Turning ‘Google Maps for Education’ From Metaphor to Reality | EdSurge News

"In his latest EdSurge column, Michael Horn laid out how Google Maps offers an aspirational metaphor for what the future of educational tools could look like. But as he also noted, locating where people are geographically is one thing; pinpointing where they are educationally is another. Today, Google Maps is an open ecosystem for accurate, real-time geospatial and navigation data. Unfortunately, current learner navigation systems more closely resemble the early, self-contained GPS devices with incomplete and inaccurate maps. To bridge the gulf, it will take a similar open-data ecosystem to support learner navigation. But in the field of education, we don’t even have a complete set of static competency frameworks for digital data that are openly accessible and interoperable—to say nothing of dynamic data that support real-time pathway optimization. Yet there are several initiatives, some of which I’ve had the privilege of working on, that aim to support the educational data ecosystem necessary for learner navigation...."