“The Architecture of Convergence on a Target; Every Learning Meal is a Local Version of the Cuisine”

IOW, all learners are specific individuals in specific environments, and not generalizations, or mere vectors in algorithms. Which is one reason why one-on-one tutoring can produce learning results when other approaches are less successful. But it is also true that learners thrive in a community in which they feel at home, and have stable self esteem, and group status and belonging.  (that’s another Core Element).

Both of the above work best with learning materials accessible through the local vernacular, and frame of reference. As has been noted often, a learner who is burdened with translation of cultural idioms and ESL, has much more work to do to accomplish learning goals than if they were immersed into circumstances where they feel at home, and know their way around their environment.

Yet schools have generally proceeded as if the student needed to adapt to the school, rather than the school adapt to the student. In locations where schools are a good match for the surrounding community or neighborhood, students tend to buy in and not drop out. Another often overlooked but significant advantage of local learning cuisines, is that the teacher/ facilitator/ guide on the side is needed less to simply explain the material in terms of what the local culture can understand.

All of which is to say, though learning platforms and learning tools in the cloud can scale up to address learners across the US, (and around the world on occasion) with decreases in costs, much of the capital that school districts have at their disposal, is spent on a “one school district at a time” basis. This prevents the huge amounts involved from being aggregated into a huge pile that spurs on learning tool investments from Big Tech.

This local pool of funding on a school district by school district basis, structures the economics of online learning tools in ways that make economies of scale and standardized platforms challenging. But the other side of local spending, is the ability to focus on local needs and MO.

Core Element #7 points out, a local version of learning cuisines need to be fashioned and prepared to fit the appetites of the local students.  But in order for online learning tools to advance, some way of  melding a local/ regional set of learning  tools, into the statewide and national upscaled  learning platforms needs to be accomplished.

Technically it’s doable, for example learning tools can readily translate a standard vernacular into local specialties through advanced forms of “search and replace” in real time. The same would hold true for images and other visual tools. And much more is on the horizon with exponential computer power increase trends ongoing.

The real problem is the politics of who has the power, who has the control, who’s going to benefit most, and who can muster both regional and national political support with some way of meshing into the local school district spending ecosystem. This includes state and local politicians as well as teacher’s unions, and often turns into yet another proxy partisan battle over what should be bi-partisan approaches.

Though the above political challenges appear to be a tangle of dismaying complexity, the ongoing Pandemic events of the last two years have disrupted many aspects of the educational status quo. Masses of students, teachers, and parents have gotten at least some familiarity with online learning tools. While that ad hoc desperation has been far from ideal for creating optimal versions, there has been a huge amount of experience with that mode which can payoff in better models of the technology going forward.

Additionally, there’s been a great deal of “teacher DIY” Ed Tech production in school districts across the country, often just for the classes a teacher handles. IOW, a Digital Version of Algebra II as created by the class teacher for his or her students.  Much has been learned about how to do online learning at the local level through trial and error.

That’s got to be a good thing, and a resource for  ongoing development of what is needed.