Stay up-to-date with the latest social-capital expert analysis, interviews, and insights grounded in current events and real-time fieldwork.
My Brother’s Keeper and Sprint Corp. are bringing tablets, smartphones, and four years of data service to students who lack internet access at home. But it will take much more than tech to transform student lives.
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This month, U.S. high schools got a healthy dose of innovation investment—the XQ Super School project announced 10 winners, each of which will receive $10 million to support their efforts to reinvent high school. Although the winners are pursuing a pretty dazzling array of approaches, all 10 are exploring ways to personalize high school in an effort […]
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Edtech entrepreneurs around the world have keyed into the enormous potential for edtech to disrupt the traditional content and assessment market. But with a laser-like focus on academic tools, entrepreneurs and school systems alike risk losing sight of how technology can also enhance students’ relationships with adults and one another. In addition to dramatically shifting how we […]
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A recent U.S. News & World Report article by Andy Rotherham made a bold claim: school districts do too much. His piece very convincingly argues that school systems spend inordinate resources and mental energy on providing student services, like food and transportation, to the determinant of focusing on their most valuable job: instruction. If we […]
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Late last year, Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, announced they are starting a private PK–8 school in East Palo Alto, Calif. Chan will serve as CEO of the new school, called The Primary School, set to open this coming fall. The effort builds on a number of investments that the couple has made […]
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This is the fifth post in the #WhoYouKnow blog series on the overlap of social capital, EdTech, and innovation. Today’s high school students interact with their guidance counselors an average of 38 minutes per year. Even more troubling are the profound gaps between rich and poor students’ access to mentors in general: according to Harvard […]
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For those adults working on, writing about, or generally pondering the fate of our education system, “teachers” are thought of as a stakeholder group, a fulcrum for change. But most of us are likewise bought into the idea of lifelong learning—that is, formal schooling may end, but we continue to be students of life. As […]
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Last week our Institute’s Michelle R. Weise and Clayton Christensen published a new book, Hire Education, on a key trend in higher education: the emergence of online competency-based degree programs. These programs are poised to offer modularized curricula that can be tailored to hone particular skill sets for different industries. Many of them offer a […]
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Education technology stands to more efficiently expand not just what you know, but whom you know. Technology may be a tool to impart skills and content in a more personalized manner, but it can also connect students with mentors and peers to provide meaningful guidance and, in turn, expand the students’ pool of social capital […]
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It’s a busy week in education in the Bay Area in California. With the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Annual Meeting in San Francisco with thousands of education researchers, the NewSchools Venture Fund Summit in Burlingame with a who’s who of education leaders and entrepreneurs, the GreatSchools 2013 Summit in San Francisco, the National Education Writer’s Association’s 66th National Seminar in Palo Alto, ImagineK12’s Demo […]
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The Department of Education’s latest foray into digital learning is a big deal. The Race to the Top-District competition’s “Absolute Priority 1” is personalized learning. For those who have been working to personalize learning through digital learning in the field, this endorsement and what it means for online and blended learning may seem like old […]
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Back in January, my friend Bror Saxberg, chief learning officer of Kaplan, published an eye-popping blog about a meta-analysis that Kurt VanLehn published recently about nearly 100 well-constructed papers about computers used to tutor learners. A couple of headlines from the meta-analysis are worth spotlighting here. First, the work shines some questions on Benjamin Bloom’s […]
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