(2012-02-28) Edutech And Egalitarianism

Justin Reich has studied a random sample of Public School Wiki-s (PBworks.com (PbWorks) helped us (for free) get access to all 179,851 publicly-viewable, education-related wikis hosted on PBWorks from the creation of the company in 2005 through August of 2008 (this is 70% of all ed wikis, another 30% were private). These wikis are used in every grade level from Pre-K through Grad school, in every subject area, in dozens of countries around the world. Then they removed non-US-K-12 cases from their sample.)... and made 2 discoveries

• only a tiny % of them are used in an ongoing and collaborative/participatory way (they evaluated wikis at various points in life up to 400 days after creation)
• there's a higher Failure rate in wiki adoption in Lower Class (Title I) schools (which are 65% of public schools)

The latter finding seems to be getting more attention.

He generalized this finding to all Educational Technology (including specifically Open Education efforts): everyone is better off than before–but the opportunity gap between wealthy and poor has expanded.

Unstructured thoughts:

• The data is 3yo, you have to wonder whether any of this is still true.
• Anyone in technology must read Crossing The Chasm with its concept of Whole Product.
• It would be nice if schools were segmented based on Standardized Test scores rather than Title I status. It wouldn't surprise me that schools with better scores get to "afford to" experiment a bit more.
• Because of NCLB/Standardized Test-s, I think most public schools teach Reading And Writing (and Social Studies) wrong, so it doesn't surprise me that Wiki wouldn't get used in the ideal way.