There was a very interesting article at Huffington Post today that I suspect is rapidly making the rounds through the blogosphere. Given the author and title of the post, “What Silicon Valley Executives Keep Getting Wrong About Education” by Dr. Keith Devlin of Stanford, I had high hopes for an insightful explanation of mistakes by ed tech executives. While the investment exemplified by Silicon Valley has great potential to improve education, there clearly is a lack of understanding by much of the investment and technology industries about how education works.
The summation of Dr. Devlin’s argument is that Silicon Valley is not listening to the right people to understand K-12 education.
When it comes to making important business decisions, they will regularly seek the advice of domain experts, often at considerable cost in consulting fees, but they fail to recognize the equal importance of domain expertise in education.
The rest of the post is an argument that in a TechCrunch post Vinod Khosla showed his ignorance of education expertise by citing Khan Academy as an example of many “out-of-the-box approaches”. I have no problem with the use of anecdotes to illustrate a point, but I do have a problem with the logic of this argument.