Digital Discourse / Archives for education technology

Privacy legislation gets a push, ed-tech funding is threatened

March 22, 2011 By

Last week’s Senate Commerce Committee hearing on privacy provided a boost to Senate efforts for advancing privacy legislation. Most notably, both Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) and White House representative Larry Strickling voiced support for legislation, with Strickling announcing that the Administration would be issuing a statement of support for privacy legislation in the near future.

Meanwhile, Sen. Kerry (D-MA) is still working to finalize his draft legislation. Additionally, House Commerce Manufacturing and Trade Subcommittee chair Mary Bono Mack indicated last week that she is ready to proceed with the first of several hearings on the issue after the Easter break.

Also, just as the nation’s education system is poised to accelerate technology-based innovation and improvement, a critical U.S. Department of Education program is on the chopping block. House-passed and Senate-proposed bills would zero-out funding for the Enhancing Education Through Technology (EETT) program for Fiscal Year 2011.

In response, SIIA and several education groups (ISTE, CoSN and SETDA) joined last week to express a statement of strong concern about budget proposals that would eliminate critical funding for critical education technology programs. EETT is the only federal education program designed to leverage innovation and technology to adequately prepare all of the nation’s children for the competitive 21st century global economy.

For SIIA policy updates, including upcoming events, news and analysis, subscribe to SIIA’s weekly policy email newsletter, Digital Policy Roundup.

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Filed Under: Digital Policy Roundup, Education, Education Policy, Government, Policy, Software Tagged With: , , ,

Mark MacCarthy sits down with 5 Qs on Tech

March 14, 2011 By

Rob Haralson of 5 Qs on Tech stopped by our DC office to interview Mark MacCarthy, SIIA’s new Public Policy VP. They sat down to chat about SIIA’s views on IP protection, cloud computing, ed-tech, privacy and cybersecurity. Check out the video–and stick around until the end to hear the story about Mark’s unusual first encounters with email!

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Filed Under: Anti-Piracy, Content, Education, Policy, Policy - Cybersecurity, Policy - Intellectual Property, Software Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Balancing Technology Standardization and Innovation in Race to the Top Assessments

January 31, 2011 By

The U.S. K-12 public education system continues to lag in both adoption of technology and related innovation as well as in leveraging technology and digital resources through interoperability standards. The two are closely connected: technology standards provide a base for cost-effective, value-added innovation; but if carried too far or adopted too early, such technical standardization can also inhibit desired innovation and competition. 

Their appropriate balance is therefore critical to advancing both important goals. The challenges in finding this delicate equilibrium point are being tested (pun intended) now as the U.S. Department of Education and its two Race to the Top Assessment (RTTA) grantee consortia — SBAC and PARCC – consider the scope and form of their deliverables and technology (interoperability) standards.

The $350 million RTTA initiative promises to bring important technology-enabled innovation to assessment — including many long available but not often implemented by states — through the online delivery of more robust (i.e., comprehensive, authentic, timely and adaptive) measurement of student knowledge and skills to inform teaching, learning and accountability. Leveraging this innovation will require changes to teaching and learning, technology investment, interoperability development and adoption, and limits on the scope of RTTA development.

In response to an important RFI by the Department regarding the technology standards to be employed by the RTTA consortia, SIIA supported the requirement that RTTA grantees “maximize the interoperability of assessments across technology platforms and the ability for States to switch their assessments from one technology platform to another.” RTTA could provide the tipping point to K-12 education’s adoption of data and content interoperability standards (see SIIA Primer) that would, for example, enable and maximize our ability to personalize learning.

But these benefits will only be realized if interoperability is properly implemented, and if standardization is balanced with innovation. SIIA’s recommendations to USED (and the RTTA consortia) elaborated on both points. [Read more...]

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Filed Under: Ed Tech Government Forum, Education, Education Policies, Education Policy, Policy Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Digital Learning Now!

December 1, 2010 By

SIIA is pleased to be a part of today’s announcement of the Digital Learning Now! campaign led by former Governors Jeb Bush (R-FL) and Bob Wise (D-WV) to advocate for state policies aligned with 10 Elements of High Quality Digital Learning. The 10 elements were identified by a Digital Learning Council of education leaders, including SIIA’s Mark Schneiderman and senior executives of several SIIA member high-tech companies.

Announced Bush and Wise: “We are grateful to the council members for forging a path for education’s historic shift from print to digital, from age groups to individuals and from seat time to competency. . . . Digital learning can transform education. Technology has the power and scalability to customize education so each and every student learns in their own style at their own pace, which maximizes their chances for success in school. It offers teachers an effective way to overcome challenges and better educate students of all learning needs. Digital learning is the great equalizer. It holds the promise of extending access to rigorous high quality instruction to every student across America, regardless of language, zip code, income levels, or special needs.”

The 10 policy recommendations include both access to technology infrastructure, digital content and online courses as well regulatory reforms to shift from seat-time to competency-based learning and remove many policy barriers to online learning. They focus on the opportunity to personalize learning through technology and include among key resources the SIIA-ASCD-CCSSO report on Education System Redesign for Personalized Learning. And they call for enhanced support for digital-age teaching through data systems, online assessment and professional development. As such, Digital Learning Now is perhaps the most comprehensive set of such policy recommendations in recent times, and represents a growing recognition among education leaders and stakeholders that transformational systemic change through technology is needed, including in light of the nation’s educational funding, teacher and performance shortages.

SIIA appreciates the leadership of Governors Bush and Wise, and the opportunity to be part of this important effort. We look forward to supporting the campaign’s next steps of helping states benchmark against these 10 elements and make changes to state policies and practices needed to advance this comprehensive vision for digital learning.

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Filed Under: Ed Tech Government Forum, Education, Education Policies, Education Policy, Personalized Learning, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , ,

Education Leaders Identify Top 10 Components of Systemic Redesign to Personalize Learning

November 15, 2010 By

The nation’s education stakeholders increasingly recognize that the fundamental redesign of our preK-12 system around the student is required for our future success. Calls for (e.g., Secretary Duncan) and examples of (e.g., Kansas City) innovative, personalized learning models are growing.

To help give voice and support to this movement, SIIA – in collaboration with ASCD and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) – released “Innovate to Educate: System [Re]Design for Personalized Learning,” based upon the insights and recommendations of some 150 education leaders convened at an August Symposium in Boston, MA (See archive of presentations, summaries and videos). The report provides a primer on personalized learning with definitions and examples and identifies the following essential practices and policies as voted on by Symposium attendees: [Read more...]

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Filed Under: Education, Education Policies, Education Policy, Personalized Learning, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , ,

Design Fix

July 15, 2010 By

[From a Symposium on Personalized Learning interview series by New Media Partner edReformer.com]

Joel Rose, CEO of School of One in New York City, addresses how personalized learning provides equity of student outcomes, and the need to address the design flaw of the traditional classroom model with with personalized systems and technologies.

Where does technology fit into [personalized learning]?
I think we need school designs that accomplish that personalized vision by integrating, instruction, professional development, leadership, options and technology. It’s one of the necessary components of an integrated design that serves that need. It doesn’t end or begin with technology, but technology is a piece of it.

What are some of the challenges being faced by the effort to bring personalization into the education system?
There is one big challenge, and that’s how nearly impossible it is for an individual teacher to personalize learning for 28 kids, during five periods a day. Even if we do that, it’s not enough. We have to complement the work of great teachers with systems and technologies that can enable personalized learning. It’s a design challenge. [Challenge is] the way we designed our schools, by putting 28 kids in a room, calling that sixth grade and putting one teacher in that room. And making that assumption that a kid can make that one year of growth . . . that’s a design assumption that is incredibly flawed. We are so accustomed to think of school in this way, the idea that there’s a different way of doing it doesn’t really enter into our minds. How we narrowly redesigned roles in school that have kind of calcified how we think about school. A lot of things we have done have just cascaded on top of this system. Until we fundamentally get to this design question . . . “This is where we want kids to be at the end of the year,” “This is the best way of doing that,” until we start asking these fundamental questions, we are going to stay where we are.

Read More from Joel Rose on how personalized learning and technology can address the design challenge of our school model, a roadmap for redesign, and how personalization flips the pursuit of equity from inputs to outcomes.

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Filed Under: Education, Education Events, Education Policy, Events, Personalized Learning, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,

Personalize and Deliver

July 13, 2010 By

[From a Symposium on Personalized Learning interview series by New Media Partner edReformer.com]

Harvard professor Howard Gardner shares his vision for personalized learning in an age of education reform which grows out of his theory of multiple intelligences. Gardner believes the educational world of the future belongs to those educators and technologists who can create robust ways to present important but challenging concepts.

What is your vision for personalized learning?
My vision of personalized learning grows out of the theory of multiple intelligences, which I developed thirty years ago. Personalized learning involves Individuation and Pluralization. Individuation means that each student should be taught and assessed in ways that are appropriate and comfortable for that child. Pluralization means that anything worth teaching could and should be taught in several ways. By so doing, one reaches more students. Today, we live in a computer age. For the first time in human history, individuation and pluralization are potentially available to any young person. And so the ideas of non personalized, remote, or cookie-cutter style teaching and learning will soon become anachronistic.

What are the challenges being addressed and the opportunities being leveraged?
The major challenge is a system that has proceeded for centuries on the basis of ‘uniform’ schooling and uniform learning: teaching everyone the same thing in the same way. That tack has seemed fair, because all are being treated in the same way. But it is actually unfair, because school is being pitched to a certain kind of mind–in my terms, a mind that is strong in language and logic. Added to that is our system of standardized assessment, which focuses on particular bits of knowledge and which often simply presents a set of choices. Once we have more personalized education, we can provide far more realistic assessments and allow students leeway in how they approach the problems and puzzles that they are presented.

Read More of Dr. Gardner’s views on the intersection of personalization and equity, the research on personalized learning, and the role of technology.

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Filed Under: Education, Education Events, Events, Personalized Learning Tagged With: , , , ,
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