There's increasing talk of technology transforming from a place to a process. With the rise of the Internet, iPhones, and other innovations, it's said, school-centric learning is giving way to more personalized education experiences that students assemble themselves from the offerings of many different providers, allowing students to go to school where and when they want. In this vision of the education future, we're headed to a world of adaptive content libraries and recommendation engines that string together customized lists of learning activities for every student every day, on-demand tutoring, and hybrid education that weaves together live and online learning--a world captured in the name of a technology pilot project in New York City: School of One. Technology presents a tremendous opportunity to tap into the vast store of knowledge and teaching talent that resides beyond the schoolhouse door, to address students' differing educational interests and learning needs, and to perhaps improve the productivity of the education enterprise (some say that technology will allow schools to reduce teaching staffs significantly). But when I hear reformers talk about a new, technology-driven schooling model that envisions a diminished role for schools, I can't help thinking about my niece. She's a DC Teaching Fellow, a 5th-grade teacher in a District of Columbia neighborhood where her students often live with aunts, grandparents, and cousins, often a few nights at a time. When school's in session, these students know they'll have two real meals a day. There's such scant decency in their violent 10-year-old lives that when my niece vowed to them that she wouldn't use profanity in their presence, they laughed. They are prepubescent tinderboxes, punching, kicking, overturning desks at little provocation, yet they clamor to be part of the one-on-one lunches my niece uses to reward good behavior. The toughest case in the grade, a chronic discipline problem since kindergarten, knows his father is in prison for raping the boy's sister. It hasn't helped that he and his classmates had four different teachers by Thanksgiving this year. In such environments, and they're prevalent in the United States, the notion that students enabled by technology will play a greater role in planning and executing their educations seems a bit fanciful. Such students need more adult supervision and support in their lives, not less. They need as much help as possible in their emotional and social development during the course of their formal education. And that's not going to happen online. Technology-based learning is expanding rapidly. Three-quarters of public systems and half the states offer online instruction. And a host of commercial online learning ventures are emerging, from iTunes U, which permits teachers and students to share lectures and tutorials via iPods and iPhones, to MyChinese360, an Internet-based language program featuring live instructors from China via Skype and other technologies, to Guaranteach, an online tutoring company with a library of 20,000 unique math instructional videos. Not surprisingly, the widest use of technology to individualize learning has been in higher education, where students are older and more independent. At Virginia Tech, a well-regarded and cost-conscious state university, 95% of students take at least one course at a converted department store in a strip mall, where they sit at banks of computers working though self-paced courses designed by the university's professors. Graduate students are stationed in the facility to help struggling students, and the university has found that students perform as well in the self-taught courses as they do in traditional university lecture halls. Expand Learning, Cut Costs There's obvious value in technology's ability to expand curriculum opportunities, take advantage of top teaching talent, and address the different ways that students learn, as Harvard business professor Clay Christensen and his co-authors write in Disrupting Class (Mc-Graw-Hill, 2008), in which they predict that over half of all high courses will be delivered online by 2019. …