Clayton Christensen’s Disrupting Class*, about the untapped power of technology to transform schools, has gotten a fair amount of play in the blogosphere (see here and here). I’m almost finished with it myself, and some of the ideas are refreshing, others a bit worked over. I tend to have trouble with these b-school books in that the messaging is so heavy-handed. After all the rave reviews of The World is Flat, I decided to give it a whirl, but it just seemed like on every other page, Freidman surmised, “And that’s why the world is flat.” Yep, got it.
Anyway, one of the most striking passages to me in Disrupting Class, and it no doubt stood out to others, is where the mother observes her daughter working on a biography of Madame Curie and thinks, I did that same assignment for the same teacher when I was in school, the only real difference being that her daughter is using a computer to look up information instead of an encyclopedia. Sort of the, These Go to Eleven, school of thought on how to use a computer in the classroom.
I hope that Christensen is right, that technology will eventually transform how students learn and teachers teach. But in the meantime, can we at least fix the bathrooms in our schools?
*See Christensen’s Ed Next article on his book here.
–Guestblogger Michele McLaughlin