Teaching in the Machine Age (Or Not)
The Christensen Institute is devoted to "disruptive innovation," or as a five-year-old might put it, new and creative ways to kick over the big stack of blocks.
For the big stack of blocks that is public education, Christensen has the big boot of personalized computer-driven education-favored product. And a new part of their pitch is the recently released report/PR prospectus, "Teaching in the Machine Age: How Innovation Can Make Bad Teachers Good and Good Teachers Better" by Thomas Arnett.
 |
| Hi! I'm your new teacher, and here's my human assistant. |
Arnett is a Senior Deep Education Thinker at Christensen, which is impressive since it was only five years ago that he was finishing out his two years with Teach For America in Kansas City. He then spent three months at Achievement First in 2012, and moved on to Senior Education Research Fellow at Christensen in 2013.If we dig deeper, we find that between 2002 and 2009 he was at Brigham Young earning a BS in Economics, and later did some graduate work at Carnegie Mellon's Tepper School of Business, including (and you'll want to remember this) Data Mining, Applications of Operations Research,Management of Software Development for Technology Executives, Innovation Ecosystems, plus Commercialization and Innovation: Strategy. So, no education.
This is the guy who's going to tell us how The Machines will help us do our jobs. Yay. But I have read this so you don't have to, because this trend toward Personalized Competency-Based Software-Centered Education has been poised to become the Next Big (Money-making) Thing, so we need to CURMUDGUCATION: Teaching in the Machine Age (Or Not):