Disrupting Class

Just finished reading Disrupting Class and while many of the ideas were fascinating and exciting, it was actually not their ideas about education that grabbed me most. Instead it was the ideas about educational research that I found most interesting. This semester I am undertaking research on Web 2.0 and writing. So far I have found this interesting and exciting. I have begun the interview portion of the research and am really enjoying these interviews to try and get a window into how teachers come by these new tools, and how they deploy them in their classrooms. However in reading chapter 7 i realized that this, and even future research I am interested in is descriptive research. As they argue, descriptive research certainly has a place in building understanding of certain conditions. However, it is more through prescriptive research and examining anomalies and creating better categories that we might be able to offer more people better educational opportunities. Although these categories are but one way to split the different types of research, the investigation was useful to me as it forced me to think about how to make my research personally useful, and useful to a wider audience.