Thoughts about government funding - US and EU

[Caroline Meeks]

In the US most of the funding for innovative educational technology is for
web content and activities.  It seems to be funded by the NSF, the National
*Science* Foundation.  I am far from an expert. I've been a subcontractor on
one grant and am on a couple others as a subcontractor that are working
through the process. However, it appears to me that they are evaluated as *
Science*. You have to do something new and different that moves forward
basic knowledge about education and technology.  You have to say it will be
replicable and scalable but in fact, once the grant is over there is no
incentive or money for actually getting stuff out to kids. It does not look
like the NSF judges organizations on how many kids are using past projects,
I think its far more likely they are judged on how many peer reviewed
articles have been written about past projects.  There is certainly no
continuing funding for support and distribution of past work.

In my opinion the result is incredibly cool stuff that no one is using.

Why not?  A big part of the problem is poor infrastructure in schools.  A
whole constellation of problems that Sugar can help solve.  Access to
computers both in and out of school, making it easy to sign up whole classes
for web sites,  Evaluation data collection and display for the teacher
without privacy issues are some of them.

So what action items do I see in the US?

1. Here in the US ride the trend for change to emphasise funding to solve
infrastructure issues.
2. Push for funding to be tied to how many students are using the results of
a project.

The EU generally has quite a bit of funding for FOSS.  I know the EU,
espeically the UK, has quite a bit of web based content.  Sometimes the EU
has saner policies then the US.  Are they being evaluated and funded to get
it out to students?  If we are looking for allies, we should look for  K-5
government funded content/activity creators who are feeling the pressure to
increase the number of users.

Cheers,
Caroline


-- 
Caroline Meeks
Solution Grove
Caroline at SolutionGrove.com

617-500-3488 - Office
505-213-3268 - Fax
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