The New Economy, Technology, and Learning Outcomes Assessment

Answering calls for change entails meaningful assessments of technology-enabled learning. By Anne H. Moore
According to Claudia Goldin, the "new economy" at the beginning of the 20th century was driven by such phenomena as greater use of science by industry; the proliferation of academic disciplines; the diffusion of a series of critical inventions (including small electric motors, the internal combustion engine, the airplane, and chemical processes); the rise of big business; and the growth of retailing.1 Progress for industrial nations depended on educating more people at secondary and postsecondary levels. The United States established an education system that produced more educated citizens and workers, enabled geographic and economic mobility, resulted in large decreases in inequality of economic outcomes, and may have increased technological change and productivity (though that is harder to prove, she wrote). It was largely a decentralized, forgiving education system that—in the context of the day—was highly successful. Today, however, more than one hundred years later, economic and social drivers are quite different, calling into question some of the assumptions that underlie our institutions of higher education.

The "new economy" of the 21st century is driven in large measure by unprecedented advances in transportation and in computing, information, and communications technologies. To be competitive, industrialized and developing nations alike are driven by needs such as greater use of science and new technologies by average citizens; more interdisciplinary work; greater understanding of highly complex, interacting systems; new and renewed efforts at building community and solving local challenges in the face of globalization and massification; and a substantial rethinking of retailing, services, and business in general as a result of changing tools, physical possibilities, and financial opportunities.

In The Singularity Is Near, Ray Kurzweil proposed that the exponential rates of technological change in modern times offer possibilities for gestalt shifts in the way we approach many challenges.2 For such shifts to occur in today's new economy, time-honored content and emerging ideas will be joined in innovative ways with old and new technologies to benefit modern society's needs. In fresh approaches to teaching and learning, deciding what students need to know and should be able to do—in the context of a changing panoply of computing, information, and communications technologies—is a critical first step.

Next come rigorous assessments that demonstrate the manner and degree to which learning takes place. More important, these assessments must evaluate information literacies, technology fluencies, and content competencies together, not as separate remnants of last century's economic and social imperatives.

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