November 2006 — Policy/Advocacy
Print this articleClick here to receive your FREE subscription to T.H.E. Journal
Trending in the Right Direction
With educators, businesses, and legislators collaborating, signs suggest that the recognition of technology’s vital role in education is reaching critical mass.
YOU PROBABLY HAVE heard of The Tipping Point, Malcolm
Gladwell’s 2000 book about understanding change and
why change happens quickly. As Gladwell writes on his website: “Ideas and behavior and messages and
products sometimes behave just like outbreaks of infectious
disease. They are social epidemics. The Tipping Point is an
examination of the social epidemics that surround us.”
Drawing a parallel to the way AIDS and other infectious diseases spread, Gladwell points out that the term tipping point “comes from the world of epidemiology. It’s the name given to that moment in an epidemic when a virus reaches critical mass. It’s the boiling point. It’s the moment on the graph when the line starts to shoot straight upwards.” In our own world, I sense that line is about to spike straight up—we are approaching a tipping point in the way technology is recognized as a force in education.
I came upon this notion after attending last month’s Education Forum: What It Takes to Compete, in Washington, DC, pulled together by the State Educational Technology Directors Association in conjunction with the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, the Council of Chief State School Officers, the National Conference of State Legislatures, and the Partnership for 21st Century Skills. The collaboration among this “Dream Team” of organizations is what it takes to use technology as an agent of change to reform schools so all students are prepared to be productive citizens in the 21st century. If the curriculum people and technology people agree on a message for the chief state school officers and the state legislators, all it takes is a push from businesspeople to make it happen. (Or at least that is the theory.) And the push, in this case, seems to be coming from the Partnership for 21st Century Skills.
The Partnership consists of 25 corporations and associations with ties to education and/or technology. Its core concern is the “profound gap between the knowledge and skills most students learn in school and the knowledge and skills they need in typical 21st-century communities and workplaces.” The Partnership is working with two states, West Virginia and North Carolina—and other states are now signing up to do the same—on revising their state curricula to ensure the development of 21st-century skills, which include:
- information and communication skills
- thinking and problem solving
- interpersonal and self-direction skills
- global awareness
- economic and business literacy
- civic literacy
