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Book Review: Blended: Using Disruptive Innovation to Improve Schools

Technological innovation is one of the primary societal change agents. Sometimes, a paradigm shift is changed by what Christensen of the Harvard Business School calls a disruptive innovation. He says in the forward to the book that “blended learning makes the best of the old and new paradigms available to all of us who want to learn.” This book is designed to help educational reformers to design and implement a student-centered learning system that blends effective face-to-face (F2F) pedagogy and online learning activities. In the introduction to the book, the authors describe how the concept of disruptive innovation that is used to explain how new technological systems can change systems in the business world can also be used to explain how new information technologies can disrupt and provide new ways to improve educational systems. The authors use email systems and Turbo software as examples of disruptive innovation technologies that have affected the post office and tax preparation businesses. A case is made that new information technologies can also be viewed as disruptive innovations for transforming schools. This book can be used with the “Reinventing Schools” book that was reviewed in the summer 2014 issue of JETS, as part of the tool kit of transforming schools. Both books provide excellent reasons for the need to change the factory model of most schools. The authors of this book provide three main reasons for the need to blend F2F learning with online learning: