“We wanted flying cars. Instead we got 140 characters.”

       The above is the motto of Founders Fund, a venture capital firm started by eBay cofounder Peter Thiel. Their concern is that tech companies have lost interest in the “big questions” being asked by society – poverty, climate change, disease, productivity...big changes that make things better in a profound way – and are, instead, merely happy to rearrange existing content in creative ways, for the sole purpose of making money. In the lead article of this month’s MIT Technology Review, Jason Pontin compares our current state of technology advancement to that of 50 years ago, a decade which began with President John F. Kennedy’s charge to NASA, to “…commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon, and returning him safely to the Earth.”

       Kennedy’s challenge was met, but the effort was herculean – at one point the NASA budget was 4% of the total US Government budget. There were hundreds of technology problems being researched to support the lunar mission. But, more to the point, this charge, and the scramble by both public and private organizations to meet it, took place (could take place!) at a time when technology was viewed as a vehicle to make fundamental improvements in how we do the business of being human. It certainly helped that the US economy was on the rise then, but even if that were true now, the interest in funding research and development projects with distant and grand goals seems to be gone… from the political landscape, but also from the interests of entrepreneurs. Hence Founders Fund.

       That, of course, is not to say that Twitter and their social networking brethren aren't valuable. They are. But they provide only incremental change over previous technologies which did similar things. And, as such, they answer a question that no one was actually asking (or has largely been answered already). It’s like the difference between the questions “How can I make a better mousetrap?” and “How can we make personal transportation compatible with the coming massive increases in global wealth and population?” We can already trap mice. A better one might be profitable, but it’ll have only an incremental impact on our lives. In contrast, the second question has two few entrepreneurs asking it, and too few research and development projects addressing the large number of technologies that must be a part of its answer. It might have worked in 1961, but it's not working now.
       So, as an educator who selects and uses technology in the classroom, why should you care?
       There are three lessons we can apply directly in our classrooms.

1. Set the goals first. Often, the way tech innovation gets lost is that entrepreneur selects a technology (social networking connections online, for instance), and then tries to figure out how to make it different enough to be attractive and profitable. In the classroom, that mistake plays out by selecting the technology before the learning goal. If you’re selecting your technology first, you’re just generating self-interest and temporary motivation in students, without actually embedding its use in the greater interests of learning. Even global education technology “answers” like 1-1 laptop programs and universal access to “intelligent classroom” tools can only work if they are paired with real learning questions.
2. Make instruction real. This is closely related to #1 above. As an example, project-based learning is very popular now, and fits well with some of the other goals associated with technology-rich instruction. As anyone with experience in this lesson paradigm will tell you, if the goals (the "guiding questions") of the projects aren't real, engaging, and important, students won't care, and won't learn.
3. Connect across the curriculum Many of the current tech start-ups are often just the same techies, trying to re-invent the same techy answers to the same techy questions. The real innovators out there are connected to real people, real needs and interests, and real goals. As a matter of fact, the best technology start-ups are began by people with arts and humanities degrees, and tech company hirers often specifically target such people. In our world, technology use which provides and leverages connections across disciplines will have the best chance at achieving goal #2 above. It will also serve to connect all of the teachers in your building in the joint pursuit of preparing students for innovative and constructive work after they leave us.

       Thomas Friedman and others have stated that our students (and the economy in which they’ll live) will only survive if they learn how to connect, create, innovate – a truism which transfers to educational practice, and should serve as the mantra for tool selection and technology use in the classroom.