Clayton Christensen |

In the Winter 2009 issue of Education Next, John E. Chubb and Terry Moe debate Larry Cuban in a forum over whether educational technology will change the role of the teacher and the nature of learning.

It will perhaps come as no surprise to readers of Disrupting Class that Cuban is skeptical that it will. As Cuban has written in the past, technologies have repeatedly promised much but delivered little besides the hype. We cite his work extensively in our book and agree with his analysis of why this has been the case.

But as readers also know, we see a new opportunity for an educational technology like online learning to now make a transformational impact—provided people take a disruptive approach. Although certainly some concerted efforts can—and have—changed the fundamental classroom, we think that most of the change from technology won’t come in our traditional classroom at all (so there’s no real disagreement here with Cuban in many ways), but instead will come by being wrapped in a new organizational model and targeting non-consumption.

Chubb and Moe share our view about the potential for change, and in their upcoming book, Liberating Learning: Technology, Politics, and the Future of American Education, lay out their case for why and how this will happen. They approach the question from a different angle, and as it appears from the article, have some interesting insights. Can’t wait to read the book!

Also, take a look at the graphs of online learning growth in the article—particularly Florida Virtual School’s growth. Quite stunning. I think it shows the power of removing many of the barriers to this disruptive innovation and letting it grow at its natural pace.

Paul Tough of the New York Times chronicled a fascinating innovation—the One-Room School Bus—in the 8th Annual Year in Ideas.

Professor Billy Hudson of Vanderbilt University started up the project, the Aspirnaut Initiative, to turn the school bus into a mobile classroom. Buses are wired for connectivity, and students receive laptops or netbooks and are enrolled in online math and science courses. On the way to and from school, children take the courses, complete assignments, do research, and communicate with instructors online. In the pilot project, other students use video iPods to watch science and math content.

What is equally fascinating is where Hudson started the project. In rural Grapevine, Ark., children spend up to three hours a day on the school bus—wasted idle hours at the moment, but also a perfect example of nonconsumption and a golden opportunity. By next fall, Hudson and his wife hope to have enrolled 2,000 students in rural communities across Arkansas.

For districts and states seeking to foster some disruptive innovations, thinking in ways similar to this is a good start. Any other similar stories out there?

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.

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.

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.

The headline says it all. That’s the potential finding from a Cornell study that found a statistically significant relationship between autism rates and television watching by children under the age of 3, according to a fascinating article by Gregg Easterbrook in Slate.

The effect of early childhood on the brain is significant and cries for more good research. In our book, we draw on Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley’s work that shows that one of the fundamental reasons some children struggle to learn is that they don’t hear enough words before they reach the age of 3 and benefit from “language dancing.”

This raises many questions. Among them: Could a busy parent simply turn on the television and put the infant in front of it so they could hear the requisite number of words? The answer from research is a clear no. That sort of “background noise” has insignificant impact on a child’s intellect. But this Cornell study raises some questions here – maybe sitting the child in front of the TV would affect the brain in other ways.

This also leads us to think that the existence of multiple types of intelligences has its roots in the process in early childhood where our neural pathways are emblazoned in the brain. Babies who hear “extra talk” perhaps have strong verbal-linguistic intelligence; maybe listening to music helps produce stronger musical intelligence. And being disproportionately exposed to certain things like TV perhaps has strong effects on the brain, too.

As we advocate for more online learning, we need to be cognizant of how the medium for our information could in fact change how we think. Nicholas Carr writes about this phenomenon in the July/August cover story for the Atlantic Monthly titled, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”

Of course, if the real world is changing regardless of whether we think it is good idea, and if students need to think differently to cope in this new world, we probably need to change how students learn in schools to match that evolution. We might also wonder if students in fact learn differently now than did students of an earlier generation, and if this, too, calls for different forms of learning.

There is mixed research on this last question to be sure. What do others think?

Maine has instituted a bold program in its schools that provides every middle-school student with a laptop. The program is now moving into high school. The question of course is, for all the money, is it effective?

Results seem mixed. The difference doesn’t show up on test scores necessarily, according to this MSNBC article, but students are more enthusiastic about school.

What do you think?

My reaction is that it’s not the technology per se that improves learning, but is instead how you use the technology. Simply cramming computers into existing classrooms–-even in one laptop per child fashion–-doesn’t necessarily change the classroom by itself or allow for customized learning.

This is one of the core reasons we advocate implementing computer-based learning disruptively. This way all it has to be at the outset is better than the alternative—nothing at all— but over time it has its own space to redefine the interactions of learning between students and teachers and improve. It’s a slower process and more organic than the Maine one, but my guess is that it would ultimately be more effective, too.

“Computer software is too rules-based. It can’t really adapt to students. You lose too much if you rely on computer-based learning.”

This is one push back we hear against the vision of student-centric learning technology that we put forth in Disrupting Class.

We have many responses, of course, but one of them is that technology always starts at the low end of performance and, over time, predictably improves to do more complicated tasks and jobs. One might not be able to envision how it will improve and what it will be able to do, but we can say with certainty it will improve.

For example, what if computers could read student emotions and adjust accordingly in the future? Sound far-fetched? It might not be.

There are many examples of cognitive tutors that are emerging that can read student emotions. According to a recent article in eSchool News, University of Massachusetts researchers received a grant of $890,419 in June from the National Center for Education Research to advance technology that uses sensors to detect student emotions.

How does it work? According to the article:

“The tutoring program uses sensors placed in a student’s seat, in the computer mouse, and on a student’s wrist to detect arousal through skin conductance, a common measure for stress response. Conductance gives researchers a clear picture of the subject’s nervous-system activity. The program also will use cameras to detect smiles and facial expressions that connote negative feelings, such as anxiety or frustration.”

Just imagine the exciting possibilities here. What other research efforts and products are out there like this? How might this revolutionize learning?