Bob Wise Travels to Ohio for Summit on Digital Learning

Yesterday Bob Wise, president of the Alliance for Excellent Education and former governor of West Virginia, spoke at a summit  titled “Learning Unbound,” sponsored by KnowledgeWorks.  The event took place in Columbus, OH and focused on ways that digital learning can improve student performance and lower education costs in the state and throughout the nation. This morning in the Huffington Post, Tom Vander Ark published a piece about some of the strategies discussed at the summit to help Ohio boost student achievement. See below for an excerpt.

Ohio is broke, but it’s possible that despite the financial status of the state that for some Ohio kids, things will get better. Learning is about to become more engaging, more personal, and more productive.

Learning Unbound, a Columbus conversation about education, dealt with the perplexing “GM moment for education” when, according to keynoter Bob Wise, the situation demands better outcomes with lower revenues.

Imagine a YouTube, Facebook, iTunes, NatGeo, Linux, and World of Warcraft for learning. They are all here, at least version 1.0. A flood of entrepreneurial activity and investment over the last few years has yielded a crop of Web 2.0 learning tools that make possible a generation of Web 2.0 schools.

Former West Virginia Governor Bob Wise, Alliance for Excellent Education, kicked off the conference by making the case that online learning is the only way to close the achievement, teacher, and fiscal gaps. Gov. Wise joined Gov. Jeb Bush in chairing the Digital Learning Now report issued in December at the Foundation for Excellent Education conference.