Almost everyone I know complains about the sorry state of schools in the US. In “Disrupting Class,” Clayton Christensen, Curtis Johnson, and Michael Horn offer a unique and well researched perspective on the crisis, how we got here and what we can do about it. One passage in particular stood out for me:
“… investing in technological platforms that will enable children to create tutorial tools for each other, that help parents to create tools for their children and others’ children, and that make it easy for teachers to create tools for their students and for other teachers will have extraordinary impact. This is because we learn most deeply when we teach others. Funding the development of these platforms and the user networks within which these learning tools can be exchanged will be financially rewarding for investors and socially rewarding for philanthropists. Remember that students, parents, and teachers are desperate to be able to diagnose and resolve their own learning problems and teaching deficiencies. These are highly motivated people who in the past have been trapped in interdependent systems that stymie custom solutions at every turn.”
Disrupting Class : How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns (Clayton M. Christensen, Curtis W. Johnson and Michael B. Horn)
- Highlight Loc. 3937-44
That short paragraph gives voice to the motivation for the Student Notebook project, the Virtual Interactive Classroom and similar efforts to create tools that put the power to shape and share educational materials directly in the hands of students and teachers. Christensen et al. also argue that “user-generated student-centric” tools will become mainstream by 2014 when online courses will have a 25% market share in high schools as predicted by their substitution curve analysis.
Thanks to Gunnar Counselman for recommending the reading, I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in improving our educational system. It also helps to illustrate the role of service innovation in bringing about positive change.
Scene from a VIC lesson
