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In 2007, The Report of the NEW Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce: Tough Choices or Tough Times made our nation hyperaware that "World market professionals are available in a wide range of fields for a fraction of what U.S. professionals charge." Guess what? While U.S. educators stuck learned heads in the sand, the world's citizens gained 21st century skills! Tough Choices spares no hard truth: "Our young adults score at “mediocre” levels on the best international measure of performance." Do you think it is an accident that the word "mediocre" is used? Let's see, I believe we saw it w-a-a-a-y back in 1983 when A Nation At Risk warned of a "tide of mediocrity." Tough Choices asks the hard question: "Will the world’s employers pick U.S. graduates when workers in Asia will work for much less? Then the question is answered. Our graduates will be chosen for global work "only if the U.S. worker can compete academically, exceed in creativity, learn quickly, and demonstrate a capacity to innovate." There they are

“Learning is what most adults will do for a living in the 21st century."

Through experimental investigation, Bloom found that “the average student under tutoring was about two standard deviations above the average” of students who studied in a traditional classroom setting with 30 other students

We can extend, expand, enhance, magnify, and amplify the reach and effectiveness of human interaction with technology and communication tools, but the underlying reality is that real people must converse with each other in the process of “becoming.”

Because the LMS is primarily a traditional classroom support tool, it is ill-suited to bridge the 2-sigma gap between classroom instruction and personal tutoring.

undamentally human endeavor that requires personal interaction and communication, person to person.

here is, at its very core, a problem with the LMS paradigm. The “M” in “LMS” stands for “management.” This is not insignificant. The word heavily implies that the provider of the LMS, the educational institution, is “managing” student learning. Since the dawn of public education and the praiseworthy societal undertaking “educate the masses,” management has become an integral part of the learning. And this is exactly what we have designed and used LMSs to do—to manage the flow of students through traditional, semester-based courses more efficiently than ever before. The LMS has done exactly what we hired it to do: it has reinforced, facilitated, and perpetuated the traditional classroom model, the same model that Bloom found woefully less effective than one-on-one learning.

n the post-LMS world, we need to worry less about “managing” learners and focus more on helping them connect with other like-minded learners both inside and outside of our institutions.

We need to foster in them greater personal accountability, responsibility and autonomy in their pursuit of learning in the broader community of learners. We need to use the communication tools available to us today and the tools that will be invented tomorrow to enable anytime, anywhere, any-scale learning conversations between our students and other learners

However, instead of that tutor appearing in the form of an individual human being or in the form of a virtual AI tutor, the tutor will be the crowd.

The paradigm—not the technology—is the problem.

Building a better, more feature-rich LMS won’t close the 2-sigma gap. We need to utilize technology to better connect people, content, and learning communities to facilitate authentic, personal, individualized learning. What are we waiting for?

Limited influence in decision-making. In many high-achieving nations where teacher collaboration is the norm, teachers have substantial influence on school-based decisions, especially in the development of curriculum and assessment, and in the design of their own professional learning. In the United States, however, less than one-fourth of teachers feel they have great influence over school decisions and policies in seven different areas noted in the SASS surveys. A scant majority feel that they have some influence over curriculum and setting performance standards for students, though fewer than half perceived that they had some influence over the content of their in-service professional development. And very few felt they had influence over school policies and decisions affecting either teacher hiring and evaluation or the allocation of the school budget.

Limited influence in decision-making. In many high-achieving nations where teacher collaboration is the norm, teachers have substantial influence on school-based decisions, especially in the development of curriculum and assessment, and in the design of their own professional learning. In the United States, however, less than one-fourth of teachers feel they have great influence over school decisions and policies in seven different areas noted in the SASS surveys. A scant majority feel that they have some influence over curriculum and setting performance standards for students, though fewer than half perceived that they had some influence over the content of their in-service professional development. And very few felt they had influence over school policies and decisions affecting either teacher hiring and evaluation or the allocation of the school budget.

Limited influence in decision-making. In many high-achieving nations where teacher collaboration is the norm, teachers have substantial influence on school-based decisions, especially in the development of curriculum and assessment, and in the design of their own professional learning. In the United States, however, less than one-fourth of teachers feel they have great influence over school decisions and policies in seven different areas noted in the SASS surveys. A scant majority feel that they have some influence over curriculum and setting performance standards for students, though fewer than half perceived that they had some influence over the content of their in-service professional development. And very few felt they had influence over school policies and decisions affecting either teacher hiring and evaluation or the allocation of the school budget.

Limited influence in decision-making. In many high-achieving nations where teacher collaboration is the norm, teachers have substantial influence on school-based decisions, especially in the development of curriculum and assessment, and in the design of their own professional learning. In the United States, however, less than one-fourth of teachers feel they have great influence over school decisions and policies in seven different areas noted in the SASS surveys. A scant majority feel that they have some influence over curriculum and setting performance standards for students, though fewer than half perceived that they had some influence over the content of their in-service professional development. And very few felt they had influence over school policies and decisions affecting either teacher hiring and evaluation or the allocation of the school budget.

Schools, in general, are not taking advantage of the power of peer-based learning or the benefits of a more decentralized type of expertise which lies outside of its ivory walls.

The same study later describes a writer’s heightened sense of authenticity that comes from peer feedback as opposed to school evaluations: “It’s something I can do in my spare time, be creative and write and not have to be graded,” because, “you know how in school you’re creative, but you’re doing it for a grade so it doesn’t really count?”

Historically, new media first appear to the vast majority of us in read-only form because they are controlled by a relatively few technicians, developers, and distributors who can understand or afford them. The rest of us only evolve into writers once the new media tools become easy to use, affordable, and widely available, whether these tools are cheap pencils and paper or inexpensive digital tools and shareware.

Thus, a new dimension of literacy is now in play—namely, the ability to adapt to new media forms and fit them into the overall media collage quickly and effectively.

n the mid 1960s, Marshall McLuhan explained that conventional literacy caused us to trade an ear for an eye, and in so doing, trade the social context of the oral tradition for the private point of view of reading and writing. To him, television was the first step in our "retribalization," providing a common social experience that could serve as the basis for dialogue in the global village.2  However, television told someone else's story, not ours. It was not until Web 2.0 that we had the tools to come full circle and produce and consume social narrative in equal measure. Much of the emerging nature of literacy is a result of inexpensive, widely available, flexible Web 2.0 tools that enable anyone, regardless of technical skill, to play some part in reinventing literacy.

What is new is that the tools of literacy, as well as their effects, are now a topic of literacy itself.

Students need to be media literate to understand how media technique influences perception and thinking. They also need to understand larger social issues that are inextricably linked to digital citizenship, such as security, environmental degradation, digital equity, and living in a multicultural, networked world. We want our students to use technology not only effectively and creatively, but also wisely, to be concerned with not just how to use digital tools, but also when to use them and why.

The fluent will lead, the literate will follow, and the rest will get left behind.

They need to be the guide on the side rather than the technician magician.