Friday, March 8, 2013

I was wrong about the Testing Bed, but they are almost here

In 2001 I wrote a book called “Scrooge Meets Dick and Jane” that predicted a school that consisted entirely of testing beds:

from page 87 

“When did they invent the test bed? inquired the girl. “That surely changed things I dare say.”

“It just made clearer what was already a done deal,” said old Joe. “The goal was to get students to be comfortable and perform as well as possible on tests. Once they were wired into the internet in their own test bed, they could get questions and answers repeated over and over until they knew the answer pair. This made it easy to require 100% on every test and students could just lie there until they had memorized it all.”


So it turned out I was wrong about the bed. Here is a picture of a room at the Carpe Diem school, (sponsored, of course, by Bill Gates.)