CHAPTER 1
HOW PERSONAL DIGITAL LEARNING WILL MAKE US SMART
If you saw three teens in the back of a classroom playing games, watching videos, and checking text messages, you would likely assume that little learning was going on. If you were in a classroom at most schools, you would be right. But there is another possibility. These students may be at one of a growing number of schools that are incorporating technology in exciting and productive ways. In fact, you could have observed the same three students in a coffee shop rather than a classroom and they may be deeply engaged in learning activities unlike any you have ever experienced. They may be part of a learning revolution that, with a little help from us, will be coming soon to a community (or a computer) near you.
Twenty years of prompting, investing, threatening, and reforming have largely failed to dramatically improve education in the United States. There may be pockets of excellence, but results from U.S. schools are flatlined. While unions and school boards argue about contract minutes, the rest of the developed world passed us by in achievement and high school graduation and college completion rates. The United States ranks near the bottom of developed countries in math, with nearly one-quarter of students unable to solve the easiest problems.1 More than 40 percent of students in Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore score at the advanced level in math and only 6 percent do in the United States.2 The nationās 2009 report card indicated āthat 38 percent of seniors demonstrated proficiency in reading and 26 percent reached that level in math. In addition, reading scores remain lower than they were in 1992. And the report found essentially no progress in closing achievement gaps that separate white students from black and Hispanic peers.ā3
The causes of our lagging performance are complicated but in short our schools are obsolete. They cannot accomplish what we need them to accomplish. Mass production style, our schools batch process each age groupāsome get it, others fail and repeat or drop out. We expect a lot out of teachers during the short school year but give them few tools to accomplish their complicated tasks. But there is a big opportunity right in front of usāto create schools that are engaging, are personalized, and work better for everyone. To better understand this opportunity letās take a closer look at that high school classroom described at the beginning of the chapter.
YES, THIS IS LEARNING
Thereās Maria, the girl checking text messages. Only these are not messages from friends or updates on a celebrity court appearance; they are responses from a local politician to her requests for interviews on immigration. As part of Mariaās course on civics, she is deputy editor of a website attempting to illuminate the immigration debate. Maria has already interviewed a number of politicians and activists on both sides of the issue and has produced articles and opinion pieces judged by online peers and advisors. All of Mariaās contributions are filed in an electronic portfolio. She is passionate about her work as an editor but she isnāt quite as passionate about statistics. Later that day, she will go to her ninety-minute math lab, which combines self-paced online learning with occasional individualized online tutoring if she gets stuck. Even though she isnāt excited about statistics and finds it difficult, this approach is working for her and she feels successful, unlike her experience in precalculus class last year in a traditional school environment, when she just couldnāt learn at the same pace as the top students.
Eric is in front of a laptop, playing a game, but is this Angry Birds or World of Warcraft? No, itās an algebra game and as he views his score Eric sees that heās got more work to do on quadratics. His smart recommendation engine has already suggested a new math game that may provide a better learning mode for Ericāthe system determined that his persistence improves under competitive situations with public recognition of his point status. Before trying out the new game, Eric takes a moment to check a discussion stream he is engaged in with his virtual learning team comparing two opposing views of tax policy. He notes that one of his teammates has cited a fact about the tax rates under Bill Clinton that he thinks may be wrong and when he checks his online source, he finds his instincts were right. He types a response with a correction.
Eric has completed enough units of study to complete lower division (what used to be the ninth and tenth grades). His culminating project and successful public demonstration will mark a midyear transition to upper division, when he will begin earning college credit and begin working on a career concentration including an internship.
Finally, we meet Isabel who is listening to her iPod and smiling. It isnāt Kanye West or Lady Gaga who is making her smile, it is a lecture on Beethoven from McGill University that she had downloaded from iTunes U. Isabel is enrolled in the upper division of a virtual high school, she plays in a youth symphony, and music is her life. The lecture is only part of the background work she is doing in preparation for a project on music composition. Because Isabel does most of her learning at home, some folks are concerned about her lack of social interactionāin addition to her friends from the orchestra and soccer, she has a dozen mentors, is on five learning teams and four project teams, and regularly interacts with three academic advisors.
This isnāt 2020 sci-fi. These portraits represent how millions of students could be learning with tools that are currently available to schools. Right now a small percentage of students in the United States are having these educational experiences. This is an emerging reality, a learning revolution under way, riding on the heels of the digital revolution, and rather than making us dumber, it has the power to help more students achieve academically and leave school prepared for work and further learning. It will extend learning to hundreds of millions of students. Personal digital learning can significantly boost traditional results. How this is happening and can happen are addressed in these pages. But before we return to the power of personal digital learning, letās look for a moment at the world that students will be learning and working ināan economy that is based increasingly on having good ideas.
IDEA ECONOMY
There are two growth economies in the United Statesāthe idea economy and the service economy. Professional and technical jobsāthe ideas jobsāare the ones that tend to be plugged into the global economy and that will continue to grow in number. At the other end of the pay scale are the services and helping professions including landscaper, waiter, cook, and health care aide. These jobs earn less than the median incomeāoften minimum wageāand do not require a college degree; they are also expanding. The jobs that used to exist between these two sectorsāthe middle-class ones that created two-car-garage suburban Americaāare disappearing. MIT economist David Autor studied the disappearing act and concluded, āThe structure of job opportunities in the United States has sharply polarized over the past two decades, with expanding job opportunities in both high-skill, high-wage occupations and low-skill, low-wage occupations, coupled with contracting opportunities in middle-wage, middle-skill white-collar and blue-collar jobs.ā4
The polarization of the economy is a big problem. As educators we canāt fix the economy but what we can do is dedicate ourselves to making sure that as many students as possible are prepared to engage productively in the kinds of professional and technical jobs that that will help our economy and our students thrive. Learning is the entry ticket to the idea economy. āMost jobs that will have good prospects in the future will be complicated,ā says Louis Gerstner, former CEO of IBM. āThey will involve being able to juggle data, symbols, computer programs in some way or the other.ā5 But are our schools preparing students for this kind of work? I would say no. Letās look more closely at the features of the idea economy, at how ideas turn into industries, and compare them to the education we are currently providing.
JUST-IN-TIME LEARNING
The idea economy is iterative; it thrives on failure and feedback. By iterative I mean that ideas are tried and refined and tried again. It thrives on trial and error, risk and invention. Just listen to Marissa Mayer, Googleās VP of Search: āWe make mistakes every time, every day thousands of things go wrong with Google and its products that we know we can fix. But if you launch things and iterate really quickly, people forget about those mistakes and they have a lot of respect for how quickly you rolled the product out and made it better.ā6
Marissaās Google Search is both a product and driver of the idea economy. Search is a new form of idea economy learning: it is inquiry-based, iterative, and instantaneous. Search organizes the worldās data to answer your questions: the better your question, the better the response. It is hard to imagine life before Internet searchingāI donāt know how we raised children, conducted business, or investigated illness without it. Google Search has turned us all into researchers, a shift whose importance we donāt want to underestimate. Gisele Huff, executive director of the Jaquelin Hume Foundation, says, āThe age of the ...
