Digital and Multimedia Commentary Online

It seems that Apple and Pearson are about to shell out big bucks, $6.4 million to be exact for what appears to be a massive failure in supporting a tablet initiative in a thousand schools in Los Angeles:

The Los Angeles Unified School District has reached a tentative $6.4-million settlement over curriculum from education software giant Pearson that the school system said its teachers barely used.

The pact is the latest fallout from an aborted $1.3-billion plan to provide an iPad to every student, teacher and campus administrator in the nation’s second-largest school district.

The Board of Education is expected to vote on the settlement in October. The bidding process that led to the original contract is the subject of an FBI investigation.

This is from a piece in the Los Angeles Times:  LA Unified to get $6.4 million in settlement over iPad software, that says that an FBI investigation is underway into the manner in which the contract was let. The writer also quotes an attorney for the school district, “one goal is to make sure schools are ready to use technology before they receive it.” Well duh!

I often say that forecasting technology applications is really tough, especially when it involves the future. We also know that we will be wrong twice… We will overestimate the near term and underestimate the long term. Although Pearson claims that their materials are being used effectively in many other schools, it seems that in this case these folks are in the near term of effective uses of tablet devices.

Read more here and here.

I have believed for some time that good educational practice is intimately related to the notion of good storytelling. As I was reading today about this massive investment that Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, and other tech leaders are making in education through “Altschool,” I was surprised by the connection that I quickly made between that investment in those schools and storytelling. The connection came from a passage in that piece that described the schools as implementing individualized learning, a “Reggio Emilia-Approach Intertwined With Technology.” Knowing nothing about Reggio Emilia caused me to jump to this Wikipedia article on the schools in Reggia Emilia, Italy. Here is the quote from that piece that caught my attention:

 For example, teachers in Reggio Emilia assert the importance of being confused as a contributor to learning; thus a major teaching strategy is purposely to allow mistakes to happen, or to begin a project with no clear sense of where it might end.

It seems that the idea of being confused, allowing mistakes to happen, or having no clear sense of how a project is to end is tantamount to the essence of good story telling, no?