Although Sefton-Green argues for collapsing the boundaries between learning contexts online and in person, virtually and physically, I wonder how that might look in practice. A recent review of AltSchool in The New Yorker highlights a few of the confrontations of these conflations.

There may be only a limited opportunity for synthesis between different theories of learning to develop if the institutional regimes of popular media culture and schools are separately and jointly impervious to change. (Sefton-Green, 2006)

With the subhead “Silicon Valley disrupts education”, Rebecca Mead finds no shortage of ways to interrogate and gawk at the constant intermingling of media in education prominent in AltSchools. Surrounded by cameras documenting every second, students immersed in iPads at AltSchool interact with teachers who are constantly tracking a variety of mediums to best individualize each child’s learning plan and educational outlook. At the core of this is the belief that every student should have access to a micro-school like AltSchool across the United States. If Mead’s experience of AltSchool doesn’t examine “a new form of progressivism wherein new kinds of digital learning—even ‘digital literacy’—will simply serve to rationalize the changing nature of middle-class childhood and youth” (Sefton-Green, 2006) I am not sure what would.

What is troubling about this model lies less in the expectations for middle-class (or any class, really) education and more in the synthesis of popular media technology and educational theory. What has resulted in this instance, is a clear system of oversight and documentation that squeezes the life from improvisation and play that is not tied to a screen. I struggle with these new developments every day in my classroom as I work to use iPads and apps or other devices as another modality in the education work I am excited about. This is quite different from their being the only modality for instruction.