Bringing the school report into the 21st century

Image via WikipediaHow do you monitor your child's educational progress at school? For most of us touch points are few and far between - a parents evening coupled with a report once a term.

There are digital means by which kids get their progress regularly encouraged and monitored - things such as Mathletics for example.

But I think there are greater possibilities to be accessed if we take a more holistic approach.
I'm thinking of your child's school progress updated live and recorded in a personal url shared between you, the child and your teachers.

This borrows heavily from ideas such as the personal url for health records - a place where your healthcare data is recorded and shared with the patient and their doctors; a place where the patients can give rapid and direct feedback to their doctors about what treatment is working, what isn't - and where the anonymised data in aggregate can be used to inform the wider medical community leading to improvements in effectiveness for all.

It is an approach being seriously considered by the UK's national health service, according to Macrowikinomics, for example.

Applied to education, parents could get more direct involvement with the child's progress - be able to identify slow-downs, strenghts and weaknesses and where their input could help most.

And again, in aggregate the data could help inform the wider education community in what works and what doesn't and how to be more effective for all kids - in much closer to real time than we have been used to.

The approach makes data live, useful and change enabling - rather than silo'd and gathering dust on a shelf.

Related articles

• Prevent Medical Errors With Health Records (everydayhealth.com)
• Slow Going For The Electronic Health Records Movement (zocdoc.com)

The power of the network: For doctors and cops

Networks create value. It's the lesson of Reed's Law (Group Forming Network Theory, see resources) and one which is repeatedly being demonstrated by the success of numerous social networking sites.
Ubiquity, allowing the constantly connected community, makes the value still greater.
And often it seems we talk about the business benefits of this model - the way it enables a new ecology of co-creators - converged prosumers (see Media is the New Way of Doing Business).
But there are other, more transparently beneficial, areas the same thinking should be applied to.
I'm thinking of the medical profession, police forces - education, too?
Anyone going through medical treatment will know you'll see a succession of highly trained individuals. Typically you'll have to describe your symptoms over and over. Typically it gets written down on paper. And while professionals within a department or even at a certain strata within that department, may discuss case studies, they won't connect with others on the other side of the same hospital (or even 'above' and 'below' themselves) - who may have seen the same patient previously or learned something useful from another experience with a patient.
Imagine if doctor A had shared with doctor B about patient X. And symptom Y rang a bell for doctor B because he'd shared with doctor C on a previous occasion. Simply, allowing for emergent intelligence in the network should result in more accurate, swifter diagnoses. That cuts costs for the medical service and heals the patient faster.
Win/Win - new value created by the network.
If networks of professionals beat the best individual professional in predicting the stock market (see Reingold's Smart Mobs), shouldn't they also be better at healthcare? At policing? At educating our children?