I was lucky enough to work with businessmen, inventors and politicians on framing the use of the Internet in our country. It became very clear to me that businesses work differently than we do in education. We framed a document called Kickstart with ideas to frame educational change in America and in the world. I guess in a business, if you frame a perspective you can make it come true. Some ideas are now being represented as new. Well ,STEM started out as SMET, and programming has a new name. Lots of old ideas, same reason for wanting to make change

It amused me to find out that businessmen thought if you defined the problem, as in “The Gathering Storm” that we in education would fix the problem. I offer to you the newest report,
http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEFUSA_NewVisionforEducation_Report2015.pdf

So many great ideas here, Who will read the report? Who will make changes based on its information.

DO PEOPLE READ THE REPORTS?

I think about these reports and the change they thought would happen. http://sites.nationalacademies.org/pga/PGA_084632. There are educational communities still resisting change. It is not about the money or being able to get professional development for the initiative.

Some say that testing has sucked the wind out of innovation.

A Retrospective on Twenty Years of Education Technology Policy

Twenty years ago,A Nation at Risk(1983) recommended “computer science” as one of the
five “new basics” to be included in high school graduation requirements. Since then, American
schools have made dramatic improvements in their technological capacity, driven largely by public
and private investments over the past ten years of more than $40 billion dollars in infrastructure,
professional development and technical support (Dickard, 2003). K-12 educators have also made
great strides in their readiness and ability to use technology to redefine the boundaries of the school
building and the school day, to improve the quality and accessibility of the administrative data that
informs their work, and most importantly, to foster the learning of core content and the development
of students’ skills as communicators, researchers,and critical consumers of an ever-expanding world
of information. However, policymakers, practitioners and the public all recognize that much remains
to be done in each of these areas. https://www2.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/tech/20years.pdf

The thing we called programming is now called coding, we can talk about computational thinking and cyber-education.

I was the K-12 teacher on the NIIAC. We started the conversations and still we wait for the changes…
The intent of the NII was to integrate hardware, software, and skills to make it easy and affordable to connect people, through the use of communication and information technology, with each other and with a vast array of services and information resources. Issues that the Council was to address included:

(1) the appropriate roles of the private and public sectors in developing the National Information Infrastructure;
(2) a vision for the evolution of the National Information Infrastructure and its public and commercial applications;
(3) the impact of current and proposed regulatory regimes on the evolution of the National Information Infrastructure;
(4) national strategies for maximizing the benefits of the National Information Infrastructure, as measured by job creation, economic growth, increased proguctivity, and enhanced quality of life;
(5) national strategies for developing and demonstrating applications in areas such as electronic commerce, agile manufacturing, life-long learning, health care, government, services, and civic networking;
(6) national security, emergency preparedness, system security, and network protection implications;
(7) national strategies for maximizing interconnection and interoperability of communications networks;
(8) international issues associated with the National Information Infrastructure;
(9) universal access; and
(10) privacy, security, and copyright issues.

We make fun sometimes of people who have a different perspective on what education is and how it should work.

In reality we in education are in many separate groups as well, with a vision that is different depending on our focus. We are K-12, we are Higher Ed, we are Technology Ed, and we are School Boards and Administratively focuses.

I am not mad with Bill Gates and others who have new ideas.