Amazon's website demonstrates the brilliant marketing that has evolved due to increasingly sophisticated coordination of vast amounts of customer knowledge. Its ability to correctly identify new products or books that a customer might like to purchase exemplifies the private sector's capacity for effectively targeting customers by capturing and integrating customer knowledge into comprehensive customer profiles.
Education is headed in the same direction, toward integrating knowledge about each student, but is still far from using the knowledge to effectively help student achievement. From a technology standpoint, integration of different student information sources has only been enhanced in the past few years by the adoption of the Schools Interoperability Framework (SIF) that enables K-12 software applications to share data. From a process standpoint, however, schools are still far from fully integrating different knowledge sources to create a complete student profile. For example, what one teacher has learned about a particular student over one year is rarely passed on to the student's teacher in the following year.
Pulling together all the knowledge about a student entails not only collecting all the student's performance data in the form of assessment scores, grades, and attendance, but also capturing all the observations and learnings from each adult relationship, whether it is a teacher, guidance counselor, parent, or afterschool tutor. Only then, will school staff, armed with the full context of an individual student's situation, be able to make effective decisions for improving an individual student's achievement.
My next postings will address in more depth how coordination is evolving at both a technological and process level.
Blogs are good for every one where we get lots of information for any topics nice job keep it up !!!
Posted by: digital dissertations | December 30, 2008 at 09:52 PM