Markets love data.

Picture the stock market. Chances are you’re imagining a bunch of people staring frantically at numbers. There are lots of numbers, so many that they need giant screens to display them all. All of the numbers are constantly changing, and each change feeds an already-intense flurry of activity. People are morphing strategies on the fly. In the next room, banks of computers are humming away trying to uncover new and interesting relationships between all of those numbers. The system isn’t perfect, but it’s pretty good at allocating resources to grow the economy, good enough that it’s failures rather than its successes are front page news.

Now picture the market for innovative ideas in education. This market is no less important, but it looks very different. There’s far, far less data. The data can’t be aggregated on a bunch of screens, it’s siloed in statistics and reports scattered across the country. That siloed data is updated rarely, usually just a few times a year. Sometimes these updates set off flurries of activity, but just as often people fail to see their significance. Individual researchers look at trends, but the data is so fragmented that intensive data mining is severely limited. This system makes headlines when it succeeds. (more…)

I’m writing this blog post from unused space in the San Francisco Chronicle building. The Chronicle has had to scale back recently, and so the space is getting used by number of early-to-mid-stage web startups. A few dozen feet from me is Change.org, a nifty activism platform that’s busy delivering customizable content on a suite of customizable platforms to a generation that hasn’t cared about a newspaper in over a decade. What does that generation’s kids think of textbooks?

Educators face an incredible challenge: constructing and delivering compelling content to distracted audiences with very few resources. The apocalypse and emerging rebirth of news media is an important example of how the systems which deliver this sort of content can be radically reinvented. Many of the tools making up this new wave of media can be directly applied to educational challenges, when they can’t they serve as an important inspiration.

There’s no question that the education system is structured more like a newspaper than a mashed-up twitter prediction algorithm, and for the time being that’s probably a good thing. Still, it’s worth asking what a reborn education system would look like. (more…)