Clayton Christensen |

There was a series of articles recently in the New York Times about video games and computers in education. One about using video games to hook children into reading, “Using Video Games as Bait to Hook Readers,” created a stir.

It even prompted an email from one of the readers of our blog. She asked us to write a letter to the New York Times immediately—which, sadly, I didn’t do. But I thought I would post some of what she wrote and let it speak for itself.

She said: “Encourage the adoption of this technology. It may still have room to improve but for those kids who learn well through the stimulation of video games, it’s a more effective way of getting them to read than a teacher standing in front of the classroom.  The goal is not to find one way of teaching kids everything… This is one part of a multi-part solution. … Let the kids decide if it works for them. … It won’t be effective for all kids, but that’s not how its success should be measured. …

That line about Dostoyevsky vs. a video game ‘meaning something’ stuck with me. To bookworm kids, reading Dostoyevsky is more impactful, more dramatic, more ‘sit-on-the-edge-of-your-seat’ worthy than the World of Warcraft equivalent. To other people, Warcraft is much more stimulating. Allow for both!”

What is she talking about when she starts talking about Dostoyevsky? Read the article and find out. And then let us know what you think.

Another article worth reading on the same theme in the New York Times was “Video Game Helps Math Students Vanquish an Archfiend: Algebra.” It is about a video game, Dimension M, made by Tabula Digita, that quizzes students on math—from algebra to fractions. It seems to be a big extrinsic motivator for students to tackle math and costs only $10 to $20 per student. A large handful of middle schools are trying it out, and the Games for Learning Institute, a $3 million research effort at New York University, will be studying it further.

It’s been an exciting week in the U.S. An historic presidential election concluded with a landmark result of which all of us can proud regardless of our political views. We look forward to seeing what an Obama presidency will mean for the future of education. In the President-elect’s past remarks, he has spoken eloquently about the potential for technology to play a game-changing role in education. We hope he continues to embrace this potential and helps open disruptive paths for such innovations as online learning that hold the potential for game-changing transformations.

An upcoming book helps show why this is important. Titled The Development of Giftedness and Talent Across the Life Span, it has some interesting insights on the nature of giftedness—namely how academic talent can wax and wane over time and how it can be nurtured and taught, according to an Education Week article previewing the book.

One implication of this work is that the structure of schools doesn’t always support this fluidity. “Children might move in and out of ‘gifted’ programs more frequently, based on their individual needs,” says the article in paraphrasing the book’s co-editor, Frances Degen Horowitz.

There are obviously many problems in doing this in current schools. For example, I imagine moving children in and out of gifted classes might crush their confidence and hurt their feeling of self-efficacy. It goes to the problem of how social promotion and holding a child back both have inherent problems associated with them.

Online or computer-based learning introduced disruptively can help solve this tradeoff. By being individually paced but not taking a child out of his or her social environment in essence, it allows for children to take what is most relevant for their individual needs at any given time. In theory it can also allow children to match with others from around the world that are in similar places, but not create static environments that could have negative effects on development. And for those children who remain “advanced” compared to their social peers, it can allow them to continue to work through challenging material to grow and expand their horizons without becoming bored—an exciting proposition to allow all children to realize their fullest potential and promise.

*Note: I will be out of the country and on vacation starting tomorrow for the next two weeks. I will not be posting to the blog during this time. I will resume my regular weekly posts upon my return.

I had planned originally to blog again about higher education, but this has been a busy few days of activity around the book and its themes so I thought it would be worthwhile posting some links to the various events and presentations and offering a few brief reflections.

Clay and I gave a presentation at the American Enterprise Institute along with Jason Hwang on the 27th titled “Disruptive Innovation in Education and Health Care” (video and audio are online here). Checker Finn was on the education panel with us as well which made for a lively discussion.  Education Week’s Andrew Trotter wrote an article about the event as well.

The next day I was in Arizona where I had the opportunity to keynote NACOL’s Virtual School Symposium. This was an exciting and informative event with somewhere around 1,100 people in attendance. It’s a conference that, just like online learning, has grown by leaps and bounds in the last couple of years.

I’ve said this before, but NACOL, the International Association for K12 Online Learning, is doing some great work in this space. The organization is a great source of information and is helping sponsor useful research to further the field.

Among the worthwhile reports that I recommend highly and that you can find from NACOL’s site are the latest issue of Threshold magazine and the latest Keeping Pace with K-12 Online Learning report (just came out on October 23rd). These reports help show that online learning really is booming and will help any reader understand what it really is.

There has been lots of activity on the Web about these events—many praising and others with insightful criticisms. One of the most interesting things, however, that I observe is the difference in conversations taking place. When you are in the Beltway or talking with people who have been in the thick of education for years, although many do see the promise online learning holds, many also don’t believe it’s happening and growing in disruptive fashion. If you are in the actual space and seeing the number of entrepreneurs and districts diving in and having successes, however, you see a very different picture. This is not necessarily surprising given how disruptive innovation works, but it is interesting.

Lastly, Scott McLeod, an associate professor and coordinator of the Educational Administration Program at Iowa State University and the director of the UCEA Center for the Advanced Study of Technology Leadership in Education (CASTLE), delivered a great presentation on the Web at the K12 Online Conference. His thesis in essence is that the coming disruptive changes necessitate new leadership models for schools. It’s a 20-minute presentation that summarizes some core concepts from our work and is well worth watching.

Let’s revisit the topic of disruption in higher education, but from a different angle. In the past, I’ve written about community colleges and online universities targeting non-consumption, but there is a policy dimension to this as well.

Henry Eyring has a great piece about it in Strategy & Innovation called “Let Disruption Fix Higher Education” (Innosight, LLC, the consulting firm that Clayton Christensen co-founded, publishes Strategy & Innovation; you’ll need to register to log in, but it’s free, takes only a moment, and is well worth it).

In the article, Eyring writes that the average cost of a 4-year degree has risen 76 percent in the past 10 years. Unsurprisingly, government feels the need to halt this. There have been reports—The Spellings Commission’s, for example—and Congressional action. One such act proposes creating “lists to embarrass colleges that increase their tuition significantly.”

As Eyring points out, although well intended, this is unlikely to have real impact. The real answer? Disruption—namely teaching universities disrupting research universities.

A key point from the article is that teaching universities are less expensive because they don’t have a cost component devoted to a research university’s real product and priority: its research (nope, not preparing its students for the workforce!). Although the classroom works similarly in both of these environments, because the two universities types have different value propositions, profit models or priorities, and processes (in other words, a different business model), the two are actually quite different. With different metrics to judge its different and lower-cost business model, the teaching university is disruptive relative to the research university.

The corollary might be that online universities and community colleges are really subsets of the teaching university category, which is a more descriptive term perhaps? Or one could argue that online universities have a new classroom labor model as well and therefore are a different category? I’ll have to think more about this–and would welcome comments, but read the article to learn more and see how this model is changing the higher-education landscape—as well as to read Eyring’s proposals for how government could act.

There are other disruptions emerging in higher education that change the classroom labor model, such as Smarthinking’s StraighterLine, which is worth a blog post some time soon.

Clayton Christensen and I have a new article out in Business Week online today in the Viewpoint section. Titled “McCain: Education’s Disruptor-in-Chief?” the article is about the presidential election and Senator John McCain and Senator Barack Obama’s respective positions on how disruptive innovation can affect positive change in how today’s classrooms operate. The article leads with McCain and how he has latched onto many of the core ideas from disruption and our book. It then talks about the great promise Obama’s vision of technology has for education, especially if implemented disruptively.

There is also an accompanying slide show that the editors at Business Week put together that profiles 15 disruptive innovations in education.

As always, we welcome your comments on this site.

Staying with the non-consumption theme from last week, let’s think about the biggest area of non-consumption in education that just cries for disruptive education models to come in and make an impact: poor children in the developing world.

According to a September 29, 2008 Newsweek article titled “Education: It’s Not Just About the Boys. Get Girls Into School,” “73 million children worldwide don’t go to primary school. Three times as many never go to secondary school.”

This is an area ripe for innovation.

In Gene Sperling’s book What Works in Girls’ Education, he writes about how focusing solutions around educating girls in essence gets the most bang for the buck in improving society. A barrier is that families are often uncomfortable when their daughters have to travel long distances to schools that don’t even have separate latrines for the boys and girls, for example. Another barrier in developing countries is even when they make education free, which benefits the poor immensely, they can’t afford or find the teachers they need to account for the spike in students.

It’s not hard to see how e-learning could help. The trick will be in devising models to get effective solutions in the hands of the would-be students. Many have already identified mobile solutions as the way to go, and I expect that learning on mobile devices will have a much greater impact abroad than in the United States for some time—for the same reasons cell phone usage in Africa has leap-frogged that of the United States.

Indeed, companies like Qooco in China have already made an impact in this arena. Unless the United States is on the ball, it’s entirely possible that truly student-centric solutions will emerge in the developing world well before they do in the United States as well. What other groups are making an impact like Qooco? How are they doing it? For those who spend time studying this world, what trends do you see?

There’s a fascinating article in the August 17, 2008 New York Times Magazine by Paul Tough. It’s titled “A Teachable Moment” and is well worth the read.

There are many strands in here worth unpacking, including the ongoing debate about can good schools be enough to turn around children or do you need all parts of society coming together if you are to have any hope. Our book discusses this in part, and Innosight Institute will address this question with a more comprehensive paper in the coming months.

For now, I want to focus on this line: “The city’s disastrously low-performing school system was almost entirely washed away in the [Katrina] flood –- many of the buildings were destroyed, the school board was taken over and all the teachers were fired.”

The total lack of options resulting in New Orleans from this tragedy created vast nonconsumption of schooling, as described in the article. Nonconsumption, as we stress, allows for disruptive models to emerge to address jobs needing to be done. This is a unique opportunity in the U.S., and indeed, there is a lot of innovation happening in New Orleans schools –- just as we would predict. It’s a fascinating laboratory, and one in which even more innovative ideas could be tried to really make an impact and improve children’s lives. We hope others, like this blogger, see that opportunity, too.

On Friday, September 26, 2008, EdWeek hosted a really interesting online chat with Susan Patrick, president and CEO of the North American Council for Online Learning (NACOL), Cheryl Vedoe, president and CEO of Apex Learning, and Julie Young, president and CEO of Florida Virtual School. You can read the transcript of the chat here.

If you have questions about what does an online course look or feel like, what requirements do you need to offer or teach in one, or what happens if the technology goes down, this is a chat you really ought to read. It’s comprehensive and informative. These three individuals are among the leaders in this field; by reading this, you’re getting the best information out there straight from the source.

In the chat, they also point to some other resources for more information, including guides on NACOL’s Web site, and some good articles and an explanatory graphic in the latest Threshold magazine.

Would be great to know people’s reactions to this chat as well as any other questions you may have that stem from it.

Our blog today brings us from D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee to New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein—two chancellors cut from a similar, if not the same, cloth. Klein has been a mover and shaker in turning the New York City schools upside down and pushing reform at every opportunity since he took the helm.

He has achieved a lot of change and sparked much controversy, too (and we’d certainly love to hear your viewpoints on him).

In the New York Sun on September 18, 2008, an article discussed education books that have proven meaningful and inspirational to him. And—yes, here’s some shameless self-promotion—he cited our book, Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns. For such an influential education reform leader to mention our book is quite an honor for us. You can read about it here: http://www.nysun.com/new-york/when-it-comes-to-new-inspiration-chancellor-klein/86133/.

Some other books he cited were William Ouchi’s influential book, Making Schools Work: A Revolutionary Plan to Get Your Children the Education They Need, as well as David Whitman’s new book, Sweating the Small Stuff. The article focuses mostly on Ouchi’s book, but Whitman’s new volume is also quite interesting. In a future white paper forthcoming from Innosight Institute, I will address some of Whitman’s points.

What other education books have inspired you? Why? And what common themes do you notice in Joel Klein’s choices?

There are a lot of features right now about Michelle Rhee, the D.C. school chancellor, as she enters her second year at the helm. Everyone from PBS to the Washington Post to CNN is writing about her. Her leadership is providing an interesting case study for Chapter 8 of Disrupting Class. Take a look at the Washington Post article, “Better or Worse, it’s Rhee’s School System Now” to see why.

In our book Disrupting Class, we describe how the only way for managers to create change in an environment where there is disagreement on both what their goals are and how the world works is to use the tools of power. And to do that, they have to accumulate enough power to wield them. In a democracy, that generally isn’t possible.

But Rhee seems to be doing her best to do just this so that she can create real and lasting change (for better or for worse, as the article headline reminds us – what do others think?). Just consider some of the lines from the article:

1) “Rhee was able to move so quickly because of the unilateral power granted her by Mayor Adrian M. Fenty, who has staked his political future on fixing the schools, which he won control over in June 2007. Fenty (D) has given her political cover by warning agency heads that they risk losing their jobs if they tell her no.

Under the new governance system, Rhee reports only to Fenty, not a school board.”

2) ““It’s like ushering in a scary era where we don’t have a say in what’s going on,” said Jones, who chaired the Burroughs restructuring team, a panel that advises the principal. “It just feels like the people are losing their voice . . . that we’re losing a grip on democracy.””

3) “Some critics say she operates the $1 billion system like the private nonprofit she founded before taking the chancellor job — with little accountability to the public.

As she has consolidated power, she has weakened the authority of principals and instructional superintendents, administrators who oversee clusters of schools, and diminished school-based decision-making.

Asked recently by a PBS reporter whether she considers herself a benevolent dictator, she said: “If by dictator, you mean somebody who, at the end of the day, is fully comfortable being held accountable for, you know, the results and is going to be incredibly decisive about the direction that we’re heading in, then, yes.””

Now that is power.