Our education model is broken.
Despite the economic promise of and documented need for a bachelor’s degree: graduation rates are stagnant, achievement gaps are widening, and costs are bankrupting our kids. While Digital-technology has transformed work, our schools retain their 19th century form and function defined by medieval paper-technology. The problems confronting our schools are caused by this new technology and requires it to solve them.
Despite my long career as a STEM educator and digital learning entrepreneur, I only very recently discovered the unique role technology plays in not just how we learn but in what we learn. I found it in the table of contents of a math book written in the year 1202. This has reshaped my work and will reinvent education. In my new book Make it Real, I tell the story of building a new foundation for learning math on spreadsheets, asking “What would math education look like if it were reinvented for the 21st century.” In its 6 chapters you will learn to use the content and digital tools of the Web to reimagine and redesign schools for the digital age.
1. “Lord Knows it Needs Something”
The role of technology in both what and how we learn
2. The Aims of Education
The need for a college degree for a thriving middle class
3. Make Room for the Future
Subtracting paper-age skills and adding digital-age skills
4. The Idea that Changed the World
Functions and functional thinking for problem solving
5. Learning Math as an Experimental Science
Lessons for learning math using spreadsheets
6. What if…
Revolutionizing education by making it real and Open-Web
You will learn about the power of technology to transform, to make people more effective, efficient, and relevant learners. You will learn how Open-Web schools will reinvent education, turn teachers into students and students into teachers, integrate disciplines, and use the business world to redesign schools, redefine intelligence, and reevaluate progress. And you will learn how digital learning can prepare our kids for their future, not our past, and enable us to set an audacious goal: Double the number of college degrees at half the cost within the next decade.