[youtube url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0GFRcFm-aY” width=“100%” height=“400”]
This is a song released by R.E.M. almost a year after I was born on November 16, 1987 but the title fits well into what I am talking about today. The first line of the song is “That’s great, it starts with an earthquake.” That is exactly what Sling a service from Dish Networks did when it announced this product at the Consumer Electronics Show in January 2015. The concept behind Sling is they will offer a base package of channels at an affordable price that can be streamed over the Internet. Their market for this new product was people like me who cut the cable cord. While this announcement was an earthquake, the aftershock of realizing that I could have access to ESPN as part of the base package was certainly not a small aftershock.
Sling had just done something that previously was unheard of in the television industry. They offered an attractive package of channels (at least for me with ESPN, ESPN2, TBS, TNT, Food Network and Adult Swim) at an affordable price. This is exactly what we as cable/cord cutters had been craving for years. It is not truly the end all goal of having an al a carte channel selection but there was enough there for me to justify the $20 a month expense.
I always try to bring my posts on this blog back to education. As I thought more and more about the disruption Dish Networks had just caused with this new service it got me thinking about education. If we have now reached a point where we can have our television streaming over the Internet, at an affordable price with channels that we actually watch…how can we do this in education?
Could we create a curriculum where the students get to choose a field or multiple fields of study? Could we incorporate into the curriculum and the field of study the same skills that we are teaching today? Could we disrupt education in a way that doesn’t look like any thing we know today?
I think the answer is yes but it will take time but more importantly it will take people to stand up and demand that we look for new ways to educate our children that may look drastically different from the way we learned as students. We recognize that for some the current system is an acceptable means of education but we are not addressing the students who are dropping out of school, why they are dropping out of school, those that may be bored with the curriculum or those that may be different from what we determine as the “standard”. We all learn differently and have different interests so why do we insist on teaching everyone in the same manner?
Food for thought.