In February next year, I will be speaking at a conference in Mumbai about how schools can use computers in class to teach innovation, and creativity. The nice thing about knowing this far in advance that I will be doing something like this is that I get a long time to think about the subject. I have been speaking to teachers on where technology is going to take education for years now and it is quite frankly, the most dangerous audience I speak to. This is due to the fact that some of the things I say must be so heretical as to actually anger some of the older educators. It is moments such as those that I have to remind myself that it is better to challenge current thinking and risk making people angry, than to be lukewarm and try to make everyone happy. So here we go…

I did not have a great experience in my K thru 12 years in school. I found the whole process to by mind numbing in many ways. I did have a few good teachers along the way, and realize now that it was not so much the method they used as the force of personality I was attracted to. Luckily, I absorbed enough from them, while sporting a solid 2.5 GPA that I had the skills to go on and be successful in life. I have never forgotten how much I hated the process of school, and how freed I felt the day they let me out. I also recognize that some people loved school and it was the best time of their life. I suspect that had more to do with things other than getting an A however. Long and short, I have become less and less of a fan of how we educate. This is a technology content source so allow me to segue to the technology part of this diatribe.

Technology has afforded us large set of tools that can radically change how we teach, what we teach, and why we teach. I am mystified as to why as taxpayers and parents, we are not rising up to put more pressure on schools to modernize their approach. Only in a system without profit motive, and outdated measurements could you allow for such inertia to exist as we have today at schools. Allow me to present a list of ways that technology should be impacting education:

We have now created a massive “library” called the Internet, on a scale that is hard to fathom – and is instantly accessible from anywhere, for free. With a structure like this that will only grow and improve, why do we make people memorize facts as a measurement of IQ? Facts that anyone can get in a nanosecond with a search.

We have created a communications system that is now free, has many various modes of communication, and the ability to scale to deliver to millions at a time. With a system like this, why would we not use this system to deliver the best of breed education to people and not create more buildings, more local content, and more local delivery?

We now have knowledge engines like WolframAlpha that can do much of the heavy lifting in doing math based calculations, and analytics. With tools like this, why would we not teach kids how to use the tools, instead of the underlying engineering? They could simply stand on the shoulders of others instead of making every generation start at zero. I don’t even know how to do math longhand any more because I use a calculator. Am I stupid because of this fact?

With the ability to tap into Internet based communities of interest that contain thousands of people, why does it make sense to have kids only get input, or build relationships with a handful of students in their building? Why not have Italian students in Italy teach U.S kids how to speak Italian? And vice versa…

The sad part is, human beings get shaken up by revolutionary change. We are more comfortable by evolutionary changes that come at a slow pace so we can accept the changes slowly. The sad part of this is, we could easily paint a picture that is completely different as to how we could educate our youth – using technology – that they will use anyway as they grow up. It is not the students that will hold us back from completely re-engineering schools, it is the educational machine, and the parents behind them. More to come in Part 2…

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com