Connected schools, not much blended learning
posted in assessment, edtech, leadership, literacy |Scott McLeod shared a great post today that reveals (with text and charts too) how connected US schools are today… and begs the question in my mind, how much has changed (broadly speaking) in the ways students and teachers are learning in our 21st century schools? Sadly, Larry Cuban’s conclusions from“Oversold and Underused: Computers in the Classroom” appear to still ring true for many if not most US schools today: Billions of dollars have been spent on educational technology, but not much has changed instructionally as a result.
This is one of my primary professional passions: To help educators answer the question, “What are you doing with your bandwidth?” As Scott’s post points out, there IS a difference between having an Internet-connected school and Internet-connected classrooms, but according to the NCES report “Internet Access in U.S. Public Schools and Classrooms: 1994-2005″ he cites:
Only 6% of [US] public school classrooms lack an Internet connection.
This IS a great achievement: US schools are way ahead of many other schools around the world that are not YET “wired.” I think we need to remember, however, that our goal in connecting our schools and classrooms to the information superhighway was not and should not be to simply augment the delivery of transmission-based instructional content to students. If we wanted more robust transmission methods for multimedia content, we could have more affordably purchased a television and a TV connection for each student to watch eight hours a day in school. Sadly, our federal eRate program (in the types of purchases it authorizes for schools) seems to have been built on a transmission-based paradigm of education. I’m glad all our US schools and most US classrooms are “wired” to the Internet, but I am very concerned that many teachers and most administrators seem to not understand (at least at present) the powerful ways that connectivity should be leveraged to increase student engagement and improve learning– and move our assessments of student learning beyond seat time.
We need to recognize that the world and the media/communications technologies multiplying all around us are not only enabling more differentiated RO (read-only) communication methods (i.e. iTunes and U-Verse) but also RW (read-write) communication methods exemplified by blogs, podcasts, and interactive sites/technologies like YouTube and SecondLife. This was a key theme of Lawrence Lessig’s keynote at the Wizards of OS 4 conference in Germany in September. (Over the holiday break, take some time and watch or listen to his preso, it’s well worth the time investment.)
I’m very glad our schools are connected. The question should be posed, however, “Now what?” Really the question should not just be posed at this point, we should have been asking ourselves all along, “Why do we want to wire our schools?” Part of that answer needs to be, so our students can safely, powerfully, and collaboratively participate in RW as well as RO education.
That will be part of the theme in my spotlight address at MacWorld 2007, coming up on January 10th in a few weeks. 
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