Sunday’s New York Times has an article about the launch of the National Center for Research in Advanced Information and Digital Technologies, which finally secured an appropriation of $50 million after more than nine years of trying to get off the ground. The quasi-governmental agency (it’s an independent not-for-profit that gets all its money from the U.S. Department of Education) is billing itself as doing for education technology “what the National Science Foundation does for science, Darpa does for the national defense and what N.I.H. does for health,” according to a quote from one of the founders in the Times.

There are certainly a number of promising ways to use technology in education, so a grant-making body dedicated to this purpose could produce some really interesting projects. Bill Tucker has written a lot in this space about better use of technology in providing online learning options and improving assessments in K-12 education. Kevin Carey, meanwhile, has written about how the  National Center for Academic Transformation uses technology to redesign courses so that they are less expensive to operate and produce better learning outcomes for students. He has also discussed StraigherLine, a company that provide for-credit college courses for just $99 a month, as a way of showing how technology can reduce barriers to entry and increase choice in higher education.

But it’s important to note that the promising use of technology in education is not about creating gimmicky video games or virtual worlds, but about using software and hardware to rethink the business of teaching. In that regard, technology is most effective when it can do one of three things: 1) Replace costly and inefficient activities, such as spending long amounts of time grading multiple choice questions, 2) Make it easier to manage and oversee a class, such as course management software that makes it possible for professors to see which questions students frequently got wrong; or 3) Make students more active and responsible for their learning, such as programs that tailor exercises to areas where students need help and then generate repeated problems so students can keep working on an idea until they really understand it.

At this point, it’s too early to see whether the new initiative will lean toward the serious activities described above or instead focus on the flashier, attention-grabbing side of education technology. But the Times story provides some indication:

To build support for the project, the group created three prototypes: an educational video game for biology students called Immune Attack; a game for museums, called Discovering Babylon; and a computer simulation to train firefighters in high-rise fires. They typify the projects the center will be looking to finance.

Now, I get how this works. You’re a new project, you need to get funding, so you need to make things that people will think are cooler enough to fund. And for museums and things like that, an entertaining piece of software can do wonders for drawing visitors. The description of potential activities on the group’s Web site is a bit more promising (emphasis mine):

Research, development and demonstrations of learning technologies that could include simulations, games, virtual worlds, intelligent tutors, performance-based assessments, and innovative approaches to pedagogy that these tools can implement.

There is certainly plenty of room for technology to play a greater role in all types of education, from kindergarten to college. But attempts to make better use of computers and the Internet in the classroom would be better off considering what the technology actually does, rather than how cool it looks, when considering promising applications.