Giving Compass' Take:

• When it comes to personalized learning, creating effective and powerful learning can be difficult for teachers to do on their own. Here, Getting Smart explains how collaborative networks can boost successful, powerful learning and make it widely available. 

• How can school districts form a coherent personalized learning network? What is the progress when it comes to establishing student-centered classrooms? 

• Read more about collaboration in schools and the best ways to deliver personalized learning for students. 

Three decades ago, at the end of the industrial era, it was about scale efficiency–stuff gets cheaper as you get bigger. That was true in the energy and retail, two sectors where I spent a dozen years early in my career.

Around the same time, Lydia Dobyns was helping to lay the groundwork for the information revolution, one that would change the economics of scale. She was marketing WordStar (you remember that name if you used a personal computer in the 1980s). She went on to “help create some of the first network businesses where it wasn’t just scale economies that mattered, it was a network effect, where the customer experience got better as the network got bigger and smarter.”

Her Internet consumer service was acquired by AOL. When that was acquired, she launched an early online social network (when Zuckerberg was in 2nd grade). She had an early insight that working in networks on platforms would change the world.

Two decades ago Lydia (and I) came to realize that education was the most important thing that she could work on, that there was an emerging opportunity to transform learning and attack inequity. She imagined ways that platforms and networks could extend access and opportunity.

Read the full article about why schools should work in networks at Getting Smart.