Technology At City University of Seattle

One of the earliest models of education was the tutorial model, in that a teacher had a small number of students and learning was a matter of mentoring, guidance, and support for what the student wanted to learn. What is interesting though is when we went to a public education system; education become more industrialized seeking a maximum output from the system. Web 2.0 though in many ways (since we are already always on, and connected in many ways through many systems) could reinvigorate the factory system back in favor of the tutorial model.

The NY Times reports that this is being discussed at the national level, in how to use technology to bring about a more egalitarian and more tutorial version of education that worked quite well 400 years ago.

But online resources, experts say, will increasingly be used to supplement and transform classroom education, moving from stand-and-lecture formats to project-based learning. “It’s a world apart from the old factory model of the high school with its rows of desks, textbooks and memorization,” said Ms. Martinez, whose organization has helped design 40 high schools in nine states and hopes to double that number by next year. Students in the New Tech schools typically outperform comparable schools in standardized tests. For all its promise to improve education, technology is still no match for one human tutoring another — which, of course, cannot be used to educate large numbers of students and is expensive. Source: NY Times

Online education is one way of breaking down barriers as we end up in an increasingly connected world, but in line with a previous article, how have we addressed educational challenges over the last 11 years shows that there are still places to go and things to fix. Additional complications come in with the idea that online education is fairly self directed, students have to have good learning habits, and be able to effectively manage their time and resources to ensure they contribute to their learning.

It will be very interesting to see what happens at the national level with this, and how changes at the Federal level will trickle down to the State and Local level.

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