… This is a time of opportunity for educators – one that we have not faced in more than 150 years. To be effective, the stakeholders who are working to build a new education system must understand the imperatives of the technologies that are driving this revolution.
• Certifications are being developed in three areas: academic skills, generic skills, and technical skills – in the academic area, there might be an English competency certiticate at different grade levels of reading and writing competency and certification exams in history, math, languages, science, the arts, and other school disciplines. Getting a certain badge would allow students to move on to the next level of schooling, as with the current diploma system. If people wanted to take courses to prepare for the exams, they could; or if they wanted to study on their own, they could. Some people might obtain a large number of these credentials, and some might obtain fewer credentials… The generic skills’ certifications would follow the general guidelines of the Department of Labor’s SCANS Commission (1991) report, which suggests five competency areas: resource allocation, working with others, acquiring and using information, understanding complex systems, and working with a variety of technologies. Within each area, there might be a number of different credentials. Technical skills would be focused on specific skills required for the workplace, such as automotive diagnosis, coding, and network administration. Students would choose which certificates they want to earn, and they would know in advance how their performance in carrying out assessment tasks would be judged.
• New curriculum designs – new media technologies open new avenues for curriculum development, ranging from new forms of teaching and learning to new ways of organizing how students and teachers interact. One curriculum design that several authors favor is using technology to help students focus their learning around their goals and interests. Such schools would place students in curricula based on their goals and interests, rather than on their ages or on the prevailing curriculum of their schools (Collins, 2017).
• Outside the realm of standards-based subject matter, games can help students develop interpersonal and leadership skills. Massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs), such as World of Warcraft, allow players to solve complex problems involving strategy, logistics, and resource allocation. In MMOGs, players interact with social groups to recruit and retain new members, coordinate large-scale movements, and make decisions about political values. Such games give players a chance to develop strategic and leadership skills, leading John Seely Brown and Doug Thomas (2006) to suggest that video games may well be the environments that train the next generation of business leaders.
• The technology literacy gap begins at home – kids today spend over 9 hours per day interacting with new media (Common Sense Media, 2015). This is more time than they spend in school, with friends, or sleeping. Every day, entrepreneurs are developing new methods for engaging young people with information and entertainment technologies. Although many parents attempt to limit children’s access to media, many confess that they do not really understand how children use the new technologies… Video games provide the clearest case of the technology generation gap. Many parents (and school leaders) frame the “problem” of video games in terms of addiction and the “corruption of our youth.” They rightly worry that many of the games that children are engaged in are violent, and that kids are wasting a lot of time with meaningless games and idle talk while not getting enough physical exercise. Meanwhile, children playing video games develop sophisticated problem-solving and communication skills in virtual worlds beyond the experience of many parents. One way to bridge the gap is to extend the idea of is reading with your children to playing with your children. Pick up a controller and take Hearthstone or Minecraft for a spin; let your children teach you how to play and ask critical questions about strategies and the purpose of the game play… Another direction that parents can pursue is to encourage their children no join online communities that share their own interests. Different kids may have a passion for dinosaurs, poetry, sports, drawing, astronomy, horses, military history, technology, or other areas… Whatever their interests may be, extended pursuit of them can develop expertise that may be highly valuable in later life. It also may develop their research skills, which can be valuable in many endeavors throughout their lives. Encourage your children to move from consumers to producers in their areas of interest. Nudge them toward creating videos, mods, models, and art about their interests.
• Rethinking education in a technological world – a vision for a new education system is just over the horizon. To realize it, political and educational leaders will need to mobilize resources to take advantage of the great power of the learning tools that have emerged to transform education for all learners… Since the end of World War I, the United States has enjoyed a disproportionate share of global resources. This abundance allowed Americans to maintain a high standard of living and take a world leadership role. Thomas Friedman’s (2006) The World Is Flat: A Brief – History of the Twenty-First Century suggests that access to information technologies has leveled the global playing field. This leveling is allowing millions of engineers, technologists, and professionals from around the world to pursue the careers that have made so many Americans wealthy. The future prosperity of countries around the world depends on how education systems can take advantage of new technologies to foster learning for all citizens. If the United States is going to lead the global economy, it will have to reinvent education to embrace the potential of new media tools as core practices.
• Rethinking learning – eventually, when people and politicians become worried about what kids are learning or what adults don’t know, their automatic reaction may not be “How can we improve the schools?” Instead, they may ask, “How can we help learners to create their own learning pathways?” “How can we make new technology resources available to more people?” or “What kinds of tools can support people to seek out information on their own?” Currently, the strong association between schooling and learning forces our conversation into institutional responses. We don’t yet know how to ask these wider questions when we think about improving education… As learning moves out of school, our conception of learning will begin to broaden, and we will see more hybrid experiences that begin in the classroom and move back and forth into other learning communities. Education may follow the path of homeschooling by having each student design an idiosyncratic agenda of taking field trips, writing Wikipedia entries, designing computer games, or even teaching others by making and circulating YouTube videos.
• Fortunately, learning technologies provide some direction about how to improve student motivation to learn and to invigorate learning content. To produce a generation of people who seek out learning, learners need more control over their own learning. Learner control can be fostered by giving kids the tools to support their learning, such as access to the web, machines for toddlers that teach reading, tutoring help when needed, and computer-based games that foster deep knowledge and entrepreneurial skills… A love of learning also can be fostered by encouraging kids to explore deeply topics in which they are particularly interested, as homeschooling parents do. Kurt Squire (2004, 2006) found that kids who play real-time strategy games, such as Civilization, begin to check out books on ancient cultures and earn better grades in middle school… Instead of diverting student attention from schools, as feared by many teachers and school leaders, video games can provide a path to make conventional school content more appealing and encourage students to give their classroom instruction another chance.
• A vision of the future – as education becomes more privatized and commercial, we risk losing the vision promulgated by Thomas Jefferson and Horace Mann of a society where everyone has an equal chance at a good education. Horace Mann was right in predicting that education could provide a path for everyone to become part of the elite. Universal schooling formed the basis for our middle-class society today. But the onset of technology, privatization, and increasing inequality of income is undermining this vision… Making economic success the central outcome of schooling risks marginalizing the political and moral goals of education. Education is, in many ways, America’s civic religion. We use education to work toward our national ideals of equality, opportunity, and democracy… As a society, we need to understand how to balance the need to use schools as engines of economic competition with our national commitment to equality of opportunity…
• It will take a concerted effort to bring about such a radical change in thinking – if a broader view develops in society, leaders will emerge who can bring about the political changes necessary to make new educational resources available to everyone. These new leaders will need to understand the affordances of the new technologies and have a vision for education that will bring the new resources to everyone.