************************************ *** Hacking Education Transcript *** *** Part: 3 of 4 *** ************************************ (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...