President proposes huge dollars for R & D
While visiting Forsyth Technological Community College in North Carolina, President Obama spoke of improving technology in schools, in an effort to make America more competitive in higher education. Obama is proposing that 3 percent of the gross domestic product go toward research and development.
Since the Digital Learning Strategies blog is not political commentary, I want to distance this post from being overly critical of our president, but one has to wonder if research and development is really the best place for this kind of money. I'm not great with numbers, but 3 percent of the GDP sounds like hundreds of billions of dollars (maybe a math teacher can specify this for us).
If President Obama can really allocate this kind of money for technology, why not simply put computers in every class in America? Maybe it's not as simple as it sounds, but if the focus is on something inexpensive like netbooks, at least outfitting classes (we're not talking about 1 to 1) with computers should be doable.Do we really need more research?
Teachers already have a myriad of Web 2.0 and social media tools at their disposal. Plus, with open source, there's plenty of development going on daily. So, would it be nice to have more money dedicated to Edtech? Absolutely, but even though Learn it in 5 is an application site, I still say, give us hardware, not research.
