Well, Tom Hoffman’s latest post on Ed-Tech Insider hits a bit close to home:

Discussing the general need for systemic reform in American education is becoming an increasingly popular pastime in the ed-tech blogosphere, which is all well and good, and indeed that was my professional focus before I morphed into an ed-tech guy.

Well… I suppose I’m guilty there. I admit, I’ve moved away from talking about educational technology and into talking about general education reform. And it’s easy for me to say that’s where my career has taken me, but there’s another reason that I think a lot of folks who have written about educational technology — myself included — are now writing about education reform.

Educational technology and the communication and productivity tools of the internet and laptops hold out the promise of really changing the game.

We have the chance to change the way we look at the relationship between students and teachers… schools and communities… the nature of the game has fundamentally changed — if we let it. If we push. If we advocate and yell and scream and cajole. If we let go of our fear of the unknown and let our students lead us — with our guidance.

About eight years ago, I was in a conversation with Gregg Betheil — then the technology coordinator at Martin Luther King HS in Manhattan, now the Senior VP for School Design at the National Academy Foundation — about how technology could change schools. MLK HS was not a progressive school, and the work he was doing with technology in his classroom was the most innovative stuff that was happening in that school. And I was at Beacon where I was surrounded by innovative folks who were doing progressive things and technology was something that just made sense there. It fit.

And we had this long conversation about whether or not we could use technology to be the progressive tail to wag the dog that was our school system. At the time, I really believed that it was going to be too hard — that the pedagogy had to come first. We couldn’t expect to "trick" schools into changing with the tool — they had to have the pedagogy first and then the tech could truly change things.

Nearly a decade later, the tools are changing the way we look at our schools. Kids are using them, teachers are using them, and even in the midst of a regressive wave of educational politics on the national level with NCLB, we are seeing change happen in our schools because these tools have changed society and schools — far too slowly — are changing along with society.

So I would hope that Tom forgives those of us who have moved from ed-tech to ed-reform. These days, it seems like a natural progression.

Now, that being said, everyone should go read Tom’s suggestions — and if I may be so bold — if we could move closer to what Tom suggests we’d get a lot closer to a powerful vision of both educational technology and educational reform.