This morning, the first batch of video footage from last week’s Aspen Ideas Festival went live. I just finished watching the education session entitled “From Bricks to Clicks: Will Technology Transform K12 Education?” (video here).

My basic reaction was that the discussion in some ways missed the interesting points about the future of education technology. The interesting question is not whether technology will significantly influence K12 education in coming years. It’s how. And one thing that the Aspen discussion made clearer to me is that different players and stakeholders have different and often conflicting visions of the future of technology in the classroom.

So it feels a bit like we’re at the start of a constitutional convention (analogy courtesy of Checker Finn): everyone agrees on the fundamental promise of the revolution (technology in classrooms), but we still have a lot of work to do to settle the details. Without serious debate, we risk poor choices and dangerous commitments. Without common ground, we risk poor coordination and fragmentation.

In the coming posts, I will use some of the most interesting tidbits from the Aspen discussion to explore a few different visions for education technology and point out where they overlap and where they are at odds. I’ll quote from the NewSchools Venture Fund, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Salman Khan, and from some recent developments in Latin America.  And I’ll try to map out where each vision conflicts with the others, and offer a few thoughts on how and where to find that all-important common ground. 

Note: This series is cross-posted at Edreformer.com