Timothy Williams

Hundreds of cities, large and small, have adopted or begun planning smart cities projects. But the risks are daunting. Experts say cities frequently lack the expertise to understand privacy, security and financial implications of such arrangements. Some mayors acknowledge that they have yet to master the responsibilities that go along with collecting billions of bits of data from residents. Concerns have intensified as Kansas City prepares to expand its technology experiment from downtown to poor neighborhoods on the city’s East Side.

The world needs to urgently rethink the way education is done, how it is delivered, and what skills children will need in a digital age to become healthy and productive members of society. The case can be made that children are not learning the skills they need, at least in part because the conventional approaches to delivering education are not effective for fostering breadth of skills.

One central aspect of this debate is how best to apply technology to learning and practice. Increased connectivity is changing how knowledge is transmitted. Libraries are being digitized. Classes and course materials once accessible only to the rich or well-connected are now within reach via a smartphone. Yet in schools, technology has largely failed to systematically transform the teaching and learning environment. While low-cost devices like mobile phones have reached many, today almost 2 billion people remain untouched by digital technology, making it clear that connectivity is neither a panacea for solving the global learning challenge, nor should it be a top education priority.