The Wikiness

Last spring I felt the time had long since passed when smart administrators and superintendents of education should be seeing the logic of bringing more virtual learning into the classrooms. The un-beatable combination of lower cost and higher quality were in my mind undeniable, and since my local admins weren’t listening, I wrote the superintendent of my state, hoping he would get respond to my plea.

He never wrote back.

But now two southern governors, a prominent republican and a democrat, are preaching the digital solution, and I feel that maybe a “tipping point” for widespread blended learning might be happening. According to Malcolm Gladwell, any successful trend needs the assistance of salesmen and connectors, and I think Governors Bush and Wise could just be them. Their arguments are pretty much what I’ve been pushing, vis:

• digital learning ensures high quality, uniformly delivered content (un-certain about teacher? No problem now)
• personalized education, in which each child works at just his/her level of proximate development–the equivalent of an Individualized Educational Program for all
• Common Core Standards can be confidently addressed through a common, quality curriculum; assessments can be crowd-sourced and made increasingly accurate
• districts and states sharing and developing digital resources means lower costs for all

So, OK. Now that these two conventional politicians are preaching its value, and now that we are two years into an increasingly dire economy, will the argument for blended learning in public schools be further ignored?

I’m betting not. Let this long-overdue “tip” begin!