Schools in the Digital Age

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Strategic Design Research

Background

Kids increasingly use digital media in their daily lives. Obsessively playing on-line games like World of Warcraft, sharing music, and interacting with friends through e-mail and Instant Messaging are just a few examples of how their use of information has transformed because of digital media. Schools, however, are ignoring and increasingly resisting this transformation. This project identifies opportunities to bring about a transformation in the way schools can be planned and organized to best leverage the rapidly developing technical and social contexts of learning.

Project web site: www.electroniclearningrecord.org

The Henry Ford Model of Education

If Henry Ford arrived in America this afternoon in a time machine, he would be understandably confused by the modern enterprise. Production, communication, corporate organization, work, and leisure have become unrecognizably different since his time. But there would be one place Mr. Ford would find comfortably familiar: the public school.

While the increasing cost and declining quality of K-12 education in the U.S. has created a political environment favorable to reform, the schools remain reformed. The consensus needed to drive and fund change does not exist. Governments have funded whole libraries of educational research, experiments have been conducted, small successes achieved, and brilliant failures made, yet the core problem remains: our schools are not the schools we would wish for our children. They do not serve the needs of the present, much less the future. In particular, digital media has revolutionized the way children live, work, and play, yet schools have not responded, leading to a growing gulf between the way kids live and learn outside school, and the way they learn inside school.

While the most evident result of digital media on learning is in the delivery of content, this will not be its most profound effect. Digital media is a disruptive technology, and as such will bring about fundamental changes in the nature of learning organizations. These changes will follow a general pattern, already seen in other industries, and characterized by two stages: first, a new technology enters and provides a better way of performing a specific function; second, the technology transforms the fundamental way organizations work.

For example, in the 1950s, computers entered organizations as a better way of doing accounting. Later, as the technology matured, computing deeply altered organizational structure and processes. Executives now write and produce their own documents, without relying on a “steno pool”. Planning teams are able to quickly model multiple iterations of global production processes. A country hardware store in Arkansas can create a supply network enabling it to become the largest company in the world.

For the last twenty years, most applications of digital media in education have been representative of the first stage of technology adoption. Interactive textbooks, on-line homework, environmental simulations, and learning games are all important innovations — as critical to education as computing now is to accounting. However, the second, transformative stage of adoption is yet to emerge.

Alongside technology and the organization, there is a third element -- socio-economic context -- that underlies the activities of daily life. Henry Ford would recognize today's public schools precisely because they remain structured around the technological, organizational and socioeconomic context of the industrial age. Then, dominant technologies like the assembly line and broadcast media were about mass production, standardization and economy of scale; leading organizations like GM and AT&T were vertical and self-contained; the socio-economic dimension was characterized by archetypes like the “Organization Man” and the union job for life.

Just as it was obvious in the 1950s that computers would benefit accounting, it is clear today that digital media can improve educational content delivery. However, just as the full transformation of society caused by computing was not obvious, it is not yet obvious what long-term changes digital media will cause in education and its surrounding context. Too many variables, changing too quickly, make classic planning methods obsolete.
Business leaders today frequently find themselves in a similar situation: capable of creating almost any type of innovation, but uncertain exactly what new products or services to produce in such a rapidly changing world. Increasingly, they are using design methods as a way to understand alternate future scenarios in the face of incomplete and changing information.

Design as a way of discovering new options

The patterns of people's daily lives today are becoming increasingly complex and hard to predict, largely due to the sheer number of choices they have for products, services and information. Technology is making products, messages and services more flexible, both in their production and in how they work, so customers are able to radically customize offerings to their individual needs. Meanwhile, companies have a growing selection of management models, from global strategic alliances to using products as a platform for selling services, allowing them to create even more new choices for customers.
These two types of change mean companies can make and market almost anything they can imagine — yet they remain unsure what to make in the first place. Ironically, their increased technological and management abilities have led to a “paradox of choice,” confusing customers with too many options. This has led industry to turn to design methods to define what to make in the first place.

Design is normally thought of as the drawing and styling of a new product, message or building. However, most great design follows an invisible planning process before any drawings are made. This process involves looking beyond conventional approaches, reframing and redefining problems, generating alternate solutions, and exploring them through iterative prototypes before a final direction chosen and refined.
Historically, design was not used this way by many organizations; production was inflexible, markets were stable, and it was relatively clear what products to make. Now, however, if organizations do not use this exploratory up-front planning process, they end up designing a highly refined service or product for a world that no longer exists.
A similar issue is facing the field of education today: problems are defined as if moms still stayed home, people needed to be trained for a single career, and reading, writing and arithmetic were the only ways to learn. But as kids’ experiences outside school become predominantly digital, reliance on past conventions will be unproductive, and standard long-term studies less useful for planning improvements.

Design methods can help move our thinking beyond conventional views about digital media in schools. While digital media’s influence on content delivery is important, it will be a fundamental disruptive force on the way schools are organized and operated. Taking this broader view prompted us to look at fields outside education, and develop an alternative framework to describe the problem of digital media in schools.

Project Overview

Our work on Schools in the Digital Age began with a nine-month investigation of the problem space, with the goal of developing a small number of promising research ideas and concepts to be explored in subsequent phases. The general process involved three steps:

Reframing the problem
We gathered information from interviews with experts in education, technology and organizational theory, then clustered the resulting insights into 16 high-level problem areas, representing a new way of viewing the problem of digital learning.

Creating principles and concepts
Two expert workshops looked at these reframed problem areas and identified research ideas based on them, as well as a small number of guiding principles for all future projects.

Identifying opportunities
Out of 60 research ideas generated at the workshops, we distilled 12 promising areas, and came up with 10 concrete research concepts.

Reframing the problem

It is widely acknowledged that digital media will have a transformative affect on the delivery of educational content. Electronic text books, interactive museum displays, wikis and games all
promise to deliver richer and more customized information.

However, as a disruptive technology, digital media will fundamentally change the nature of learning organizations, much like computing revolutionized
business organizations in the last century. Merely changing how content is delivered, without changing the organizational context of schools,
would be analogous to a company installing flexible manufacturing technology without addressing
how employees work, the supply chain, and how information flows in the rest of the company.

To begin thinking about how to address digital media in education more holistically, we interviewed experts in education, technology and organizational
theory, and clustered their insights into 16 high-level problem areas. These stand in contrast to the currently prevailing framework, which, while not wrong, is focused exclusively on content delivery and leaves out the organizational context.