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One reason educators search for alternative education modalities is to provide access venues to overcome student challenges. For many students, online is the only modality by which they are able to attend college or continue with a college education. But it’s by no means a panacea.

Paving informal paths

On paving informal paths, see resources on social and informal learning at Jane Hart’s Social Learning Centre: http://sociallearningcentre.co.uk/ On curation, see Beth Kanter’s blog post “Content Curation 101”: http://www.bethkanter.org/content-curation-101/ On the Cheesecake Factory’s video café: http://www.bersin.com/News/Details.aspx?id=14676 On communities, see Katja Pastoors’s comparison of types of communities of practice as well as the dynamics of top-down v. bottom-up communities of practice: http://www.emeraldinsight.com/journals.htm?articleid=1585429 For a study on understanding the workings of a successful community of practice, see Bozarth, J. “The Usefulness of Wenger’s Framework in Understanding an Existing Community of Practice”: http://repository.lib.ncsu.edu/ir/bitstream/1840.16/4978/1/etd.pdf

If you doubt that we live in a winner-take-all economy and that education is the trump card, consider the vast amounts the affluent spend to teach their offspring.

This power spending on the children of the economic elite is usually — and rightly — cited as further evidence of the dangers of rising income inequality.

But it may be that the less lavishly educated children lower down the income distribution aren’t the only losers. Being groomed for the winner-take-all economy starting in nursery school turns out to exact a toll on the children at the top, too.

There has to be a better way to get data so schools themselves can figure out how they’re doing in comparison with their peers.