UNION SQUARE VENTURES HACKING EDUCATION FRENCH INSTITUTE 22 EAST 60TH STREET, 8TH FLOOR NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10022 FRIDAY, MARCH 6, 2009 10:00 A.M. P R E S E N T: Danielle Allen Charles Best Jon Bischke Danah Boyd Asi Burak Brad Burnham Gaston Caperton Mike Caulfield Nt Etuk Jose Ferreira Teri Flemal Bing Gordon Alex Grodd Idit Harel Caperton Scott Heiferman Michael Horn Chris Hughes Jeff Jarvis Lewis Johnson Steven Johnson Rob Kalin Bob Kerrey Mark Loughridge Paul Miller Charlie O'Donnell Nancy Peretsman Shai Reshef Mitchel Resnick Diana Rhoten Sir Ken Robinson Jim Rosenthal Jonathan Sackler Katie Salen Dave Schappell Suzanne Seggerman Jessie Shefrin Jeff Shelstad Brian K. Smith Tom Vander Ark Albert Wenger Brian Willison David Wiley Fred Wilson P R O C E E D I N G S (Time noted: 10:00 a.m.) MR. WENGER: I feel a lot like a kid in a candy store, because this topic is so important and so interesting and there's so many great people here. And I felt a little sorry to break up all the conversations that were taking place just to get people to sit down. But we want to get a start and then we'll have plenty of opportunities for further conversations, including lunch. So, I want to just jump right in. I wanted to say a few words, first of all, welcoming everybody. Thank you all. Some people travelled from far, including Europe, to be here. That's great. The amazing thing is that everybody showed up, which is wonderful. So, a little bit before I get to the format. I want to say thank you to Andrew, Eric and... I can't see her right now, who handled all the logistics, and did a fantastic job. And the format itself is very simple. We are to sit around this table and, hopefully, have a conversation on this topic. And it'll be somewhat loosely structured based on those ideas that were contributed ahead of the event. We are not doing intros. Everybody's bio is up on the Wiki. And if you missed it, we made a printout here. It could take an hour or so of conversation. We're also not going to do a wrap-up at the end. Last time we had gone around and let everybody do a wrap-up, and that took an hour and a half. So, if you have plans to stay, stay. And if it doesn't fit in the conversation at the moment, you can say it at first. All you have to do is tweet it and include, column, text edu... make sure it's 50 characters, and it will show up here. And we will hopefully get to it later. MR. WILEY: Is there a password for the wireless? MR. WENGER: Yes, there is. ERIC: I'll broadcast it on the screen. (Indicating.) MR. WENGER: I was supposed to e-mail that around and -- other than that, I think that's everything that is to be said about the form. Thank you. We're recording this and we're going to be transcribing it, and we will have it up on the web afterwards. And hopefully that will provide a basis for a continued and ongoing discussion. THE SPEAKER: It also means don't say anything either that you don't want millions of people to be able to read. MR. WENGER: It's all going to go on Twitter. It was invitee-only, but we're not trying to close the results out from the world. MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: Or be brave. Or be brave. MR. WENGER: So, we've broken the day, loosely, into four sections. And the first section, really, is to talk about the goals. What should be the goals of education? What are the things we're trying to accomplish? What are the things, maybe more importantly, that we're trying to avoid? And we are going to introduce each of those four sections with a little video. And so, we have this wonderful inspirational video with a lot of love outside. Actually, I think we have Sir Ken. I set up a video for the first section. We're going to have Sir Ken speak directly. SIR ROBINSON: Have you seen this set here? Do you know what we are talking about? (Indicating.) I spoke with Pat around two years ago about creativity and about how education, on the whole, is a precedent. And this video has been downloaded now 4 million times, which is great, from some points of view. But my son recently showed me a video, that's also on YouTube, of two kittens that seem to be having a conversation. It takes 90 seconds, and that's been downloaded 18 million times. (Laughter.) So I'm not getting carried away, but the reason I mentioned it is this talk is about -- or that particular thing is about how education, I believe, systematically -- not deliberately, I think this is important -- but systematically, tends to divert people from their natural talent. And in my experience, most adults as a consequence have no idea what they are really capable of achieving. Most parents, in my experience, kind of bounce along, doing things that they wandered into, with no great sense of passion or commitment to it. I don't say that's true here; you look passionate to me. But for the most part, that's true. And yet, all children are born with immense natural talents. And education, you might suppose, is for that child to evolve and develop. And I believe it doesn't do it. I don't believe it's deliberate, but I believe it's in the DNA of the current system, and it is getting worse. As you know, for those of you who live in America, partly through the impact of legislation like No Child Left Behind. And the reason -- how many here are not from America? (A show of hands.) Well, it applies -- you see the system is doing the same thing. And the reason I think is this: That education systems around the world were originally evolved almost specifically to meet the needs of industrialism. So, there are already two parents for education: One is industrialism, which is what gives the organizational character of education, it's linear character, in the sense of it being organized around age groups. You know, if you think of it, there are some things that you simply take for granted in education. One of them is that happens to young people, and then it stops, pretty much. So, this is front-loading the system. We're educated by an age group. Why? You know, it's like the most important things they have in common is that they can manufacture with the -- they are all four-year olds and five-year olds. Education is obsessed with getting people to college. Why? I think you should go to college. I don't know of a kid who never wanted to go to college. Very few people who've gone to college understand why, and there are now legions of people leaving college with no idea what the whole thing is for, going home and demanding an explanation. I saw, probably when I first came to America, it was a policy paper -- I think this was in LA -- and it was called, College Begins in Kindergarten. Well, it doesn't. If we had more time, I can go into this, but I don't. Kindergarten begins in kindergarten. Somebody runs a great place, it's called the Arc Children's Place in Dublin, and he made a great comment. He said that a 3-year-old is not half a 6-year-old; a 6-year-old is not half a 12-year-old. And so, they're 3, they are 6. But in New York, in London, in Chicago, all the great metropolitan cities, people are competing to get their children into kindergarten, to get into the right kindergarten. Kids are being interviewed for kindergarten by the age of 3, presumably producing presidents, sitting in front of unimpressed selection probers, thumbing through this stuff, you know, like "This is it; Been around 36 months." (Laughter.) "This is it? You've achieved nothing." (Laughter.) "First six months, breastfeeding --" certainly that's obsession, and yet we don't know anything about that. It is not linear. What people go on to do isn't a function of what they are becoming. Most people I know, and I guess it's true of you, did not intend to do what they are doing now when they were 5 or 10. You know, they've evolved into this through this, sort of, process of opportunity and disposition and so on. So, the program is very linear. And that is embedded into the current system of education, a hierarchy of subjects which is based on an old idea of science and math and language and arts and physics at the bottom. I'm telling you this because one parent of the current system of education is industrialism. But there is a second parent of education, which is the intellectual culture of enlightenment, which is a view of intelligence that reduces intelligence and affects a certain type of deductive reasoning. It's obsessed with academic ability, so called. And while going to a university is not higher than going to an art college or to a music college or to a fashion college -- and there is, I think, extraordinary and damaging division in academic implications. I was sitting down -- this book, by the way (indicating) -- and not to promote this book -- well, I'll tell you about this because I was in Northern California recently to sign a copy of the book. I did not, by the way, go all the way to Northern California just to sign this one copy of a book. There were many copies. But there was this particular guy I was signing it for, and I said to him, "What do you do?" I've been having a lot of academic invitations. And I said, "What do you do?" He said, "I'm a fireman." I said, "Fantastic. How long have you been a fireman?" He said, "All my life. All my adult life. I've always wanted to be a fireman." He said, "I got really mad at times in school about this, because not every kid wants to be a fireman. I actually wanted to be a fireman. And so, they said that I was stupid, that if I didn't want to go to college, I would never amount to anything." And he said, "I always felt demeaned by the job because of school. A man, six months ago, I saved his life. He was in the car accident and I pulled him out. I gave him CPR, and his wife too." He said, "I think you think special of me." (Laughter.) What I'm saying is, our educational system tumbles people, sort of a system, in the interest of industrialism and through a particular view of intelligence. Now, the reason I'm telling you this is -- not that you don't know it, it's because the current system, in my view, is broken beyond repair. Most school systems in the world are being reformed, but reform isn't the issue anymore, I think; it's transformation. We need to reinvent education, properly, for the 21st century. But we have to do it, then, based on a different sense of economic purpose or economic circumstances. But critically, we have to build into it a different sense of intelligence and creativity. And I think the technologies that you're talking about today, that you're going to be involved in, are both -- one of the primary reasons why the current system is broken, the revolution is being triggered in part by the impact of these new technologies around the world. It changed the whole equation. And they could also be part of the new settlement. The problem was that you can't fix it to evolve. But our kids are telling us something important, that they have drawn constantly through these technologies. They think about it differently. They engage in the process and most of the people in the educational system are beyond the point in their lives where they're really fully aware of the impact in technology. You know, Mark... makes this interesting distinction between digital matrix and digital... I know it's the best distinction. But the essential idea is if you are 25, you were born before the digital revolution began. And some of those people -- not all, but most adults have a kind of passing relationship with digital culture. I do myself, and I have started tweeting at the urging of my kids. I'm on Twitter and I have a thousand followers. I can't tell you how great this makes me feel. These people are interested in what I had for breakfast. (Laughter.) I think that it's a great system because my kids understand this far better than I do. But the thing is, these technologies are transformative, not just economically but culturally. So my take on this is that education has three main purposes. One of them is economical. There is no doubt in my mind that education of all sorts has clear and powerful and essential economic purposes, and any attempt to transform education has to take account of it. The problem is that the old economic model doesn't work and none of us can figure out how new economic models would fall out. So, that, to me, puts a premium on innovation and creativity. We have to think hard about that. The second big purpose of education is cultural. Everybody expects education will enable kids to engage with the culture out of their own sense of identity, and be part of the culture in the global sense. But how do you do that? The third big part of education is personal. Education has to focus also on personal capability and what makes us distinct, as well as what we have in common. And that, for the moment, flattens out in the current systems of education. Because the way in which we're promoting schools is through standardizing rather than through personalizing, customizing. So, I see a vast potential in these new technologies, not only within the system, but as a way of creating breakouts in the system, new forms in formal education. This book, just very briefly, is based on the premise that most people haven't discovered their talents, but many people do. And a part of education is a different sense of personal growth and development. The figures in America are, I think, 15,000 school districts in America. There are 90,000 schools. The dropout rate in public education is 30 percent. There are growing numbers of graduates who are unemployed. And also, among the people who are at school, there's growing levels of disaffection, not only among students but among their teachers, because they find that whole creative process, as teachers, is being flattened out. And the normal response in political circles is to demand control methods. And the whole point about these technologies is they are not... control. They are vernacular, they are grassroots and they are cross-fertilizing technologies. How you stimulate those, how you make them grow, is, of course, a big challenge to the conversation. But I just wanted to say that I think that this conversation is not a fringe conversation, although it's happening on the fringes of education. I think what we're all here to talk about today is a process of educational development which could, I think, create a new sentiment across the whole system. But it would take, I think, not only your knowledge of the technologies, but your being willing to challenge who you're addressing. Is it just the kids? Is it the students? Is it the teachers? Is it the parents? So, what are the things that you reflect on your own education, that you have made, that have held you back? I think it's worth reflecting on those, in particular the sense of intelligence. My point about giving these numbers about the schools is that when these numbers are trotted out, it all gives the impression that this is still a bit like... My point is, you can't understand education if you only think statistically. For every child who drops out of school, for every kid who doesn't succeed, even though he eventually does, there is a personal story. Education is always and inevitably personal. And the great thing about these technologies is a way of calibrating the personal involvement in the way that they never did before. So, I just wanted to mention the conversation that we're about to have. I think it's important, not just for you but the students that we'll serve. And it could, I think, be a historic moment in terms of the collaborations being at least cultivated around the table. So, I want to -- if I could stay for this bit, really, is to hang on to the bit in the middle. And I just want to end with this. There was a fantastic booklet a few years ago by a guy called Peter Brooke. He's a theater director, if you ever come across it. He wrote a book called "The Empty Space." And he asked himself this question. He was concerned most theater and is -- loose entertainment -- it's not invigorating. It's like a passing time. His thing is theater as a vibrant, social and cultural force. So, he also analyzed what goes wrong with the theater. So, he asked himself this question. He said, What is the heart of the theater? What is it? What is this thing we are talking about? And to get to it, he started the process of subtraction. He said, "What can you take away from it and still have it?" And he said, well, you can take away the stage. Take away the script. You can take away the lighting. See what's going on, you take away the curtains, and you can take away the building. You can take away all the crew, and you can certainly take away the director. All of that is very easy. Take it all out. The only thing you cannot remove from theater is an actor in a space and somebody watching. That's the heart of it. And if either of those parts is missing, there is no theater. You need a performer and an audience. Theater is that relationship. And he said you should never add anything to that relationship unless it improves it. If it gets in the way, if it encumbers it, if it makes it more difficult, you shouldn't have it. And that's his problem with theater. Everything is a distraction from the main business. And that's, I suppose, what I want to suggest here, that part of the conversation should be about what's the heart of education? What is the irreducible minimum? In public education, I think we've lost sight of it. The heart of education is what happens in the hearts and minds of individual learners. You cannot make anybody learn anything that they're not interested in learning, if they don't see and feel the relevance of it. And what we've got now in this industrialized system is a multitude of distractions from this central purpose. The heart of it is falling out of it because kids aren't interested. What we have here is, an opportunity to really engage kids' imaginations by giving them education, using these technologies not to get in the way but to enhance and properly develop -- collaboratively and creatively. So, I want to thank Albert for the tremendous conversation. I think it's a really important one. I want to wish you well. I wish I could be here longer, but I have another conference to attend. Thank you. (Applause.) MR. WENGER: So we're going to go home and work hard on all of those things. Thank you, Sir Ken. I raised my hand when Ken asked who is here who's not from the United States. I'm a U.S. citizen, but I grew up in Germany. So, I want to open this up for everybody. What are the goals worth pursuing? Everybody should jump right in on that. MR. KALIN: I was at the economic forum in Davos. The world is changing. I think it's created a massive amount of opportunity. And I started a company four years ago called Etsy.com... people who make a living making things. And it's four years now, there are about 350,000 sellers, 97 percent women. And these are one to three person businesses for the most part. And one of the talks in Davos is about how you would get engaged... Sir Ken said something and I think this really illuminated how education is going to change. He said, people graduating from school now, their goal should not be to get a job; their goal should be to create jobs for other people. And when you look at that type of entrepreneurialism, now, you can't teach that as a disciplin because it's inherently interdisciplinary. The word "interdisciplinary" is actually slapstick humorous to me. This is life, the fact that you could think otherwise is humorous to me. And there is this other irony that all these younger kids who spend so much of their time online and then have to spend time online for school using blackboard, software or anything, the have to be forced to do it, and they don't enjoy it. They just do it by spending all that time outside of school on the web. So, I think that there's some connection there in terms of how you empower students. You're not going to teach it like that, and how the school curriculum could change that or if that could be even part of the curriculum. MR. WENGER: Rob, how well did you do in high school? MR. KALIN: I graduated high school with a D minus. I had an interesting argument with my guidance counselor. My guidance counselor said, "Drop out of high school, you'll have an easier time getting into college if you just get a GED." Then he said, "Not only am I not getting a GED -- (Laughter.) -- but I'm going to graduate with this D minus, and see how it does for me. And it didn't get me into any accredited school. I got a diploma program in an art school in Boston, and it was near MIT. And actually I used the art school to make a fake ID to go to MIT. (Laughter.) Somebody said it was expensive, but I said No, it is free, you just won't get credit for it. But the other part is, to do a college degree. And if you're in college for four years -- in my experience, college degrees, their value in the job market is getting less and less, but their cost is increasing. So, you have these two things are quite at odds with each other. And that's going to balance itself out. People are going to find another way. I think that's the beauty of humanity, you can't have systems that are so monolithic now that you can say this completely stifles creativity. You know, there's people who just get rejected in the system. You can't go through it and they find other paths. And with the Web nowadays, I think there's never been more opportunity to find these other paths and connect with other people. MR. WENGER: Mr. Jarvis, you have something to say? MR. JARVIS: Just to play off what Rob said -- and I didn't mean to plug my book, but as Sir Ken did, I'll follow up. I wrote a book called "What Would Google Do?" And in looking at that, I came to two great conclusions myself. One is that -- and I called this "creation generation," but I realized that we always want to create. And everyone wants to create. We want to leave our hands on things. And we have a system that doesn't enable this. One survey, for the 81 percent of Americans, I think, they have a book in them. We can probably be grateful most don't come out, but we should be sad that people don't have the chance to try. And so, all I want to say is that the one bing moment from me was wondering why education does not have -- like, Google or 20 percent rule, that people use 20 percent of their time to create something and that education becomes an incubator for that creation, because like what Rob said, it's not a class I teach. I teach entrepreneurial journalism, which is not an oxymoron, at the City University of New York. And it's all about them creating whatever they can create and helping them do that. And so, how can we help students create and, in that process, learn? And we are not built to do that at all. We are built to put out cookie cutters and make them pass tests. MR. WENGER: But don't you need skills? Is teaching skills an important goal of school? MS. BOYD: I think a lot of us in the room are really interesting success cases, a lot of people who also didn't play by the rules, any sort of changes to the rules or -- may end up why we're in this room to begin with. I spent most of my time running around the United States, interacting with teens who don't necessarily have that mind set, don't necessarily have those opportunities, and their priorities are fundamentally different. And one of the biggest priorities that I hear, that strikes me as so different from my own, was what it meant to make certain that you stay with your family, you stay in your community and that you're a part of a local social system and they're watching as the jobs fall out of the local economy. Sir Ken, as a point of going back to thinking, he -- about the industrial era and how education perished. The industrialist is really interesting. And we're still stuck in that. We're watching as the industrial structures have fallen out and, of course, it's devastating. And we have these great opportunities. And sitting in Manhattan, having those great conversations about the creative cultures and what all the awesome possibilities are for people who are super motivated. But at the end of the day I keep wondering, what do we think about the vast majority of people who are frankly being trained in the service class labor? And what is that training look like? Do we prepare them for service class labor or should we be thinking about how we prepare people to find stuff that's not just about labor per se, but about enjoying their life more broadly? And this is where the creativity comes in. My feeling in a lot of education is that you may not be preparing people for the skills of service class labor -- although there's certain things that are done there -- but giving them the tools to be creative when they want to be creative in their personal lives; to create as a form of art or a form of fun, the things that they can do when they're not working 9:00 to 5:00. Many of us in the room get to live -- you know, our work and leisure are sort of blended into one. We love what we are doing. But can we really truly expect everybody to be in that kind of job mind set? And when do we have to actually think about the balancing of the work and pleasure and how we actually educate people to be happy? MR. O'DONNELL: One thing that really strikes me, anytime -- I teach an entrepreneurship class at Fordham. And when I encourage students to find something they really like doing -- and I tell them, Look, as a finance major, I can tell you from all my investment banker friends that the money is not worth it if you don't like what you do. And the assumption -- on behalf of the students, and I don't know where they got this idea -- they can't find what they really want to do because they need to make money. And I said, Well, I don't really understand why, for some reason, all of the jobs people would like to do are somehow disproportionately underpaid. And I said, there are lots of jobs for finance I wouldn't necessarily want to do, but they make a lot of money. And so, somehow, the education system is teaching students along the way that the pursuit of doing something you really want to do is not economically viable. And I think that's the real problem. MR. WENGER: Well, I think that may well be the reality for a lot of people. MS. BOYD: If you look at the job market in the United States, there's certain things we're not going to export, and a lot of that is service labor. And the fact of the matter is we do need to put people to fill those jobs. And those jobs aren't always fun. And so, how do we balance those different dynamics? I think it's great that we train and educate people to really succeed and go and do the things that they're passionate about. But I think that if we only focus on that and we don't focus on the reality of the labor market where not everything is fun -- but we really want people to clean our sewers, but that might not be the most enjoyable job. But how do we actually create those kinds of balances so that the fun might not be just necessarily your job? And there's certain things where getting paid takes the fun out of it. I love talking to people who are amateur chefs. And they're amateur chefs because when they tried to go and work in a restaurant, they hated it. It wasn't fun anymore. And it was fun when they can cook for their friends. And so, how do we balance these kinds of engagements where it's not just an obsession of labor? And I think as American society, we obsess over labor. And we obsess over making everything without fun labor. That may not be the way the society goes. MR. L. JOHNSON: I'm not sure how this is relevant to education, but I would point out, what is wrong with serving fries? The notion of serving people by cleaning their sewage systems or serving fries is to be abuse and -- MS. BOYD: But it's a form of prestige. It has no prestige, which makes it a miserable experience. MR. L. JOHNSON: Prestige is deep with the abuse. And in education I think that's the notion of -- I agree with a lot of what you said, but the idea that service as a profession is something that must be societally avoided is -- I don't really get. When I sold a company eight years ago, I went to work in McDonald's because I felt I needed to kind of connect with human beings. I was spending too much time with investment bankers and lawyers and such. I would throw out one sentence. The thing I'm most interested today, and I've talked to Dave about this -- the idea of broadening the notion of education to be a lifelong idea and how the work that Paul -- the school, everything -- and Dave are doing around, saying that everyone's got something to teach, everyone's got something to learn. We live in this crazy connected world, how does education -- how do you expand education? And I guess the other things which we're talking about today is -- which I don't know much about is -- it's just really hitting hard at the broken public educational system and what to do about that. MR. WENGER: Let's think about that. Let's just stick with that point, number one. Is it the goal of education to enable people to find the job that makes them happy? Or is it a goal at a large scale to have people to somehow figure out how they can lead happy lives even if they have jobs that today they don't consider -- it's a very fundamental difference on what we're going to wind up focusing on, not for the education but for the large majority, depending which of those goals. MR. KALIN: There are now jobs out there; that's the other part of it. I got my BA and I taught my friends with similar degrees, and I was studying literature at the time. My dad's saying, "Go to go work in the book publishing industry." And I saw my friends who had Master's, Ph.D.s in the book publishing industry, and they're doing alphabetizing, copy editing. I started my own company because I found that the only way to avoid wasting my education -- MS. FLEMAL: But that's just this moment. But I think the broader question and I think it's good what you're saying, talking about this expanding the concept of education, and what Sir Ken is saying about, I don't know if he said vocational, but also the cultural aspect and personal aspect is that. I work with families here in Manhattan, what we do is we take kids off that track of, whether they're 36 months or whether they're in fifth grade or sixth grade, taking them off the school track and bringing them home and home-school them for a while and then whether they choose to go back or not. Parents will often say, okay, you know, they are more concerned with sometimes the social aspect than, what is my child really going to be interested in academically? What is their real interest academically? I. Think people have gotten so caught up in the social aspect of school that they've forgotten really about what we're really there for, that we're there to learn and we're there to find a passion and maybe find a vocational skill, a useful skill. But this whole social piece that we're getting in school, which is ultimately, I think, secondary to everything else, has sort of taken precedence. This social interaction of who likes me and who doesn't like me, and all the other things we see on TV. So to think of the part of it that brings the focus definitely to education is so important. I'd love to hear more and learn more and focus more about that. MS. RHOTEN: Historically, education's had three primary objectives (Inaudible.) Economic development and vocational skill trainings. And then human development, the ability to create and ability to pursue what you are interested in and have a sense of yourself. I think we've lost two of the (inaudible). There's too much pressure around the question of vocational economic development. What job will you get? What college will you go to? The question of civic responsibility into a nonformal learning institution, which I'm currently spending a lot of time. And what I see happening in the nonformal learning institutions are development organizations that shoulder two other areas of responsibilities. And they are currently losing their ability to provide -- to serve those two responsibilities. Where are those going to be met? They are not being met in the large part because of what Sir Ken mentioned. The child left behind. Hopefully, this administration will reverse that, but that will not happen within the next six months, I can assure you. So, what I hope for in this conversation and the work that all of you are doing, is how can the private sector, along with the public sector, try to bolster the missing objectives and start school learning? If you can't do that, I think we are in very, very deep trouble. MR. WENGER: I know that Alex has taught in schools. What are the goals of the students? MR. GRODD: Well, thank you for putting me on the spot. The goals of the students, I think it's pretty universal, based on my experience with the students and teachers, is to be cool. Fundamentally, when you are a middle school child and you are in a social setting where there's all sorts of social pressures to fit in, I think the driving force in the life of a child, starting much earlier than it used to be, is to be cool, to fit in, to be accepted by peers. And so, that, it is a very compelling force to the child. And so, when combined with the fact that it also can be pretty universally it's generally cool to be bad and it's cool to rebel, and I think a lot of people in this room probably have experienced those instincts. It creates a lot of challenges for teachers. And so, I don't know if that's where you were going, but I think it is an important point for me, as a teacher, in all this conversation, to think about the fact that when you are alone in a room with 30 11-year-olds -- and we can talk a lot about personalized instruction and unlocking creativity, but a lot of what need to take place -- to me, one of the fundamental flaws in our K-12 education now is the amount of discipline. Teachers invest so much time, so much energy trying to manage a class, and by the time they've done that, there's so little energy to actually differentiate the instruction, personalize instruction. So, I think that, to me, when thinking about, how do we really get into the core of the transformation, part of that is how do we create systems of discipline, whether it's sort of top-down, sort of authoritarian model that a lot of charter schools I've taught in use, and a lot more intrinsic sense of community. And it has got to be both and it's got to be on the table. That's one answer. MR. L. JOHNSON: I think the cool thing that's really important, when I look back on the moments of my life, the periods of my life when I actually felt in my educational development that I was kind of, the most formative periods, they were periods where, for whatever reason, I stumbled into a peer group where the cool kids were the smart kids. It's kind of an intrinsic reward of the group to be smarter and to be more passionate in some way, to get to Sir Ken's idea, that the group really rewarded people who really got obsessed with something and has something, whether writing plays or write short stories or doing art or whatever it was. And when you get to -- well, I think about a parent and I just try to think about how I can draw my kids towards kind of social groups, where there is that intrinsic award, you're clever, you are at the top of the pile, because you've done that, that's really smart. And I think that's one of the things you see in kind of talking about hacking education, kind of like a nerd culture. It's very valuable. There is going to be an intrinsic award in that society like whoever makes the best program are in this group, like it is the coolest on some level. And I don't know how you work that into an educational institution, but it's an incredibly powerful force. MR. GRODD: Creating a school culture wherein students were cool and smart is what very few schools do in this country, one or two at best, the best schools in the country -- MR. SACKLER: And it's very doable. You do it through a series of programs so adults can feel the... of the program to celebrate its success... students and the hard work and teamwork and initiative. And just looking on those incentives in place in a school for the kids, the kids respond, in that culture. And I have seen that in every great school I worked in. It is not reasonably -- it is not done idly... organizational discipline on these teachers. MR. WENGER: Try to jump in. People queue up -- MR. RESNICK: They could be smart. It's all about what you mean by "smart." But I think the way that the culture is smart, it's problematic. Well, I think the way -- I link this with some of the earlier conversations, Sir Ken, Jeff said, the word "create" came up a lot. And part of what people wanted to do is to have their voice heard, mainly develop their own voice. And that's where a lot of the passion comes from, developing your voice, because that's important, to give you the opportunity to create, create the rule of creativity. And we don't give enough opportunities for people to create. I think what we have seen is we've started after school centers, the network of after school; because the kids were unsuccessful at school and uninterested in school and unmotivated by the school. And then we said, lots of times -- create their own, you know, animations, simulations, you know, other things you want to hear to keep up their creating something. It is not just you're seeing that as intellectual leaders. When they're creating games, when they're developing their voices, I think it's both important to their personal life. As Dana was saying, to be able to express about -- personally, develop your voice accordingly. And increasingly, I feel very fortunate that in some way, I think we're lucky that we're luck -- what I would want for people, their personal life is better aligned with what the society's needs and the economy's needs in the past. I would hope that if we were meeting a hundred years ago, there would still be a part for the development of personal expression and ability to create. That is not well aligned with the economy at all. Today it is better aligned, yet there are some jobs -- there is a certain percentage of jobs in rising creative paths, part of the documented growing percentage. So, there is this better alignment of what is needed. I felt fortunate we have better alignment of what is needed for personal satisfaction and economic success. And yet still, the system does not support the -- for the development of letting the kids create design, to be able to -- MR. ETUK: What I just want to say to you is that going back, one of the goals are -- I think that one of the goals have to be that education has to evolve with the user; right? And what I mean by that is that at the end of the day, the format in which you present information right now is everything that we used to believe with the way to present information and shoving it down kids' throats, and they don't like it. What are the tools that can be created for presentation that have input into that process so that they can evolve as the kids evolve? Today it might be something like Twitter. Tomorrow it might be something explicitly different. How does that information get back to the system that lets teachers become the facilitators, put knowledge in here that the students then know how to work? Does that make a lot of sense? I think that's one of the things structurally we need to build in. MS. SHEFRIN: I wanted to just go back for a minute to Peter Brooks. One of the things that Peter said -- and when he was rehearsing, it was an exercise with the actors. And he often found that when they came to start work, they actually weren't there, even when they were all there. And so, he would often do an exercise called "double bond, double time" which was to do the rehearsal in twice the normal speed of the conversation, and go through that. And what would happen in the course of doing that was, of course, is that the subtext of the play would all of a sudden become visible and tangible through tonality and nuances in the voice, in the speed. Another exercise that he would do to sort of get people there was a masking exercise. And you just put everybody in a white mask. And it allowed people to kind of arrive without their personas there. And all of a sudden, this imaginative space became rendered visible. And I think some of the conversation has a lot to do with how we create the conditions necessary for imaginative space because I think it is from that space that we move from transformation to translation. I'm not sure how my bio arrived on the paper, but it didn't go through me and it didn't say what I actually do. And just for the sake of everybody's information, I would just like to say that I'm currently the provost of the Rhode Island School of Design, which has informed a lot of my thinking about all of these things. I think the relationship -- somebody talked about skills and the necessity some skills, somehow separate from thinking or making. And I think -- I'd like to think about, and I understand it from working with the students, the relationship between making and thinking is that making is a kind of thinking and thinking is a kind of making. The idea of asking questions as opposed to making questions, which I think the students are engaged in. I think how education is delivered has changed dramatically; and I think it has started to create another kind of path which has to do with teachers teaching students, students teaching teachers, teachers teaching teachers and students teaching students. And I think all of those things are now occupying the same territory. And through those different kinds of exchanges, they're all ways of engaging imaginative space; which ultimately I think really allows for the crossover from all of these various domains, which opens up all kinds of other possibilities. MR. WENGER: Jump in, Ms. Salen. MS. SALEN: I've been working on a project to open a new school in the fall that's try to tackle some of these questions. And what I found in doing that is that there's a fundamental tension between the ideas of education and the notion of learning. And I think that what we are really trying to talk about is learning as the space of innovation and transformation and not so much education. Because we see innovation in the space of learning all over the place today, in terms of how people are coming to learn things, how people are sharing information. We are not seeing innovation in the space of education because of its institutionalization. So, I think that the space that we really want to begin to understand is how learning itself is a form of currency today for young people. It's actually valued, and this is what you were talking about. Learning is actually valued in very interesting ways by young people today; not so much in school, but in spaces outside of school where they're really learning how to do things. And it goes to the conversation of, if one of our goals is to allow people to move into a future; that they are able to learn, able to adapt to any kind of change, whether they're changing jobs, whether they're changing what they're passionate about. That, I think, is the best thing that we can do for people is to give them that kind of skill set. And so, for me, that, I think, is the space of transformation -- it will get to education, but it is so systemic, the problems with education, that I feel like we have to come in the back door. But if you talk to educators they say they're in the learning business, but it is, actually, they are not. You don't see that so much when you get down to the nuts and bolts. MR. BURNHAM: There's a great story that comes out of your work with... and I think the kid's name is Giapetto, the Brazilian kid who -- I don't know if you've seen this piece of work. But there is a Brazilian kid, I think, like 17 years old who was passionate about animated music videos, and there was nothing in the educational system that he was in that would help him in any way to figure that out. But he found a site on the Web, began to download the tools and figure out how to manipulate the stuff and began to interact with people on that site. He began to upload videos that he created to that site. He was welcomed in as a peer in that site, ultimately worked his way up to the site to the point that he was respected within that community and was beginning to educate others who were coming into that community. Eventually, his teachers figured out that this kid knew how to edit video and asked him to come back to the school system, and teach a course on editing video. And all of that took place with absolutely no infrastructure and no support. And I think that's what you are getting at -- you're talking about something that was self-directed, completely outside of the system, but enabled by the medium that we are now all swimming in and it either creates an opportunity to help people learn even if we don't figure out how to reform the system. MR. CAULFIELD: I think there is an important point there too, that comes back to the peer group observations you were making. Something that is relatively new is the ease of creating a nonlocal reputation. This is something that's available to a nine-year-old that wasn't available before; that nonlocal reputation, that global reputation of a niche reputation on the web. In cases where the peer group influence may be a little suffocating or a little limiting or constricting, that can serve as a balance, as a corrective, if it is encouraged, or sometimes if not encouraged at all, it just happens. And I think that's relatively -- I think it's always hard to separate out in these conferences what is new and what is really not new but just sort of redundant. But I think it is relatively new, the ease with which, especially younger kids, can create global reputations and how that can really broaden their sense. I think that also related to Diana's point, in that people now can have jobs which may not be the best jobs, may not be the jobs that they would prefer to have; and they still have an option of pursuing, fulfilling artistic or academic life with others on the Web, once again, through these tools. So, I may work this job, but I also publish through Creative Commons, a bunch of folk songs. And that may not have been an opportunity before to actually have any sort of audience for that. MS. BOYD: Connecting this and Diana, actually it's really important that we recognize that status and validation and reputation are not just means to get skill sets, but there's also value that that is something that we actually learn. We kind of forget how much we have learned that until you see and you have to figure out to negotiate the social world. I mean, here we are in this environment where there's a great deal of -- we want to be smart, we want to be seen as cool in this room. We're an environment that values that. We're also in a room where people have negotiated and networked their way to here. You wouldn't be here if you weren't somehow connected to other people in this room. And one of the things that takes place, especially at the teenage years, starting in middle and high school, is that people actually learn how to network; they learn how the social world works. If you look at what they're doing on the social network, such a lot of social media, they're trying to make sense of those social structures. Who your friends are, what happens when you have to articulate the social dramas of that? How do you make sense of social dramas? We pooh-pooh this often as like something that's fully irrelevant education, but we all, as adults, rely on those skills, those very social skills they've gotten us into this room, that we have to learn. One of the things that's sort of scaring me is I'm looking at a lot of class differences around the social network patterns and whatnot, is that young people who are from wealthier environments are actually encouraged to network with people in other factors, other than their schools, and with adults in very formal situations. Young people who are from more working class environments are less likely to be encouraged to network outside of their peer group and their families. This has dramatic effects on their abilities to get jobs and their abilities to find validation and also other factors. So, we ignore all of this sort of cool stuff as sort of extra-curricular and unnecessary; but we also might want to think of embracing it as actually a set skills, that we all use it. And we actually have networking classes as adults when so much of that takes place at those formative years. MR. WILSON: Dana, I want to read you an e-mail. This is from a kid, an 18-year-old kid named Michael Yuretcho, I never met him. He may not go to college. He left a comment on the blog post I read about a week ago, saying that a lot of entrepreneurs don't go to college. And he wrote a comment and he said, "I'm not going to college, and I'm going to work for a start-up." In this e-mail, he said something today, "Thank you. Fred, I really never got a chance to say this, but thank you. I'm the kid who commented on your post about successful entrepreneurs and not going to college. From that one comment, I had two job offers -- well, two potential job offers." (Laughter.) "I was contacted a couple of days ago by a friend of yours, Boris Wertz. I was also contacted over Twitter by a guy from Boot-up Labs. I'm meeting with both of themthis week. I want to thank you for taking time out in your schedule to e-mail some people." I actually I only e-mailed one. The other guy he contacted directly. "I'm truly grateful that something came out of this. So, it's because of you." I wrote back to him, it's not because of me, but because of him. He had the balls, an 18-year-old kid, to wade through a comment thread brought between a bunch of creative, influential people. He made a smart comment and found, as he said, two potential job offers. So, what you are saying is, that these kids do know these networking skills. And they figured this out; and I think there is a great equalizer here. I don't know if the kid comes from a wealthy background or not, but I'm not sure it really matters. He just figured it out and weighed in, left a comment, and he's making his way into the world. MR. JARVIS: Did his mother also e-mail you? (Laughter.) MR. JOHNSON: He's dragging kids away from college. MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: To build on that, there were a lot of other comments on that connecting, because it's so impressive that you and Dana pointing out that kids can network now. But if we go back to what Sir Ken started for us, you know, he asked a great question: "What is at the heart of education?" And actually, I'm using that tag '06, because it is entitled "Schools, Skills, Creativities" that he gave a tag in 2006. So, I think he used it yesterday to jump off of a keynote that I gave. And the thing that I really like about that is, what is at the heart of education? He's talking about the child who is sitting in a classroom and doodling and the teacher who is passing by say, "Samantha, what is this? She's looking at her and she's saying, "It's a picture of God." And the teacher says, "But no one knows how God looks." And that student says, "Well, in a minute they will." (Laughter.) So, I think that's kind of at the heart of education, as so many amazing comments are being put there. And so, when you have that insight about whether it's a picture of God or what is the climate change or why is obesity happening and anything that we want to kind of understand about the importance of the First Amendment. All these conflicts, things and mathematics and physics and science that are out there, I think what Sir Ken was trying to say is that schools, as we know them today, are naturally not enticing people or facilitating the kinds of things we're even doing today; which is starting from where the learner is and expressing the learner's kind of ideas and allowing them to take a stance and allowing them to express themselves and allowing them to enter a conversation; preferably, also as Mitch was going to ask, building something that is expressing their ideas and growing it through that social networking. And I think what's at the heart of that kind of education is very, very different than what's at the heart of most of the education that we see out there. And I think it -- I don't know how today is going to be, but as I finally figured out how to unlock the fact that my comments are private and participate in a twittering, not everybody here is using it. Just like the the millions and millions of kids out there, they don't know how to use it. So, they're not part of that conversation with Fred or with many other people -- and I'm really worried about that because the knowledge and skill that it takes to, first of all, culturally be able to express yourself and then to be able to participate in that social -- empowering social media technology, is not available to all equally right now. And so, what's at the heart of that education that we can all celebrate here is not really accessible yet to a lot of people out there in our nation, rural and poor communities, in urban communities that don't have the benefits, that don't have the tools. And even if they do, they don't really have the cultural ability to take the stance, express themselves, connect to people below, above, and on the side, and build stuff. And I think we have to really worry about that here today. I hope we will. MR. KERREY: I'm going to add a little about the politics of all this. Sir Ken had talked about the 16,000 school districts, and that's where governance occurs, and the civic responsibility and cultural mission of the schools. It is worth remembering that the history of the common school in the United States is a history of people attempting to pass state laws mandating education at an early age, mandating the creation of public schools. And up until the 1920s, when there began to be the a rise of the nativist movement, as a result of the enactment of the openly racist Immigration Act of 1924 and the creation of the American Legion, that resulted in the rapid expansion of public schools in the United States of America for the purpose of teaching citizenship. That's why the Pledge of Allegiance is mandated in all schools. If one of your 11-year-olds is found out on the streets of Atlanta this afternoon, they can be arrested and found in the juvenile justice system for violating their -- as an offender of their status. They're required, for approximately a thousand hours a year in all 50 states, to be in schools. So, that's the context. Secondly, you've got to sort of imagine yourself -- I have a 7-year-old in the largest public school district in the country, the New York public school system. If you're trying to have an impact on PS41 where he goes to school, to put it mildly, that's a hell of a challenge. Just to try to have an impact upon the arrival of air-conditioners in June, let alone the curriculum and the budget and other sorts of things. So, I think you have to separate the conversation between the effort to improve the public schools and the effort to improve the non-public school environment. These are two completely different things. And finally, you have to get used to the idea that you have to bring an argument inside the context -- you haven't been in a room full of parents. There are 2 million parents in the New York public school system that might, I should say, have a slightly different attitude about what they want the New York public school system to accomplish than I do. And these board meetings can be raucous, dispiriting and at times counterproductive. You find yourself saying, Gee, I don't want to do that anymore. You can find yourself fighting the battle to get curriculum imposed and brought to the schools and it's exactly what you wanted and, two years later, the board of election occurs and the people you supported get turned out. As a great example, the state board of education in Florida, not what I would consider for the most part a backwater state, last year, just voted to allow the theory of evolution to be taught by five to four votes. Kansas caught a lot of attention a couple of years ago when they took a vote saying it couldn't be taught. That got reversed again by a five to four vote. So, there are arguments that have to be brought, and you can't get timid in bringing these arguments and you can't give up after you have lost a battle. But I think it's terribly important in a discussion like this to separate the public school argument, which is an intense one, from what you want to occur outside of the school environment, which oftentimes, in my view, is more important than what's going on and mandated and brought inside of the school. MR. KALIN: But Bob, you can opt out, couldn't you? You could home-school your kids and then you're not breaking the law. You can do that; right? MR. KERREY: I broke into a cold sweat earlier with Alex talking about facing 30 11-year-olds; and now you're talking about facing a single 7-year-old all day long? (Laughter.) MR. WILSON: My point is this: Instead of bringing an argument in this country, we could simply have a revolution. We can simply take our kids out of the school systems and come up with alternate ways of teaching. MR. KALIN: But they don't have the framework that exists yet. MR. RESNICK: There's are families -- a single parent who is working round the clock. So, how can they be doing that? It's fine for us to say we can do it. MS. RHOTEN: School is a safe place for a lot of kids. It's not only the single parent argument. But it's also the school represents the eight hours of your day wherein you actually are warm and have food. Not every kid can opt out of that. MR. SACKLER: The charter school -- the district monopoly is being challenged all over the country by the charter school. That's going to open public education to enormous entrepreneurial opportunities and energy; and it's happening in 41 states. MR. BISCHKE: It's really up to us to develop alternative models and set an example for the public school system. And one of the advantages of where we are today is that there are lots of opportunities for initiatives to be exploited of alternative models. MR. HUGHES: I think that's exactly right. I think there's a structural question here. It says the classroom has 30 students and one teacher in front of it. Even if it's for eight hours a day and that's a safe place, that just isn't working anymore. And I think that what's really interesting, what are the models in which teachers can interact with students, and sort of adapt to their different ways of learning throughout the course of the day or throughout a year, so that they actually are able to flourish and be happy and also be good citizens. MR. WENGER: This last bit of conversation actually kind of prefigures the structure of the day quite a bit. So, the structure of the day -- I think this was very, very good to start with goals. It is clear even around this table that it is not easy to come up with unanimous agreement on what the goals might be. I think it's something very, very important about learning. And we were tempted to call this Hacking Learning, but it didn't sound as good as calling it Hacking Education; for that reason. So, the structure of the day is that actually -- after taking a short break now. We will come back and talk first about how learning -- how hacking education can occur completely outside of the existing system. So, what are things that are happening, what are tools, what is the leverage available to us today, and maybe shortly? And then after lunch, bring that back to the point that Bob was raising about. So, then, there's the schools. So, there are things outside of schools which are already taking place; and what is the interface between old and new and how does that happen? That will be the focus of the afternoon. MR. GORDON: I wanted to throw something out. I've asked people for a decade and I've never heard a good answer. Has anybody ever seen a coherent description or definition of what "well-educated" means, that they didn't write themselves? (Laughter.) If so, I would love to be pointed at it. Because I haven't heard one, even in universities. I have asked what a great university head is and got a 50-page speech from Rick Levin, about the president of Harvard in the 1800s; but I've never seen a definition of "well-educated." MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: I don't know if we want that -- MR. KERREY: I have something written in 1905 with several great descriptions of what "well-educated" means; not by me, but somebody else. MR. KALIN: You can be dead and well-educated would be a question? It's not static, staying in one place. MR. JARVIS: It's different for everyone. We do have to write our own. If we don't want to write it, that's a different question. Chicken/egg, but it has to be -- the problem is that we'd make every student take the same frigging test and come up with the same frigging answers. That is no way for a creativity to begin. But it comes out of the idea that there is a definition of "well-educated." The same way that there's this mass view in news, if there is one newspaper that can serve, everyone is the same. It's absurd. MR. GRODD: I will only say that I've been part of many, many of those conversations, but I think, on a fundamental level, kids need to read, write and do math. They need to know how to read, they need to know how to write and they need to know basic math. So, after that, then critical thinking, and the holistic concept of an educated humanitarian; I think that is all relevant, and I would love to participate in that, but fundamentally, there's millions of children who can't read, can't write, can't do math. MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: But the problem is that the way to reach the literacy, the old literacy of reading, writing and arithmetic that you're talking about, has new methodologies. And so, that's really the fundamental thing we are discussing today. And probably, it's not just one definition, but many, and many ways for different people to really reach that literacy. But there are also a lot of new literacies; your ability to imagine something and make it up, express yourself with media, remixed media, participate in media like the one we're using today. I wonder how you would use what we are posting. I'm trying to generate a lot of noise -- MR. WENGER: I think one of the great things, I keep looking up there (indicating overhead projection). It's other people already not in this room, so -- MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: But how are we going to integrate that into the conversation, because sometimes people summarize what's being said and sometimes they comment on what's being said, how are we going to model, how this can be used effectively? It's hard to use it effectively in a conversation. MR. WENGER: That's going to take us to the next session. We'll take a five-minute break for people to grab a coffee, go to the bathroom. And there are sign-up sheets over there for lunch, and we're having a self-organizing lunch called "Birds of a Feather." So, there's five topics that people have already created. So, if you don't like the topics, there's room to create a sixth topic or add more sheets also. And then we're going to have to continue in about ten minutes. (Time noted: 11:15 a.m.) (Time noted: 11:30 a.m.) As I have promised earlier, we are going to try to start each section off with a little video. And so, this is a video on YouTube. (Discussion off the record.) Check this out, and we'll put links out on Wiki. But here is why this caught our attention, to preface this section. This section is all about how is learning occurring, how do we get leverage on learning from technology? How do we get social leverage from the web for learning? And, actually, leaving existing schools aside, until the afternoon. And this is a kid, clearly, maybe a 14- or 15-year-old kid, who put this video up explaining how to do something to have a blendered water effect. So, one of the great things is that this video's been viewed almost 50,000 times. There are a lot of responses that actually explain how to do it better, including video responses that show how to do this. And I think that it is, in my mind, a great illustration of how this can happen. And so, Bob, we'll use that as a kick-off point for how can technology provide leverage in learning in both technology leverage and social leverage. MR. WILSON: I wanted to ask Jim Rosenthal a question. Jim is a long time friend of mine who runs a piece of Kaplan's business. Do you teach adults professional education -- your business teaches adults professional education on the Web; right? MR. ROSENTHAL: On the Web and in school. MR. WILSON: What percentage is online, and what percentage is in schools? MR. ROSENTHAL: It varies, probably more than 50 percent in schools, but it's moving in the other direction; faster in the U.S. than overseas. MR. WILSON: You actually give people degrees? You give people accreditation via online classes? MR. ROSENTHAL: Yes. I'm not granting degrees, although Kaplan University certainly does. My area is test prep for real estate and financial services, for insurance, for accounting. MR. WILSON: And are these live classes that they participate in? They log in and a there's a teacher sitting there? MR. ROSENTHAL: Yes, there's live scheduled classes. And all of those are archived. So, you can go back. Or if it doesn't work, reschedule, you can go and check it all. It's always online. MR. WILSON: Is there any data about the performance of -- in the tests of the people who do the learning online versus the people who do it face-to-face? MR. ROSENTHAL: I know what you are looking for, but I don't have it. MR. KALIN: Do you think that the founders of YouTube, said we're going to reinvent education? MR. ROSENTHAL: No. MR. KALIN: But they do more to change the way education works than anybody in this room right now, and that's something -- MR. WENGER: Speak for yourself. (Laughter.) MR. KALIN: In terms of reaching people, gauge it in terms of purely numbers. I'm sure that people would qualify it. So, I think that's the beauty of the Web and technology. You don't create a pedagogical -- you just created the tools for them to teach each other. MR. L. JOHNSON: Think how much more you could have a learning paradigm, based upon the content -- MR. HUGHES: There's Twitter and Facebook; you learn all types of social information. The vast majority might be that, but it doesn't mean that doesn't tell you something about the sender or what that means for you socially and that doesn't mean you don't necessarily learn about content. I think the challenge is in figuring out the technologies, and the one's that are existing and the ones that are coming into the classroom -- which was, what I was trying to get at earlier, the structural problem is that a teacher in front of 30 people with no computers, it will not work anymore. MR. WILSON: Albert, Brad and I and, I think, Andrew and Eric here all sat with an entrepreneur, probably about four or five months ago, who had taken YouTube, just brought it in and built a layer on top of it, and was delivering English language learning to Chinese kids. And they were doing it in internet cafes. They would -- it's basically somewhat like a game. Kids would go into an internet cafe in China and they would watch popular YouTube videos and they would try to say the words in English. And then they would record it and then they would get rated by other kids. So, basically, it just took the raw material that's already on YouTube, pop on the videos, put a little technology layer on top of it, and they were teaching millions of Chinese kids how to speak English. MR. ROSENTHAL: It's a better version of how they used to learn it, which is by just going to the movies. MR. GORDON: I'll ask Lewis. You helped invent a pretty good after action review. So, there's kind of pedagogical -- teaching that's automated, without humans involved. What did you learn from doing that? How do we take humans out of the scalable education process? MR. L. JOHNSON: The goal wasn't to take humans out of the loop. But so people understand, we've created video games, help people learn a foreign language. And part of our rationale is that we weren't satisfied by the type of interaction we saw in the classroom, for obvious reasons; nor were we satisfied with the type of interaction that we saw on the Web, which typically presumes a certain level of language proficiency and tends to be text-based, whereas a lot of learners have difficulties speaking the language. So, we saw a lot of value helping people get up to the point where they can utilize these other technologies to help learn. But just to say, here you go on YouTube and learn from that, I'm glad to see that that is having so much success. But I think there are a lot of kids who aren't reached well, skills that aren't well-taught just by relying on the technologies out there. MS. SALEN: I want to build on that a second, because I think one danger is to start to begin to imagine that learning happens in isolation, that there is a single platform or a single tool that is going to teach. Learning is ecological, and it happens in many places simultaneously. So, I was talking to a parent last week about a model of sort of nodal learning, and thinking about what are the configurations of spaces that we are making available for kids to learn in and across? And he wasn't understanding, mostly because I was not communicating well. And I said, "Let's talk about your daughter. I know she loves to play basketball. So, where did she learn to play basketball?" And he said, "Well, she learns at practice." I said, "Oh, but I bet she talks to you at home about it." He said, "Yeah." And I said, "I bet she has conversations with her friends about it on the phone and they work through plays. Does she ever go online? Does she watch basketball games? Does she go to basketball games?" He said, "Yeah, yeah, she does all those things." And I said, "Well, yeah, learning is happening across all of those spaces." And so, what I think we want to begin to understand is, what are the kinds of infrastructures that we need to build to help leverage the movement of that child across those kinds of learning spaces? And it may be the invention of certain kinds of technologies, but I think there's larger things, what Dana was talking about in terms of how do we enable social capital for kids? What are the mechanisms by which we make that possible? How do we enable just connectors between some of these different spaces, whether they're content connectors or mentor connectors or even a validation that what a kid might be doing in an after-school space is relevant and valid within an in-school space? So, I think we need to remember the configuration and the ecological question because we're in a networked world. Our model of learning has to exist within that certain networked idea, as well. MR. HEIFERMAN: Can we articulate more about what problems need solving? And why isn't it just the Web? Why isn't this solving this problem all by itself? MR. HERROD: What other questions? MR. BISCHKE: I think one thing is there's a big disconnect between learning and credentials. And so, we're moving to a world where you can learn anything; you can go to Yale and you can watch their courses as you can do all different types of things, but the credentialing system is one that hasn't changed at all. And I think there's been a few people who have written some very interesting stuff, I know Fred a little bit, about how can you look at whether the testing is standardized testing, whether it's degrees, accreditation, and change that system? Because without that, the rest of this stuff is not nearly as meaningful. MR. WILSON: My son is a big video gamer. He understands credentialing in a video game, and he knows what his score is. And he knows what his friend's score is and he knows that he's better than anybody else at Caller Duty 5. When he gets credentialed in school, he goes home and say, "Dad, it's not fair, you know. I got such and such on a test. And this kid didn't -- he went up after class and had a chitchat with the teach. All of a sudden he ended up with a better grade than me." And he appreciates the raw power of Caller Duty 5. I beat that kid one on one, you know. And he didn't get it in school. MR. GORDON: There are a couple of other parts to video game credentialing. So, one is having more parallel reward paths is useful. Video game credentialing has to succeed by motivating. And clearly, academics don't stay in power by motivating, but have to succeed by motivating. And so, there is a feedback loop and it has to be considered fair. But a video gaming system, that's the most motivating, it's going to have four or five parallel tracks, the motivation of all clients, all on different time cycles. MR. WILSON: But that means you can get your scores in different ways? MR. GORDON: People that are playing, are usually playing, trying to accomplish a couple of different things, usually that have different time cycles. You want something that takes one minute and something that takes a month. MR. S. JOHNSON: When I think about the skills that I had that I got when I was a young kid that are still valuable, I think back to when I was 10 or 11 when I spent thousands of hours playing baseball games and designing better baseball games. And I got a huge amount out of that in terms of the map that are creating the whole statistical model of how baseball works and stats, and a lot of collateral learning experience, building simulations and things like that that they're using to this day. But the most important thing about that was, I think I learned how to be obsessed with things. There's another way of saying that, which is passion. I got obsessed with these things and I had a series of stages in my life where I got obsessed with something else. And I just immersed myself to learn as much as I could. And it's that mechanism I used again and again and again in my professional life. So, how do you teach kids to be obsessed with things? I think one of the advantages we have with technology and particularly with games is that they have built-in structure, almost to a fault, as most parents would say. They have an addictive quality where people will just immerse themselves and become obsessed with them, something in that structure. When you look at the games that most of these kids are playing, the amount of information that they have to accumulate and master to perform well in these games is a mess compared to the amount of information they're willing to reinforce to learn at school. And so, somehow, there's something in this formula, this kind of platform, without anybody telling them to do it, they are going out learning all this information and becoming really skilled at it. So, they have to kind of figure out what is the cocktail there that's allowing them to do that, and then maybe take that and actually, causing them to learn other things that perhaps they aren't getting from the games. MR. CAULFIELD: One of the things that differentiates some of those activities is that the referee in the interaction, in the coaching, are separate. That allows, I think, for a much more intensive experience than one where people feel the game is rigged. And so this person goes and talks to the referee and gets a better grade. My daughter plays Castle Crashers incessantly. And she is on the headset to her friends and she's trying to pull up YouTube videos to figure out how to get the achievements. But the sense is that here's her interaction. And then there's a separate sort of referee that is somehow objective. So, she's not playing to the referee. For me, one of the moments of teaching that really got to me is when I was teaching English composition and you tell students, Oh, it was a 90. So, you did gun control essays and things like that. And so, we go through rhetoric and at the end of class, you say, "Write your gun control essay." And one of the students comes up and says, "What's your thoughts on gun control?" And I feel, "silly student." Come on, you know. "You're not writing this for me. You're writing for your audience." And he says, "I'm writing it for the grade, so doesn't that mean the audience is you?" And I realized that yeah, it's a fraud, you know. It's really kind of scam that we're perpetrating here. And so, I think things where those two things are separated, where there's a separate referee and a separate coach allows the referee to be more fair, allows the coach to really focus on the success of the student. The referee doesn't have to be this abstract rule-based thing. The referee can just help someone engage with an audience as a writer. MS. BOYD: But are referees always fair outside of games? When I was in Brown, I was obsessed with who was succeeding and who wasn't at Brown. I went and talked to the dean about what was going on, how things are playing out. And one of the things I found out really quickly is that the people who are doing best at Brown are those who figured out how to bend every rule available to them. They figured out what rule was there, they figured out how to work around it and how to leverage the different people to get what they wanted. And people view it as almost a game in and of itself. And one of the things that's been -- in talking to people who do research on kids with autism, there is this set of rules where we can sit and formalize it. We can create and formulate structures and we can say this is how you succeed and this is how you avoid. And certain kids, such as kids along the autistic spectrum, do tremendously well with this set of rules. Other kids do extremely well when given the set of rules, figuring out how to work around it. And there's this interesting thing to your son's point. I totally agree that the school system isn't fair. But how may of you have tried to get a raise at work? Is that process fair? Is that process about who is getting rewarded in a direct manner that you can evaluate, or is it about figuring out how you can ease around and manipulate that to get that raise? And so, each of these are different skill set, and we can't say one skill set is better or worse than another, but how are we thinking of it in the ecology of saying, "These are the things that we want to mix in; and some kids learn to figure out which personalities are going which way." But if we go for one system or another, we end up breaking down. And if we want a more fair system, we have to think about a more fair adult society, not just a more fair kid society. MR. RESNICK: I want to make sure we're not too drawn into everything being driven by some evaluation how well you succeeded or whether it's the highest score in the game or an award from the teacher; just to give a different paradigm as opposed to some people are motivated by their high score in the game. But there's another paradigm that flourishes today, the maker community, the do it yourself community. There's a huge maker fair going on. And people don't go there to get the award with the best exhibit at the maker fair. They build what they're excited about. They became obsessed with something and they want to share it with others, to get feedback from others. Wow, that's incredible. That's the excitement, and to see what others have done. So, I just want to make -- not that the paradigm is right for everybody or for all contexts, for all people. But at some point we get too drawn into what's the best way of getting for the competition paradigm, just a little overblown. MR. GORDON: We did this in sincity.com. Once you find that there are people who want to share, you can give them a more rewarding experience if you give them a platform to share on. And they feel like there's a chance you're going to be looked at. So, I would argue that something like Etsy or craft fairs are platforms that can be more motivating, because when people are halfway done, they think, If I just finish, I've got a way to share. So, creating platforms that seem like open ways to share, I think, are another way to motivate. MR. RESNICK: Yes. I agree. This is true. To promote my own thing a little bit, we have this project called Scratch, where kids are programming their interactive stories and games and sharing online which, there are more than a thousand new projects each day. And kids see what others are doing and then making things together, just open, they grab what others have done, remix and add other things. There is some external motivation, the ones that get featured on the home page where lots of other people are using it. MR. GORDON: And they probably have to believe that there's fairness in deciding who gets top of the box and how you get to remix somebody else's stuff. So, that's the referee, which doesn't necessarily have to be a person. THE SPEAKER: I'm going to plug the Scratch program that Mitch and his group created. So, we're doing an experiment in Hawaii, and I'd love to get feedback. We're finding kids to be very passionate about making their own games and there's all kinds of good learning stuff for these kids, measured quantitatively and also -- this is what I made. This is where I want to go. We've run these after school programs with Scratch, kids make their own games. Some of the games and some of the themes are, make games that are about math or about creating stories. You can tackle any kind of learning with this sort of tool. Essentially, it's world making. You define your own world, what's important to you, and you share it with kids that are in this group together. And we've got coaches, older kids who have gone through it and are now teaching the younger kids. To me, it's really working. And I would love to propagate that. But I think the approach that Mitch talks about for having -- I guess your phrase is "playful invention." And I think that's what going on in these courses. And I think that's what goes in internship. And I think that's what leads to new cultural developments. MR. BURNHAM: The product is becoming the credential. In the old days, I went to school, I got a grade, I presented the grade and I got a job. And now, what happens is, you create this game; and that game is what creates your reputation. And there's no grade there. And it's not important, because you've created a great game and hopefully, that game is bubbled up to the top of the board, because others have linked into it. And if you think about the Web as a medium in a way, that's the way people are creating their own credentials. It has a lot to do with how many links there are into your blog, into your voice, into your opinion about what's going on in the world. And I think it's fundamentally changing what we need from education, to Scott's question. What we need is to become familiar with the tools that we use to promote our ideas and really, basically, to search engine optimize our products or the things we created. And I think that's what people are doing. MR. JARVIS: They have a faith in the marketplace and the marketplace, which I share. But, you're from the educational world, and it says -- the authority says this is right and that's success. A game world shows some danger and it systematizes a one victory, one definition again. I prefer creation as a new framework, personally. But how do you certify that? I also like the idea of the public doing it, but there's some danger there, too. MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: I think we are developing methodologies that you are describing, that Mitch is describing, that we're doing. I think Katy's doing a lot of that kind of work. There are several people in the room that are really working very hard to create an assessment that relates to imagination, innovation, creativity, coming up with an idea, beginning a project from the beginning, middle, end; delivering this in digital form, sharing, exposing, presenting. All of us are trying to transform education through those playing games or making games and doing both which is the new reading and writing. I think they're working very hard and there's a lot of research out there for assessments that are beginning to work. I'm right now working with 350 students and teachers in 14 schools. They are using it, they are evaluating it in a whole new way. And it's project-based daily -- MR. JARVIS: The assessment may be less thinking of a product than a process, and saying we'll make this better and better and better. MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: Both. The assessment is about the process, it's about the product and even about how it relates to other grades. It relates to the content of what the games of the teamwork or the project is about. There are ways. And I want people to know that there are ways to do it. And it works. It works on the ground. MR. KALIN: How many people here have hired people? How important is what degrees you have in terms of hiring? If you hire an engineer, you want to see samples and quizzes and tests. There were people who were doing the media stuff for Etsy, they have a site and video showing videos you've made. I don't care what degrees these people have. It's something that's becoming less and less meaningful in the job marketplace, as well, and you talk so much about how important the degree is in getting a job. But talk to people who are creating jobs right now. There may be degrees that are important for people who want to work at Citibank, but Citibank isn't exactly hiring right now. MR. L. JOHNSON: I care about degrees for the people I hire. MS. FLEMAL: I can think of someone right now, an artist who did so well with her videos on YouTube that she took a site on... and delivered lessons and the students did incredibly well and has quite a business for herself. She has no given credentials, at all. MR. KALIN: She has lots of credentials in the eyes of other people, I'm sure. - MS. FLEMAL: But her credentials are -- what I'm saying is, we were talking about giving credentials in terms of degree and so forth. It's exactly what she needed to present. And she has a huge audience and a huge business. MR. WENGER: There are a couple of different things about how technology provides leverage -- provides leverage, because it allows you to publish your work product and allows more objective referees. It's about a new form of credentialing. I wonder, in this section, what other types of leverage does technology provide us? MR. GORDON: When I've taught classes, I throw this out for somebody else to use, tell the students you can't get an A from the teacher. The best you can get from the teacher is a B+, because the teacher-student grading relationship is corrupting. So, if you want to get an A, you've got to get somebody outside. And in a video game class, you got to get 10,000 downloads as an A. I would suggest in journalism, somebody's doing entrepreneurial journalism, that you've got to get a certain amount of blog readers per a month to get an A and -- MR. JARVIS: Which I love, but there's the Paris Hilton factor. (Laughter.) I still like it. There is a corruption there, too. MR. GORDON: I had one student get to a million in a month. So, that, a million downloads. That was an A. MR. JARVIS: With what? MR. RESHEF: Technology does enable us to bring education everywhere. And that's something we should remember because, if you look at the world, most of the world doesn't have the proper tools and system. And technology enables us to overcome and reach most -- not necessarily most of the people yet, but many people that were unable to get education and get proper education. Second, we're talking about the school system. Education basically makes schools what they have been for the last few hundred years; a place for the kid to go, stay out of the street and for the parent -- to enable the parent to go and work. They work in a babysitting place. Now, we had a notion that they get -- the teachers -- we used to consider the teachers as the source of the knowledge. Well, I'm not sure if they ever were, but definitely they're not right now. And the technology enables the kids to go and get all the information that they need outside of the classroom. I think that one of the main problems that we're facing right now is that the school system resists this change. And the school system refused and says, "Okay; we still have a rule. Without a rule in the school, it will be totally different than what it used to be." And the information the kid should get somewhere else, maybe bring it to school, maybe use it in school, maybe exchange knowledge between the students, but get it somewhere else. And I think that that's where the school system is now fighting all over the world, staying as it used to be and there will be a real change in the next few years, because it can't stay as it was. MR. WENGER: We'll trying to get back to the schools in the afternoon. But you made the point, one, the key to technology leverage is access, simple access. You can read an article and be anywhere else in the world, and that's a big technology leverage that we didn't have. MR. ETUK: One of the things, and I think they're related to, is the ability to increase what we call efficiency to learn, when the kids start to teach each other. That also has an effect on labor costs, because if you don't have to spend as much on teachers, the normal one teacher and twenty students, thirty students; if you create these multi-user environments and start to help each other, it's four or five kids. One of the big things that we saw during the educational games was, high school students love to teach the younger kids and get points and credit for that. It's one of those things if you could leverage that, you can actually tap in and you'll fight with the teacher federation; because you can actually either reduce the number of substitute teachers, which is an economic impact. MR. KERREY: To be specific on the question of leverage. You can see how leverage is occurring in one big area, and that's in the library. And you can see it either in the higher education environment or the on public side, in public libraries, where librarians themselves are increasingly use technology to leverage access. And universities, for example, they're not building libraries like they used to. Our libraries have become Starbucks or the library becomes wherever the student is moving with a wireless tool. We're using software increasingly to get students access to materials, and it's leading the university to change substantially, largely through the open curriculum issue. It's leading students in a different direction than before. But if you want to see the leverage of the technology, this kind of technology, any library you go into today, talk to students about what they are doing and see where it is going. The other thing I wanted to address is Fred's question about home-schooling. Because I do think, at some point, as uncomfortable as it may be to get them to examine these sort of things, I do think there is a question of different kinds of regulatory structure that needs to be addressed. In fact, in the old days, it was entirely appropriate to say I'm going to have a roll at the local school and that's as far as it's going to go. But the problem is today the students have migrated way beyond the localities, and you really can't allow -- I don't think -- I think the regulatory structure of both the K to 12 and the post secondary levels, is limiting the use of technology, particularly in the home environment. And leaving aside for the moment, Rob's argument that credentials don't really matter, credentialing is still -- and the question about whether or not I get credit or not -- I just played a multiplayer game. I know a language, let's say, I acquired a language question is, is there a regulatory structure that allows me to be tested and get a credit for that without having to enroll in some institution, an accrediting institution that satisfies the middle stage, that stage in Nebraska, or wherever. I think we need to have to get into the regulatory environment, because I think the regulatory environment today, unless it's changed, will continue to frustrate and limit the leveraging capacity you can have with technology. MR. KALIN: You don't need a board of people to say, this is the legit, let's just put it out there. It's up to the people to judge it. MR. KERREY: I love your free spirit. (Laughter.) MR. KALIN: What is the accreditation issue? MR. KERREY: Is it a rhetorical question or a real question? MR. KALIN: It is a body of people that are elected to a board and have -- MR. KERREY: If the regulatory structure comes off, the law, the laws are passed that people pass, specific law would have to be changed. And the barriers to the law are the institutions that don't want the barriers to be limited. I will give you a very specific example. Let's say you value the degree as you were going through the school system, and you did pay for a course at MIT. And you were at MIT and wanted to transfer somewhere else. Now, the transferring entity, the entity you're transferring into, is making its decision about whether or not it wants to accept you. It's a tremendous barrier and it's allowed under the law, unless the law changed. So, the barriers themselves, the regulatory barriers, are creatures of law. They begin with the law and the law hasn't changed. The laws were written at a time when none of this was possible. MR. KALIN: And your schools follow laws? MR. KERREY: Yes. MR. KALIN: If I'm at the School of Fine Arts and want to transfer to the New School, I found out the School of Fine Arts weren't officially accredited. MR. KERREY: The challenge of operating an institution, you have to follow the law. MR. WENGER: I want to come back to the discussion about changing the existing institutions, later in the afternoon, and just talk more broadly about what we are seeing in technology today. But I would love to hear from David, because we are using a lot of technology and the school is going to impose it. MR. WILEY: I was going to say we are doing something in the school that we're opening in the fall, an online high school. But it is ridiculously simple. It seems to me it was radical, as well. In terms of using technology as a leverage point, by taking content and assessments in the system that we are using, the students work within and there is an alignment ofto standards. We can do this completely revolutionary thing in giving a student a pretest and then pulling out the materials that they already know and creating a personalized path instead of four weeks training, maybe, let's say, two and a half or maybe, let's say, three weeks in one and a half. Maybe you finish the course in a four-week period instead of the whole semester. The idea then of a pre-test, based on what the students already know, is older than dirt, probably. But this is one place that technology gives us a leverage point. With something as simple as aligning the assessment with the content and the standard in the middle to connect them to each other. Pre-assessment, pass the standard, and I'll just pull the content out to build path for you. MR. KALIN: The teacher can give the student a test on the first day of class. MR. WILEY: But this is much more efficient way to do it. MR. BURNHAM: You can't deliver personalized curriculum after the fact. Once you've done the testing, the teacher can't handle that. MR. JARVIS: The test should be reversed. We should test what we need to know rather than what we supposedly know. It should be entering into the process rather than coming out of the process. We are so tied up in certification. It doesn't feed education, in fact, it stifles it. MR. L. JOHNSON: There's something called Time dollars, time banking. It's like helping each other out like community service, there is a trading of dollars. There is something that feels wrong about time making and time dollars. It feels wrong. It is like it is sort of certification of credentials or learning as we have been talking about. Even the words "product" and "marketplace" don't feel right, that people -- that if I get 10,000 downloads in my thing, does that mean I'm more virtuous than the thing that only gets 5,000 downloads? That sort of a metrication of everything, net certification, that thing, and it can be dangerous in that way. But ultimately it is -- I think what is ultimately important is, are you -- it doesn't feel right. It is just -- ultimately, like the value on creativity and that sort of self expression, personal expression. But simply like -- sorry to repeat the phrase I said before -- but like to be of use, to be helpful to other people, or let's say, this is an era of responsibility. These are things that ultimately are hard to measure and are about norms and mores and virtues that are not game-like, but yet have real material like -- my credibility, my trust with people I love and who love me and who care about me are grounded in that, but not grounded in a point system. And that happens naturally within communities. That happens in -- some of you know the work of Douglas Rushkopf, who just wrote a book. I just read through it. It was fascinating. He talks about how -- you become obsessed about how people are following you on Twitter. I hate the idea that I am becoming obsessed with how many people are following me on Twitter. (Laughter.) It is a measure of my worth. And that's not good. That's not an argument for quality over quantity and all of that bullshit I usually spew about this kind of thing. It is really, you know, who are you, what are you good for, and it does not necessarily like, you know, amassing the point and the followers. I wish I had a more -- MR. KALIN: We're talking about assessment, the education lingo fo assessment. Today you are still talking about that type of tests for assessment. Assessment is one thing that's more qualitative and less quantitative. This should take years to develop. MR. WILEY: Let's be clear. How about the role of what the role of credential is; right? Just pop up the level of abstraction and say, if you have got one or two or three or four people that you wanted to evaluate, you can get into the material that has been produced and you can do a firsthand evaluation and hire someone. But when you've got thousands of people or -- when you're trying to scale this kind of decision, there is a mission decision or a hiring decision. We are trying to scale some kind of a high stake decision. You don't have -- you can't efficiently go in and do a firsthand evaluation,all the artifacts made by all the people over all the lifetime, things you have done related to the decision we are trying to make. What we want is, we want a supposedly objective third party to give you some proxy statement, some statement that you have some confidence in about the ability or the expertise. MR. L. JOHNSON: Do I want the doctor who is most certified, or the doctor who has the most followers on Twitter? (Laughter.) MR. O'DONNELL: If you have other doctors who are followed by other doctors, then that to me is worthwhile. MR. L. JOHNSON: That was a loaded question. MR. WILEY: This is why certification and credentialing isn't going away. We need a way to scale high stakes decisions in an efficient manner. MR. KALIN: Use technology, not a third party board. MR. WILEY: I'm not saying we have to keep doing credentials in the same kind of way. MR. WENGER: But I am trying to bring it back to the question: What are the technologies out there today that let us learn better, more easily than ever before? And what, if anything, is missing from that? MR. ROSENTHAL: Albert, you are asking what technology leverages. And the way I think it leverages fantastic is, terrific, passionate teachers. If I have passionate teacher Ph.D.s in La Crosse, Wisconsin, who love CFAs. With a credit card and a broadband connection, you can be anywhere in the world, and start learning from them in a minute. It's incredibly powerful. And to bring it down to the public school, something that excites me, again, we are very far from -- what Bob was talking about; when we think of a backwater school system, that for whatever reason, can't attract anybody good to their math department. So, for whatever reason, everybody in third grade math is poorly educated and isn't learning math. Now, if you could figure out -- and this isn't as simple as some of my colleagues here would like it to be -- if you could figure out how to wipe out the department and put in a computer and broadband connection into each kid's homes, all of a sudden, they can be learning from unbelievably passionate teachers anywhere in the world. MS. BOYD: Technology does not determine practice. I can give you any set of technologies and find educational ways of using it, and I can give you any set of technologies and find dreadfully noneducational uses of it. And so, just shoving broadband into a group of kids, just giving them an iPhone, we can think of a gazillion designs that are valuable. Wiki, it is pretty useful for that. But if you would have a culture that is not embedded in it, this becomes just another toy you can text your friends with. And so, how do we actually think about technology, not just as technologies themselves but within that sort of ecology of how you actually make this leverage work and to make it work for you. Teachers are critical for this. It is actually not learning from teachers in another environment, but figuring out how teachers can give you and work with you to understand how you engage with these technologies to do something important. So, there are infrastructures, there are definitely gateways, but they need to be imbedded within a broader system. One of the things I've been so infinitely frustrated with is, saying, "Let's just dump a bunch of laptops off onto a population and see what happens." But that doesn't work. And we've watch students ripped out the batteries and used them for everything else under the sun. So, how does that fit as part of a broader system? Maybe I am just challenging the question, but I don't think we can just think about the technology. So, we have to think about it in a broader system. MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: I can certainly second that. I think it is very, very important in the question of what technology is doing, if something new, and maybe to just follow on what Dana is saying. It's not about the technology but the whole learning environment that you create with the tool -- and she mentioned, for example, Wikipedia or let's say, a media Wiki software. You can really use it very creatively. For the first time, we can put all of us on a Wiki with profile pages, we can work on different projects. The learning environment becomes transparent, and teachers are extremely important. It can be a teacher that is physically with us in the room, or it can be people who are coming from outside of the room because of the network. So, it is the network environment that is transparent with tools that allow you to build and construct digital media, to learn through design, to learn by teaching; you teach and you learn in the same environment and there is the expert guidance. So, to take this revolutionary idea that Fred proposed before about home-schooling is, I think, with the technology of this kind with the right infrastructure, professional development, not just physically but also virtually, can allow us to do home-schooling-like environments for the homeless, for those who don't have the opportunity, for those who don't have their parents at home to run the home-schooling. And I think that is a huge, new opportunity that can scale, that's not the technology alone, it is the give and take with people from both your physical community, state, nation and world that come in a way that organizes itself. But the Wikipedians have a culture and rule of how you go about doing this. And how to learn to become a Wikipedian is the skill that that structure can do. So, everybody can theoretically be home-schooled, but not necessarily in their home. And I think that's the revolution. MR. L. JOHNSON: More broadly, there is a set of metaskills that we want learners to learn. They need to learn how to reflect on their own knowledge or lack of it and to reflect on their own learning. And that is actually something which is not explicit anywhere into the curriculum or often in the classroom, but is an essential outlearning outcome, if you will. Some of that can be derived, you know, teachers can promote that, technology can promote that as well. But without that, then any technology you throw out is going to fail. With that, lots of technologies can be effective. MR. WILEY: Another thing that technology can allow us to do much more efficiently -- so much more efficiently than maybe we could really do before, is to effectively gather, visualize, and then make direct use of a lot of data that was happening in the classroom. Because as a teacher, the thing you really want to know is who knows what, who is struggling with what, who needs my help, whose way do I need to get out of. And when you are standing in front of a group of people like this, you don't have direct access to that. But in an online learning environment where you can see how long people are spending where, you can see how far behind you are, if they're read it, did they fail the last thing, did they do this, did they do that -- you can have them all, a teacher can see on a dashboard, let's go to that school and see who is behind, who is failing, who needs help -- and can just get on the phone and spend some one-on-one time with the people that need one-on-one time, to spend time with them and, that people who in this particular course, this weak on this unit are doing kinds of -- Bring that data together and making it usable by us to make good effective use of our time; because you can't take teachers completely out of the loop. MR. GRODD: This is in video games from Asteroids Pacman on. It's a game where the game is acutely aware of your ability to play at every point. MR. JOHNSON: And so, you stayed in what was called that zone of competence, right, where you were like challenging -- not challenging. Then it was like, gosh, I am going to figure this out, but I will figure it out and I am going to get to that. MR. KALIN: People learn in different ways. You don't want to test what we should be learning in the first place. MR. S. JOHNSON: The wonderful thing about games is, now like Asteroids and Pacman, there is one objective. The games are incredibly rich now, it is like rich in relation or like how can you create all sorts of objectives that are not necessarily as score based as -- (Laughter.) So, it isn't about metrics, it isn't about points. Most people, I think, don't play games for points. They play games in a much more Etsy type feeling way, which is like, I want to build this little thing or I have got this little, you know, group, that we are going to go out and we set goals for ourselves. But, we're not necessarily trying to win anymore. We are trying to do these things along the way, but there's feedback constantly from the environment saying, get better. You still need to work on these skills but you have improved yourself and it is very individualized for each individual person playing. MS. RHOTEN: I just want to add to that. I think that you are right. I would like to extend what you are saying further. I think about the power, the back end of it, ways to understand how the users or the game or the turns they take and those things and the decisions they make. And then there is a game development company called... thinking hard about this and the back end of the gaming platform. And I think what we don't really know is, we know in terms of gaming data leveling, we know all the different things that are the obvious explicit way in which a kid goes through games or games. What we haven't figured out yet and we will soon, I think that you're right, and in turn, and then what that tells us about cognitive inroads and the cognitive aspects, which really will empower the arguments that you are making. And we are on the verge of that, but we haven't gotten it yet. MR. GORDON: I want follow on through quickly. It assumes that as many girls as boys would play it, probably more. Only a quarter of the people who play it play it primarily as a game. And the people who play it as a game tend to stop playing after 20 hours. And the people who play it for four years, play it as a story-telling and creative device. A quarter of the people play it primarily as a creative tool and don't play the game at all. MR. WILSON: It gives us access to teaching moments. I found myself teaching my daughter vector calculus, because her school can't teach her vector calculus. Her vector calculus teacher sucks. So, I don't remember this stuff very well. She came home with a problem which was the cooling tower, and she had to calculate the volume of the cooling tower based on the equation of the curve. I said, God, I can't figure this out. So, the first thing we did was go to Google and we found the cooling tower and then, okay, now we know what a cooling tower looks like. Then we googled "cooling tower calculus problem," then all of a sudden, we found a problem that's pretty similar to her problem. We reverse engineered it, the two of us did it, and she ended up solving the problem. And it was a great learning moment. And we used the Web to do that. We used freely available data on the Web, images and equations and other solutions, and it required some work on both of our parts to figure it out. But there's just so much data out there, and if you just get access to it, at the right place at the right time, the teaching moments reveal themselves. MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: But you did it with her. That can be part of the occurrence of technology -- MS. RHOTEN: Talking about learning through technology. It is the practice, a large part. It's not just the information push. It is the practices around, what you do by navigating, by negotiating, interpreting, evaluating and playing with that information. And that's where it plays an important role for whether it's the mentor or the teacher or the staff or whatever term you use when -- MR. WENGER: I think technology helps in that portion, too, where you can discovery your mentor in -- MS. BOYD: Remember that we have a complete fear in the society of young people acting as adults at every level. So, that's not easy, unless you solved the predator panicked [sic], could you please do? I beg you. (Laughter.) MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: It doesn't have to be an adult. MS. BOYD: There are other dynamics if you get -- but actually, kids, because of the culture of fear, getting input to interact with strange kids are also part of the problem right now -- and I think that even within their already existing networks, you can actually encourage -- there's a lot of opportunities for technology to make obvious interventions that -- I love going in and watching how many teachers still fill out paper material for every little step along the way. This has come in as easy to put technology and to give you some of the feedback that goes on as a teacher. Now, the next level is how do you get a teacher to connect to the network of teachers? They are allowed to network. That's a statement. And why are they not sharing all sorts of the problem sets and the way they're going about this? Some of them are. And to me, it's to find a cooling tower -- how do you search these learning lessons that the teachers are doing? Now, how do you create those tools that parents can -- MR. GRODD: That's my pleasure. MS. BOYD: And how can the parent engage with this, as well? Fred is smart enough that he can figure it out, how to reverse engineer this puzzle. MR. WILSON: Actually, it was a collaborative effort between me and my daughter. MS. BOYD: One, you read English, which is really helpful. It's a part of this. But how do we give parents the tools which they can actually engage with their kids across language, across cultural barriers, across all these other things, so you can make the partnerships much more obvious? It's not even just about how do we intercept learning with directly with kids, but affecting the larger ecology. And there's a lot more opportunity for technology there, first and foremost, and directly to the kids. MR. RESNICK: One thing I think about when Albert... what leverage... what Bob Kerry was saying about access to information outside of libraries. There's no doubt that leverage is access to information. Another thing, clearly, leverage is the possibility of making things, whether making videos, making music, there's new ways of making things which we didn't have before. And the third thing about it is connecting to other people. None of these things are totally new. In learning education from millennia, we have accessed information, we interacted with other people or we've been making things. Technology extends all that. But it doesn't by itself change the... it expands the possibilities for active information, making things in connection with other people. But what the real role of teachers, mentors, parents, is to guide -- how do you go about active information and making things? That's not obvious. Some people will figure it out on their own, you know, better than others. That's the real support that's needed and better structure around the people and materials, other ways in order to support -- just the greater capabilities and all those mentioned. MR. LOUGHRIDGE: This might seem a little freaky, but I think we are starting to experiment with technology as a guide to how to gain the right information at the right time. There's a company I'm involved with, Avatar Reality. It's a virtual world. And we have expert learning systems that we're playing with and chat engines. So, an expert can impart a series of questions and answers to this Avatar and you can pose to be Socrates, let's say, and you impart this give and take. The system is smart enough to understand any sort of question that relates to the questions in place. And so, for example, do you like chocolate, or is chocolate good for you? It can feel those kinds of questions and give that -- serve off that expert advice. It actually sucks information, or it's about to, from Wikipedia. I think there's an interesting new horizon for technology where you have these agents that can help the human interaction. And I think back to -- if you're lucky enough to be a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, you would study one on one with Bertrand Russell at one time, or Wittgenstein. Now, I think we're on the cusp of having the ability to impart your knowledge into a Socratic machine that can carry on its sort of personalized, one on one learning, with whatever individual and whatever passion they may have. I think, that should be incendiary. I don't think it is right to intermediate humans from the learning. I think it's a whole new really interesting tool. MR. BURNHAM: To me, we're talking about three basic thrusts for technology. One is just the increasing liquidity of information, the web; and access to information, access to other people and access to adults who can help, whether they're parents or others. The second is this more structured notion of, whether it's structuring a game or including the feedback that they're requiring as people interact with the system and then feeding that back into a game or to another kind of educational system. And that is more designed. I would say the Web is not really particularly -- the infrastructure is designed, but interaction, social interactions are not. And then the third is the point that Mark brings up, which is that there may be a possibility that technology in the form of artificial intelligence in which you're learning to get to a point where it could begin to behave like a teacher. And is there another category that we're missing. MR. MILLER: Yes, I think technology is an organizing tool. We've been talking about it -- because the economy is bad, that's why we have that. The schools and buildings and all that kind of thing -- basic technology and everything to take those economies of scale and mess with it. So, it might be cheaper to have, you know, a kid home-schooled part of the time and then learning from somebody. And then in another building, another time for a different subject, because you can get more diversity. The internet is great, but is it necessary and actually great in organizing the real world? I think that's where there's a lot of opportunity education to be turned completely upside down in new ways of organizing the system. MR. WILSON: In light of that, I think that's exactly right. When I think about where we're going to be in 50 years, I think we're going to have a marketplace model for education where the student is in control of their education and they determine who is going to educate them, when, where and how, and the educational system can be built into all of that. But the problem with how to get from here to there -- we have these physical spaces and -- when I think about how I want my kids to ideally learn, I'd like them to be able to avail themselves of the quality classes and teachers they have in their physical space, and then opt out of those that they don't and go get those somewhere else. But the problem is that the whole economics of that physical space breaks down as they sort of opt out. And maybe this is just what we're going through in other industries that they get crushed by the organizing efficiency powers in the Internet. But I don't know how to get across that chasm. MR. SCHAPPELL: Maybe schools ought to offer statements for expert to teach outside of a formal curriculum of four years. And so, in Seattle, we use Town Hall Seattle, the same things, four times a day in New York. Paul... is in town. I pay every time he is coming to town. And so, rather than having education systems that hire experts to get accredited and paid and tenured, they're just a facility that bring in people who are popular or who have big followings or who are rated well, so you can go pick and choose what you want do learn and when you want to learn it. And so, it takes some of the economics out of it as a problem, because it is not about if the students came to sign up for four years, and the student could be you, and interested in learning this one subject for just a brief period. MR. MILLER: Getting kids to teach kids... there probably are schools... MR. HEIFERMAN: Like school camp? MR. L. JOHNSON: One mechanism of getting a little bit past the dilemma of curriculum being focused towards this goal of accreditation. It is now possible for the learners to define what are the goals they want to achieve; and end up with a personalized curriculum that meets those goals, and it may meet the accreditation goals, too, or not. But the access is very valuable both in its own right also in terms of metaschool's skill of encouraging learners to define their learning goals and then try to achieve them. MR. WILEY: I think you can slice that into at least five pieces OF higher ed in any way. One of the functions of the university right there, there is some content provision, there's some research conducted, archived and disseminated. There's help that's provided when the student has a question on the content, it wasn't enough. There's a social life aspects and there's a credential aspect. And right now, all those things, plus probably some others, they're all within a single monolithic organization. They can point for each one of those things... the course realm, the content side, the public library from the research side; Yahoo Answers is on the help side. Western Governors University in credentialing doesn't even offer classes. They only offer exams. Social life on the Internet, we really don't even have to talk about that. Those are all starting to kind of fall apart. And you could, right now, put together a very small piece of this joined approach to higher education, getting your content here, your research there, your help there, your credential over here. MR. WILSON: Sounds like Rob did. MR. WILEY: As far as the path forward, I think as people continue to work in the spaces, what generally happens with credential is it a better job of cost, which then means the people will start going looking, may start to shop around and say, "I'm going to get my content from here and my support from there." If I want to buy instructional contracts... MR. LOUGHRIDGE: I think, to me, as a teacher on the one hand, the technology offers...access to amazing teachers in any subject. I can find AN online facilitator. But to me, number one, I think, K-12, that's where my focus is, you can't overlook the value of a human relationship in the person sitting down next to a student and getting a red pen and working together. So, I think all the conversation, when you're trying to think about skill, you need to keep that in mind. In fact, as far as I've seen, and I think a lot of people -- there's some debate, but to me, the truest form of educating is the teacher to student relationship and it is in person and it is watching that relationship grow over time. MR. CAULFIELD: So, that doesn't necessarily -- MR. GRODD: Like at my school, we taught a Chinese class and it was all done through online video, no teacher knew how to speak Chinese. But there was a teacher in there facilitating the 12 students, making sure they're on task, creating the curriculum, giving the assessments, managing the classroom. So, to me, the limit of the video conference model is that in order to have the effect, you always have to choose being there to manage the class. It's one on one to manage the class to make sure that kids are doing the work, paying attention. And so, it really comes back to the teacher, human being. MR. CAULFIELD: Hopefully what happens is, when you move to things and you sort of disaggregate the content from the interaction from the assessment is that you -- you don't get into a situation where you have a person and they're brilliant in that interaction piece, but not really a builder of curriculum. But you don't lose the talent of that person simply because they're not a person that can build a 14-week or 20-week or whatever week course. So, I think, a lot of times when talk we talk about pieces loosely joined, we start to think this is sort of digital Utopianism. It doesn't necessarily have to be. We can actually use that to focus the pieces that are more personal and make them more personal. MR. WENGER: We have two more comments from Daniel and Bing, and then we're going to break for lunch. MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: Last two. MS. ALLEN: I think we have a consensus about what education's forward purposes are. As long as we understand that would be the modular form; right? You gave us five human interaction pieces. Human development is six. I would put the social one into the network citizenship piece. So you've got seven modules. And the plan of the university is always given, it's a sufficient way of delivering all seven. So, essentially, as people develop new technology, they each need to ask itself which it would be delivering, and how you articulate that the efforts of other pieces to deliver some set of those? But then for me, the final and most important thing is, actually, how do you teach young people to understand that they need all seven of these things, and to figure out to put them together in a way that does give competence. MR. GORDON: From an economic point of view, I would say the goal of smart people like us is to figure out how to get the education goals we have down to a marginal cost of zero. And somebody mentioned Oxford. I think the marginal cost for a student at Oxford is probably $250,000; at a U.S. university, it's probably $90,000. SPEAKER: Per year? MR. GORDON: Per year. That's what it costs per student. It's not what they charge. And public school, I think, they're trying to do it at 6- or $8,000. And so, what if it had to get to zero? We've seen technologies that get the marginal cost to zero, plus bandwidth. And then on this notion that you have to have a teacher to educate. In the 1970s, I did advertising for banks with ATMs and 100 percent of grownups said that ATM's are impersonal and they would keep going to live tellers because they're more personal. Around 1980, there was a flip-flop. And on average, humans realized that ATMs were more personal than tellers -- (Laughter.) I would submit that the experience with a lot of kids is that the teachers are bank tellers of the 1970s. (Laughter.) MR. WENGER: With that, we will break for lunch. There are two openings in the table here on purpose so that people can take their chairs and bring them inside up against smaller groups that can actually sit across from each other. And if you haven't signed up, sign up for one. And as I said, if you don't like any of them, create your own. (Time noted: 12:35 p.m.) (Time noted: 1:30 p.m.) Before lunch, we talked a little bit about goals; we talked a little bit about technology and leverage. And we want to spend the afternoon, really, talking about what we can do and what people are already doing to make this all actually happen. And it looks like -- we'll start again with a little video that some of you may have seen. The things we talked about, the things that are possible, and the things that seem to be mostly true, and that will happen -- (A brief video presentation was done.) MR. WENGER: There's a lot of other great videos on YouTube that are all worth watching. Now, the great thing, there are a bunch of people in the room who are all building things to help bridge that gap between what's technologically possible and what's technically useful today. So, we have people talk this afternoon, starting with what they are actually doing and why they are doing it, and how that may help address some of those things. I will put some of you on the spot, unless there's any volunteers. MR. BISCHKE: So, I run a site called edufire.com. It comes from the Yeats quote which is, "Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire." And what we've done is, basically, create a marketplace in the community on live video learning. So, people can come to eduFire, they can create classes on whatever topics they want to. Those classes are then available for anyone who wants to take their class. It's a very open format. They can choose to run the classes for free or they can charge money for those classes as well. So, we're basically leveraging the free markets with our idea, and we have right now over 2,000 teachers that are teaching at eduFire about 10,000 students, people from all around the world, and really just simply trying to apply a lot of the open principles that worked in other areas of the Web, worked at sites like Etsy, a lot of stuff that Jeff talks about in his book, just trying to apply that stuff to education. And we really feel that the biggest opportunity is when you give teachers the opportunity to innovate. And the best way to do that is to give them financial incentives, give them opportunities to scale, give them opportunities for attention and appreciation. So, that's a little bit of what we are trying to do. MR. WILSON: And it was videos; right? MR. BISCHKE: Live video. MR. WILSON: Live video? MR. BISCHKE: Live video. MR. WILSON: Like YouTube or something like that? MR. BISCHKE: Yes. It's interactive. So, the students can actually ask questions of the teachers. MR. WILSON: Who sets the price of these classes? MR. BISCHKE: The teachers do. MR. WILSON: So, they set a price and then the students -- they get students and obviously if the price is too high or the class is -- MR. BISCHKE: Supply and demand, yes. MR. SHELSTAD: I'm Jeff Shelstad. I founded a company called Flat World Knowledge, which is trying to solve the textbook affordability problem in higher education, competing with some other chains. So, our basic mission is -- we're publishing great textbooks by renowned experts in their fields, but we're letting publishers publish it free and open, which means I give the professional complete control over the content deployment locally. They can modify the book any way they want, any way they want, create common relations. And we give them complete control over their consumption. Because we publish a free and open book, we can consume it free. We're making a bet that... altering the format, we provide the... print being one of them. Some of the readers bring others, study it and wrap it around that content. David Wiley is actually our chief... officer -- which is two other companies we're watching right now. MR. WILEY: Best title ever, by the way, Chief... MS. SEGGERMAN: I'm Suzanne Seggerman. I run Games for Change. We started about five and a half, six years ago, and our model is something like -- what early documentary film was originally meant to do, where you use the video games to address real world issues. We have an online community of more than a thousand people. We have an annual festival that happens in the summer, which has been doubling in size every year and is now, unbelievably, the biggest game event in New York. Some of the people in this room know it. We have spoken with panels and our makeup is a third educators, a third game developers, and a third non-profits. And what we aim to do is, really, to help the non-profit -- help all of these sectors understand better the power of games to do more than just entertain, to put them, really, towards things like poverty, the environment, civic engagement, journalism. But at least, we try to foster these... by bringing everyone together and we share resources and tools and ideas. It's a platform for change and... MR. WENGER: I think it consists of three conversation. So, I think people should jump in and ask questions, as some people are doing. So, I should have probably clarified that up front. MR. BURNHAM: I would like to know what Shai is doing. I've read about it. You are starting a global university? MR. RESHEF: It is a non-profit, tuition-free online university, which is basically aimed at the third world student who graduated high school and has decent English, decent enough to be able to study at an American university. However they couldn't get into university either because they don't have the financial means or because they are located in a place where there aren't enough universities, the demand is much more than the supply of universities where they live. So, we offer them a tuition-free university. The way it is going to operate is that students are not going to pay for courses or tuition. However, they pay admission and they pay for exams that they take after each course, between $10 to $100, depending on the country they come from. And the idea is to open admission to everyone around the globe. MR. KALIN: Will you give a degree? MR. RESHEF: It is going to be an accredited American degree. MR. KALIN: How do you get an accredited American degree? (Laughter.) MR. KALIN: -- organization to grant that? MR. RESHEF: You can apply for accreditation. First you set up your own university. You need to operate for several years, and then you apply for accreditation to the agency to become accredited. And what you do and whether you follow their rules and -- MR. KALIN: The rules are published? MR. RESHEF: Yes. MR. KALIN: What do they call it? I think there's a credit instrument -- MR. RESHEF: There are six regional accreditation agencies, and there are a few measurements. MR. WENGER: Where does the content come from? MR. RESHEF: Open source, open courseware. It doesn't make the university tuition free. Basically, everything that is available for free. So, we take the content that is available online, and we take open -- we use open source technology. And I think that what is actually very unique about what we do is, we apply social networking into that. So, there are not going to be teachers in the classroom. Students are going to teach each other. If you are teaching -- and there will be a forum where they can get help or professors. However, in the classroom itself, the studies will be through discussion between the students with each other on the topics. MR. BURNHAM: All in English? MR. RESHEF: Right now -- we started in English. When we will be big enough, we will offer other languages. MR. BURNHAM: Do you have a sense of how you solved the problem that Daniel was talking about earlier, about some of the cultural literacy -- not really cultural literacy, the cultural framework within which these students are operating and whether their parents -- you've got a basic, kind of hidden problem in that -- certain parts of the world where that seems to be a problem. When we assume that problem's solved, then the second part of the problem is, even if you're predisposed to finding this kind of education and investing the time and energy, even though it is free, do you think there are students out there that -- do you think the demand already exists, or do you have to bring along that kind of cultural change in order to create the demand? MR. RESHEF: The demand for the program is there for sure. Let's go one step backward. We hold only two programs right now, business administration and computer science. The reason for that is that these are the most-needed degrees in order to get a job. Remember that, unlike the discussion that we had here at the beginning, this morning, most of the people that we are actually approaching are people who need money to live. They need to find a job. We help them to find a better job than they can get otherwise. The people out there, we know because we announced the program a month ago and we are flooded with demand from all over the world, from people who tried to register even though we haven't opened our gates yet. We haven't started admission. I think -- we chose these two programs that are both needed worldwide and they are not studied -- computer science is the same wherever you study. So, there is no cultural bias. We are not trying very hard not to get into topics that have cultural differences. To give one example, the most needed degree in the world is a teaching degree. Teachers come out needed all over the world. We're not getting there because teacher in Ghana is not a teacher in the U.S. and is not a teacher in China. So, we're trying to have those topics that -- they are worldwide. Still, there will be a chance for the student from different cultures together in one class. That will be an issue. I used to run an online university in the Netherlands, which was the International University, and it was a big challenge. People from different cultures behave differently and react differently to the way other students discuss topics. So, it could be a challenge. MR. WILSON: And when you say "classroom," this is some virtual space they are going to or is that not -- MR. RESHEF: It is virtual. MR. WILSON: They actually all go at the same time? MR. RESHEF: No. MR. WILSON: So, there is some kind of representation of space that they are all part of -- are they dialoging or discussing or is it the same content? MR. RESHEF: You're presuming the same lecture and then they discuss one after the other the same topic. It is asynchronous and -- because of the time difference and because of the there's not going to be any video, but it's very, very simple, to make sure that anyone around the world can get it. Not in the beginning. MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: I think, from conversations that we've had, it's important that maybe you share the niche market you're after, the lower middle class or the upper lower class. And mainly international, because -- I think slightly different than a lot of what we discussed today in terms of, I think, somewhat more national -- there is a need among the population that, I think, you're targeting that is very wonderful but very well-defined. MR. RESHEF: You are right. It's a good point because it's not for everyone. You need to know English. You need to have a computer. You need to graduate high school. So, that's the requirement is there. So, our assumption -- I think it varies from one country to the other, but basically the upper or the lower class -- or the lower of the middle class, that's the population that we are approaching. It's people who almost made it -- almost -- could have been in the university but lost their chance. MS. FLEMAL: Do You have some provision for the people who didn't graduate high school? MR. RESHEF: No. MS. FLEMAL: No alternative? MR. RESHEF: No, because we want accreditation. In order to get accreditation, we must make sure that they graduated high school. MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: Down the road, probably, you will have programs, but not when you launch? MR. RESHEF: Right. When you think about it, there's really no reason -- anyone who has these two preconditions can get in. And it takes two courses -- if they pass, then they become a full-time student, with English 101 and Computer Science 101. So, we think by then, they become regular students. Theoretically, there is no reason not to let anyone in the world to take these two classes. If they pass there, they can become students. We can't do it because of accreditation. MR. WENGER: What's the biggest hurdle for you to be launched? MR. RESHEF: I think we have only two hours. (Laughter.) MR. WILSON: This conference is getting in the way. MR. WENGER: I would love to hear about Katie's school, which is another school being started. MS. SALEN: I am working on a new 6th grade through 12th grade public school that will open in the fall. It's based on the idea of game-based learning. And we were trying to look at the question of that you couldn't just change one part of the school, that in order to actually have transformative change, you needed to work at a systemic level. So, that was the idea of trying to design a school from the ground up. All aspects of the school, the curriculum, the professional development program, student recruitment, the kinds of technology and communications platforms in the school, the leadership model and all of that is built around a pedagogy, which is the way that we think kids learn best. So, we've been working on it for about two years. We wanted to open a public school because we're really interested in the equity and access question, making sure that -- in a lot of our work, we found that kids that have struggled in traditional schools do really well with some of the work we've been doing around game-based learning. So, we're interested in a classroom that has a really diverse set of kids. And I have to say that's been a struggle, to make that happen, because there's all kinds of crazy politics, you know, in the Department of Ed. So, we'll open in the fall. We're recruiting students now -- MR. WILSON: How many students? MS. SALEN: There'll be 81 in a single class. So, it'll be a small -- it falls into the small school model. Eventually, it'll have about 600 kids in the school. And so, we're trying to look at this notion of how we marry non-profits with industry with schools. So, we have a set of industry partners, we have a set of non-profit partners and then we're kind of a public institution. And we're trying to understand how we -- when we were talking about that nodal system this morning, how do we develop infrastructures that allow kids access to resources in a range of spaces? We're trying to blur ideas around college and career. So, kids begin internships in the eighth grade, and apprenticeships. So, we're really interested, again, in getting kids out into the world and figuring out how to leverage different kinds of knowledge. MR. WILSON: I really like that, I've seen that work really well with my kids. How do you do that? How do you facilitate these interesting opportunities for internship at such a young age so that for my kids who's about -- by the time they get to the age of 16, 17 or 18, the opportunities will start to present themselves. But, at 14, it is hard. MS. SALEN: That's where our partnerships come in. So, we have a partnership with these school universities, so kids -- and we're working there with sets of academics that are interested in having young people come for work with graduate students. And then we have a set of industry partnerships where kids can -- particularly in eighth and ninth grade, they're going to have to sort of work in groups. So, we can't sort of send sixth graders or seventh graders out into the city. But we're looking at kinds of programs that can sit inside some different institutions that will support kids in that sort of internship. So, it has to do with partnerships and we've started trying to build those early on. MR. KALIN: Do they have to be institutions... MS. SALEN: No. It is quite open and internships may be virtual. They may be online where kids are having a chance in some online communities to intern in a virtual world, for example, learn something about that. MR. RESNICK: To make the walls a little bit more permeable so that it gives off a portal for the community; it could be part of the community public? MS. SALEN: Right. MR. RESNICK: The community is a key to all of the issues that are raised today. MS. SALEN: Right; absolutely. So, the question is good as not about all formal institutions, we're trying to look at what -- where a kid is at, what they're interested in and how we can create some kind of internship work. We liked the word "apprenticeship" because we want to look at those models to look for, who kids might be sort of studying with and learning from. MR. KALIN: Do students get school credit for the internship? MS. SALEN: Yes. MR. KALIN: So, is there any accreditation issue that you're dealing with? MS. SALEN: So, the other piece that we're having to work on which has come up a lot lately is the assessment issue. So, we have received some opening of permissions from the State to develop an alternative assessment model that begins to look at competencies that can be granted both within industry by academic institutions and by other kinds of individuals. So, that's something that will happen over time. And our goal is to try to say kids should be able to get credit by doing work in lots of different kind of phases, not just within -- within an academic institution so that there would be a process by which people will be able to be considered accreditable or to be able to give a credit in some sense; yes. MR. KALIN: What I was asking you is the same. If I get an intern, will the school even see me as a legitimate enough business to... what is relatively a business proprietorship. MS. SALEN: Sure. Part of our model is that online communities have their own appreciative system. If you're successful within that community, it's really clear that that community values what you do and there's a whole set of expectations around that. We think that community should evaluate performance, not an outside organization. So, we are trying to look at the notion that if you have the common expert in a community, that should be enough. MR. GRODD: Did you say private school? MS. SALEN: No, it's public school. Public-public. MR. GRODD: The charters are on public school... The charts are for public schools? MS. SALEN: Yes. What do you mean "full autonomy"? MR. GRODD: How do you start your own public school without it being chartered? MS. SALEN: You just ask if you can do it. (Laughter.) There is a process. So, we had to go through an application process. MR. GRODD: New York has a process. MS. SALEN: Yes, there's a process. There's something called the Office of Portfolio Development and you apply for -- you have to provide sample curriculum. It's very rigorous and then once you get approved, yes. MR. GRODD: I think New York is not unique. MS. SALEN: Yes. MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: Is New York interested in then making many schools like this? Are you a model school for other schools in the public school system to become similar? MS. SALEN: We've been trying to stay away from the scale question right now, because we feel like schools are so context-specific. We think there are maybe parts of the model that can scale but we don't want to put that pressure on right away. But the DOE, to give them some credit, they're deeply interested in innovation. They recognized current structures are not working. They did not run from us when we came with this idea which is what I thought would happen. They've been super supportive, which I also didn't think would happen. But we haven't touched the scale question yet. MR. GORDON: Do you have any non-traditional metrics for successful graduates? MS. SALEN: In terms of what? Give me an example of a non-traditional. MR. GORDON: Non-traditional might be passing tests and getting into college. MS. SALEN: Yes, that's the assessment model that I'm talking about. We have to give grades of some sort because those are required. But we are looking at an alternate model. MR. GORDON: You're getting as much support as the DOE -- MS. SALEN: Yes. An alternate model around competencies. So, we have a model where kids are earning badges. And so, it's some sort of a portfolio model that by the time they graduate, that the evidence of participation and of certain kinds of excellence become a measure of their success as a graduate. MR. GORDON: So, they now become an expert of something and get out of here? MS. SALEN: Yes, exactly. Our whole goal is to let kids be a master of something by the time they graduate. We think that's a huge goal, to allow every child to feel that they have become an expert in something that they feel passionate about. And ideally, be supported around what we would call "functional literacies" and we were talking about within this group reading, writing, math; yes, absolutely. But the other stuff, kids become what they want to become and build what they want to build with their lives, based on how they gather knowledge and utilize it. So, that's the model that we're aiming at. THE SPEAKER: What would the enrollment be and how many kids? MS. SALEN: We'll first take in 81 in the first year and we'll roll out a grade each year. So, that will end up being about 600 students overall, yes. MR. WILSON: Will it be seven grades? MS. SALEN: Seven grades. MR. WILSON: Middle and then high school? MS. SALEN: From 6 to 12. So, we're really interested in -- we haven't talked much today of the trajectory of learning. So, what would it need to actually catch a kid in middle school and be able to help them move into the upper school without having to change -- necessarily change schools, how do you develop a deep understanding of literally their movement through school rather than thinking about them just as in grade to grade level? So, we've been thinking about not having grade levels. So, we're having sort of phases that kids can move at their own pace, their own pace within. MR. BURNHAM: And does everything have to be a game? MS. SALEN: No. MR. BURNHAM: Is the school itself, do they think of their educational process as a game or do they think of each course as a game that they think of within a course that there are certainly elements that are game-like? MS. SALEN: Sure, now that's a good question. So, the curriculum is disseminated through a game-like structure. So, kids are given a ten-week mission, and that mission drops them into a complex problem space and then that mission is broken down into a series of smaller quests that allows kids to build skills and knowledge in order to solve that problem. So, that's the big game idea. And then certain quests also have kids are making games or playing games but it's not every -- MR. BURNHAM: Each of these had to be created, this curriculum and the actual game dynamic and the game structure and I assume some of the programs that had to be created class by class? MS. SALEN: Yes. And so, our curriculum is co-developed by teachers and game designers. So, that was the other model that we're looking at, that it may be a new type of collaboration that could be to invent a curriculum. It's not all digital; there's a lot of non-digital steps. MR. BURNHAM: Digital games? MS. SALEN: Yes. MS. ALLEN: You will fund it philanthropically rather than the public school system? MS. SALEN: The schools themselves, no, but our planning cost us -- we got some money through MacArthur, the two-year planning grant. But the school itself is funded by public moneys; yes. MR. GORDON: Do the kids always had one identity, or do they get to mess around? (Laughter.) MS. SALEN: We have an online social network that we built for the school called "Be Me" and it's the idea that we want kids to play around with multiple identities and to recognize that they, at any one time, may be taking on different identities. There's an "at model" in it called "The Expertise Exchange." We're also trying to get kids to understand what they are experts in, what they want to be experts in, what they're not good at. So, this notion of how do you find other people to work with, other kinds of mentors and that kind of thing. So, the multiple identity thing is a big one. The notion of the curriculum -- and then I'll shut up because I don't want to dominate here -- is allowing kids to step into identities. MR. GORDON: Keep talking as long as you are saying something better than the rest of us, under the circumstances. (Laughter.) MS. ALLEN: Is there any ambition to attract kids from private schools back to the public system? MS. SALEN: Obviously, that's already happening because the economy crashed. So, we suddenly have had people showing up at our open houses that have been people that have been in private schools that are now trying to enter public school. And so, it wasn't an intention, but I think it's the reality today, particularly in New York, because there are families that are suddenly in a totally different place then they were six months ago. MR. KALIN: Is there any way to see what's going on from the outside? Can we see this? MS. SALEN: Right this second? MR. JARVIS: Soon thereafter? MR. GORDON: You can pass as a seventh grader. (Laughter.) MR. KALIN: There is a program in New York where if you can prove you're under 18 you can get into all these theaters for $5; you just flash a fake ID saying how young you are. (Laughter.) So, these other kids want to see and learn from it in the context being created there. It can seem to be a open course where in this side of things, that's something that's stuck inside of it there? MS. SALEN: So, we have a big notion of kids being given an opportunity to disseminate. So, we have lots of channels out as well as channels in. So, one thing we found with kids is that the ability to give them that -- the idea to give them the ability to share what they have done is super critical to them and to make choices about who they're sharing it with. We're trying to build in mechanisms by which they can export things that they were doing in the space for more public kind of space; whether if it's public in a sense of their small group of friends or their parents or whether it's to the world. So, the publication notion is a big one in the school about outward facing. MR. L. JOHNSON: What lessons did you learn about things that you thought would be good ideas that turned out not to work out and have unintended effects? MS. SALEN: We haven't opened the school yet. But we'll probably learn a lot. I think that there is an instinct to always make it more complex than it really needs to be. So, I think that a lot of -- I'm a designer. So, part of what I do is to always strip things down. So, I think a lot of our early work was way too complicated, trying to over-design. And so, I think we found that it's really about stripping, stripping away and understanding what, who are the participants in any learning moment. So, trying not to get to over-design what the teacher does, not to over-design what the student does and understand that the student brings things, the teacher brings things. So, what is this simple-as-possible interface to connect those two? I think that's been our big lesson. And also that parents are very freaked out about their children's education, do not underestimate that. So, that's a big mistake we made, or I did. MR. WILSON: Rob, I would like to ask Rob to talk a little bit about what you are working on. MR. KALIN: I'm taking everything that I've learned from Etsy and trying to create essentially a framework that a lot of the things you will hear people talking about fit into. And the type of application does exists. So, I think it's about the early stages. And, they're just the experts here in the articles where they had to implement these software. The new types of software suddenly enabled all these new interactions. So, I think, blogs, forums, Wikis, private entities, all these things aren't quite right for the educational sector and there's essentially the new type of Web education. So. , I'm working on that and then, specifically, to start with looking at how people are home-schooling their kids; because I don't want all the hurdles of the accreditation that are being set back especially in the beginning. And also specifically looking at kids, three years and younger, how these people are going to start using the Web and at what age we start developing that literacy. There are people actually on the Web before they can read and all kinds of interfaces and how technology does that. Again, we're talking about learning here, we're talking what needs to be met more about. And we should be ready in a couple of months since the first to use is the Internet component to it and to make sure that the components you make maybe explained as adaptations to the entire system. It's not like this is a game and this isn't a game, the whole space has that kind of staple built into them. You've got some entities where you -- you entice people to turn out and be playful, I think that's the premise of it thus far in the application. And it will have potentially, there would be an application arguably of using the right things that exist inside of its framework and the goal of the opportunity is to kind of build a social business and explaining that it's not a for-profit model. There's a lot of restrictions the IRS places on you in terms of what you can do and it's non-profit tax code, it's not written in the website where you can find it, that's for sure. We're also talking of use of other means and other ways to start this business step, something successful that we keep giving back to the people who are making it successful. Given that security to do stuff that we're doing right now, we're kind of placing a hold to be there but at least we want to get by that in a month or two. MR. WILSON: Anybody would able to use this? A school could use this? MR. KALIN: Completely open and in public, and if you're teaching a class, if you're figuring to teaching a class, you can restrict who comes in through and then you can narrow through those things that you see there documented where you can see whatever content they want. There's also the fact how people would be connected with the others, so -- and have this vision of a five-year-old American teaching English to a five-year-old in Paris and vice versa and creating something that's simple enough to connect with each other. So, it's a system where if there's someone that definitely wants to teach a class, they can do it or at least that they can do it there as well. So, that's the design challenges that we had that since we're doing this. And I think a lot of the educational software out there is really good and of smart design that we can use, as well. MR. WILSON: Have you tried to build something out there that could be used at any part of the educational establishment, everything from very traditional school situations to someone who is trying to teach themselves, to home-schooling, adult education? MR. KALIN: Right. The framework for organizing the information facility and the interaction itself, the people would actually have. I think the Web as a whole enables to teach with a learning framework, but it's not well-organized enough to facilitate the instruction interaction that happens as well and with computers. MR. JARVIS: Are there metrics built in? Are there commercial aspects built in? If somebody wanted to use this as a platform to build an educational business on top of it, could they? MR. KALIN: Sure. It's going to encompass the total range of learning. Coming from the perspective of Etsy, for me, I worked in a 9,000 square foot warehouse... as Etsy started growing... the sellers will be very successful because the last dealings over the particular businesses turned on to hobbies and I asked them if they include any new things. One of the tools they need to learn is -- and a lot of it comes back to community as much as knowledge. And so, we are working together, and the first pilot program is basically going to be kind of home-schooling for people or for the employees as we home-school each other and figure out how to create successful, very small business. And we're going to be using the platform to publish everything without ever doing... Then I'm talking with a bunch of other organizations. Again, some of the home-schoolings under the university level to kind of get people and testing it out. Anyone here who is interested in trying to get an entire... parachutes of that worth and I'll be happy to give everyone your access. MR. WILSON: Idit? MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: I'll bring the kid's voices. I think we're lacking some kid voices. I can connect it to my computer to the Web or from yours, if yours is connected? (Discussion off the record.) So, this is La Gloria [sic]. We're about social networks for learning how to design games and simulations, teach science or global social issues. Actually, it's very, very similar. It is about people teaching and learning at the same system, middle school, high school, community college students. And I, instead of telling you that -- it's a platform that is combining media, Wiki, Blogger and a web resource, each piece within the top of my sequel [sic]. It's an open source with a very comprehensive year-long curriculum that works both for teachers who are learning how to be teachers in universities, community college students. And if you go to this (indicating projection), students and educators both from the field, we can pick just three, one from middle school, one from high school, we can maybe exempt people -- just played the first one, it would just -- probably just start. And that's Quianna and Alexi reflecting about what they are doing. If you can just leave the volume. (Video presentation.) MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: So, now you can go -- scroll down and you will find also different features really from middle school or high school, vocational school, community college. And I think we talked a lot about these ideas today, finding things that you need on Google or in your community, and finding -- gain experts or content experts or programming experts, design experts on this network that we are putting and that are starting to take each other, all for free and available through the governor that is financing it. MR. WILSON: I'm just going to ask you, how do the teachers and the schools and the students find this tool? Word of mouth? How do they find out about it? MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: Just word of mouth. We started in five schools, we grew to eight, and now we have a huge list of people who are just registering, "We want to do this, we want to do this." We are proving that there is demand, and therefore, we can probably plug it into the Department of Education and they are using it to transform the schools. So, we are now in 14 schools, and some schools are already teaching these classes. If we had time, I would have shown you the curriculum and the Wikis and how it's customized. So, we have teachers teaching science, teachers teaching health, teachers teaching drafting and architecture using this game, and all different kinds of -- right now, it's based on our budget. But it really should be a work and play type of environment of give and take, which is really what the plans of it is now, but we just wanted them to demonstrate the scalability and demand. MR. WILSON: Thank you. MR. GRODD: About nine months ago, I started Better Lesson, which is, hopefully, on the way of becoming the social network for teachers. It started in the United States and is aspiring to be the social network for teachers internationally. It is focused around sort of -- this first version is focused around PowerPoint for teachers which is, what do I teach tomorrow, how do I create it and where do I find that. So, I spent so much time over the past four years reinventing the wheel, writing lessons from scratch and then when I had done that, it would waste away on my desktop. There's no way for me to share my creations with other teachers. And I think it is just so detrimental to my instructions. I spent four hours. I would spend on average three to four hours each night writing lessons. My only option is to go with the scripted textbook or reinvent the wheel. Those are really the core options for most teachers today. We have built and launched three months ago the alpha, beta version of a social networking site, with the sort of highest level of file sharing technology. Some of it are files that are from script and embedded with Facebook and are rolling it out through high performing charter schools, in pre-schools. And now it's sort of, the main difference between us and all of the other initiatives that we're trying to do is, because when I first came up with the idea about three years ago, I thought it was totally not like the others. It's like this is totally original and teachers sharing files in the internet. (Laughter.) And over the past year, there's been dozens of well-funded initiatives. One called... Teachers just folded up two months ago after trying for two years correcting these, and either Sun MicroSystems people and sort of flailing out there, trying to figure out who they are, what to do. And so, my very brief take on the space currently is that there's been two types of attempts to correct this. Now, on one hand, we have the open source movement represented by Wiki of CC Learn; and on the other hand, we have intranet, which are closed off internet. And the open source -- the failure of the open source initiative, it indicates -- in the K-12 space well, it's not referring to open course software. In the K-12 space, there's been to go from the isolated teacher, which is the status quo, to the global revolution overnight. And so, that, the open source movement failed to account for the fact that teaching is best when it's done locally, we have local standards, we have local protocols, local rubrics. And it's sharing better when you know who you are sharing it with. And they failed to do that literally. There's a global revolution online. But I don't want a global revolution. I want to share with the person down the hall. And the closed internet is the failure that every -- and this is -- it's tragic that every major district, every state and every major charter management organization has an intranet and it's all defunct, literally, ineffective. You've got millions and millions of dollars invested in these intranets. And the reason they're defunct is you can't initiate the wisdom of the crowds without a crowd. And so, you're talking to CMOs that have 1,200 teachers. And you can't really create sorts of the depth and breadth of content you need to have it into the lessons, which is the substance of what we aspire to be, when you're dealing with 1200 teachers. So, our response, aside from creating a totally unique interface and technology, is to channel Chris over there, and do a Facebook that did very well, roll out the real world community, keeping it local and starting with one charter management organization in May, and to roll out to another and then maintain the integrity of local sharing of files, while beginning to incrementally graduate an approach to that open source vision and have the sharing crossover to communities. I think the Facebook analog is a very good one for us and it's really been highly influential, so, thank you, Chris. MR. WILSON: The essential element today is a class, one class worth of several things. MR. GRODD: What about 180 days to the core for most K-12 teachers is 180 days of instruction. What we allow you to do is see... If you are learning yourself as you finance out from high performing teacher to one lesson, one 50-minute lesson out of those 180 days, as we have introduced today, that teachers that is using multiple -- also to be using video games, they're PBS PowerPoint and YouTube courses. One 50-minute lesson, we allow you to aggregate that content on a one-page, sequence in an order, then you drag and drop one unit, and then sequence those units into the 180 days. And that's the way teachers teach now. So, our organizational hierarchy is really resources, which are primarily files, that is now, to a lesson to a unit to a course. And we allow you to do that really in a nice, intuitive way. And so, as opposed to going to -- not to pick on these open sources, but if you go to open sources and you find the resource. That resource helps you for the one-third of one class under the 180 days. When you come in with a better lesson and you find the highest performance sixth-grade social studies teachers in the country, then you have their 180 days mapped out for you. And you can -- instead of having all your time reinventing, trying to recreate those 180 days, you can take that foundational knowledge now to tailor that instruction to the needs of your students. MR. WILSON: But the thing that's interesting for me is that you've got a whole semester's worth of the teaching, but each lesson is its own unit. And then each lesson, there's units within that. And don't you really want to facilitate sharing the most atomic elements and not the whole thing? MR. GRODD: We do. I think the goal is to be able to have people mix and match in those -- every -- not just atomic, everything. Mix and match and have two of your lessons in my unit, two of your lessons in one unit, two of your files in one of my lessons. And so, that's the goal and that's what we facilitate here. It's like favor, favor of something to understand. It's very specific to do in a lesson and also in a unit. MS. BOYD: How does the network work? MR. GRODD: The social network is a Facebook right now. And so, it's similar to Facebook. When you find someone that you're really interested in sharing your community with them, and our site you'll become a colleague with someone, they can then use your curriculum and they -- they can do their own. So, it's really meaningful, so -- MS. BOYD: But then you have to be willing to colleague everybody for them to share? It could be yourself? MR. GRODD: No. There's two for this. Great question. Each individual artifact, when you upload a file, you can set sharing permissions. So, this is another core to friendships. So, you can -- it would open to all of the other lessons. And you can share just to your colleagues or keep it private because you have many organizational tools. Some people just use them and not to share it, to organize their stuff online. And then -- so, that's for each individual object. But in order to share your full recipe book, your full 180 days, you've got to be on top of it. Some people really like that because it gives people a sense of ownership of their curriculum. It forces them to just always meet new people in order to share. MS. BOYD: So, is it required to confirm that we are colleagues? Basically, there are politics with these things. It's like, I think we are colleagues, but you don't think the same. (Laughter.) MR. GRODD: Yeah, that's an issue. It hadn't been an issue thus far because we rolled it out to 300 other teachers. And I anticipate that being an issue. And so, I think, in any sort of project in the social network, and slightly, they just quote from a UI standpoint, the technical standpoint, is issue permissioning and trying to replicate real roles in that network. MS. BOYD: This made me wonder early about this. So, they're going to be much more friendly in this? And there is more of a direct to draft element, when you have to deal with one network. If only we'd be talking about social situations for whatever these professional networks come into play, you actually have so many levels of politics for this. MR. GRODD: I agree. MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: I think it's a fantastic idea and we were wondering if educator's Wiki, that it could probably benefit by sending educators to what you're facilitating. What I can see coming is a need for -- first of all, there is no high bandwidth in a lot of the schools. And a lot of these educators that you're trying to reach may not have both the access or the knowledge of how to upload and download and remake and whatever. And I wonder if you have virtual Web based training sections? MR. GRODD: Yes. But that's what we're doing. We're kind of rolling out the individual schools, literally; one school at a time. MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: Yes. MR. GRODD: We're working with those schools, mostly in Boston and New York, primarily charter schools going in there, training teachers, working with instructional coaches. MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: But that means to also become virtual, what you just said. MR. GRODD: Yes, sure. One step at a time. MR. L. JOHNSON: Are you inviting course work publishers to participate in this network? MR. GRODD: Yes. We invite those. We just want good quality content to work in this open source curriculum, organizations working with Larry Berger and of FreeReading.net, which is something you might have heard of more... So, we are totally open. And I mean, it's kind of a -- Fred, you were saying that you were trying to find the deep set of it. Teachers are so much tougher on the internet. And it just -- but to go through Google for a teacher, then you need to figure out the day of the platform and try to figure out what you're teaching tomorrow, spend three hours googling to get to the good stuff, which is really, really hard. And for everybody, we're thanking you for the questions. The stuff is there. But we're trying to aggregate and doing it in a way -- we're trying to organize it, make it searchable and play the matchmaker to -- when you register with us, you know what grade level you teach, what subject you teach and try to sort of matchmake you and give you the best stuff that we can give you. MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: But also, you are giving -- other teachers can help you form this, the new way of teaching and learning. And I think that may be even more important. Having a team of teachers who are doing the same thing in different classrooms together. MR. GRODD: Yes. I was shocked. When I was teaching sixth-grade social studies, and I said, Well, I don't really know what I'm doing with that, so I'm trying to find another middle school social studies teacher in Georgia that knows what they're doing. It just doesn't exist. Like, literally, you have to guess, scour blogs. It just doesn't exist. So, the ability to find other people teaching what you are teaching, being able to have some sort of dialogue. There's a massive need for it. MR. O'DONNELL: What do you think is the most effective motivation for getting the individual teacher to share? Is it the access to -- if I share this, then I can get somebody else's thing? Is it the reputation of, I want to be the teacher who gets the community credit of forming the best lesson? Or is there a potential -- and I don't know if you are doing this -- so that I could literally sell a lesson perhaps to -- if I have the best lesson on the causes of World War II? Other people might want to buy that at two bucks a pop or something. MR. GRODD: I will say three things. One is the direct correlation between age and comfortableness. So, first off, the sort younger generation teachers, the 25 to 35, it's generally much more comfortable with sharing things in general, we don't have much of the concerns that you might think teachers would have. The second thing is that the best teachers are lesson artists. They can create -- someone talked about this earlier -- they can create amazing works of art. You can spend five hours, which I have, on a mind history PowerPoint Jeopardy game. That's -- you create whatever -- you want to share it. It's helping -- you're helping a hundred students, right now, a year with that kind of history PowerPoint. You show the 600 teachers you're helping the 600 students. So, this is a strong desire, and then that ties into things that -- that how many Twitter followers, are fundamentally wanting to be recognized. So, we are just using the Web tool for metrics. Each file would be tracking the number of views, the number of downloads, the number of shares. It's amazing how a teacher is all ready to give to 300 teachers, and those teachers come back everyday to see how many people viewed the web and taught in it. So, it is a fundamentally, teachers want to share and, like any artist, want to share and they want to be recognized. So, we're trying to use the Web to recognize. And if they were teachers, our Web will target rock stars. MR. ETUK: How difficult is it to overcome that full questionnaire? How do I use this level? MR. GRODD: What we have done is, we've tried to take almost no point of view, we tried to be an agnostic platform instead of a sharing platforms with point of views that we have taken than organizational hierarchy. So, people, when they're uploading or creating the lessons on our site, they create a lesson that has objective, it has a plan and it has resources. So, people generally -- they view and browse throughout the site. It is pretty much the way most teachers are delivering instructions and probably presentations; am I right? MR. WILSON: About a week ago, I gave a talk to a bunch of television executives and I published 22 slides on the Web, on Slide Share. And I got a couple of messages from people who had downloaded my talk and had delivered the talk. But there's no audio. So, they took my 22 slides and they delivered the same talk. The slides had no words on them; right? So, they literally had to be -- spread on it one word at the top and then a picture. So, there was no -- and they just delivered it. And I think there is something really interesting about the idea that you can take, in effect, a framework for a lesson or a presentation and different people will have a different slant on it, but the framework is pretty consistent piece of organization. MR. GRODD: Again, we did a lot of user testing and a lot of focus groups on how teachers generally organize their content to lessons. Lessons are generally organized into units. That's it. Lessons are made up of multiple resources, diverse multiple media. MR. BURNHAM: I think that's a wake-up call here. And I think Paul and Dave are both constructing sites where teachers can reach audiences in probably different ways and ultimately perhaps make a living in a different way. In some ways,if somebody's motivated by some of the same objectives, they would also be motivated by the possibility of making a living. MR. MILLER: I run the School of Everything, which is a very simple way of matching up people who have something to teach and focus primarily on their local area. It's about trying to find somebody to teach you something face-to-face in your local area. And then, the thing that we found very, very quickly is that there are already lots and lots of people doing this. So, there's a kind of market of self-employed freelance teachers that are teaching music lessons or language lessons or whatever it might be. And so, those are the people who are using the School of Everything at the moment. And it is really interesting that, basically, it's a growing group, made up of an economically driven -- I don't know. There's so many people that are turning their passions, supporting their passions by teaching them. And so, they may have a day job, but they are finding a way to make that leap out of a job that they don't like into maybe they're teaching something that they do like as a way of supporting -- doing what they like. And that's something that's seeing an increase. And so, we get so many stories of people doing that. That's really wonderful to see that happen. MR. BURNHAM: Is what you have just a marketplace? There's no curriculum or notion of curriculum? It's just a matching function? MR. MILLER: Yes. It's just a matching function. What you find is, people already sign up to some particular curriculum. It's like, for example, I didn't know about painting, but there's a technique for learning oil painting is called the... oil painting technique. It's really -- this learning lesson will teach using the particular method of teaching oil painting. And so, now we have pretty much every... oil painting technique teacher in the UK on the site. MR. JARVIS: Off of PBS 15 years ago. Like all good educators, you make it look easy. MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: What I see is that you have a very nice transparent system of looking at how many people are teaching and how many are learning. But it looks like it's the same teacher teaching two groups. Can you explain how that works? MR. MILLER: How do you mean? MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: It says, like teaching to learning. What does that mean? MR. MILLER: So, we ask people what they want to learn as they sign up, as well. So, we're going to have demand and supply for every local area. We are not big enough to be able to be kind of, properly demonstrating exactly what a particular town wants to learn. We have supply and demand in place. And an interesting one that we have noticed is that we have far more people who are wanting to learn photography than there are teachers. And I say that's kind of function of -- digital photography has, kind of, exploded and the number of people who can teach it hasn't caught up yet. MR. JARVIS: So, what do you do about that? How do you create -- MR. MILLER: We try to find people to teach digital photography. MR. JARVIS: So, what are the best tools to find them? Craig's List, or what? MR. MILLER: We don't have Craig's List in the UK. Photography shops, we have notice boards -- MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: And is it only one-to-one, or one-to-many? MR. MILLER: Most of the teaching is one-to-one, but there are quite a lot of classes, as well. It depends on the subject. The music classes are almost always one-to-one. Some things, like art classes, tend to be a group. MR. BURNHAM: And is there a reputation system? MR. MILLER: Yes. Basically, endorsements. One thing we found is that teachers were very wary of five-star systems around teaching, because they think it is a bad relationship with a student and that that's basically subjective. So, teachers are suspicious, we found, when we talked to them of objective representation systems when it comes to teaching. MR. WILSON: You can only give an endorsement? MR. JARVIS: Not an "undorsement." MR. MILLER: At the moment, we placed that at the top. We actually haven't had any complaints about the teachers at all. MR. L. JOHNSON: There are existing platforms for social networking, such as Facebook. They're existing platforms for management such as Noodle [sic], and why are you going your own way in this regard? MR. GRODD: I get that question every day. So, I think, for me, it is fundamentally -- to do this well, we will have to create a sense of real privacy for of teachers. If they're exchanging their tests and quizzes and exchanging their instructional content, for the first version, we want to ensure that we do our best to make them feel that sense of privacy. You really can't do it now on Facebook. And the other thing is, teachers go to Facebook to get away from their professional life. It is an escape in many ways. So, we prefer to let it be that escape, have our site be focused around professionals. MR. BISCHKE: I think it's similar to Etsy and eBay. You know what I mean? You look at Etsy and you look at eBay and some way it's similar functions. But in other ways, they are very different. And I think that some of the stuff that has been talked about here, the notion of education is just so fundamentally different from a lot of other things that are happening on the Web, that you really need to tap into that to leverage that. I think that the best platforms are built by people who have actually taught, who understand how difficult it is to be a teacher, what some of the challenges are, and can build systems from the ground up to address those challenges. MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: But in our case, we really couldn't use any of the existing systems that had advertising on it, because when we did some tests with the -- especially the economically underprivileged and technologically underserved populations -- especially in public schools, they don't see the ad. So, we have to create something that is open source, clean, noncommercial for them to adopt it. This is why we created our own platform, not because it didn't exist in other forms. And a commercial version of this probably will be different. MR. BURNHAM: And how is what you are doing different than what Paul is doing? MR. SCHAPPELL: I think it's exactly the same. Our mission is to crush Paul. (Laughter.) I would say we're about as perfectly aligned on a mission as two organizations can be. And there probably aren't any other -- it is a very weird space that we are in, that this is fairly absent. And what the TeachStreet team brings to the game, we are basically an ex-Amazon group, with some other folks thrown in, with experience building marketplaces. So, we look at what Rob -- and I'll use Scott as an example. The idea that somebody could launch a company like... to bring together disparate groups of people to learn things is really what, in my opinion -- what goes on with... And so, when I went to learn about podcasting, I started this podcasting and Second Life meetups in Seattle. And within days, upon hours of podcasting, the first group was set up and meeting. And my wife thinks that's mildly odd, like people get together at a bar to talk about Second Life. And they were odd. (Laughter.) What we are trying to build we think is a massive marketplace around things that people are passionate about. And so, a lot of what was being discussed today, I hope you all figured it out, and it's sort of like the learning up to age 22, 23, when you get the confidence to go and learn whatever it is that you are excited about. Some people can start when you're 10, and some people it never starts. But the idea for TeachStreet came from really, I'm a class taker, and it really hasn't improved that much with all that the Web's done. You go and search online and the people that win those searches are online video bloggers. They're not the person that lives within a mile of you who's a great piano teachers. And so, we're trying to get them a platform where they can list themselves as a teacher or as an expert. They can be reviewed and negatively reviewed by the people that take the classes. It doesn't happen often, very much like Amazon. You don't get any negative reviews. And then you can pay to take them off of our sites. (Laughter.) I'm kidding. (Laughter.) It is really is about learning -- that's the difference, the accreditation issue isn't something we're trying to tackle. We don't really go after the college education or even the grades K to 12. We're really about creating platforms so that if you're an expert in something -- I need another example. I listed a class in Twitter, and within 24 hours I had three people contact me for this class that I put up as a joke a little bit, I wanted to teach people to teach people who wanted to learn Twitter. Three people, totally randomly, had contacted me about it and I had to let it expire. So, I don't want to keep teaching this class. But you could make money teaching a class about how to teach Twitter, because it is a common search term. MR. JARVIS: Finally, a business model. (Laughter.) MR. WILSON: This is largely for the adult community. It is not like -- my kids have piano teachers and drum teachers and computer guys come over to teach my son how to write computer software. MR. SCHAPPELL: For all that, too. Anything you want to learn, experts set themselves up online. They indicate that they teach children to adults. MR. WILSON: You said something about K through 12, you go figure that out. I think this might be more -- what's like going to come -- we're going to start realizing that we and our kids are just realizing that if they're not going to get it in school, they'll have to get it somewhere. MR. SCHAPPELL: I think that you can supplement a lot of the learning places, the piecing together, what's the thing you're excited about this week? And that sort of stuff drives my wife nuts. I go through a month where I want to learn about photography, and I'll go through a month where I might learn to cook and never cook, and you just sort of piece these things together, whether TeachStreet or MeetUp. It's all the tools that are out there and how you patch them together. MR. JARVIS: This is how to do vouchers. If you gave people vouchers for that. That's vouchers that are working. THE SPEAKER: Paul, Can you tell the story of how you came to this idea and the historical perspective on this? MR. MILLER: In 1965 a group of students at Stanford wanted to learn computer science. The curriculum hadn't caught up. So, they set up their own university, a message board, which is a piece of paper and you write at the top of that the sheet what you can teach and people would sign up. It had two courses for the first week and they agreed to have 300 courses every week. At it's a big book that was going around. John reckons that at its peak, it had 50,000 students. It changed the way that Stanford was organized, as far as the way that John explained it. And to wrap it up, if you're going to do that today, you wouldn't use a pinboard and some pieces of paper; you'd use the inter-Webs. MR. BISCHKE: One question for Dave and Paul. It seems right now with the economy, there's this massive structural shift. If Detroit goes under -- you have all these people now we need to get them trained. So, my question to you guys is, how much of what you guys are seeing right now in schools and TeachStreet is what you guys call continuing professional education versus hobbies, crafts, entertainment, passions -- MR. SCHAPPELL: We're a lot more toward the latter, probably; just being real honest. When we launched we didn't know. So, we threw everything up and probably the five of the eight main categories where there's just a lot more energy is around creative, language, sports. I don't think it will stay there. How to build a non fuel-efficient car hadn't showed up yet. It's a lot more on the aspirational learning, which is great, because it really has a lot of tools. We just launched two weeks ago. It's a little laughable -- much blogging, potential articles. Teachers can write articles. It's amazing, people just writing about everything and uploading videos. It's not surprising. But compared to the classes and their reputations and reviews, it is exactly what we thought would happen, and it is happening. MR. MILLER: And it's pretty similar to us. Our three main categories are crafts, music, languages and arts. But what surprises us is, kind of sustainable environmental stuff. That really seems to be that passionate people -- the teaching people about environment and the sustainability that we haven't expected. MR. WENGER: What about E-fire? MR. MILLER: Language and test prep are our two biggest categories. But it's interesting because we have seen, like what was mentioned, sustainability. There's a guy who teaches a class called the Green House, and it's one of our most popular classes. We've also had a class on how to use Twitter, which ended up on the top 10 searches on Twitter for a while, because everyone in the class was tweeting at the same time. So, it's been an interesting kind of hybrid of pushing certain areas that we know have well-defined markers, like, language and test prep; and then also having an open platforms where we can say, you know what, teach whatever you want to teach. Anybody can start a class in whatever they're passionate about. It's similar to what Dave and Paul are doing. That's a real option that we are seeing. THE SPEAKER: A 21st century Madoff scheme, we may have seen behavior like twittering and then have a whole industry of teaching how to behave -- (Laughter.) MR. WENGER: Schools are teaching a lot of things that are very obscure and not politically useful. MR. KALIN: A college degree -- you just gave us all this money to get a degree and it just qualifies us to give more money to the school; because we go back to school and they keep you in grad school. MR. WILSON: I want to ask Terry a question. Do you think that some of these marketplace models like the School of Everything and TeachStreet will be useful in the home-schooling movement? Can you imagine using these services to identify specific teachers that you can use? MS. FLEMAL: I absolutely can, because right now we often use Craig's List, honestly. For us, it's economical. And oftentimes, if we are looking for a Spanish teacher -- we've gone to Craig's List to find someone good at philosophy -- like somebody would come in and talk with the child about philosophy -- MR. BURNHAM: You found somebody advertising this? MS. FLEMAL: Yes, absolutely. For philosophy, we just happened to find somebody who knew, who had a doctorate in philosophy and didn't have a job. And the guy was just incredible. And it happened that he was perfect for what we were looking for. Yes, there is an absolute need for that. And so, yes, I think definitely, and I'm thinking and hearing that it is something that's a perfect match, absolutely. MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: I think that a lot of the home-schooling, we're getting a lot of e-mails and people using us although we're not really marketing or trying to reach this population, and because it's open source, they can just come and they are telling us how they are using it so down the road we will launch it for them. But to relate to the other question of what takes off in a network, we realize there is a small network of innovators and it relates to some of what I have said. They really need to figure out how to create these innovative things that they are willing to jump in and trying to take a risk and connect it to what they call the content standards that -- the things that are out there. And once you give them a lot of support with all these innovative platforms and a very comprehensive curriculum that we have on step-by-step, how to use it, and you match it with where they are, they really adopt it. And they are willing to come to, with exceptions and virtual tutorials on how -- so for those of you who are innovating and trying to create communities, I think the more you create tutorials for them so they have the answer for their system, the more loyal they will become. That's my experience. MS. FLEMAL: I love the idea of connecting teachers, because so many teachers are isolated in their classrooms, whether they are, for us our home-schooling teachers, who are very isolated in different homes. But also the teachers in the classrooms often are in that room all day and the only place they see other teachers is in the faculty room and some teachers don't even go to faculty rooms. So, they would be open to that life sharing; there's got a lot of release time to teachers to be able to share. So, the opportunity to do that in a platform such as that would be a wonderful thing. You really have the opportunity -- I think from the outside, there is this imagination that teachers share a lot more than they do. So the opportunity to do that tenfold magnifies the learning that teachers can continue to do that as they continue their career. MR. WILEY: I want to say a thing or two about the Open High School in Utah. And we talked a little bit this morning about ways we're using technology. Open High School of Utah is an open charter school. And in our charter, we committed ourselves to exclusively using open educational resources. So, in terms of teachers sharing items as opposed to sharing lesson plans and resources, we've done a complete textbook replacement, all the material on everything you need to run the course is what we're providing with open source for everyone. So, working in a manner that's not dissimilar from the University of the People, we're going around and finding material, aggregating, state standards, building standards identifying, matching, building content, putting that together. And also, I have a mission, not to scale our individual school out to the world; but when there's a completely open curriculum available and a charter application documents and budgets and things are available, other people just pick up and start these schools. We don't have to be involved and the curriculum is free, things like that. In addition to the personalization and the individualization I was talking about earlier today, the point of open source. MR. BURNHAM: Dave brings us back to what the theme was for the last hour, which we didn't really touch on, which is the relationship between everything that we have talked about and where we are today. And by putting the template out there, it is going to create a vehicle that will allow us to begin to influence the current educational system. There will be leakage that we talked about and people educating themselves, many of the tools we have talked about. I would like to put Chris on the spot here for a second. If there is another vehicle that we might be able to use. Chris is the architect of Obama's "My Obama" website, and that was a very effective political advocacy vehicle. And the question is, If you think about the Web as a platform, is there any way of creating a credible and effective political advocacy towards trying to address the failures of the current educational system? MR. HUGHES: I think it's interesting, listening to the conversation, particularly the second-half of it. I think essentially what we're talking about here, this service market online which happens to be in context of education, because that's what a lot of people here specialize in. And there are good examples of people starting to solve the problem. So, that is one piece of a much broader market of different people who have different services and you can frame that as education or any other services that someone is trying to provide. So, I feel like that's the direction things are going in. But if that doesn't deconverge, then I think that, the question you are asking about political organizing, or whether or not that has an implications for it -- I think it does, but it requires a sort of a historical, cultural moment when people realize when things are broken. And that's a question that I don't know when it comes to education. It seems to me pretty clear that the way that kids are still being taught these days, and the fact that there's a computer that's over there in the corner of the classroom, but that's only the extent to which technology may play a role, it sort of seems like it is broken to me. And I feel like, as more and more people understand that something isn't right, that we are using technology all throughout the day but our students aren't using it on a hands on way in the classroom; then it opens up a real opportunity for starting integrating office tools that people are starting to develop now, actually in the classroom, in students' hands. MR. WENGER: Could you build a novel item community of events as part of the question that brings this dialogue, takes this kind of dialogue and makes it -- a more actual change function? MR. BURNHAM: The school board is the issue right here, that's the mechanism. And the politics of the school board, and you were very clever in figuring out how to create advocacy for national politics -- but is there some way that these issues to the degree that parents have more direct access to a conversation about the issues and that could be used to create leverage, to create change? MR. HUGHES: Yes. I think we can create that infrastructure and people would use it. I don't think it's enough. Until there's a cultural movement, until it's understood in a broader content that our schools aren't working. I think that people are disappointed, but I think it's very different when -- I think that's really required for any type of real organizing infrastructure to matter. But as far as whether or not you could create it, unless people care about it, I'm not sure of that. MR. JARVIS: Will it ever come? Fred was proposing the revolution of the importance of home-schooling. You're saying, and I think it's right, unless there's enough of a movement, the rest doesn't matter. Are we ever going to get there or? MR. CAULFIELD: I think ultimately, the first drop to fall is going to be cost -- if you look even at open access political movements where some inroads are being made as, Hey, we paid for this research, open up this research. And I think that's -- if you're looking for -- like this is a niche crowd. We want to change education in terms of what it does. But I think the broader movement that we're going to see is -- people talk about the tuition bubble, and we're really up against the upper bound of being able to do this at all at the price that we're hitting. I think as that bubble bursts, the important thing is there are numerous ways to address the expense of education and some of them are detrimental to how education is done. And some of them create opportunities for a better education. I think the real challenge is going to be -- as we start to bump up against that cost, especially in hard economic times, how do we steer that? And there's some models around the world in terms of government involvement with open resources, sharing, things like that, that we could emulate. But there are also the ways of political camp, just slash it, just remove, keep the system the same, just remove a bunch of pieces. MS. BOYD: One of the things -- I was reading about the history of education in the U.S., And It's funny how downturns in the economy always involve upturns in what happen in schools, and we get more motivated and more directed about it. And we're seeing it in terms of energy about people thinking of teaching as a stable, reasonable job and all sorts of things. MR. JARVIS: Our applications are up 40 percent. MR. CAULFIELD: For example, in open courseware, one of the opportunities here, I think, is that you have a lot of state universities. You have a lot of people in state universities on taxpayer dollars who are creating curriculum. And so, there is a question there, if we are paying the bills that -- those curricula, and we could more broadly disseminate it and educate more people for less, then -- MS. BOYD: Can we actually explicitly target the places where things are cracking the worst? We're seeing these two different ruptures happening simultaneously. It's super intensive, it's so local, there are so many different effects. So, can things specifically go after an ideal test that... For example, you're watching California's state budget not balance. So, is there a way in which you actually come in and use as an ideal intervention point around community colleges, around schools or -- MR. CAULFIELD: I think that's kind of what David is doing -- it's on a state-by-state level. Eventually, some state -- because I don't think it could be on the school board level, I don't think it's going to happen in K-12 because it's 9,000 institutions. So, you can't do it on the K-12 level. But on the state college level or on the state charter school level, on the state level things, if there is a successful model and it's done below cost, I think that's where it is going to happen. And if someone proposed something in California right now, yes, that might be a perfect example. MR. WILEY: In the State of Utah, I can tell you, if we got this curriculum rolled out. And the kids will get it this fall and are going to make a YP at the end of the year. The next summer, there's conversations about what to do with the textbooks we have to replace and with the money supposed to be spent on curriculum? And there's a completely open source curriculum, and we can show kids YP when they use it. It kind of forces a lot of really interesting conversations and that is a very strong secondary goal. Obviously, after the goal of the kids in school -- MR. WENGER: The curriculum development, is that open course already as well in -- can people contribute to that already? MR. WILEY: The way you can contribute right now, you help us fill the bag. We're currently trying to identify all the resources there and the state standard for writing. And that's what we are doing right now. People can contribute to that. MR. WENGER: That in and of itself is an open process . MR. RESNICK: I think it's still be -- a greater effort to understand the real problems and challenges of education. We're looking at three things to talk about, we observe three priorities of health care, energy and education. I do think, my sense as a general consensus of the public, is they recognize that healthcare as a crisis, energy is in crisis. I don't think there's as much of an understanding of what this group has that education needs to be hacked. Somehow there has to be a better education, to help us understand the billing challenges. MR. WILSON: Maybe not. Because when the government goes about hacking something, we are all toast. (Laughter.) MR. RESNICK: The government doesn't have to hack it, but -- MR. WILSON: I think we have to put the government out of education business. If we could bankrupt those schools in that system, and create something that's better, then we can beat it. That's what happens when hacking -- MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: I don't agree. MR. GORDON: We need the eight-year old vote. MR. WILEY: Buckminster Fuller says you can't make the existing reality obsolete. I think there's something new that makes the existing reality obsolete. MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: I really would like to argue that you can -- also, in fact, the revolution and state of the revolution from within that existing system and build models that really force them to change from within. And, otherwise, you will not get funded. To fund education, because you don't fund that. MR. WILSON: I don't want to fund that. I want to fund these kinds of people. MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: Exactly. But you don't, not yet. (Laughter.) MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: So, we will be delighted to actually form a good strategy to how things like this can get funded. But right now, the way the funding goes to solve the crisis, especially with this population that Dana was pointing towards, those that are really in a crisis and also the places where they are in a crisis and the ability to fund it. I think you have to reach people in the school system because -- they don't have Starbucks in their neighborhood. They have just a school with high speed Internet and maybe a library with high speed Internet. Most of them have dial-up, if at all, at home. And if we really want to reach them and get that funded, you have to figure out that open source participation from outside of the community to contribute to those disadvantaged communities. And I think that's a way of thinking about it, that you cannot really just say "trash government." Because government right now, they have a lot of money. They may not tell us what to do, but if we approach it right, we can take little pieces of the fact that the $7 billion into wiring the state. And what will we do with this? MR. BURNHAM: Both extremes are -- MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: I'm not extreme. MR. BURNHAM: You're not extreme. Fred's taking a extreme position. But I think what David said, it's a really interesting point and that is that we can force change by just showing them the raw economics of alternatives, in a situation where economics are real and meaningful and there's not a lot to go around. And that's probably the moment that Chris is talking about. It may not be a public perception moment, but in those individual decisions, if we can get a great example out there where you can do this more efficiently. There's a problem with the notion that we are going to fund the solution to this problem, and that is that what was what Bing talked about earlier which is the zero marginal cost implementation. If David is right, then what it is going to do ideally is drive down the cost of education for everybody in a way that maybe diminishes the opportunity for investment in that space. But that's a problem for us. MR. WILSON: Craig's List is in the classified business. That's the opportunity for us. MR. KALIN: It's a $6 billion year industry, the textbook industry. If you could get a fifth of that, you'd be in pretty good shape. MR. HEIFERMAN: I don't know anything about education or schools. I recognize seeing through the years, in the past 15 years, every sort of big, big industry or big part of the world that you really couldn't hack it, that -- like, who would have really thought that YouTube would be where it is relative to TV networks? Or Craig's List to newspapers? I think that the idea of things bubbling up have -- seems crazy and farfetched and -- they don't really cease to surprise. My favorite Barack Obama line is that, "We are the ones we have been waiting for." And it's a surprise that that comes out of these platforms like Dave's and Paul's -- and what I've experienced at meet-ups is -- never thought that it was a platform for education, but in fact, what -- that's sort of the base function that is actually providing with -- all the people are going to entrepreneur meet-sup, small business meet-up, whether, you know, language meet-ups and moms' meet-ups. They want to learn about entrepreneurship or -- some of these women say they learned how to potty-train their kids at the moms' meet-up. So, this is not necessarily a market-based model, like there's a transaction of I'm going to teach it, I'm going to learn it. That model is great, but it's just a classic history of the human idea of it taking a village or just people learning in the context of the community. So, it's a long way of trying to say that, I think, is the decentralized, emergent systems and behaviors. They can hack at a big system -- now, maybe that's in 20 years. Does that fit -- I'm with Fred. I would look at things 10, 20 years from now, and I think there would be some seismic shifts and we -- MR. SACKLER: I think this is important, right now, with government-run monopolies, we get to the very different beast of diving into private enterprise for socioeconomic -- MR. KALIN: Because you're looking at education, looking at learning, and the government can't have a monopoly on learning. MR. HEIFERMAN: No, they don't. But they have a monopoly on kids' time and it's a trillion dollars a year spent across the country. So, I think there is a role for political action to organize, none of which was talked about these sessions, which is very critical if we're really going to connect. Because it's $500 billion a year run through that monopoly which is politically-driven, not marketplace-driven. And if we're really going to impact it, we're going to have to act pretty good at starting to nibble away at that -- MS. RHOTEN: I think it's also a matter of getting examples out there which are demonstrative. Right now a lot of what we're talking about, TeachStreet has come up, and all these different things come up. We can't yet demonstrate a lot of the ideas, which are important. I guess I fundamentally believe in. But I think part of our challenge -- MR. GRODD: I would posit that the biggest problem facing K-12 right now is human capital. It is talent, and it's not a great thing to talk about. But having spent a lot of time in the system and those who have -- there is a big issue with the fact that the talent pool is not deep. And I'm not talking about teachers, I'm talking about principals, administrators, policy people. People making a decision -- the most important decisions -- in fact, our students, are not necessarily people you would hire, and that's the reality. And until we -- MR. BURNHAM: Is that in part because it's not an inspiring place to work? MR. GRODD: It's because the incentives aren't there. My buddies graduated from good schools, go to McKenzie, because it's prestige. Like, who wants to go -- the reason I taught for Teach For America, because that gave me a prestigious way to become a teacher, probably I wouldn't have had it not been for Teach For America. So, what Teach For America is doing -- there are few other places. What they're doing is figuring out a way to get ambitious, creative, innovative thinkers into K-12. MR. WILEY: What is the stay rate? MR. GRODD: It is high, 60 percent. SPEAKER: Up to what period? MR. JARVIS: For two years. MS. FLEMAL: Teachers are underpaid. The teachers coming to us are -- mainly teachers who don't like being in the system. And the teachers who are staying are largely underpaid. They are staying because they are tenured and they have protection. So, when -- MR. WENGER: When you tie all of these things together, the questions are: Is the existing system so badly broken that the time and effort spent on it -- we've got to figure out a way to get young people to start teaching in the schools that are not working. It's where we should be spending our time or -- we can be spending our time completely hacking the system by building new structures on the side, either in the completely unregulated model of the School of Everything, or TeachStreet, or in the sort of shorter model of radically different charter -- MS. BOYD: Again, it's a matter of timing. I go back to the fact that the economy is crap right now. You have an opportunity to actually do a high-prestige, high-status shift within the talent pool. And this even happened with the tech bubble. If you look at what happened when the bust happened, unbelievable numbers of people in the tech industry went into teaching math and computer science at the high school level, and it actually speeds the ramped-up CS at the high school level because it was like all of this talent would be like, Now I'm going to do something I can give back, right. But whatever that narrative is that you can leverage. So, I think that there's social service -- I think that we give them that -- this organization is your investment. In trying to hack education at a different level, it makes sense, but there's that collective -- there's so many people in this room. We have to go both directions. And I do think we have to actually have to work to think about that talent pool and to think about a way, in the society -- that we reach into the narrative around it. It's driving me crazy about it all. When women went to work outside of the nursing and the teaching world, it basically was an escape where you try to get out of education. So, the gender politicking that happened in the 1970s around education meant that we lost the prestige of education in a whole different way that we don't really like to talk about. And now we finally have a whole different gender dynamic in the workforce. We now rethink the way traditional women's work and how nurses and teachers and a whole variety of traditional women's work are now considered low prestige, even though they were always high prestige when they were a women's only thing. And so, there is that cultural reworking that has to happen. And now is the time to do that at the same time as a sort of hacking culture. MR. BISCHKE: I think your point about talent, I think that's an interesting story... There's a company in Korea called... Study. And what they do is, they're one of the... schools industry in Korea, but their top teachers currently make over a million dollars a year. They sell out sports stadiums -- it's called "Megastudy." And they sell out sports stadiums. Ten thousand people will come and they'll watch these rock star English teachers. And I think that one of the things that we like to think about is, How do you turn teachers into rock stars? How do you give them the attention, the appreciation that a Mick Jagger, a Tiger Woods -- and it sounds ridiculous right now, but there're starting to be examples of that. And then what happens is that a kid in Korea grows up and sees that teacher on a billboard when he's driving on the freeway in Korea, and he says, "I want to be like that guy someday, I want to be like that girl someday." MR. WILSON: Jimmy is gone, but he told me he's got one guy who teaches a CFA course that sells out every -- there's a waiting -- there's a queue to get into that guy's class. It's like 600 people sitting, you know, in an online education platform watching this guy teach, and he's a rock star. He makes a lot of money. Because -- and I think the reasons why education -- hacking education is not going to be any harder than hacking media business... it's about information, it's about talent, it's about getting... out there. I think you can actually infect the school system from within, from things like better lessons. When you start putting the power in the hands of the teachers, start collaborating around lesson plans, and you start to create teachers who are stars because they make the best lesson plans. All of a sudden they say, "Hey, you know what, I'm a star." And then they're going to start doing whatever stars in the media business do. They say, Screw you, school, I'm a star. I'm getting paid. MR. JARVIS: Bob, Teri and I talked once about that, that when you have those stars -- what role was there for him. We talked about it, a virtual distributed Cambridge model. He had a lecturer and a tutor. And to build on top of that is that at a local level, you have the tutor who will work one-on-one with the big-star lecturer. And there's a new economic structure that allows the stars to support -- because they have wide distribution; and the tutor to support, because they have a different relationship with the community. MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: And also the trick is when you have a star teacher, it can also be dangerous because the revolution could actually make it contagious for other teachers in the same school, for the tipping point to really happen. So, you have to create an infrastructure that really allows it to be legislative. There are simple things where you don't even think about -- a course number, I want to do this Globaloria thing; right? What is the course number that will officially allow me to do this as part of what I need to cover? And then these teachers show that, the star quality of figuring it out, and then you right away have to put five more teachers in the same school, in the same star atmosphere so, they would all succeed. Because one star teacher in school will not create the tipping point... So, there is a system out there and it worked. The model that worked about it, that -- it also, all the time, has to be working with the legislature at the top, whether through funding, through really giving it the credit that it can work in a system and transform. And also from the bottom, the students has to succeed, show up, attend, get good grades, perform really well. More teachers than one want to do it if everybody wants to engage students, and it all works together like that. So, that star thing is complicated, much more complicated than you think. THE SPEAKER: You said that rock star teacher had made a lot of money. There's really no incentive for teachers to be rock stars, again, because -- there is no incentive because teachers get the same amount of money. MR. WILSON: My point is, Jim's business is professional education; right? So, that teacher is in the free market system and is very valuable. And he makes Kaplan a lot of money and he makes himself a lot of money, and that's an open marketplace model. I don't think we will reinvent education without getting rid of this monopolistic system where teachers are undervalued and good teachers get paid the same as bad teachers. THE SPEAKER: And that's my point. MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: By the way, one thing that we do, practically stipend all of the teachers that work with us. MS. SEGGERMAN: You didn't have hundreds applications for fabulous teachers for your school? Why do you think that was? A lot of people are pointing out there are not good teachers around. MS. SALEN: Because I think there's a lot of amazing teachers out there. I think there's a lot of amazing teachers stuck within systems that don't let them be amazing teachers. And I think if we provide opportunities for those teachers -- that may be online spaces, that may be new kinds of schools -- I think they are out there. One thing that I -- I think we are still stuck in this model that school is the only -- we're trying to stuff all of the learning back in school. I think we need to take the pressure off the school and sort of re-imagine, Well, what do schools do well, because they've been charged with doing so much. Can we take some of it out of the schools, distribute it in the places where it is actually done better and, again, allow the learning to happen in most places? Because we can't fix the school by keeping it, charging it with all that it's still doing. It's busted. It simply cannot support all of our expectations about what has to happen there. So, I think if we can figure out -- we can figure it out, lighten the load, that might help, and provide market opportunities for these other kinds of innovations to begin to happen. MR. O'DONNELL: It's feature creep. MS. SALEN: Feature creep. Well, it's got to do with what Diane had said earlier -- in the early part of the century, there was this configuration between home, church and school. And it was understood that kids learned in those three different places and it was really clear what was learned in each of those three places. And over time, the Web infrastructure between those things split and all of it got stuck back in the school. And so, it is too much. Yeah, the features creeped into one space. So, yes. MS. RHOTEN: The schools got burdened with all of the responsibilities that were once in a distributed set of institutions, and then they got retrenched. And so, they're burdened with all of the big responsibilities but not endowed with money to provide... we lost arts, we lost vocational. And so, it's been shifted off, ideally, to these other institutions who are struggling. I looked at -- in this case of New York, very, very hard to compliment and augment what happens in the school. And simple things, whether it's a virtual environment, they're finding they can't get to the firewall in school, can't augment... can't get standards in a way that makes the chancellor happy; those problems, we are trying to rebuild that network. That's the place. We'll try to -- MR. WENGER: I want to go back to John's comment on that. One of the key leverage points would be to have more opportunities for alternative systems to evolve. So, if there is one political thing that could happen, it is the political thing that lets more people create the ultimate realities of schools more rapidly. MR. WILEY: The charter movement is one area? THE SPEAKER: Well, it would be one. But I think in the same way that the Internet itself, as a collection of pipes and protocols, provide free, relatively low-risk places to experiment as an infrastructure, I think -- one of the reasons we're doing this in open high schools is because it feels like free educational content is an important piece of infrastructure around which these later educational innovations can happen. They're always paying for this per kid every year, leasing access to it, renting access from ...com or whoever. Starting something like this is very expensive and there's a great cost and risk there. So, content, I think, is one of the most important pieces of infrastructure that needs to be freely available to allow other these other innovations to happen. MR. CAULFIELD: The content conversation get contentious, but it's important to note that if you look at areas like the textbook industry, there have been places where free market solutions, albeit run through government-run schools, have been just remarkably inefficient. The inefficiency of when you consider what is needed out of a textbook, K through 12, even at college level -- and how much money has to go into actually providing to these kids textbooks -- it is kind of staggering. So, you start to look at things like, in California, there is a group of community colleges that are getting together. They're trying to put together a set of open textbooks that can be shared among community colleges. I think it comes down to this idea of having this common infrastructure that's available to anybody that wants to set up shop and teach. But I think where the effort really should be put into is developing this infrastructure, whether it's physical infrastructure or whether it's information infrastructure. So that, if someone wants to set up shop and teach, or if a institution wants to transform how they teach, they can pool through a common pool, and it's not this rival pool which is creating this unnecessary expense and these unnecessary permutations of textbooks and so forth. Obviously, I'm biased here, being from Open Coursework Consortium. But if I was going to pick out a place where I think we could have a lot of effect, it is in providing common sets of materials open to everybody. They either approach zero cost or are free through subsidization of government, in some way approach through one of those -- MR. RESHEF: Content is expensive. However, when you look at the cost of education, this is not the most expensive thing. What I'm saying is that lowering it, that says thank you, because you're enabling me to use this free. This is very important. But the main cost is the people, mostly teachers and the administration and the building. Now, if you want to save, you really need to save on these. I think that looking at teachers, there may be -- having less teachers, maybe using the Internet more, maybe in the classroom actually -- people that cost you less but are more effective in doing other things than teaching the student, I don't know, different ways to look at it, that's the way to lower the expenses. MR. CAULFIELD: My point is kind of along the lines of what you're saying. If you open up to everybody that base level infrastructure much as of a courseware is available to people that want to try different models with it, then you can have experimentation with those different models on top of that. And the experimentation, you're right, the cost that you save by making the content freely available is not necessarily your big savings. But by enabling people to try different models on top of that content, that's where you're going to get the experimentation, that's where you're going to get, I think, the new ideas in the real -- in the hacking. But you need that first level because, again, obviously, if everybody had to come in from the ground floor, build this up -- some people around here have done that, but I'm sure those people will tell you it's very expensive and very challenging. You could make it less challenging by building a common pool of resources. MR. WILSON: Diana, what do you mean by Text Shop model? MS. RHOTEN: Are you familiar with Text Shop? I'm a huge, huge fan of Text Shop and I feel like it's optimized for the downturn in the economy, frankly. Text Shop is actually a for-profit model, it's classified as a retail model. But it's essentially a storefront place and you go in and it's a maker's shop, essentially -- you can go in and you can build anything, whether it's building up wood or building up metal -- MR. RESNICK: For fabrication purposes, you go in and make -- you rent materials and that should be a better maker. I think with other people as well, it's not just the tools. MS. RHOTEN: It's not as real, but knowing about Text Shop and a line of advocating it in everywhere I go. It is not -- it's really thinking hard about the community aspect of it. So, it's not just putting... into that space, but thinking hard about courses, why they have the courses, who teaches the class, who gets to teach what. It's perfect... on Teach Street and people are signing up. It's incredibly empowering -- MR. BURNHAM: But there are online companions to the space? MS. RHOTEN: We're working on the -- MR. SCHAPPELL: I never heard of Text Shop. We have a knitting store that a friend opened. I said, how will this work? And she has a bunch of big sewing machines and tables and fabrics. The place is packed. It's called Stitches, in Seattle. And it's one of those like, "oh, you're going to fail." To "oh, my gosh, it's just happening with all these people, a huge online community that are saying, I don't think -- I'm thinking Text Shop, that would be awesome. At the moment, you have to sign a waiver before you let me on the chain saw. MS. RHOTEN: Your point is good. We're having a meeting this spring to think exactly how to -- we're trying to help Text Shop from a variety of angles. To bring in the legislators, to understand Text Shop's economic development innovation. To bring in stimulus dollars. MR. WILSON: To teach or make stuff? MS. RHOTEN: Yes. MR. HEIFERMAN: How can we move further? You know, Jeff and I are having second thoughts. MS. RHOTEN: I just wanted to add we're trying to getting the policy level, but we're also really thinking about how do we build a virtual aspect of communities. And Text Shop, should it go, should it be successful. Well, eventually, a network of a different types of... MR. HEIFERMAN: Jeff and I talked for a couple of hours, but the question of using dead retail space for a new network of organizing centers -- an entrepreurial effort, it can be like, you know, new schools. I see that. The number one problem -- there's been two million meet-ups. The number one problem is the space, space surveys. Starbucks won't cut the open basement, the church won't cut it. Real good surveys are a group of not three, four or five, but kind of 10 to 20 people. Like I said, how much did this space cost? Can a group of parents that care about coming together and making their school better, just rent this space? Space simply doesn't exist out there. MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: In New York, it's very hard. But yesterday, I was in Winston-Salem and in Greensboro and High Point. These are places that are empty, no tobacco, no wood, no furniture, no textile; huge spaces are available, waiting. MR. HEIFERMAN: They are padlocked. MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: They're just waiting for economic development at this time. MR. JARVIS: We have the River Rouge of Starbucks, you know, the world's largest. But it's probably also that need a new second place; right? People leave offices and jobs, they need a new second place and there's a business there. And Starbucks is good at coffee and mediocre at space. You have the inverse of that. MR. RESNICK: The school buildings should be community centers, but there are all these rules and regulations. MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: There's also factories. MR. JARVIS: Google would create a platform -- thank you for the plug. Google would create a platform that would treat it as a platform where you can create business on top of this, the space maybe. And then discussion on Twitter while other people from the outside say that the space should be free. But if you want to reserve the space, it would cost you. If you want the broadband, it would cost you. If you want the social services, there are maybe ways to make a good business of this. I think, Fred, we will be putting it before we know it. MR. SHEFRIN: There's a start up in Seattle. They're building a platform including 50 others just like that. But they're creating a platform for people to list their rooms. The companies can list their conference rooms, they have somebody to manage them. You can choose to have overhead projectors, coffee, any amounts that -- you basically -- MR. HEIFERMAN: If anyone wants to develop that business as a retail developer, we'll license the name. MR. WILSON: You know, Rob, you have done this right now. You did this with Etsy's offices in Brooklyn. And then you did it again in Red Hook, where you actually put in saws and -- MR. KALIN: It's a 9,000 foot work space, but a space to make stuff isn't enough...how to make a living. And education isn't available in Text Shop... through board here. There's a huge space in Brooklyn, they have something -- What I'm trying to do is create what I call Parachute, there's thousands of Parachutes around the country... with a name in it. And the stuff made by the Parachute, you have a little Parachute icon and a number. You can go to Parachute and look at number of it, see where, what, you bought the name. This shirt has a little Parachute in the back and 101. But each one of these Parachutes can have a variety of resources. You can have this studio space or it can have sewing machines. You can have Text Shop. And it all gets listed in the directory. But I've found landlords who were interested in giving free, low rent for these large spaces. And I know three such landlords. One who owns half of Kingston. What are you buying... in upstate New York. And they want to economically revitalize these towns by putting these Parachutes in them. That's one of the group of projects I'm playing on. There's a huge demand for it. So, the demand for the education side, this is as much about learning how to make stuff and learning how to make a living. Its like the aphorism, give a man a fish and you'll feed him for a day; but teach him how to fish, and he'll have fish for a lifetime. We've got to teach them how to sell fish so they can -- (Laughter.) MR. RESNICK: And when the lake dries up, teach them how to do something else, as well. MR. CAULFIELD: And teach those people how to fish. MR. KALIN: Teach them how to teach other people how to fish. There's more to life than eating and fishing. (Laughter.) MR. GRODD: I'll say one thing about the monopoly issue. I think that is the fundamental issue, sort of the detriment to creating a good school culture in K through 12. And I think a good school culture is key to the teachings and learning. And so, I think the only way to hack the monopoly is through competitions and creating good schools and giving parents a choice. So, the charter movement -- and I think the charter school is doing a lot of good stuff. Whether or not it can scale it is a good question. I'm not convinced that it can. MR. WILSON: Stop there. You can't scale because there's not enough charters out there or there's not enough people? MR. GRODD: There are the schools that get a lot of press, sort of these incredible schools with really high student achievement, based on standardized tests, in the narrowest sense of the term. Is the system there in place which you can tell the system, but it's the people implementing the system. You will find people like me, 20 something, Ivy League. MR. KALIN: But that's the old system. If you reinvent it to what Dave Wiley is saying -- that human capital problem, and you will be able to scale. MR. GRODD: I'm talking about my current charter. MR. BURNHAM: What Rob is saying is that -- well, I don't know what Rob is saying. (Laughter.) MR. BURNHAM: The point is that if you create an environment that's an inspiring place to work, that's attracted to a 20 something from an an Ivy League, where it's a meaningful way to invest your life and not become a drone in the bureaucracy where there's a lot of uninspiring people surrounding you, then there's a real chance that you'll solve that human capital problem, as well. MR. HEIFERMAN: It's how do you appeal to the 98 percent of college graduates who are not graduating from Ivy League schools and turning them into great teachers by letting the best practices emerge through systems like Alex's? And in general, my take from Fred's point was the rock star. The rock star teacher isn't about teaching at Yankee Stadium like the story over here and making a million bucks. It's about having their reputation in the teaching world be the rock star, because people are using their lesson plan, using their -- MR. GRODD: We are trying to do that without a platform to do it, but we're arguing that. I think charter schoolss, the reason I don't think their current scalable in the current form because is they're currently driven by 20 something, Ivy League types for two for three years. MR. SACKLER: And so, High Tech High is a 2,000-seat school as an extension of their program. It's going to be an interesting experiment. MR. WILSON: I think if we're going to do political advocacy, I think we should try to make it legal for kids to opt out of classes in the public school system that suck, and take the classes online instead and be able to get credit for that. In that way, my kids would opt out -- either you send a kid to the private school or the public school, you can't opt out on a class by class basis. MR. JARVIS: That's the voucher system. MS. SALEN: That is happening. There's a school, a public high school called the I School opening this fall. And that's their model, that kids are able to take online courses as part of their course work. So, that, I don't think that is a dream, that's a reality. That's happening now. MR. WILEY: In Utah, at our charter school, we're not allowed to require students to attend more than three-quarters time. They can use the rest of that time to take online classes or to go to a second school -- MR. WILSON: And they can get credit for online classes? MR. WILEY: Yes. MR. WILSON: I don't think that exists in New York. MS. SALEN: It is. The high school does. MS. FLEMAL: The teacher is intrinsically rewarding or somehow recognized or somehow empowering for you. And typically what happens, and this is a story I hear over and over when I'm interviewing teachers for the private jobs, is, "I'm a good teacher, I do a great job, and what happens? I get all the difficult cases put into my classroom. I get all the tough kids. I have got 30 kids now in my classroom and 25 of them are the problem kids. After three or four or five years, I'm beaten down, I can't handle it anymore." So the best teachers are the ones that get all the problem kids, and the least capable teachers are the ones who don't. Those teachers aren't being rewarded. Whatever you want to call "being rewarded," whether it's a pat on the back, whether it's a showcase, whatever the reward is, theyre not getting rewarded. MR. KALIN: The system that does succeed, the system that is the dominant system in 20 years, is going to be one that solves the hum capital problem. When it create more teachers, it will be a successful system. MR. GORDON: I disagree. Here is why I disagree. I'm going to disagree with numbers rather than adjectives and tone of voice. I would submit that an independent school of 15 kids per class costs $30,000 a year tuition with the capital cost of the school for free. If you build in the capital cost of the school and depreciate it over 30 years and you put in the outside cost, I would submit a kid going to an independent high school in a city costs $60,000 a year. And those kids, about a third of the teachers that they get are not good enough. So, you can get a third of the teachers who are kind of public-school-quality teacher for 60 grand a year all in, and the public schools, not including the cost of -- they don't include the capital cost of the buildings, which they should, because most public school districts should be selling buildings now, in my opinion. But $60,000, we need to get it to $5,000 a year to scale. MR. KALIN: You're thinking inside the current system. MR. GORDON: No, not quite. I'm saying, if you decide to do it with people and you go to a school where there is one adult for every six kids, that costs $60,000 a year, fully loaded. MR. KALIN: If the teachers doing nothing but teaching those kids. MR. GORDON: No, if there's six adults per student. THE SPEAKER: But that's not a necessary number. MR. GORDON: Okay. Well, if you do any kind of ways. So, yes. So, take it to 15 -- so, you can take it to 30, I would submit. So, take it to some number. You could take it to one, it's $250,000. If you take it 50, then it's $5,000 plus the cost of the -- So, to try to argue the numbers, I'm saying I know really well independent school -- MR. KALIN: The music industry's kind of a way on how much to record an album when, people didn't have laptops, they could record at home. MR. GORDON: I'm sorry. Try to talk with numbers. I'm trying to take it with numbers. MR. BURNHAM: Well, the way Rob -- the disagreement here is, one is facilities-based and one is not facilities-based. MR. GORDON: Facilities plus materials plus people; if you pay the people. So, we need to get it to $5,000. MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: Why five? MR. GORDON: Because that's the number -- I think that's the number that the State of California thinks they pay on average out-of-pocket per student; 5 to $6,000. So, pick a number or take -- who knows how many students are per year -- MR. JARVIS: Who says we have classes the way we have? MR. GORDON: That's not the point to all of this. MR. JARVIS: Where the cost can come way down, where the rock star teacher can teach thousands with minimal support and get better education out there; and the support comes from fellow students and you get radically new models, they're supported by frameworks to do things that reduce the cost way down and make maybe a lot of the space irrelevant. MR. GORDON: Perfect. MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: But there's always professional development. MR. GORDON: We need to get the full cost per person, about $5,000 of the US GNP that can't afford arbitrage. MR. JARVIS: We may arbitrage that. MS. ALLEN: Why don't we just have -- why does space return in the conversation? Because you're right. Everybody is talking about the concept of space for the last 15 minutes, it's how important it is. MR. JARVIS: Open and flexible space that people can use in various ways, that you can hold a class at any way. You don't necessarily -- the community doesn't have to own -- MR. BISCHKE: I think there's some courses that drive the cost way down. One of my friends runs a site called Grocket, which is a benchmark company, and they're focused on students to learn. So, it's a game you play alongside other people. When you get the question all right, the game moves on to the next question. When one person gets the question wrong, the game stops. Everybody discusses amongst each other without knowing what the right answer is, what the learning concepts are. Now, that's something where there's so much knowledge locked up in student's heads that as we develop systems and software to allow students to teach each other, you can drop the cost way down. MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: But I think the cost of virtual, even virtually nonphysical professional development and training for and innovation, when you have to take -- all the range, from not very qualified or talented to the most talented and faster learner type of instructors or teachers to really scale is the largest cost. You said "people," but I don't know if you meant that. Even if you run a one hour once a week session for people to come and learn how to teach and learn in a new way in the system, even if they don't end up in a physical space; that's from my analysis of budget in the last three years when we were running Globaloria, is the largest cost item. MR. KALIN: On the people side, why don't you just require as a requirement to graduate high school, you have to teach other people. You show that you've learned best when you're teaching something to other people. So, just require high school students to teach -- MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: The thesis on teaching, on learning by teaching, but to teach daily, a two-hour workshop, tech shop style that we're talking about, where you really create a year or two-year or three-year program when you start as a beginner, you advance to the next story. In fact, the programmatic way, it's not something people just do. They may be very good at it but they always need some training and that training still costs money even if it's not physical or virtual. And you have to consider that in your numbers when you think about your very creative idea. MR. BISCHKE: I have a cousin with seven kids who home schools them. It's like, the 15-year-old teaches the 13-year-old, who teaches the 11-year-old, who teaches the 9-year-old. Rob's point is right on which is, again, the best way to learn something, to understand something, is to teach it to someone else. And yet, in schools, we don't do that at all. MS. SALEN: Some of your training is simply just -- the student who is teaching you is also training you to teach the next student, so there's some training involved. MR. KALIN: And some people are better teachers. It's also like some people are better learners. MR. JARVIS: I teach a course on entrepreneurial journalism, and a business out of this last term was a structure for teachers and students to share video instructions in Physics because there was a niche. And then the community, if this works and it takes off, will judge the best and worse and easyest and hardest and then you'll have a platform for more. That's one small idea and I'm sure there are others here doing the same thing. The point is that there is a business opportunity in that. My fear is -- I'm on the one hand, I'm jazzed by this, but on the other, I'm profoundly depressed because my son is a Junior and it's almost -- it's too late for him, I fear, and my daughter is 12 years old and I watch her going through the system and I don't know what to do. And I feel like I've made terrible mistake in saying that, yes, son, get good grades because that's why -- because that's what we expect in getting a good college and I'm touring them around right now. And he's a creator, they're both creators and they're being taken away from creation. And I almost feel like Rob would tell me have them drop out tomorrow. My wife would kill you but -- (Laughter.) What I fear here is time, and what I see happening in school boards politically is that while you have the kids in, you care deeply; as soon as your kids are out, that's somebody else's problem. Or while you're out of school some people here care deeply for teaching; but the care factor here, to get the critical mass to make the change, I just fear, is not there yet. What we need in great measure is P.R., is a movement, is writing, is stuff. MR. RESNICK: One model that I like -- citizen schools that started in Boston and other cities as well, where it's using school buildings in having people from the community come and teach specialized workshops at the school, and volunteering, people, architects, participate in workshops after school. And I think it's really getting people who are engaged in expanding the things that they do. They are expanding their role... So, this is not a replacement for school. It can do some the role that Katy was talking about, redefining what the teacher needs to do and what the rest of the community is being part of. And I think the citizen schools' role for new start-ups -- there's also a role right now in the country, pouring out the possibilities for the community services, public service, and a lot... schools for 20 somethings, 30 somethings after work all day at their investing banking firm, law firm and people who still have their job, will spend some time in the community school. That's just one example. But I do think that's an example showing how we can try to reframe who it is doing it -- it's not just the latch teacher, there are other people in the community. But I think you need a whole collection of other ways to engage the whole community in the education effort. MR. LOUGHRIDGE: I think there is a really simple approach that maybe can be hatched here now with some of the folks and their talents -- I'm thinking of Chris -- I know in Hawaii there's enough pain with how the public schools are not working out. I think it's harder to get into a private school in Hawaii than it is to get into Harvard literally. So many people want to get out of that system. But there's a super simple tool, SST, where you can get involved -- it's something that the PTA can use, for maybe a goal setting with teachers and principals. I feel that the tough things that we have now to effect change or problems in accountability and transparency -- and if there is a way to tackle that with a social networking tool that's inclusive versus... Some way to engage teachers and principals locally, school by school, using this tool, where a parent can sit down with the teachers, administrations and say, "This is what we are going to work on; because we have a problem with math in your school or we want to bring in robotics," whatever it is, just be a part of -- MR. HUGHES: I think that's a fine idea. But what I'm more interested in is what tools can actually enter the classroom to make it so that students can learn from other students who are in the same room or halfway across the world; or engage with games that people have begun to create -- How does that integrate with the rest of the curriculum that the teacher or facilitator can be categorized. I think that's where the real paradigm shift is here now, where people can learn from other experts regardless of their age, regardless of their background, and be judged or assessed on what they actually take in or what they put out. I think that's where -- MR. BURNHAM: You have to get into the classroom. I think what we're hearing about -- to answer Jeff's questions about what do you do with your children is, you begin to work around the limitations of the classroom and you find a tutor, and Fred's hired a guy to teach his kids how to code. That's the kind of perspective that you can have when you sit in this room and you have the education that you had and the resources that you have. But I think that to the degree that we can make these resources more broadly acceptable, what Shai is doing, what David is doing and then begin to make parents more aware of them. You can begin to work around that. I think the hardest problem that we have is not whether or not the technology could create real value inside the classroom; the hardest problem is how you get it inside the classroom. MR. KALIN: A million student march. All the students get together and say, We're sick of this education, we don't like it -- MR. BURNHAM: No school administrator ever said that Facebook is now allowed on our campus. (Laughter.) MR. O'DONNELL: In fact, the opposite -- MR. HUGHES: If you give everybody a $200 computer, not just the use of technology but the new structured history lesson around whatever the given topic is... not the major things that we keep talking about, like force kids to, like, interact with and tell me was that truthful, what was actually, you know, bullshit, and actually make all of the decisions and then integrate into some type of creative work letter, say paper or presentation of video or whatever. But I think that's the challenge, it's getting that technology in the classroom and using teachers as being facilitators rather than -- which is a whole paradigm shift from everything else. MR. WENGER: When you think about how much it costs to every student in the United States a net book with full Internet access compared to the cost of the AIG bail out. MR. O'DONNELL: I disagree. I don't think it should be in this classroom at all. The worst thing I've ever done is teach a class in a computer room where everyone is sitting in front of a computer that's connected; because absolutely nobody pays attention, they were just instant messaging with their friends or whatever. I think outside the classroom, especially in situations where you are teaching the kids how to access resources, the content, other students who are learning the same thing, on the off hours, when the teachers might not be able to reach or wait for the teachers to reach them on their own time. Because in the classroom, I think it can be a distraction; but outside, if there is a support systems especially in situations where maybe parents don't know the same language as the kids in the classroom, they don't have the parental support around the education, stuff like that, to be able to access those resources. MR. HUGHES: I understand where you're coming from, and there's a debate raging around the country about whether or not students should be able to have laptops. I think the problem there is just -- you just need to build a software that does real time assessment. So, if you have given a task or given a problem or you're trying to teach a given topic you should be able to know which of your students are actually engaging with that topic or whatever they're doing online. MR. JARVIS: Or at some point it's up to them. At some point they're responsible. MR. HUGHES: I'm talking about younger. MR. JARVIS: Graduate students. MR. HUGHES: Twelve-year-olds who are on Facebook. But maybe you have those different channels where you also see software development so you can assess what -- MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: I think that you don't realize that most public schools don't have computers in the classroom and maybe -- but also they don't have it at home, and to answer your question in this debate, the only way is to really post in a place where teachers are looking, that there is this innovation and what you're looking for teachers to be patient about it and want to do it; and you work with them and then try to advance to get the principals and decision makers and the school. That's what we are doing and it works really, really well; but you really have to make sure that they have the bandwidth, the infrastructure, the computers and everything in order to work with them from within. Once it works, then after a year the school sees that something did happen, they may actually -- whether it's writing for grants or asking for funding to bring more computers, more productivity, but they have to see that that configuration is monitored towards the classroom is happening. And that is happening all around. It's an old trick. And this is -- so far, my knowledge is how innovation spreads in schools. The answer to the question "how did we get it there" is really to identify those teachers. So, not necessarily techie but passionate as to what extra time to make it work and demonstrate because they're excited about doing something new. And that's really how it works so far in the research. MR. GORDON: Fred, to add to your idea about the vouchers. How about the idea of about a $100,000 check to a family who successfully gets a kid a GED home school? Just thanks, and here's a hundred thousand. That would probably create activity. MR. WILSON: Who is funding those $100,000 checks? You and me? MR. GORDON: We already are, Dude. With half a billion dollars we're paying $10,000. MR. WILSON: We're not going to get the government do it; right? They are not going to do it. MR. GORDON: They already are. Instead of doing it by credit, here's the only outcome we care about -- we want the kids in jail until they're 18 or until they're 16, and they're run down jails and we want the GED. That's all we really care about. We don't care is they're smart enough to vote, obviously. We don't care if they understand science, obviously. All we want is a GED and get the government out of it. Sell the jails. MS. ALLEN: A small anecdote on the issue of technology in all schools and to underscore the fact that any conversation on education needs to take a whole bunch of other factors into account, which are pretty absent from our conversations. I've served on a board of the University of Chicago Charter Schools for a number of years. We had to quit because kids were getting attacked. First, we tried school buses so that they didn't have to walk home, but that wasn't enough and it's super expensive. So, it wasn't a sustainable program, just because of various social factors. MS. FLEMAL: I live for technology, but I'm not sure that it is worthwhile putting it into any more classrooms. MR. KALIN: Technology is the software, not the hardware. MS. FLEMAL: And you have to keep updating the technology instructors. What I do is tell kids -- I keep sending people to the Apple store, that's where I send my students. "Go to the Apple store and sit there for free classes and you will get the most up to date instruction." I'm not sure it's worthwhile. MS. SEGGERMAN: I always ask, why does education seem to be the last thing we're going to get a handle on? Technology seems really well used in the corporate sector, in health corporations, the military obviously knows how to do it, politics is starting to totally get it. Why, when most of us are parents, we care about education, why is it that technology and education as a marriage is like the last? MR. WENGER: That may be the perfect way to wind up. I think what they refer to is that the hacking that is taking place is taking place on the outside and that's, I guess, where innovation tends to come from, largely. And the reason, I think, that the school itself is going to be last place it takes place, is it's the system that's the most tightly controlled by lots of different interests; and that slows down innovation because the big system and the innovation doesn't fit inside the existing system and the system changes slowly. MR. SHEFRIN: I think this idea of the inside and the outside is really critical and I think the role of education really is to make a porous wall between those things. That's what schools and education really should be about right now. We're living in a time where we have access to all of those things, and we're moving back and forth. So, what's happening on the outside needs to be able to move in a revolving door and be brought into the inside and back out again. And I really do think that's the role of education. And I also want to say that lots of conversations today were about what's happening in the public schools and also at that level of education. And I think the next teachers, to think about teachers as innovators, innovators as teachers in the relationship, the paradigm between those two things. And what happens all the way through, the next teachers and innovators are the kids in kindergarten right now and the kids that are graduating college right now. And what the continuum is between that whole range I think is critical to be able to understand and to know also that it goes both ways, that it's not just kindergarten up to college, that that learning goes back and forth in a continuum. So, I do really think that the inside, outside -- as the outside becomes more acceptable, things that would happen in the after-school programs and what students and teachers have access to now are easier to fold back in in may ways. What the classroom is, the idea about what the classroom is, is the real question, what is it, where is it, what happens inside and then outside of this and maybe to not be able to think about inside and outside as two separate worlds. So, I think a lot of what needs to be happening in education is that what happens to the students is, they are finding a way to be in the world that's meaningful. And then I think the way we begin to think through these things is what makes that happen and then tell the students to really empower so that what happens is also initiated from them. We have to find a way to do that. MR. WENGER: We have promised more time to talk in smaller groups. I want to thank everybody for being here but I also want to encourage everybody to continue the conversation with the part of the group or on the Wiki or just through connections established today. I think that's how ultimately we will carry out the ultimate hack of education, creativity in all of us. Thank you all. (Time noted: 4:10 p.m.) (Applause.)