Comments on: Disrupting Gaps (a draft for peer review) http://tomliamlynch.org/2009/12/11/disrupting-gaps-a-draft-for-peer-review/ On literacy and technology and education Fri, 23 Jul 2010 15:45:40 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 By: michael_horn http://tomliamlynch.org/2009/12/11/disrupting-gaps-a-draft-for-peer-review/comment-page-1/#comment-410 michael_horn Sun, 13 Dec 2009 19:43:52 +0000 http://tomliamlynch.org/?p=599#comment-410 Thanks for your thoughtful post and thanks for pointing out a mistake in the book that we should remedy in an end note to Chapter 7. I appreciate that. That's a good catch. I don't think it destroys the fundamental point behind the chapter--which, by the way, could be applied even more so in critiquing the majority of business research (a good book on this point that I recommend highly is The Halo Effect). Clearly there is some good education research out there, but the majority that finds its way into policy debates stays at a correlation level--or does not get translated in a way that understands the environment in which teachers practice. Even randomized-control trials do not ask the next question (a similar phenomenon plagues health care). As for the other gaps you point out--we pointedly don't rely on point #3 that you cite. Others write about this, but we ourselves don't hinge our argument on this point. For point #2 -- right now textbook companies of course largely play this role, and we actually envision a world where this goes well beyond a company doing it, as we point out in Chapter 5 so this criticism is not accurate. Lastly, to your point #1 -- this sort of misses the point that this is not a book about technology, but a book about transforming a system into a more student-centric one. Technology can be integrated in the current classroom--see Wireless Generation's success in certain areas--but it has sustained the system, not transformed it. I could go on, but the work of Larry Cuban and ours stands on its own I think. Thanks for your thoughtful post and thanks for pointing out a mistake in the book that we should remedy in an end note to Chapter 7. I appreciate that. That’s a good catch. I don’t think it destroys the fundamental point behind the chapter–which, by the way, could be applied even more so in critiquing the majority of business research (a good book on this point that I recommend highly is The Halo Effect). Clearly there is some good education research out there, but the majority that finds its way into policy debates stays at a correlation level–or does not get translated in a way that understands the environment in which teachers practice. Even randomized-control trials do not ask the next question (a similar phenomenon plagues health care).

As for the other gaps you point out–we pointedly don’t rely on point #3 that you cite. Others write about this, but we ourselves don’t hinge our argument on this point. For point #2 — right now textbook companies of course largely play this role, and we actually envision a world where this goes well beyond a company doing it, as we point out in Chapter 5 so this criticism is not accurate. Lastly, to your point #1 — this sort of misses the point that this is not a book about technology, but a book about transforming a system into a more student-centric one. Technology can be integrated in the current classroom–see Wireless Generation’s success in certain areas–but it has sustained the system, not transformed it. I could go on, but the work of Larry Cuban and ours stands on its own I think.

]]>