{"id":2418,"date":"2010-09-07T23:55:11","date_gmt":"2010-09-08T03:55:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wordpress\/?p=2418"},"modified":"2010-09-10T16:33:29","modified_gmt":"2010-09-10T20:33:29","slug":"hoping-that-the-digital-learning-council-is-not-strong-american-schools-digital-version","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/?p=2418","title":{"rendered":"Hoping that the Digital Learning Council is not Strong American Schools, digital version"},"content":{"rendered":"

Apparently there is now something called a Digital Learning Council, which a press release announced in August and apparently has Bob Wise and Jeb Bush on board as co-honchos. I would point to the website of the new DLC, but there isn't a website I can find (though there is a Twitter feed<\/a>). I will admit it's a bit of a trick to get Ed Week to run a story<\/a> on an organization that only exists as a press release to prod American schools to use technology to improve learning. That's never happened before, either the argument or spending money on technology, so I can understand why it was newsworthy. And Bob Wise has never been involved with vaguely-titled national civic organizations having something to do with education, either. And there hasn't been any national civic organization with a Republican and Democrat as titular leaders. Oh, wait, there has been: Strong American Schools, aka Ed in '08, the multimillion-dollar Publicity to Nowhere funded by the Broad and Gates foundations.  <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I had my say on last week's National Journal forum on the topic<\/a> (short version: let's be honest about the likely benefits and costs of any proposal\/program*), but the organization-by-press-release is the second time something like that happened (or appeared to happen) in the summer. The first time was an aborted press conference that never happened in late July<\/a> to publicize a statement by civil rights organizations on education policy critical of the Obama administration. But in contrast to what happened in July, no reporter has pointed out that the (non-electioneering) DLC exists at the moment only as a press release. (DLC also stands for Democratic Leadership Council.)<\/p>\n

More to the substance of the matter: I hope that whatever the (education) DLC does, it's concrete. We have a vague set of arguments already about the use of technology for pinpointing instruction to individual need. In reality, this is less a matter of some ideological movement than the work of changing school culture. I have some experience with this in my postdoc appointment in the '90s, and I've observed at some distance the major projects in the last decade in Florida funded by Reading First. I appreciate the 30,000-foot-level perspective, but sometimes language such as the following<\/a> seems, well, frustratingly ignorant of existing work and the dangers of techno-boondoggling:<\/p>\n

\n

The comparability of common formative assessments is great, but the lockstep application forces standardization. I’d much rather see a marketplace of powerful instructional systems that invisibly embed assessment.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The first sentence is not true: a subfield of special education is devoted to the use of common formative assessments to individualize instruction, with significant evidence of effectiveness (and the list of Digital Learning Council members includes those who should be familiar with that subfield). Frankly, the second sentence looks like a justification for boondoggle-level sales of the Instructional Software of the Month. Gramby Games takes students to a new level! embedding invisible assessment through Gramby Level Badges(TM) students accumulate as they play through the virtual learning environment of NuSkulWorld (TM). Fully articulated with common core language-arts standards for grades 1-8, as verified by Capitalized Name, retired educational psychologist from Northsouth State University. Test score increases guaranteed. District license costs only $195 per enrolled student per year, technical support $50 per student additional. License fee and technical support does not include server hardware, operating system, maintenance and personnel costs, individual desktop systems, and school-level technical support for desktop clients. <\/em><\/p>\n

Given the realistic financial condition of many school systems, the investment in instructional technology is going to be (and should be) fairly limited in the next decade, so it needs to be targeted. I don't know if the federal assessment competition is going to produce the quantum leap in assessment quality schools need, let alone whether technology can be used for such purposes. Or, rather, while centralized investments might create some infrastructure, you might see more productive pressure coming from an educational equivalent of PatientsLikeMe<\/a>.<\/p>\n

* Update (I forgot the footnote on Tuesday): This point seemed obvious to me and not particularly unique to technology. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Apparently there is now something called a Digital Learning Council, which a press release announced in August and apparently has Bob Wise and Jeb Bush on board as co-honchos. I would point to the website of the new DLC, but there isn't a website I can find (though there is a Twitter feed). I will […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2418","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education-policy"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-D0","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2418","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2418"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2418\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2442,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2418\/revisions\/2442"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2418"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2418"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2418"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}