“America's competitiveness is driven by our ability to create world-class scholars and engineers and scientists, and our public education system is really falling behind the rest of the world . . .
We teach all of the students in the class as if they each learned in the same way. Customizing the information to the needs of different types of learners is very, very expensive, and as a consequence, our schools are heading more pronouncedly towards teaching and testing everyone in the same way. Although the research is not yet definitive, there is widespread agreement that there are many different types of intelligence, for example one type of intelligence is called bodily kinesthetic intelligence, Michael Jordan is a genius in bodily kinesthetic intelligence. Another type relates to mathematics and logic, and some people can be geniuses in one type and very inept in another type. That's because each of our minds are wired to be good at a few things and not to be really smart in other things. We need to develop the ability to teach each student in a different way that is tailored to the way their brain is wired to learn. The only way that can be done is if learning is accomplished by computer and by software rather than a teacher standing up in a monolithic mode. Computer-based learning is much more customizable to individual students' styles and paces of learning.
If you try to deploy a new technology inside an existing business system, that system always co-opts the technology to reinforce the way it already does its work. In fact, 60 billion dollars at a minimum has been spent putting computers in our schools. Those computers have all been put into classrooms where the teacher leads the instruction, and so computers are used to help students to write better research papers, or they use computers to learn keyboarding skills. But computers have had no impact on the way education is delivered to the students.
The way disruptive change occurs is the computers have to be deployed competing against non-consumption first, and in fact as the computer takes root as the main learning vehicle competing against non-consumption, it gets better and better and better, and one by one, applications or courses are then drawn out of the conventional teacher-centric classroom into a computer-based world until ultimately, the current mode of delivering instruction has been disrupted.”
ESy
