Education as a platform — from radar.oreilly.com by Marie Bjerede
A data-driven architecture could disrupt the school system and improve it the more students use it.
Any and every education reform design is going to fail for two reasons. The first is that the problem is not one that is solvable by “design” in the traditional engineering sense — the education system, including all its human elements, is too complex for that. The second is that the system as currently built contains feedback loops that damp out change.
At the Gov 2.0 Summit, Deputy Director for Policy for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy,Thomas Kalil, referred to the challenge of educational software that improves the more students use it.
What would it mean to talk about a whole school system that improves the more students use it? I’ve heard the Department of Education’s Steve Midgely refer to school as a service and education as a platform — why not apply this kind of systems thinking to the Gordian knot of our education system, using the Internet as a lens and a platform model?