The first group, the classic edu-tech games, have danced in and out of schools for so long that many kids take them for granted. Most of these programs are cute, but they fall short on pedagogical ambitions and graphic design. That doesn’t make them worthless; it just limits their effectiveness. (One person’s drill-and-kill can indeed be another’s guiding light. When educator and blogger extraordinaire, Scott McLeod, asked, “Do most educational games suck?” he drew fire from just about all sides.)

By contrast, a handful of educators a few years ago sought to put game controls directly into students’ hands by teaching them how to build their own games. Scratch, developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at MIT’s Media Lab, is the reigning champion here. (Here’s more of my take on Scratch). There are a few others, too, including Microsoft’s Kudo, a programming language that kids can use to build games for the Xbox game platform.

And now comes what I would dub a third approach, something that has picked up its very own buzzword before it has even reached most school gates: gamification. The term is as elegant as a teenager jawing a mouthful of bubble gum. But it suggests adding far more sophisticated game mechanics to applications — no matter how stuffy or serious the application has been. Gamification probably has more momentum outside of schools than in. Case in point: Dean Takahashi of VentureBeat has written about how DevHub, a place for web developers, added gaming feedback and watched in awe as the percentage of users who finished their sites shot up from 10 percent to 80 percent.

Most games are naturally social, which means gamification depends on that other ubiquitous web trend, social networking. Sure, go ahead and play Solitaire. But most of us take a certain pleasure in besting the competition — whether it’s the Texas Rangers or some ugly troll in World of Warcraft.

Academics are creating a skin of respectability for gamification. Byron Reeves of Stanford University has recently co-authored “Total Engagement” to outline his ideas about how gaming can turn the erstwhile plodding company man into an engaged and motivated worker. (Reeves is also putting his ideas to the test by co-founding a consulting firm, Seriousity, that will coach companies on how to do this.) The first gamification summit is slated to take place in January in San Francisco.

What does each of these approaches say about education?

The first type of games were willing to entertain kids to keep them engaged — the “just-make-it-fun” school of thought. But any standup comedian will tell you how tough it is to keep people entertained for long. It’s even harder with kids who outgrow the “fun” of a game faster than most games can evolve.

The Scratch camp is more about empowerment. Scratch appeals enormously to kids who want to control their environment and be in charge. Those who build Scratch games get feedback from others when they post their games. They say they love the comments and feel great when hundreds of others play their games.

Ultimately Scratch aficionados bring their ambitions to learn with them. I’d wager that if these kids were born a generation or two ago, they’d be building transistor radios. The Scratch kids have to be self-motivated: most use Scratch outside of school. No one makes them do it. All it took to get them going was for someone to introduce them to Scratch in the first place. That’s a great argument for exposing more kids to the tools.

Gamification, by contrast, doesn’t rely on internal motivation. Instead, it’s using the oldest tricks in the book: providing instantaneous feedback, egging on the competition, and rewarding even tiny steps of progress. Gamification assumes that the player isn’t especially motivated — at least at the beginning — and then provides barrels of incentives to ramp up that motivation.

I’m betting that gamification, in spite of its throat-clearing name, is going to be big in the commercial world — and in schools. Gamification can help build kids’ competitive spirits. As they gain confidence, they may become hungry for tools that put them in control. At the end of the day, those who know how to create the rules of the game, know how to win.

Related:

• Kodu: Visual Programming on the Xbox with P2P Level-sharing
• Innovation, education and Makers
• Education as a platform
• In defense of games in the workplace
• Reality has a gaming layer
• App Inventor and the culture wars

On the education side, the Washington Post took theses questions to the classroom in a piece entitled, “Some educators question if whiteboards, other high-tech tools raise achievement.”

I keep wondering why we lump all “technology” into the same basket. By doing so, we ignore the most important distinction of all: whether we are sponges for absorbing other people’s ideas, or whether we’re making our own.

O’Reilly has long been a champion of the “Maker” movement so perhaps this amounts to singing to the choir. But here’s one slice through the technologies organized according to their potential relationship to kids:

A Powerpoint (or Keynote) presentation is hardly the height of intellectual achievement. But when we think about how kids interact with ideas and media — what promotes creativity and learning — it seems to me we need to focus on whether the gadgets are the means for kids expressing themselves or a way of imprinting someone else’s ideas onto their brains.

Of course, a kid doesn’t need to make a Prezi presentation to deliver a great and inspiring report. But we live in a world that values flashing lights and cool transitions.

That struck home a few weeks ago when I saw a group of fifth grade students show off a semester’s worth of work to their parents and guardians. They had done traditional, glue-and-paper reports on different U.S. states, a project that had extended over about a month as the students gathered information, wrote summaries and clipped out pictures. Then, a week or so before “open house” night, the students were asked to deliver a report on one element in the periodic table using a Keynote presentation.

On the evening the parents and guardians showed up, I saw the same act repeated over and over: students grabbed the arm of their guest and dragged them over to watch their Keynote. They stood by, beaming as the slides clicked through. They had also absorbed a surprising amount of information about their elements, where they were found and why they were located on the periodic table. The students were proud of their state reports, too =- and knew they had worked far longer on them. But at least on this evening, the Keynotes stole the show.

Back in the 1970s, kids who sat glued to the television screen didn’t have a choice: we were all just sponges for the stuff broadcast over the airwaves. Today’s computer technology lets us choose if we want to be a maker or a sponge. Shouldn’t that be starting point when we argue about the role of technology in schools?

Postscript — Could this be the ultimate “Maker” class? Encouraging engineering in kindergarten.

If you can’t answer that question, go straight back to “Go” and don’t even dream of collecting $200.

VCs, of course, needs to weigh competitive as well as potentially complementary efforts. But answering that question should help the entrepreneur, too. Entrepreneurs are most likely to help a field move forward if they build on the knowledge and the mistakes of the past rather than tripping down the well-trodden road.

Really compelling ideas draw multiple entrepreneurs (think of how the idea of social networking brought out Facebook, MySpace and a swarm of other startups). And sometimes ideas have to wait for the technology to catch up (picture phones and electronic books come to mind).

Smart startups, however, look for unique approaches even when tackling a problem that others are–or have–taken on. And the fastest way to assess whether an approach is fresh or a rerun is to know what else is going on.

So what about the educational-technology space? We want to invent new approaches and ideas that will engage students, teachers (and even the occasional parent). But do we have good maps of what’s going on—not just in the for-profit venture sector but in the philanthropic sector, too?

Dale Dougherty, who’s no slouch when it comes to staying on top of the latest technology, summed up the problem well in his recent post:

“I wished the teams themselves were a better judge of their own proposals, and that they understood how their project advanced appropriate uses of technology in education. I wished that each of the applicants had been able to consult an evolving set of best practices for developing educational technology projects. …. They might help others avoid pitfalls and learn from failures.“

Our problems in education are too intense, funding is too thin and time too precious to take on duplicative efforts. We need to apply some of the same discriminating standards in our philanthropic Edu2.0 projects that we use in for-profit ones.

So what would be the relevant features of a topographical map of the educational-technology sector? Here’s one set of categories:

Projects aimed at:

• Improving instruction
• Individualized (adaptive) instruction
• Doing assessment
• Improving teacher practices
• Promoting project-based learning
• Improving transparency
• Bridging the school-home communications gap
• Improving school infrastructure

What would you add? What elements do you think would help people designing education-technology projects get a useful picture of what else is going on?

Ask a hundred educators to draw a picture of what “school” should be like, and some big common themes will similarly crop up: school should be engaging, have genuine connections to the real world, should nurture different talents, help kids no matter what their strengths and weaknesses and, of course, be safe.

Ed Fish, president of ePals, spends a lot of his time thinking about that beautiful, shimmering image of school — and then all the puzzle pieces that need to fit together to make it possible. ePals has had some stunning success: it boasts that it is the largest online community of educators and students, delivering mail and other communications services to 600,000 classrooms around the world and 25 million students. (About half of those are in the U.S., Fish says.)

Today ePals said it was teaming up with Microsoft to try to create another piece of the puzzle — namely, how to shore up the foundations underlying school email and collaboration technologies. There’s a second element of the deal, too: Microsoft took a minority ownership stake in ePals (less than 10 percent), making it the second outside investor in the privately held, 14-year old firm. (National Geographic made a similar investment 18 months ago.)

The gist of the deal: ePals will offer Microsoft’s Live@edu mail and calendar services to its far-flung constellation of teachers and users. (Here’s the official release.) In practice, educators won’t see much evidence of the alliance until at least September. Then ePals expects to nudge them to look first at the email applications available through Live@edu, then at the calendar capabilities. By 2011, other web applications should become available.

The journalist in me immediately figured that the ePal-Microsoft alliance was another bit of saber rattling between Microsoft and Google. Many educators — both in higher ed and in the K-12 arena — are embracing Google Docs as a nifty way to provide free email, collaborate on documents and share calendars. (Experiences such as those of Bronx middle school principal, James Levy, are compelling.) Even though just about everybody uses Microsoft Word documents, the Redmond company trails Google on the “cool” factor among geek educators.

I’ll confess I’m also suspicious of proclamations that cloud computing is on the verge of transforming public education’s rickety technology infrastructure. At one marvelous elementary school I know, the valiant IT guy wrestles with nine different versions of operating systems sprinkled across a fleet of more than 100 computers, many of which are old enough to register for first grade—not to mention two different networks connected to two independent servers that share less communications than a divorced couple. And did I mention that this IT guy is only scheduled to visit the school twice a week? Stuffing all that complexity in the cloud would be awesome—almost as awesome as the complexity of transferring the management to the cloud in the first place.

Fish, of ePals, understands that kind of problem well. “It’s the small things that kill you,” he agrees—like figuring out how to reset a student’s lost password in a way that doesn’t waste a day or even a week of instructional time.

When Fish ticks off the pieces that he believes are necessary to build that bright and shining picture of education, he starts with giving individual teachers the ability to design (and easily use) “prescriptive policies,” real and workable ways of establishing who can communicate with whom. Teachers need to set the rules: Should a class in Detroit be blogging or emailing a class in Mexico? Should students be able to comment on one another’s work? What should be done to shut down bullying? And what constraints should be on students’ school email accounts when they use them outside school hours?

“Those policies have got to be designed to support learning and safety,” Fish says. And teachers have got to have their hands on those knobs, he adds.

Until recently Microsoft had little that could help on this front. Its communications technology for schools was built on its Hotmail product. But 18 months ago, nudged by customers, such as universities that wanted to offer life-long email to alumni, Microsoft migrated its support for education messaging to an Exchange environment. “Live@Edu was born from that demand,” says Anthony Salcito, vice-president of worldwide education at Microsoft.

“We thought a lot about who was the right cloud partner,” says ePal’s Fish. “We need an ecosystem. It needs to be a sustainable model. Fewer than 10 percent of school kids have collaborative email accounts—but we think that’s going to explode.”

The education infrastructure may indeed be on the verge of tumultuous change, provoked by those final grains of sand dribbled on top of the existing pile: the financial incentives offered by the Obama administration, the wrenching local budget crises, and the growing agreement about what we want to see happen in schools.

More telling to me than much of the rhetoric surrounding the ePals and Microsoft deal is the personal alliances that have been forged: the ePals board is packed with long-time anti-Microsoft firebrands: former AOL CEO Steve Case, former Lotus CEO Mitch Kapor. Nothing draws erstwhile competitors together like an opportunity. “Even as a competitor, I’ve always been impressed with how Microsoft’s corporate culture embraces others’ technology and approaches,” says Fish, who is also a former AOL executive. (It’s not a total bear hug, however: Microsoft did not get a seat on the ePals’ board.)

I hope ePals and Microsoft are a success. Schools — and teachers — do need great controls to make that bright and shining picture of schools a reality. I’ve got my version of that picture pinned on my wall. Far more important — so do millions of kids.

The program was thoughtfully designed and took advantage of the latest and greatest learning algorithms. If any program should be able to help students learn geometry, one might be tempted to conclude, it should be this one. That kind of logic could give ammunition to those who declare that computer-assisted learning is bunk.

But there’s more behind the story.

The researcher told me (and is writing in the paper) that she observed even the most well-intentioned teachers really struggled to figure out how to use the technology. The program wasn’t well integrated into the regular classwork. The “protocols” for use, carefully constructed by the developers, weren’t followed because, as every teacher knows, stuff just happens. Students moved out of town; new students showed up. Teachers came; teachers went. The list goes on.

It was, in short, a pretty good reflection of how technology gets implemented in most classes — hardly in the precise and careful way designed by those who have sweated over the program.

The trial was a flop — not because the technology failed but because there was a mismatch between how the designers believed it should be used and how the teachers wound up using it. Was that the teachers’ fault? Nope. Every day, in every class in the world, teachers come up with workarounds to cope with the unexpected. Most technology, however, isn’t yet as resilient.

We drop test hardware before we send it into the field. Seems like it’s time to start drop testing software programs before sending them into the classroom.