21st Century Education Requires Distributed Support for Learning, Dr . Chris Dede

http://etcjournal.com/2012/01/07/21st-century-education-requires-distrib...

21st Century Education Requires Distributed Support for Learning
Posted on January 7, 2012 by JimS

By Chris Dede
Harvard Graduate School of Education

[Note: ETCJ associate editor Bonnie Bracey Sutton invited Chris Dede to submit this article. -Editor]

Educational transformation is coming not because of the increasing ineffectiveness of schools in meeting society’s needs – though that is certainly a good reason – but due to their growing unaffordability. We now see student-teacher ratios in some urban settings climbing to unworkable levels of 40 plus, even 60 pupils per class (Dolan, 2011; Dillon, 2011). This is not a temporary financial dislocation due to an economic downturn, but a permanent sea-change that has already happened in every other service sector of our economy.