Opinion: Internet and Education -- Back to the Future - AOL News - 0 views
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evomlit multiliteracies tutoring future of education CMI personalized opinion
shared by Vanessa Vaile on 24 Feb 10
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The education industry, like so many others, is busy being transformed by the Internet.
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he best possible system of education actually existed thousands of years ago. And what the Internet can help us do is go back to it, with one important modern twist: scale.
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individual relationship between an enlightened tutor and an eager student
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there simply aren't enough expert teachers with enough time to bring every child along
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If the 21th century is to be a time of progress, education must continue to expand. This makes it even more difficult to provide individual instruction for all the world's students.
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That's the promise of the Internet, which excels above all else at scale: scale of information, social interactions, geographic reach.
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The acid test I apply to every new initiative is: to what extent does it bring us closer to the old system of individualized, personal, expert instruction, except with scale?
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Online tutoring is an example of a promising Internet-driven innovation. Companies like TutorVista and Smarthinking let hundreds of thousands of students get on-demand personal help in their homes at a reasonable cost.
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online systems that can "diagnose" individual students' strengths and weaknesses and dynamically generate a tailored curriculum.
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Other innovations lie somewhere in between the two
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It's important to remember that many of the most important education innovations lie outside the Internet.
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But the Internet will also disrupt. Textbooks, for example, can't continue in their present form
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two principles: first, invest in Internet innovations that bring us closer to the vision of universal, personalized instruction; and second, champion those designed to complement, rather than replace, traditional academic institutions.
