The iZone and the valley of death
If you hang around conferences, incubators or hackathons devoted to K-12 blended learning, you'll constantly hear people lament the so-called "valley of death"--the slowness of the public procurement process in particular, and bureaucracy in general, that provide an unbridgeable divide between innovations and students, teachers and classrooms. There's a metabolism mismatch here: In Silicon Valley the mantra is "fail fast" and an organization that spends 18 months and several million dollars before closing down without impacting many users isn't necessarily considered a failure, just a bump in the learning process. In public schools, that is a scandal. But there are emerging solutions. In Slate, Katherine Mangu-Ward, a writer with a conservative and libertarian background, asks if onerous regulations and teachers' unions will "kill" virtual learning. She calls seat-time and line-of-sight requirements that demand that students be physically in front of teachers for a certain number of hours per day or per year outdated, given the current reality of blended, hybrid, competency-based, and distance learning. And she calls teachers unions "obtuse" for suing to limit the number of children in charter schools, to close virtual schools, and to try to limit enrollment in such schools to the physical districts where online schools are based. Over on Pandodaily, a tech news site that is spending this month plunging into the world of online