************************************ *** Hacking Education Transcript *** *** Part: 1 of 4 *** ************************************ 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...