Published back in January, the call to action put forward by the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy couldn’t have been simpler — at least at first glance.
Asking for “public comments to inform its policy development related to high-impact learning technologies,” the criteria, on the other hand, was pretty broad. The essentials all came back to opportunity, basically — and not just the opportunity to learn, but that to teach, or even to change the *way* we teach. Specifically, the opportunity “for interested individuals and organizations to identify public and private actions,” it said, “that have the potential to accelerate the development, rigorous evaluation, and widespread adoption of high-impact learning technologies.”
That’s it. The wide-scale adoption of technology that will, most likely, completely change the face of learning and the entire civilized world along with it. No problem, right? Done like dinner.
To be fair, it’s a more focused request when it comes down to the particulars. The release asks readers to use their imaginations, picturing a cross-section of technologies with the capability of building bridges, the sort that span chasms across yawning social and economic divides. Education is the backbone, namely the associated tools needed to make it more effective, more inclusive of greater groups of people. In breaking that down, it focused on “pull mechanisms,” described by Tom Vander Ark in Education Week as a “good way to attack an underdeveloped or inefficient market.”
Essentially, dangling a carrot in front of hungry minds and seeing what happens next.
Describing those mechanics, Vander Ark lays out a few key forms and their related categories. First, market development, looking at the aggregate demand for a specific idea. Then there’s the question of cutting through bureaucracy with accelerated approvals and incentives, what it folds into the category of fast-tracking. Finally, there’s the idea of inducement prizes — rewards for “successfully meeting a breakthrough challenge.”
The business-oriented language of it all might get a little daunting, for sure. But what the request is framing is a pitch, put before pioneering minds with an entrepreneurial incentive: come up with a good idea, get a prize. In traditional cases, usually those seen in business, they’re incentives for the first idea ahead of the investment curve, competing for profit, more or less. So in the world of research and the marketplace of ideas writ large, it makes sense to ride the same currents to a similar objective — in short, using the framework of competitive capitalism to make ideas more competitive themselves.
An example? “USAID,” Vander Ark wrote, “is also awarding [a] $100,000 prize to the organization or individual that develops a software solution to help writers create reading materials in local languages for children in developing countries.” Others include Planet Read, with the simple idea of “subtitling content in the same language as the audio whether on TV programs, film songs, music-videos, folk songs, [or] movies.” World Reader, it notes, is another. Using e-readers in Ghanaian primary schools, the aim is to close the gender gap by empowering children through literacy.
There’s a trend, of course: ideas as their own currency, their own commodity. The mechanics Vander Ark describes might be the kick needed to push a great idea into in an even greater trajectory. Like initiatives that have already brought us the template for being a tourist in space, maybe the same can be used to rejuvenate a stagnant educational system.
After all, education is the highest-valued commodity in this whole thing. What do you think?
photo: Jorghex
