I have decided to spend the remainder of my career helping to replace industrial era schooling with educational structures better suited to our 21st century, global, innovation-based economy. This sweeping goal of total educational transformation may seem overly ambitious for someone whose work centers in learning technologies. However, in my research I consistently find that new media are at the heart of innovative models for education: contributing to the obsolescence of traditional schools/universities as educational vehicles, while simultaneously empowering new forms of learning and teaching.
Why do I believe, after facing decades of resistance to changes in schooling, that shifting our current model of education might now be possible? Educational transformation is coming not because of the increasing ineffectiveness of schools in meeting society’s needs — though that is certainly a good reason — but due to their growing unaffordability. Events of the last few years, and projections of our nation’s economic future, paint a bleak picture of the financial viability of schools as we know them; we can no longer support an educational system based on inefficient use of expensive human labor. These inefficiencies are not simply within the walls of the school, but reflect our lost opportunities to help students learn in all the hours and all the places they spend time outside of classrooms.
A century ago, a dedicated group of innovators was able to replace the one-room rural schoolhouse, emblematic of agricultural America, with the industrial-era schools we still have today. But that was a simpler time, both in terms of public beliefs about the goals of education and of the available organizational mechanisms, which are resistant to change. The core questions now are: How can we redesign education in order to prepare students for the 21st century? And how can we transform teaching in light of our current knowledge about the mind and new research on what works when, and how? What types of learning environments might modern technologies enable us to create?
The 2010 US National Educational Technology Plan provides some important ideas, sketching both opportunities and challenges. For instance, many talented people not in the teaching profession would be happy to serve as tutors, mentors, and coaches for students, if our formal educational system provided training, certification, resources and formal recognition of those roles. Modern technologies provide ways of coordinating such a distributed system of learning/teaching, so that teachers can both benefit from and guide the efforts of others who help students learn outside of the school’s location and hours.
In framing such alternative models, however, I find myself wrestling with the unpleasant truth that the primary barriers to altering curricular, pedagogical, and assessment practices towards any transformative vision of education are not conceptual, technical or economic, but instead psychological, political, and cultural. The largest challenges in moving beyond historic models of schooling are people’s emotions and their typically unconscious beliefs, assumptions, and values. To be achieved, a transformative model must generate professional commitment, political will, and cultural enthusiasm — not an easy task.
That said, with so much at stake in the lives of children, the economic competitiveness of our country, and the effectiveness of our democracy, I believe the time is ripe for advocating, designing, and fostering such a transformation. In the past five years, social media, immersive interfaces from the entertainment industry, and ubiquitous mobile broadband devices have coalesced to offer powerful ways to empower and integrate learning in and out of school. Too often, I have seen educational technologies used to put “old wine in new bottles.” Now, if we seize the moment, we not only can have new wine — such as peer mentoring anytime, anyplace — but also can move beyond the “bottle” of the stand-alone school to lifewide learning.
Christopher Dede is the Timothy E. Wirth Professor in Learning Technologies and former Chair of the Learning & Teaching department at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Dr. Dede served as a member of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Foundations of Educational and Psychological Assessment and the U.S. Department of Education’s Expert Panel on Technology.
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