New Thinking & Terminology

In harnessing the power of an "enabling" system approach, the WEgrid initiative will introduce new terminology and new ways of thinking to map the future of education. It expands the set of education reform objectives to include implementation objectives that enable the taming of increasing complexity and the accommodation of inevitable change. Education reform is viewed not simply in static terms to meet education rehabilition objectives, but in dynamic terms to enable customizable, scalable, interoperable, extensible, and evolvable education solutions for an unknowable future.

The "Enabling System" approach represents a key innovation that WEgrid brings to the pursuit of global education excellence. Simply stated, this part of the WEgrid concept is to establish an underlying system infrastructure that supports the rapid and timely construction of a large variety of customizable, interoperable, extensible, and evolvable education solutions. The idea is to move the implementation of education solutions from current fragmented "horse and buggy" implementation methodologies onto an advanced unifying implementation infrastructure, an Education Super-system. With such an infrastructure in place, the whole tenor of the debate on education reform is changed from static conceptualization of prescriptive broadly-applicable education solutions to the dynamic assembly of smaller simpler locally-customizable education solutions (i.e., "just-right, just-enough, just-in-time" education solutions). No longer will educators talk about seeking a "holy-grail" for education reform in static prescriptive terms. Instead, the debate for the "holy-grail" for education reform will be governed by the concepts of dynamic enabling systems.

Systems design methodologies and technologies will be applied 1) to model the abstractions that will be the building blocks used to construct education solutions, 2) to enable the interoperability, customization, extensibility, and reuse of education solutions, and 3) to create simple contextually-sensitive interfaces for the stakeholders.