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.
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, Marc Prensky makes this
interesting distinction between digital natives and
digital immigrants I know it's the best distinction. But
the essential idea is if you are 25, you were born
before the digital revolution began. And some of
those people -- not all, but most adults have a
kind of passing relationship with digital culture.
I do myself, and I have started tweeting at the
urging of my kids.
I'm on Twitter and I have a thousand
followers. I can't tell you how great this makes
me feel. These people are interested in what I had
for breakfast.
(Laughter.)
I think that it's a great system
because my kids understand this far better than I
do. But the thing is, these technologies are
transformative, not just economically but
culturally.
So my take on this is that education
has three main purposes. One of them is
economical. There is no doubt in my mind that
education of all sorts has clear and powerful and
essential economic purposes, and any attempt to
transform education has to take account of it.
The problem is that the old economic
model doesn't work and none of us can figure out
how new economic models would fall out. So, that,
to me, puts a premium on innovation and creativity.
We have to think hard about that.
The second big purpose of education is
cultural. Everybody expects education will enable
kids to engage with the culture out of their own
sense of identity, and be part of the culture in
the global sense.
But how do you do that?
The third big part of education is
personal. Education has to focus also on personal
capability and what makes us distinct, as well as
what we have in common. And that, for the moment,
flattens out in the current systems of education.
Because the way in which we're promoting schools is
through standardizing rather than through
personalizing, customizing.
So, I see a vast potential in these new
technologies, not only within the system, but as a
way of creating breakouts in the system, new forms
in formal education.
This book, just very briefly, is based
on the premise that most people haven't discovered
their talents, but many people do. And a part of
education is a different sense of personal growth
and development.
The figures in America are, I think,
15,000 school districts in America. There are
90,000 schools. The dropout rate in public
education is 30 percent. There are growing numbers
of graduates who are unemployed.
And also, among the people who are at
school, there's growing levels of disaffection, not
only among students but among their teachers,
because they find that whole creative process, as
teachers, is being flattened out. And the normal
response in political circles is to demand control
methods.
And the whole point about these
technologies is they are not... control. They are
vernacular, they are grassroots and they are
cross-fertilizing technologies. How you stimulate
those, how you make them grow, is, of course, a big
challenge to the conversation.
But I just wanted to say that I think
that this conversation is not a fringe
conversation, although it's happening on the
fringes of education. I think what we're all here
to talk about today is a process of educational
development which could, I think, create a new
sentiment across the whole system.
But it would take, I think, not only
your knowledge of the technologies, but your being
willing to challenge who you're addressing. Is it
just the kids? Is it the students? Is it the
teachers? Is it the parents?
So, what are the things that you
reflect on your own education, that you have made,
that have held you back? I think it's worth
reflecting on those, in particular the sense of
intelligence.
My point about giving these numbers
about the schools is that when these numbers are
trotted out, it all gives the impression that this
is still a bit like...
My point is, you can't understand
education if you only think statistically. For
every child who drops out of school, for every kid
who doesn't succeed, even though he eventually
does, there is a personal story. Education is
always and inevitably personal. And the great
thing about these technologies is a way of
calibrating the personal involvement in the way
that they never did before.
So, I just wanted to mention the
conversation that we're about to have. I think
it's important, not just for you but the students
that we'll serve. And it could, I think, be a
historic moment in terms of the collaborations
being at least cultivated around the table.
So, I want to -- if I could stay for
this bit, really, is to hang on to the bit in the
middle.
And I just want to end with this.
There was a fantastic booklet a few years ago by a
guy called Peter Brooke. He's a theater director,
if you ever come across it. He wrote a book called
"The Empty Space." And he asked himself this
question. He was concerned most theater and is --
loose entertainment -- it's not invigorating. It's
like a passing time.
His thing is theater as a vibrant,
social and cultural force. So, he also analyzed
what goes wrong with the theater. So, he asked
himself this question. He said, What is the heart
of the theater? What is it? What is this thing we
are talking about? And to get to it, he started
the process of subtraction. He said, "What can you
take away from it and still have it?"
And he said, well, you can take away
the stage. Take away the script. You can take
away the lighting. See what's going on, you take
away the curtains, and you can take away the
building. You can take away all the crew, and you
can certainly take away the director. All of that
is very easy. Take it all out.
The only thing you cannot remove from
theater is an actor in a space and somebody
watching. That's the heart of it. And if either
of those parts is missing, there is no theater.
You need a performer and an audience. Theater is
that relationship.
And he said you should never add
anything to that relationship unless it improves
it. If it gets in the way, if it encumbers it, if
it makes it more difficult, you shouldn't have it.
And that's his problem with theater. Everything is
a distraction from the main business.
And that's, I suppose, what I want to
suggest here, that part of the conversation should
be about what's the heart of education? What is
the irreducible minimum? In public education, I
think we've lost sight of it. The heart of
education is what happens in the hearts and minds
of individual learners. You cannot make anybody
learn anything that they're not interested in
learning, if they don't see and feel the relevance
of it.
And what we've got now in this
industrialized system is a multitude of
distractions from this central purpose. The heart
of it is falling out of it because kids aren't
interested. What we have here is, an opportunity
to really engage kids' imaginations by giving them
education, using these technologies not to get in
the way but to enhance and properly develop --
collaboratively and creatively.
So, I want to thank Albert for the
tremendous conversation. I think it's a really
important one. I want to wish you well. I wish I
could be here longer, but I have another conference
to attend.
Thank you.
(Applause.)
MR. WENGER: So we're going to go home
and work hard on all of those things.
Thank you, Sir Ken.
I raised my hand when Ken asked who is
here who's not from the United States. I'm a U.S.
citizen, but I grew up in Germany. So, I want to
open this up for everybody. What are the goals
worth pursuing? Everybody should jump right in on
that.
MR. KALIN: I was at the economic forum
in Davos. The world is changing. I think it's
created a massive amount of opportunity. And I
started a company four years ago called Etsy.com...
people who make a living making things.
And it's four years now, there are
about 350,000 sellers, 97 percent women. And these
are one to three person businesses for the most
part. And one of the talks in Davos is about how
you would get engaged... Sir Ken said something
and I think this really illuminated how education
is going to change.
He said, people graduating from school
now, their goal should not be to get a job; their
goal should be to create jobs for other people.
And when you look at that type of
entrepreneurialism, now, you can't teach that as a
disciplin because it's inherently
interdisciplinary.
The word "interdisciplinary" is
actually slapstick humorous to me. This is life,
the fact that you could think otherwise is humorous
to me.
And there is this other irony that all
these younger kids who spend so much of their time
online and then have to spend time online for
school using blackboard, software or anything, the
have to be forced to do it, and they don't enjoy
it.
They just do it by spending all that
time outside of school on the web. So, I think
that there's some connection there in terms of how
you empower students. You're not going to teach it
like that, and how the school curriculum could
change that or if that could be even part of the
curriculum.
MR. WENGER: Rob, how well did you do in
high school?
MR. KALIN: I graduated high school with
a D minus. I had an interesting argument with my
guidance counselor. My guidance counselor said,
"Drop out of high school, you'll have an easier
time getting into college if you just get a GED."
Then he said, "Not only am I not getting a GED --
(Laughter.)
-- but I'm going to graduate with this
D minus, and see how it does for me.
And it didn't get me into any
accredited school. I got a diploma program in an
art school in Boston, and it was near MIT. And
actually I used the art school to make a fake ID to
go to MIT.
(Laughter.)
Somebody said it was expensive, but I
said No, it is free, you just won't get credit for
it.
But the other part is, to do a college
degree. And if you're in college for four years --
in my experience, college degrees, their value in
the job market is getting less and less, but their
cost is increasing.
So, you have these two things are quite
at odds with each other. And that's going to
balance itself out. People are going to find
another way. I think that's the beauty of
humanity, you can't have systems that are so
monolithic now that you can say this completely
stifles creativity.
You know, there's people who just get
rejected in the system. You can't go through it
and they find other paths. And with the Web
nowadays, I think there's never been more
opportunity to find these other paths and connect
with other people.
MR. WENGER: Mr. Jarvis, you have
something to say?
MR. JARVIS: Just to play off what Rob
said -- and I didn't mean to plug my book, but as
Sir Ken did, I'll follow up. I wrote a book called
"What Would Google Do?" And in looking at that, I
came to two great conclusions myself.
One is that -- and I called this
"creation generation," but I realized that we
always want to create. And everyone wants to
create. We want to leave our hands on things. And
we have a system that doesn't enable this.
One survey, for the 81 percent of
Americans, I think, they have a book in them. We
can probably be grateful most don't come out, but
we should be sad that people don't have the chance
to try. And so, all I want to say is that the one
bing moment from me was wondering why education
does not have -- like, Google or 20 percent rule,
that people use 20 percent of their time to create
something and that education becomes an incubator
for that creation, because like what Rob said, it's
not a class I teach.
I teach entrepreneurial journalism,
which is not an oxymoron, at the City University of
New York. And it's all about them creating
whatever they can create and helping them do that.
And so, how can we help students create and, in
that process, learn? And we are not built to do
that at all. We are built to put out cookie
cutters and make them pass tests.
MR. WENGER: But don't you need skills?
Is teaching skills an important goal of school?
MS. BOYD: I think a lot of us in the
room are really interesting success cases, a lot of
people who also didn't play by the rules, any sort
of changes to the rules or -- may end up why we're
in this room to begin with.
I spent most of my time running around
the United States, interacting with teens who don't
necessarily have that mind set, don't necessarily
have those opportunities, and their priorities are
fundamentally different.
And one of the biggest priorities that
I hear, that strikes me as so different from my
own, was what it meant to make certain that you
stay with your family, you stay in your community
and that you're a part of a local social system and
they're watching as the jobs fall out of the local
economy.
Sir Ken, as a point of going back to
thinking, he -- about the industrial era and how
education perished. The industrialist is really
interesting. And we're still stuck in that. We're
watching as the industrial structures have fallen
out and, of course, it's devastating.
And we have these great opportunities.
And sitting in Manhattan, having those great
conversations about the creative cultures and what
all the awesome possibilities are for people who
are super motivated.
But at the end of the day I keep
wondering, what do we think about the vast majority
of people who are frankly being trained in the
service class labor?
And what is that training look like?
Do we prepare them for service class labor or
should we be thinking about how we prepare people
to find stuff that's not just about labor per se,
but about enjoying their life more broadly? And
this is where the creativity comes in.
My feeling in a lot of education is
that you may not be preparing people for the skills
of service class labor -- although there's certain
things that are done there -- but giving them the
tools to be creative when they want to be creative
in their personal lives; to create as a form of art
or a form of fun, the things that they can do when
they're not working 9:00 to 5:00.
Many of us in the room get to live --
you know, our work and leisure are sort of blended
into one. We love what we are doing. But can we
really truly expect everybody to be in that kind of
job mind set? And when do we have to actually
think about the balancing of the work and pleasure
and how we actually educate people to be happy?
MR. O'DONNELL: One thing that really
strikes me, anytime -- I teach an entrepreneurship
class at Fordham. And when I encourage students to
find something they really like doing -- and I tell
them, Look, as a finance major, I can tell you from
all my investment banker friends that the money is
not worth it if you don't like what you do.
And the assumption -- on behalf of the
students, and I don't know where they got this
idea -- they can't find what they really want to do
because they need to make money.
And I said, Well, I don't really
understand why, for some reason, all of the jobs
people would like to do are somehow
disproportionately underpaid. And I said, there
are lots of jobs for finance I wouldn't necessarily
want to do, but they make a lot of money.
And so, somehow, the education system
is teaching students along the way that the pursuit
of doing something you really want to do is not
economically viable. And I think that's the real
problem.
MR. WENGER: Well, I think that may well
be the reality for a lot of people.
MS. BOYD: If you look at the job market
in the United States, there's certain things we're
not going to export, and a lot of that is service
labor. And the fact of the matter is we do need to
put people to fill those jobs. And those jobs
aren't always fun. And so, how do we balance those
different dynamics?
I think it's great that we train and
educate people to really succeed and go and do the
things that they're passionate about. But I think
that if we only focus on that and we don't focus on
the reality of the labor market where not
everything is fun -- but we really want people to
clean our sewers, but that might not be the most
enjoyable job. But how do we actually create those
kinds of balances so that the fun might not be just
necessarily your job?
And there's certain things where
getting paid takes the fun out of it. I love
talking to people who are amateur chefs. And
they're amateur chefs because when they tried to go
and work in a restaurant, they hated it. It wasn't
fun anymore. And it was fun when they can cook for
their friends.
And so, how do we balance these kinds
of engagements where it's not just an obsession of
labor? And I think as American society, we obsess
over labor. And we obsess over making everything
without fun labor. That may not be the way the
society goes.
MR. L. JOHNSON: I'm not sure how this
is relevant to education, but I would point out,
what is wrong with serving fries? The notion of
serving people by cleaning their sewage systems or
serving fries is to be abuse and --
MS. BOYD: But it's a form of prestige.
It has no prestige, which makes it a miserable
experience.
MR. L. JOHNSON: Prestige is deep with
the abuse. And in education I think that's the
notion of -- I agree with a lot of what you said,
but the idea that service as a profession is
something that must be societally avoided is -- I
don't really get.
When I sold a company eight years ago,
I went to work in McDonald's because I felt I
needed to kind of connect with human beings. I was
spending too much time with investment bankers and
lawyers and such.
I would throw out one sentence. The
thing I'm most interested today, and I've talked to
Dave about this -- the idea of broadening the
notion of education to be a lifelong idea and
how the work that Paul -- the school, everything --
and Dave are doing around, saying that everyone's
got something to teach, everyone's got something to
learn.
We live in this crazy connected world,
how does education -- how do you expand education?
And I guess the other things which we're talking
about today is -- which I don't know much about
is -- it's just really hitting hard at the broken
public educational system and what to do about
that.
MR. WENGER: Let's think about that.
Let's just stick with that point, number one. Is
it the goal of education to enable people to find
the job that makes them happy? Or is it a goal at
a large scale to have people to somehow figure out
how they can lead happy lives even if they have
jobs that today they don't consider -- it's a very
fundamental difference on what we're going to wind
up focusing on, not for the education but for the
large majority, depending which of those goals.
MR. KALIN: There are now jobs out
there; that's the other part of it. I got my BA
and I taught my friends with similar degrees, and I
was studying literature at the time. My dad's
saying, "Go to go work in the book publishing
industry." And I saw my friends who had Master's,
Ph.D.s in the book publishing industry, and they're
doing alphabetizing, copy editing.
I started my own company because I
found that the only way to avoid wasting my
education --
MS. FLEMAL: But that's just this
moment. But I think the broader question and I
think it's good what you're saying, talking about
this expanding the concept of education, and what
Sir Ken is saying about, I don't know if he said
vocational, but also the cultural aspect and
personal aspect is that.
I work with families here in Manhattan,
what we do is we take kids off that track of,
whether they're 36 months or whether they're in
fifth grade or sixth grade, taking them off the
school track and bringing them home and home-school
them for a while and then whether they choose to go
back or not.
Parents will often say, okay, you know,
they are more concerned with sometimes the social
aspect than, what is my child really going to be
interested in academically? What is their real
interest academically? I.
Think people have gotten so caught up
in the social aspect of school that they've
forgotten really about what we're really there for,
that we're there to learn and we're there to find a
passion and maybe find a vocational skill, a useful
skill.
But this whole social piece that we're
getting in school, which is ultimately, I think,
secondary to everything else, has sort of taken
precedence. This social interaction of who likes
me and who doesn't like me, and all the other
things we see on TV.
So to think of the part of it that
brings the focus definitely to education is so
important. I'd love to hear more and learn more
and focus more about that.
MS. RHOTEN: Historically, education's
had three primary objectives (Inaudible.) Economic
development and vocational skill trainings. And
then human development, the ability to create and
ability to pursue what you are interested in and
have a sense of yourself.
I think we've lost two of the
(inaudible). There's too much pressure around the
question of vocational economic development. What
job will you get? What college will you go to?
The question of civic responsibility
into a nonformal learning institution, which I'm
currently spending a lot of time. And what I see
happening in the nonformal learning institutions
are development organizations that shoulder two
other areas of responsibilities. And they are
currently losing their ability to provide -- to
serve those two responsibilities.
Where are those going to be met? They
are not being met in the large part because of what
Sir Ken mentioned. The child left behind.
Hopefully, this administration will reverse that,
but that will not happen within the next
six months, I can assure you.
So, what I hope for in this
conversation and the work that all of you are
doing, is how can the private sector, along with
the public sector, try to bolster the missing
objectives and start school learning? If you can't
do that, I think we are in very, very deep trouble.
MR. WENGER: I know that Alex has taught
in schools.
What are the goals of the students?
MR. GRODD: Well, thank you for putting
me on the spot.
The goals of the students, I think it's
pretty universal, based on my experience with the
students and teachers, is to be cool.
Fundamentally, when you are a middle school child
and you are in a social setting where there's all
sorts of social pressures to fit in, I think the
driving force in the life of a child, starting much
earlier than it used to be, is to be cool, to fit
in, to be accepted by peers.
And so, that, it is a very compelling
force to the child. And so, when combined with the
fact that it also can be pretty universally it's
generally cool to be bad and it's cool to rebel,
and I think a lot of people in this room probably
have experienced those instincts.
It creates a lot of challenges for
teachers. And so, I don't know if that's where you
were going, but I think it is an important point
for me, as a teacher, in all this conversation, to
think about the fact that when you are alone in a
room with 30 11-year-olds -- and we can talk a lot
about personalized instruction and unlocking
creativity, but a lot of what need to take place --
to me, one of the fundamental flaws in our K-12
education now is the amount of discipline.
Teachers invest so much time, so much
energy trying to manage a class, and by the time
they've done that, there's so little energy to
actually differentiate the instruction, personalize
instruction.
So, I think that, to me, when thinking
about, how do we really get into the core of the
transformation, part of that is how do we create
systems of discipline, whether it's sort of
top-down, sort of authoritarian model that a lot
of charter schools I've taught in use, and a lot
more intrinsic sense of community. And it has got
to be both and it's got to be on the table.
That's one answer.
MR. L. JOHNSON: I think the cool thing
that's really important, when I look back on the
moments of my life, the periods of my life when I
actually felt in my educational development that I
was kind of, the most formative periods, they were
periods where, for whatever reason, I stumbled into
a peer group where the cool kids were the smart
kids.
It's kind of an intrinsic reward of the
group to be smarter and to be more passionate in
some way, to get to Sir Ken's idea, that the group
really rewarded people who really got obsessed with
something and has something, whether writing plays
or write short stories or doing art or whatever it
was.
And when you get to -- well, I think
about a parent and I just try to think about how I
can draw my kids towards kind of social groups,
where there is that intrinsic award, you're clever,
you are at the top of the pile, because you've done
that, that's really smart.
And I think that's one of the things
you see in kind of talking about hacking education,
kind of like a nerd culture. It's very valuable.
There is going to be an intrinsic award in that
society like whoever makes the best program are in
this group, like it is the coolest on some level.
And I don't know how you work that into an
educational institution, but it's an incredibly
powerful force.
MR. GRODD: Creating a school culture
wherein students were cool and smart is what very
few schools do in this country, one or two at best,
the best schools in the country --
MR. SACKLER: And it's very doable. You
do it through a series of programs so adults can
feel the... of the program to celebrate its
success... students and the hard work and teamwork
and initiative.
And just looking on those incentives in
place in a school for the kids, the kids respond,
in that culture. And I have seen that in every
great school I worked in.
It is not reasonably -- it is not done
idly... organizational discipline on these
teachers.
MR. WENGER: Try to jump in. People
queue up --
MR. RESNICK: They could be smart. It's
all about what you mean by "smart." But I think
the way that the culture is smart, it's
problematic. Well, I think the way -- I link this
with some of the earlier conversations, Sir Ken,
Jeff said, the word "create" came up a lot. And
part of what people wanted to do is to have their
voice heard, mainly develop their own voice. And
that's where a lot of the passion comes from,
developing your voice, because that's important, to
give you the opportunity to create, create the rule
of creativity. And we don't give enough
opportunities for people to create.
I think what we have seen is we've
started after school centers, the network of after
school; because the kids were unsuccessful at
school and uninterested in school and unmotivated
by the school. And then we said, lots of times --
create their own, you know, animations,
simulations, you know, other things you want to
hear to keep up their creating something.
It is not just you're seeing that as
intellectual leaders. When they're creating games,
when they're developing their voices, I think it's
both important to their personal life.
As Dana was saying, to be able to
express about -- personally, develop your voice
accordingly. And increasingly, I feel very
fortunate that in some way, I think we're lucky
that we're luck -- what I would want for people,
their personal life is better aligned with what the
society's needs and the economy's needs in the
past.
I would hope that if we were meeting a
hundred years ago, there would still be a part for
the development of personal expression and ability
to create. That is not well aligned with the
economy at all. Today it is better aligned, yet
there are some jobs -- there is a certain
percentage of jobs in rising creative paths, part
of the documented growing percentage.
So, there is this better alignment of
what is needed. I felt fortunate we have better
alignment of what is needed for personal
satisfaction and economic success. And yet still,
the system does not support the -- for the
development of letting the kids create design, to
be able to --
MR. ETUK: What I just want to say to
you is that going back, one of the goals are -- I
think that one of the goals have to be that
education has to evolve with the user; right? And
what I mean by that is that at the end of the day,
the format in which you present information right
now is everything that we used to believe with the
way to present information and shoving it down
kids' throats, and they don't like it.
What are the tools that can be created
for presentation that have input into that process
so that they can evolve as the kids evolve?
Today it might be something like
Twitter. Tomorrow it might be something explicitly
different. How does that information get back to
the system that lets teachers become the
facilitators, put knowledge in here that the
students then know how to work?
Does that make a lot of sense? I think
that's one of the things structurally we need to
build in.
MS. SHEFRIN: I wanted to just go back
for a minute to Peter Brooks. One of the things
that Peter said -- and when he was rehearsing, it
was an exercise with the actors. And he often
found that when they came to start work, they
actually weren't there, even when they were all
there.
And so, he would often do an exercise
called "double bond, double time" which was to do
the rehearsal in twice the normal speed of the
conversation, and go through that.
And what would happen in the course of
doing that was, of course, is that the subtext of
the play would all of a sudden become visible and
tangible through tonality and nuances in the voice,
in the speed.
Another exercise that he would do to
sort of get people there was a masking exercise.
And you just put everybody in a white mask. And it
allowed people to kind of arrive without their
personas there. And all of a sudden, this
imaginative space became rendered visible.
And I think some of the conversation
has a lot to do with how we create the conditions
necessary for imaginative space because I think it
is from that space that we move from transformation
to translation.
I'm not sure how my bio arrived on the
paper, but it didn't go through me and it didn't
say what I actually do. And just for the sake of
everybody's information, I would just like to say
that I'm currently the provost of the Rhode Island
School of Design, which has informed a lot of my
thinking about all of these things.
I think the relationship -- somebody
talked about skills and the necessity some skills,
somehow separate from thinking or making. And I
think -- I'd like to think about, and I understand
it from working with the students, the relationship
between making and thinking is that making is a
kind of thinking and thinking is a kind of making.
The idea of asking questions as opposed
to making questions, which I think the students are
engaged in.
I think how education is delivered has
changed dramatically; and I think it has started to
create another kind of path which has to do with
teachers teaching students, students teaching
teachers, teachers teaching teachers and students
teaching students.
And I think all of those things are now
occupying the same territory. And through those
different kinds of exchanges, they're all ways of
engaging imaginative space; which ultimately I
think really allows for the crossover from all of
these various domains, which opens up all kinds of
other possibilities.
MR. WENGER: Jump in, Ms. Salen.
MS. SALEN: I've been working on a
project to open a new school in the fall that's try
to tackle some of these questions. And what I
found in doing that is that there's a fundamental
tension between the ideas of education and the
notion of learning.
And I think that what we are really
trying to talk about is learning as the space of
innovation and transformation and not so much
education. Because we see innovation in the space
of learning all over the place today, in terms of
how people are coming to learn things, how people
are sharing information. We are not seeing
innovation in the space of education because of its
institutionalization.
So, I think that the space that we
really want to begin to understand is how learning
itself is a form of currency today for young
people. It's actually valued, and this is what you
were talking about.
Learning is actually valued in very
interesting ways by young people today; not so much
in school, but in spaces outside of school where
they're really learning how to do things. And it
goes to the conversation of, if one of our goals is
to allow people to move into a future; that they
are able to learn, able to adapt to any kind of
change, whether they're changing jobs, whether
they're changing what they're passionate about.
That, I think, is the best thing that we can do for
people is to give them that kind of skill set.
And so, for me, that, I think, is the
space of transformation -- it will get to
education, but it is so systemic, the problems with
education, that I feel like we have to come in the
back door. But if you talk to educators they say
they're in the learning business, but it is,
actually, they are not. You don't see that so much
when you get down to the nuts and bolts.
MR. BURNHAM: There's a great story that
comes out of your work with... and I think the
kid's name is Giapetto, the Brazilian kid who -- I
don't know if you've seen this piece of work. But
there is a Brazilian kid, I think, like 17 years
old who was passionate about animated music videos,
and there was nothing in the educational system
that he was in that would help him in any way to
figure that out.
But he found a site on the Web, began
to download the tools and figure out how to
manipulate the stuff and began to interact with
people on that site. He began to upload videos
that he created to that site. He was welcomed in
as a peer in that site, ultimately worked his way
up to the site to the point that he was respected
within that community and was beginning to educate
others who were coming into that community.
Eventually, his teachers figured out
that this kid knew how to edit video and asked him
to come back to the school system, and teach a
course on editing video. And all of that took
place with absolutely no infrastructure and no
support.
And I think that's what you are getting
at -- you're talking about something that was
self-directed, completely outside of the system,
but enabled by the medium that we are now all
swimming in and it either creates an opportunity to
help people learn even if we don't figure out how
to reform the system.
MR. CAULFIELD: I think there is an
important point there too, that comes back to the
peer group observations you were making. Something
that is relatively new is the ease of creating a
nonlocal reputation. This is something that's
available to a nine-year-old that wasn't available
before; that nonlocal reputation, that global
reputation of a niche reputation on the web.
In cases where the peer group influence
may be a little suffocating or a little limiting or
constricting, that can serve as a balance, as a
corrective, if it is encouraged, or sometimes if
not encouraged at all, it just happens.
And I think that's relatively -- I
think it's always hard to separate out in these
conferences what is new and what is really not new
but just sort of redundant. But I think it is
relatively new, the ease with which, especially
younger kids, can create global reputations and how
that can really broaden their sense.
I think that also related to Diana's
point, in that people now can have jobs which may
not be the best jobs, may not be the jobs that they
would prefer to have; and they still have an option
of pursuing, fulfilling artistic or academic life
with others on the Web, once again, through these
tools.
So, I may work this job, but I also
publish through Creative Commons, a bunch of folk
songs. And that may not have been an opportunity
before to actually have any sort of audience for
that.
MS. BOYD: Connecting this and Diana,
actually it's really important that we recognize
that status and validation and reputation are not
just means to get skill sets, but there's also
value that that is something that we actually
learn. We kind of forget how much we have learned
that until you see and you have to figure out to
negotiate the social world.
I mean, here we are in this environment
where there's a great deal of -- we want to be
smart, we want to be seen as cool in this room.
We're an environment that values that.
We're also in a room where people have
negotiated and networked their way to here. You
wouldn't be here if you weren't somehow connected
to other people in this room.
And one of the things that takes place,
especially at the teenage years, starting in middle
and high school, is that people actually learn how
to network; they learn how the social world works.
If you look at what they're doing on
the social network, such a lot of social media,
they're trying to make sense of those social
structures. Who your friends are, what happens
when you have to articulate the social dramas of
that? How do you make sense of social dramas?
We pooh-pooh this often as like
something that's fully irrelevant education, but we
all, as adults, rely on those skills, those very
social skills they've gotten us into this room,
that we have to learn.
One of the things that's sort of
scaring me is I'm looking at a lot of class
differences around the social network patterns and
whatnot, is that young people who are from
wealthier environments are actually encouraged to
network with people in other factors, other than
their schools, and with adults in very formal
situations.
Young people who are from more working
class environments are less likely to be encouraged
to network outside of their peer group and their
families. This has dramatic effects on their
abilities to get jobs and their abilities to find
validation and also other factors.
So, we ignore all of this sort of cool
stuff as sort of extra-curricular and unnecessary;
but we also might want to think of embracing it as
actually a set skills, that we all use it. And we
actually have networking classes as adults when so
much of that takes place at those formative years.
MR. WILSON: Dana, I want to read you an
e-mail. This is from a kid, an 18-year-old kid
named Michael Yuretcho, I never met him. He may
not go to college. He left a comment on the blog
post I read about a week ago, saying that a lot of
entrepreneurs don't go to college.
And he wrote a comment and he said,
"I'm not going to college, and I'm going to work
for a start-up."
In this e-mail, he said something
today, "Thank you. Fred, I really never got a
chance to say this, but thank you. I'm the kid who
commented on your post about successful
entrepreneurs and not going to college. From that
one comment, I had two job offers -- well, two
potential job offers."
(Laughter.)
"I was contacted a couple of days ago by
a friend of yours, Boris Wertz. I was also
contacted over Twitter by a guy from Boot-up Labs.
I'm meeting with both of themthis week. I want to
thank you for taking time out in your schedule to
e-mail some people."
I actually I only e-mailed one. The
other guy he contacted directly.
"I'm truly grateful that something came
out of this. So, it's because of you."
I wrote back to him, it's not because
of me, but because of him. He had the balls, an
18-year-old kid, to wade through a comment thread
brought between a bunch of creative, influential
people. He made a smart comment and found, as he
said, two potential job offers.
So, what you are saying is, that these
kids do know these networking skills. And they
figured this out; and I think there is a great
equalizer here. I don't know if the kid comes from
a wealthy background or not, but I'm not sure it
really matters. He just figured it out and weighed
in, left a comment, and he's making his way into
the world.
MR. JARVIS: Did his mother also e-mail
you?
(Laughter.)
MR. JOHNSON: He's dragging kids away
from college.
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: To build on that,
there were a lot of other comments on that
connecting, because it's so impressive that you and
Dana pointing out that kids can network now.
But if we go back to what Sir Ken
started for us, you know, he asked a great
question: "What is at the heart of education?"
And actually, I'm using that tag '06,
because it is entitled "Schools, Skills,
Creativities" that he gave a tag in 2006. So, I
think he used it yesterday to jump off of a keynote
that I gave.
And the thing that I really like about
that is, what is at the heart of education? He's
talking about the child who is sitting in a
classroom and doodling and the teacher who is
passing by say, "Samantha, what is this?
She's looking at her and she's saying,
"It's a picture of God."
And the teacher says, "But no one knows
how God looks."
And that student says, "Well, in a
minute they will."
(Laughter.)
So, I think that's kind of at the heart
of education, as so many amazing comments are being
put there. And so, when you have that insight
about whether it's a picture of God or what is the
climate change or why is obesity happening and
anything that we want to kind of understand about
the importance of the First Amendment.
All these conflicts, things and
mathematics and physics and science that are out
there, I think what Sir Ken was trying to say is
that schools, as we know them today, are naturally
not enticing people or facilitating the kinds of
things we're even doing today; which is starting
from where the learner is and expressing the
learner's kind of ideas and allowing them to take a
stance and allowing them to express themselves and
allowing them to enter a conversation; preferably,
also as Mitch was going to ask, building something
that is expressing their ideas and growing it
through that social networking.
And I think what's at the heart of that
kind of education is very, very different than
what's at the heart of most of the education that
we see out there.
And I think it -- I don't know how
today is going to be, but as I finally figured out
how to unlock the fact that my comments are private
and participate in a twittering, not everybody here
is using it. Just like the the millions and
millions of kids out there, they don't know how to
use it.
So, they're not part of that
conversation with Fred or with many other people --
and I'm really worried about that because the
knowledge and skill that it takes to, first of all,
culturally be able to express yourself and then to
be able to participate in that social -- empowering
social media technology, is not available to all
equally right now.
And so, what's at the heart of that
education that we can all celebrate here is not
really accessible yet to a lot of people out there
in our nation, rural and poor communities, in urban
communities that don't have the benefits, that
don't have the tools.
And even if they do, they don't really
have the cultural ability to take the stance,
express themselves, connect to people below, above,
and on the side, and build stuff. And I think we
have to really worry about that here today. I hope
we will.
MR. KERREY: I'm going to add a little
about the politics of all this. Sir Ken had talked
about the 16,000 school districts, and that's where
governance occurs, and the civic responsibility and
cultural mission of the schools.
It is worth remembering that the
history of the common school in the United States
is a history of people attempting to pass state
laws mandating education at an early age, mandating
the creation of public schools.
And up until the 1920s, when there began
to be the a rise of the nativist movement, as a
result of the enactment of the openly racist
Immigration Act of 1924 and the creation of the
American Legion, that resulted in the rapid
expansion of public schools in the United States of
America for the purpose of teaching citizenship.
That's why the Pledge of Allegiance is
mandated in all schools. If one of your
11-year-olds is found out on the streets of Atlanta
this afternoon, they can be arrested and found in
the juvenile justice system for violating their --
as an offender of their status. They're required,
for approximately a thousand hours a year in all 50
states, to be in schools. So, that's the context.
Secondly, you've got to sort of imagine
yourself -- I have a 7-year-old in the largest
public school district in the country, the New York
public school system. If you're trying to have an
impact on PS41 where he goes to school, to put it
mildly, that's a hell of a challenge. Just to try
to have an impact upon the arrival of
air-conditioners in June, let alone the curriculum
and the budget and other sorts of things.
So, I think you have to separate the conversation
between the effort to improve the public schools
and the effort to improve the non-public school
environment. These are two completely different
things.
And finally, you have to get used to the
idea that you have to bring an argument inside the
context -- you haven't been in a room full of
parents. There are 2 million parents in the
New York public school system that might, I should
say, have a slightly different attitude about what
they want the New York public school system to
accomplish than I do.
And these board meetings can be raucous,
dispiriting and at times counterproductive. You
find yourself saying, Gee, I don't want to do that
anymore. You can find yourself fighting the battle
to get curriculum imposed and brought to the
schools and it's exactly what you wanted and,
two years later, the board of election occurs and
the people you supported get turned out.
As a great example, the state board of
education in Florida, not what I would consider
for the most part a backwater state, last year,
just voted to allow the theory of evolution to be
taught by five to four votes.
Kansas caught a lot of attention a
couple of years ago when they took a vote saying it
couldn't be taught. That got reversed again by a
five to four vote. So, there are arguments that
have to be brought, and you can't get timid in
bringing these arguments and you can't give up
after you have lost a battle.
But I think it's terribly important in a
discussion like this to separate the public school
argument, which is an intense one, from what you
want to occur outside of the school environment,
which oftentimes, in my view, is more important
than what's going on and mandated and brought
inside of the school.
MR. KALIN: But Bob, you can opt out,
couldn't you? You could home-school your kids and
then you're not breaking the law. You can do that;
right?
MR. KERREY: I broke into a cold sweat
earlier with Alex talking about facing 30
11-year-olds; and now you're talking about facing a
single 7-year-old all day long?
(Laughter.)
MR. WILSON: My point is this: Instead
of bringing an argument in this country, we could
simply have a revolution. We can simply take our
kids out of the school systems and come up with
alternate ways of teaching.
MR. KALIN: But they don't have the
framework that exists yet.
MR. RESNICK: There's are families -- a
single parent who is working round the clock. So,
how can they be doing that? It's fine for us to
say we can do it.
MS. RHOTEN: School is a safe place for
a lot of kids. It's not only the single parent
argument. But it's also the school represents the
eight hours of your day wherein you actually are
warm and have food. Not every kid can opt out of
that.
MR. SACKLER: The charter school -- the
district monopoly is being challenged all over the
country by the charter school. That's going to
open public education to enormous entrepreneurial
opportunities and energy; and it's happening in 41
states.
MR. BISCHKE: It's really up to us to
develop alternative models and set an example for
the public school system. And one of the
advantages of where we are today is that there are
lots of opportunities for initiatives to be
exploited of alternative models.
MR. HUGHES: I think that's exactly
right. I think there's a structural question here.
It says the classroom has 30 students and one
teacher in front of it. Even if it's for
eight hours a day and that's a safe place, that
just isn't working anymore.
And I think that what's really
interesting, what are the models in which teachers
can interact with students, and sort of adapt to
their different ways of learning throughout the
course of the day or throughout a year, so that
they actually are able to flourish and be happy and
also be good citizens.
MR. WENGER: This last bit of
conversation actually kind of prefigures the
structure of the day quite a bit. So, the
structure of the day -- I think this was very, very
good to start with goals.
It is clear even around this table that
it is not easy to come up with unanimous agreement
on what the goals might be. I think it's something
very, very important about learning. And we were
tempted to call this Hacking Learning, but it
didn't sound as good as calling it Hacking
Education; for that reason.
So, the structure of the day is that
actually -- after taking a short break now. We
will come back and talk first about how learning --
how hacking education can occur completely outside
of the existing system.
So, what are things that are happening,
what are tools, what is the leverage available to
us today, and maybe shortly? And then after lunch,
bring that back to the point that Bob was raising
about.
So, then, there's the schools. So,
there are things outside of schools which are
already taking place; and what is the interface
between old and new and how does that happen? That
will be the focus of the afternoon.
MR. GORDON: I wanted to throw something
out. I've asked people for a decade and I've never
heard a good answer.
Has anybody ever seen a coherent
description or definition of what "well-educated"
means, that they didn't write themselves?
(Laughter.)
If so, I would love to be pointed at it.
Because I haven't heard one, even in universities.
I have asked what a great university head is and
got a 50-page speech from Rick Levin, about the
president of Harvard in the 1800s; but I've never
seen a definition of "well-educated."
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: I don't know if we
want that --
MR. KERREY: I have something written in
1905 with several great descriptions of what
"well-educated" means; not by me, but somebody
else.
MR. KALIN: You can be dead and
well-educated would be a question? It's not
static, staying in one place.
MR. JARVIS: It's different for
everyone. We do have to write our own. If we
don't want to write it, that's a different
question. Chicken/egg, but it has to be -- the
problem is that we'd make every student take the
same frigging test and come up with the same
frigging answers. That is no way for a creativity
to begin.
But it comes out of the idea that there
is a definition of "well-educated." The same way
that there's this mass view in news, if there is
one newspaper that can serve, everyone is the same.
It's absurd.
MR. GRODD: I will only say that I've
been part of many, many of those conversations, but
I think, on a fundamental level, kids need to read,
write and do math. They need to know how to read,
they need to know how to write and they need to
know basic math.
So, after that, then critical thinking,
and the holistic concept of an educated
humanitarian; I think that is all relevant, and I
would love to participate in that, but
fundamentally, there's millions of children who
can't read, can't write, can't do math.
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: But the problem is
that the way to reach the literacy, the old
literacy of reading, writing and arithmetic that
you're talking about, has new methodologies. And
so, that's really the fundamental thing we are
discussing today.
And probably, it's not just one
definition, but many, and many ways for different
people to really reach that literacy. But there
are also a lot of new literacies; your ability to
imagine something and make it up, express yourself
with media, remixed media, participate in media
like the one we're using today.
I wonder how you would use what we are
posting. I'm trying to generate a lot of noise --
MR. WENGER: I think one of the great
things, I keep looking up there (indicating
overhead projection). It's other people already
not in this room, so --
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: But how are we
going to integrate that into the conversation,
because sometimes people summarize what's being
said and sometimes they comment on what's being
said, how are we going to model, how this can be
used effectively? It's hard to use it effectively
in a conversation.
MR. WENGER: That's going to take us to
the next session. We'll take a five-minute break
for people to grab a coffee, go to the bathroom.
And there are sign-up sheets over there for lunch,
and we're having a self-organizing lunch called
"Birds of a Feather."
So, there's five topics that people
have already created. So, if you don't like the
topics, there's room to create a sixth topic or add
more sheets also. And then we're going to have to
continue in about ten minutes.
(Time noted: 11:15 a.m.)
(Time noted: 11:30 a.m.)
As I have promised earlier, we are going
to try to start each section off with a little
video. And so, this is a video on YouTube.
(Discussion off the record.)
Check this out, and we'll put links out
on Wiki. But here is why this caught our
attention, to preface this section. This section
is all about how is learning occurring, how do we
get leverage on learning from technology? How do
we get social leverage from the web for learning?
And, actually, leaving existing schools aside,
until the afternoon.
And this is a kid, clearly, maybe a 14-
or 15-year-old kid, who put this video up
explaining how to do something to have a blendered
water effect. So, one of the great things is that
this video's been viewed almost 50,000 times.
There are a lot of responses that actually explain
how to do it better, including video responses that
show how to do this.
And I think that it is, in my mind, a
great illustration of how this can happen. And so,
Bob, we'll use that as a kick-off point for how can
technology provide leverage in learning in both
technology leverage and social leverage.
MR. WILSON: I wanted to ask
Jim Rosenthal a question. Jim is a long time
friend of mine who runs a piece of Kaplan's
business. Do you teach adults professional
education -- your business teaches adults
professional education on the Web; right?
MR. ROSENTHAL: On the Web and in
school.
MR. WILSON: What percentage is online,
and what percentage is in schools?
MR. ROSENTHAL: It varies, probably more
than 50 percent in schools, but it's moving in the
other direction; faster in the U.S. than overseas.
MR. WILSON: You actually give people
degrees? You give people accreditation via online
classes?
MR. ROSENTHAL: Yes. I'm not granting
degrees, although Kaplan University certainly does.
My area is test prep for real estate and financial
services, for insurance, for accounting.
MR. WILSON: And are these live classes
that they participate in? They log in and a
there's a teacher sitting there?
MR. ROSENTHAL: Yes, there's live
scheduled classes. And all of those are archived.
So, you can go back. Or if it doesn't work,
reschedule, you can go and check it all. It's
always online.
MR. WILSON: Is there any data about the
performance of -- in the tests of the people who do
the learning online versus the people who do it
face-to-face?
MR. ROSENTHAL: I know what you are
looking for, but I don't have it.
MR. KALIN: Do you think that the
founders of YouTube, said we're going to reinvent
education?
MR. ROSENTHAL: No.
MR. KALIN: But they do more to change
the way education works than anybody in this room
right now, and that's something --
MR. WENGER: Speak for yourself.
(Laughter.)
MR. KALIN: In terms of reaching people,
gauge it in terms of purely numbers. I'm sure that
people would qualify it. So, I think that's the
beauty of the Web and technology. You don't create
a pedagogical -- you just created the tools for
them to teach each other.
MR. L. JOHNSON: Think how much more you
could have a learning paradigm, based upon the
content --
MR. HUGHES: There's Twitter and
Facebook; you learn all types of social
information. The vast majority might be that, but
it doesn't mean that doesn't tell you something
about the sender or what that means for you
socially and that doesn't mean you don't
necessarily learn about content.
I think the challenge is in figuring
out the technologies, and the one's that are
existing and the ones that are coming into the
classroom -- which was, what I was trying to get at
earlier, the structural problem is that a teacher
in front of 30 people with no computers, it will
not work anymore.
MR. WILSON: Albert, Brad and I and, I
think, Andrew and Eric here all sat with an
entrepreneur, probably about four or five months
ago, who had taken YouTube, just brought it in and
built a layer on top of it, and was delivering
English language learning to Chinese kids.
And they were doing it in internet
cafes. They would -- it's basically somewhat like
a game. Kids would go into an internet cafe in
China and they would watch popular YouTube videos
and they would try to say the words in English.
And then they would record it and then they would
get rated by other kids.
So, basically, it just took the raw
material that's already on YouTube, pop on the
videos, put a little technology layer on top of it,
and they were teaching millions of Chinese kids how
to speak English.
MR. ROSENTHAL: It's a better version of
how they used to learn it, which is by just going
to the movies.
MR. GORDON: I'll ask Lewis. You helped
invent a pretty good after action review. So,
there's kind of pedagogical -- teaching that's
automated, without humans involved. What did you
learn from doing that? How do we take humans out
of the scalable education process?
MR. L. JOHNSON: The goal wasn't to take
humans out of the loop. But so people understand,
we've created video games, help people learn a
foreign language. And part of our rationale is
that we weren't satisfied by the type of
interaction we saw in the classroom, for obvious
reasons; nor were we satisfied with the type of
interaction that we saw on the Web, which typically
presumes a certain level of language proficiency
and tends to be text-based, whereas a lot of
learners have difficulties speaking the language.
So, we saw a lot of value helping people
get up to the point where they can utilize these
other technologies to help learn. But just to say,
here you go on YouTube and learn from that, I'm
glad to see that that is having so much success.
But I think there are a lot of kids who aren't
reached well, skills that aren't well-taught just
by relying on the technologies out there.
MS. SALEN: I want to build on that a
second, because I think one danger is to start to
begin to imagine that learning happens in
isolation, that there is a single platform or a
single tool that is going to teach. Learning is
ecological, and it happens in many places
simultaneously.
So, I was talking to a parent last week
about a model of sort of nodal learning, and
thinking about what are the configurations of
spaces that we are making available for kids to
learn in and across? And he wasn't understanding,
mostly because I was not communicating well.
And I said, "Let's talk about your
daughter. I know she loves to play basketball.
So, where did she learn to play basketball?"
And he said, "Well, she learns at
practice."
I said, "Oh, but I bet she talks to you
at home about it."
He said, "Yeah."
And I said, "I bet she has conversations
with her friends about it on the phone and they
work through plays. Does she ever go online? Does
she watch basketball games? Does she go to
basketball games?"
He said, "Yeah, yeah, she does all those
things."
And I said, "Well, yeah, learning is
happening across all of those spaces."
And so, what I think we want to begin to
understand is, what are the kinds of
infrastructures that we need to build to help
leverage the movement of that child across those
kinds of learning spaces?
And it may be the invention of certain
kinds of technologies, but I think there's larger
things, what Dana was talking about in terms of how
do we enable social capital for kids? What are the
mechanisms by which we make that possible? How do
we enable just connectors between some of these
different spaces, whether they're content
connectors or mentor connectors or even a
validation that what a kid might be doing in an
after-school space is relevant and valid within an
in-school space?
So, I think we need to remember the
configuration and the ecological question because
we're in a networked world. Our model of learning
has to exist within that certain networked idea, as
well.
MR. HEIFERMAN: Can we articulate more
about what problems need solving? And why isn't it
just the Web? Why isn't this solving this problem
all by itself?
MR. HERROD: What other questions?
MR. BISCHKE: I think one thing is
there's a big disconnect between learning and
credentials. And so, we're moving to a world where
you can learn anything; you can go to Yale and you
can watch their courses as you can do all different
types of things, but the credentialing system is
one that hasn't changed at all.
And I think there's been a few people
who have written some very interesting stuff, I
know Fred a little bit, about how can you look at
whether the testing is standardized testing,
whether it's degrees, accreditation, and change
that system? Because without that, the rest of
this stuff is not nearly as meaningful.
MR. WILSON: My son is a big video
gamer. He understands credentialing in a video
game, and he knows what his score is. And he knows
what his friend's score is and he knows that he's
better than anybody else at Caller Duty 5.
When he gets credentialed in school, he
goes home and say, "Dad, it's not fair, you know.
I got such and such on a test. And this kid
didn't -- he went up after class and had a chitchat
with the teach. All of a sudden he ended up with a
better grade than me."
And he appreciates the raw power of
Caller Duty 5. I beat that kid one on one, you
know. And he didn't get it in school.
MR. GORDON: There are a couple of other
parts to video game credentialing. So, one is
having more parallel reward paths is useful. Video
game credentialing has to succeed by motivating.
And clearly, academics don't stay in power by
motivating, but have to succeed by motivating. And
so, there is a feedback loop and it has to be
considered fair.
But a video gaming system, that's the
most motivating, it's going to have four or five
parallel tracks, the motivation of all clients, all
on different time cycles.
MR. WILSON: But that means you can get
your scores in different ways?
MR. GORDON: People that are playing,
are usually playing, trying to accomplish a couple
of different things, usually that have different
time cycles. You want something that takes
one minute and something that takes a month.
MR. S. JOHNSON: When I think about the
skills that I had that I got when I was a young kid
that are still valuable, I think back to when I was
10 or 11 when I spent thousands of hours playing
baseball games and designing better baseball games.
And I got a huge amount out of that in
terms of the map that are creating the whole
statistical model of how baseball works and stats,
and a lot of collateral learning experience,
building simulations and things like that that
they're using to this day.
But the most important thing about that
was, I think I learned how to be obsessed with
things. There's another way of saying that, which
is passion. I got obsessed with these things and I
had a series of stages in my life where I got
obsessed with something else. And I just immersed
myself to learn as much as I could. And it's that
mechanism I used again and again and again in my
professional life.
So, how do you teach kids to be
obsessed with things? I think one of the
advantages we have with technology and particularly
with games is that they have built-in structure,
almost to a fault, as most parents would say.
They have an addictive quality where people will
just immerse themselves and become obsessed with
them, something in that structure.
When you look at the games that most of
these kids are playing, the amount of information
that they have to accumulate and master to perform
well in these games is a mess compared to the
amount of information they're willing to reinforce
to learn at school.
And so, somehow, there's something in
this formula, this kind of platform, without
anybody telling them to do it, they are going out
learning all this information and becoming really
skilled at it.
So, they have to kind of figure out
what is the cocktail there that's allowing them to
do that, and then maybe take that and actually,
causing them to learn other things that perhaps
they aren't getting from the games.
MR. CAULFIELD: One of the things that
differentiates some of those activities is that the
referee in the interaction, in the coaching, are
separate. That allows, I think, for a much more
intensive experience than one where people feel the
game is rigged.
And so this person goes and talks to
the referee and gets a better grade. My daughter
plays Castle Crashers incessantly. And she is on
the headset to her friends and she's trying to pull
up YouTube videos to figure out how to get the
achievements.
But the sense is that here's her
interaction. And then there's a separate sort of
referee that is somehow objective. So, she's not
playing to the referee.
For me, one of the moments of teaching
that really got to me is when I was teaching
English composition and you tell students, Oh, it
was a 90. So, you did gun control essays and
things like that.
And so, we go through rhetoric and at
the end of class, you say, "Write your gun control
essay." And one of the students comes up and says,
"What's your thoughts on gun control?" And I feel,
"silly student." Come on, you know. "You're not
writing this for me. You're writing for your
audience." And he says, "I'm writing it for the
grade, so doesn't that mean the audience is you?"
And I realized that yeah, it's a fraud,
you know. It's really kind of scam that we're
perpetrating here. And so, I think things
where those two things are separated, where there's
a separate referee and a separate coach allows the
referee to be more fair, allows the coach to really
focus on the success of the student.
The referee doesn't have to be this
abstract rule-based thing. The referee can just
help someone engage with an audience as a writer.
MS. BOYD: But are referees always fair
outside of games? When I was in Brown, I was
obsessed with who was succeeding and who wasn't at
Brown. I went and talked to the dean about what
was going on, how things are playing out.
And one of the things I found out
really quickly is that the people who are doing
best at Brown are those who figured out how to bend
every rule available to them. They figured out
what rule was there, they figured out how to work
around it and how to leverage the different people
to get what they wanted.
And people view it as almost a game in
and of itself. And one of the things that's
been -- in talking to people who do research on
kids with autism, there is this set of rules where
we can sit and formalize it. We can create and
formulate structures and we can say this is how you
succeed and this is how you avoid.
And certain kids, such as kids along
the autistic spectrum, do tremendously well with
this set of rules. Other kids do extremely well
when given the set of rules, figuring out how to
work around it.
And there's this interesting thing to
your son's point. I totally agree that the school
system isn't fair. But how may of you have tried
to get a raise at work? Is that process fair? Is
that process about who is getting rewarded in a
direct manner that you can evaluate, or is it about
figuring out how you can ease around and manipulate
that to get that raise?
And so, each of these are different
skill set, and we can't say one skill set is better
or worse than another, but how are we thinking of
it in the ecology of saying, "These are the things
that we want to mix in; and some kids learn to
figure out which personalities are going which
way." But if we go for one system or another, we
end up breaking down.
And if we want a more fair system, we
have to think about a more fair adult society, not
just a more fair kid society.
MR. RESNICK: I want to make sure we're
not too drawn into everything being driven by some
evaluation how well you succeeded or whether it's
the highest score in the game or an award from the
teacher; just to give a different paradigm as
opposed to some people are motivated by their high
score in the game.
But there's another paradigm that
flourishes today, the maker community, the do it
yourself community. There's a huge maker fair
going on. And people don't go there to get the
award with the best exhibit at the maker fair.
They build what they're excited about. They became
obsessed with something and they want to share it
with others, to get feedback from others. Wow,
that's incredible. That's the excitement, and to
see what others have done.
So, I just want to make -- not that the
paradigm is right for everybody or for all
contexts, for all people. But at some point we get
too drawn into what's the best way of getting for
the competition paradigm, just a little overblown.
MR. GORDON: We did this in sincity.com.
Once you find that there are people who want to
share, you can give them a more rewarding
experience if you give them a platform to share on.
And they feel like there's a chance you're going to
be looked at.
So, I would argue that something like
Etsy or craft fairs are platforms that can be more
motivating, because when people are halfway done,
they think, If I just finish, I've got a way to
share. So, creating platforms that seem like open
ways to share, I think, are another way to
motivate.
MR. RESNICK: Yes. I agree. This is
true. To promote my own thing a little bit, we
have this project called Scratch, where kids are
programming their interactive stories and games and
sharing online which, there are more than a
thousand new projects each day. And kids see what
others are doing and then making things together,
just open, they grab what others have done, remix
and add other things.
There is some external motivation, the
ones that get featured on the home page where lots
of other people are using it.
MR. GORDON: And they probably have to
believe that there's fairness in deciding who gets
top of the box and how you get to remix somebody
else's stuff. So, that's the referee, which
doesn't necessarily have to be a person.
THE SPEAKER: I'm going to plug the
Scratch program that Mitch and his group created.
So, we're doing an experiment in Hawaii, and I'd
love to get feedback. We're finding kids to be
very passionate about making their own games and
there's all kinds of good learning stuff for these
kids, measured quantitatively and also -- this is
what I made. This is where I want to go.
We've run these after school programs
with Scratch, kids make their own games. Some of
the games and some of the themes are, make games
that are about math or about creating stories. You
can tackle any kind of learning with this sort of
tool.
Essentially, it's world making. You
define your own world, what's important to you, and
you share it with kids that are in this group
together. And we've got coaches, older kids who
have gone through it and are now teaching the
younger kids. To me, it's really working. And I
would love to propagate that.
But I think the approach that Mitch
talks about for having -- I guess your phrase is
"playful invention." And I think that's what going
on in these courses. And I think that's what goes
in internship. And I think that's what leads to
new cultural developments.
MR. BURNHAM: The product is becoming
the credential. In the old days, I went to school,
I got a grade, I presented the grade and I got a
job. And now, what happens is, you create this
game; and that game is what creates your
reputation. And there's no grade there.
And it's not important, because you've
created a great game and hopefully, that game is
bubbled up to the top of the board, because others
have linked into it.
And if you think about the Web as a
medium in a way, that's the way people are creating
their own credentials. It has a lot to do with how
many links there are into your blog, into your
voice, into your opinion about what's going on in
the world.
And I think it's fundamentally changing
what we need from education, to Scott's question.
What we need is to become familiar with the tools
that we use to promote our ideas and really,
basically, to search engine optimize our products
or the things we created. And I think that's what
people are doing.
MR. JARVIS: They have a faith in the
marketplace and the marketplace, which I share.
But, you're from the educational world, and it
says -- the authority says this is right and that's
success. A game world shows some danger and it
systematizes a one victory, one definition again.
I prefer creation as a new framework,
personally. But how do you certify that? I also
like the idea of the public doing it, but there's
some danger there, too.
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: I think we are
developing methodologies that you are describing,
that Mitch is describing, that we're doing. I
think Katy's doing a lot of that kind of work.
There are several people in the room that are
really working very hard to create an assessment
that relates to imagination, innovation,
creativity, coming up with an idea, beginning a
project from the beginning, middle, end; delivering
this in digital form, sharing, exposing,
presenting.
All of us are trying to transform
education through those playing games or making
games and doing both which is the new reading and
writing. I think they're working very hard and
there's a lot of research out there for assessments
that are beginning to work.
I'm right now working with 350 students
and teachers in 14 schools. They are using it,
they are evaluating it in a whole new way. And
it's project-based daily --
MR. JARVIS: The assessment may be less
thinking of a product than a process, and saying
we'll make this better and better and better.
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: Both. The
assessment is about the process, it's about the
product and even about how it relates to other
grades. It relates to the content of what the
games of the teamwork or the project is about.
There are ways. And I want people to know that
there are ways to do it. And it works. It works
on the ground.
MR. KALIN: How many people here have
hired people? How important is what degrees you
have in terms of hiring? If you hire an engineer,
you want to see samples and quizzes and tests.
There were people who were doing the media stuff
for Etsy, they have a site and video showing videos
you've made. I don't care what degrees these
people have. It's something that's becoming less
and less meaningful in the job marketplace, as
well, and you talk so much about how important the
degree is in getting a job.
But talk to people who are creating
jobs right now. There may be degrees that are
important for people who want to work at Citibank,
but Citibank isn't exactly hiring right now.
MR. L. JOHNSON: I care about degrees
for the people I hire.
MS. FLEMAL: I can think of someone
right now, an artist who did so well with her
videos on YouTube that she took a site on... and
delivered lessons and the students did incredibly
well and has quite a business for herself. She has
no given credentials, at all.
MR. KALIN: She has lots of
credentials in the eyes of other people, I'm sure.
-
MS. FLEMAL: But her credentials are --
what I'm saying is, we were talking about giving
credentials in terms of degree and so forth. It's
exactly what she needed to present. And she has a
huge audience and a huge business.
MR. WENGER: There are a couple of
different things about how technology provides
leverage -- provides leverage, because it allows
you to publish your work product and allows more
objective referees. It's about a new form of
credentialing.
I wonder, in this section, what other
types of leverage does technology provide us?
MR. GORDON: When I've taught classes, I
throw this out for somebody else to use, tell the
students you can't get an A from the teacher. The
best you can get from the teacher is a B+, because
the teacher-student grading relationship is
corrupting.
So, if you want to get an A, you've got
to get somebody outside. And in a video game
class, you got to get 10,000 downloads as an A. I
would suggest in journalism, somebody's doing
entrepreneurial journalism, that you've got to get
a certain amount of blog readers per a month to get
an A and --
MR. JARVIS: Which I love, but there's
the Paris Hilton factor.
(Laughter.)
I still like it. There is a corruption
there, too.
MR. GORDON: I had one student get to a
million in a month. So, that, a million downloads.
That was an A.
MR. JARVIS: With what?
MR. RESHEF: Technology does enable us
to bring education everywhere. And that's
something we should remember because, if you look
at the world, most of the world doesn't have the
proper tools and system.
And technology enables us to overcome
and reach most -- not necessarily most of the
people yet, but many people that were unable to get
education and get proper education.
Second, we're talking about the school
system. Education basically makes schools what
they have been for the last few hundred years; a
place for the kid to go, stay out of the street and
for the parent -- to enable the parent to go and
work. They work in a babysitting place.
Now, we had a notion that they get --
the teachers -- we used to consider the teachers as
the source of the knowledge. Well, I'm not sure if
they ever were, but definitely they're not right
now. And the technology enables the kids to go and
get all the information that they need outside of
the classroom.
I think that one of the main problems
that we're facing right now is that the school
system resists this change. And the school system
refused and says, "Okay; we still have a rule.
Without a rule in the school, it will be totally
different than what it used to be."
And the information the kid should get
somewhere else, maybe bring it to school, maybe use
it in school, maybe exchange knowledge between the
students, but get it somewhere else. And I think
that that's where the school system is now fighting
all over the world, staying as it used to be and
there will be a real change in the next few years,
because it can't stay as it was.
MR. WENGER: We'll trying to get back to
the schools in the afternoon. But you made the
point, one, the key to technology leverage is
access, simple access. You can read an article and
be anywhere else in the world, and that's a big
technology leverage that we didn't have.
MR. ETUK: One of the things, and I
think they're related to, is the ability to
increase what we call efficiency to learn, when the
kids start to teach each other. That also has an
effect on labor costs, because if you don't have to
spend as much on teachers, the normal one teacher
and twenty students, thirty students; if you create
these multi-user environments and start to help
each other, it's four or five kids.
One of the big things that we saw
during the educational games was, high school
students love to teach the younger kids and get
points and credit for that. It's one of those
things if you could leverage that, you can actually
tap in and you'll fight with the teacher
federation; because you can actually either reduce
the number of substitute teachers, which is an
economic impact.
MR. KERREY: To be specific on the
question of leverage. You can see how leverage is
occurring in one big area, and that's in the
library. And you can see it either in the higher
education environment or the on public side, in
public libraries, where librarians themselves are
increasingly use technology to leverage access.
And universities, for example, they're not building
libraries like they used to. Our libraries have
become Starbucks or the library becomes wherever
the student is moving with a wireless tool.
We're using software increasingly to
get students access to materials, and it's leading
the university to change substantially, largely
through the open curriculum issue. It's leading
students in a different direction than before.
But if you want to see the leverage of
the technology, this kind of technology, any
library you go into today, talk to students about
what they are doing and see where it is going.
The other thing I wanted to address is
Fred's question about home-schooling. Because I do
think, at some point, as uncomfortable as it may be
to get them to examine these sort of things, I do
think there is a question of different kinds of
regulatory structure that needs to be addressed.
In fact, in the old days, it was
entirely appropriate to say I'm going to have a
roll at the local school and that's as far as it's
going to go. But the problem is today the students
have migrated way beyond the localities, and you
really can't allow -- I don't think -- I think the
regulatory structure of both the K to 12 and the
post secondary levels, is limiting the use of
technology, particularly in the home environment.
And leaving aside for the moment, Rob's
argument that credentials don't really matter,
credentialing is still -- and the question about
whether or not I get credit or not -- I just played
a multiplayer game.
I know a language, let's say, I
acquired a language question is, is there a
regulatory structure that allows me to be tested
and get a credit for that without having to enroll
in some institution, an accrediting institution
that satisfies the middle stage, that stage in
Nebraska, or wherever.
I think we need to have to get into the
regulatory environment, because I think the
regulatory environment today, unless it's changed,
will continue to frustrate and limit the leveraging
capacity you can have with technology.
MR. KALIN: You don't need a board of
people to say, this is the legit, let's just put it
out there. It's up to the people to judge it.
MR. KERREY: I love your free spirit.
(Laughter.)
MR. KALIN: What is the accreditation
issue?
MR. KERREY: Is it a rhetorical question
or a real question?
MR. KALIN: It is a body of people that
are elected to a board and have --
MR. KERREY: If the regulatory structure
comes off, the law, the laws are passed that people
pass, specific law would have to be changed. And
the barriers to the law are the institutions that
don't want the barriers to be limited.
I will give you a very specific
example. Let's say you value the degree as you
were going through the school system, and you did
pay for a course at MIT. And you were at MIT and
wanted to transfer somewhere else.
Now, the transferring entity, the
entity you're transferring into, is making its
decision about whether or not it wants to accept
you. It's a tremendous barrier and it's allowed
under the law, unless the law changed. So, the
barriers themselves, the regulatory barriers, are
creatures of law. They begin with the law and the
law hasn't changed. The laws were written at a
time when none of this was possible.
MR. KALIN: And your schools follow
laws?
MR. KERREY: Yes.
MR. KALIN: If I'm at the School of Fine
Arts and want to transfer to the New School, I
found out the School of Fine Arts weren't
officially accredited.
MR. KERREY: The challenge of operating
an institution, you have to follow the law.
MR. WENGER: I want to come back to the
discussion about changing the existing
institutions, later in the afternoon, and just talk
more broadly about what we are seeing in technology
today.
But I would love to hear from David,
because we are using a lot of technology and the
school is going to impose it.
MR. WILEY: I was going to say we are
doing something in the school that we're opening in
the fall, an online high school. But it is
ridiculously simple. It seems to me it was
radical, as well. In terms of using technology as
a leverage point, by taking content and assessments
in the system that we are using, the students work
within and there is an alignment ofto standards.
We can do this completely revolutionary
thing in giving a student a pretest and then
pulling out the materials that they already know
and creating a personalized path instead of
four weeks training, maybe, let's say, two and a
half or maybe, let's say, three weeks in one and a
half. Maybe you finish the course in a four-week
period instead of the whole semester.
The idea then of a pre-test, based on
what the students already know, is older than dirt,
probably. But this is one place that technology
gives us a leverage point. With something as
simple as aligning the assessment with the content
and the standard in the middle to connect them to
each other. Pre-assessment, pass the standard, and
I'll just pull the content out to build path for
you.
MR. KALIN: The teacher can give the
student a test on the first day of class.
MR. WILEY: But this is much more
efficient way to do it.
MR. BURNHAM: You can't deliver
personalized curriculum after the fact. Once
you've done the testing, the teacher can't handle
that.
MR. JARVIS: The test should be
reversed. We should test what we need to know
rather than what we supposedly know. It should be
entering into the process rather than coming out of
the process. We are so tied up in certification.
It doesn't feed education, in fact, it stifles it.
MR. L. JOHNSON: There's something
called Time dollars, time banking. It's like
helping each other out like community service,
there is a trading of dollars. There is something
that feels wrong about time making and time
dollars. It feels wrong. It is like it is sort of
certification of credentials or learning as we have
been talking about.
Even the words "product" and
"marketplace" don't feel right, that people -- that
if I get 10,000 downloads in my thing, does that
mean I'm more virtuous than the thing that only
gets 5,000 downloads? That sort of a metrication
of everything, net certification, that thing, and
it can be dangerous in that way.
But ultimately it is -- I think what is
ultimately important is, are you -- it doesn't feel
right. It is just -- ultimately, like the value on
creativity and that sort of self expression,
personal expression.
But simply like -- sorry to repeat the
phrase I said before -- but like to be of use, to
be helpful to other people, or let's say, this is
an era of responsibility. These are things that
ultimately are hard to measure and are about norms
and mores and virtues that are not game-like, but
yet have real material like -- my credibility, my
trust with people I love and who love me and who
care about me are grounded in that, but not
grounded in a point system.
And that happens naturally within
communities. That happens in -- some of you know
the work of Douglas Rushkopf, who just wrote a
book. I just read through it. It was fascinating.
He talks about how -- you become obsessed about how
people are following you on Twitter. I hate the
idea that I am becoming obsessed with how many
people are following me on Twitter.
(Laughter.)
It is a measure of my worth. And
that's not good. That's not an argument for
quality over quantity and all of that bullshit I
usually spew about this kind of thing. It is
really, you know, who are you, what are you good
for, and it does not necessarily like, you know,
amassing the point and the followers. I wish I had
a more --
MR. KALIN: We're talking about
assessment, the education lingo fo assessment.
Today you are still talking about that type of
tests for assessment. Assessment is one thing
that's more qualitative and less quantitative.
This should take years to develop.
MR. WILEY: Let's be clear. How about
the role of what the role of credential is; right?
Just pop up the level of abstraction and say, if
you have got one or two or three or four people
that you wanted to evaluate, you can get into the
material that has been produced and you can do a
firsthand evaluation and hire someone.
But when you've got thousands of people
or -- when you're trying to scale this kind of
decision, there is a mission decision or a hiring
decision. We are trying to scale some kind of a
high stake decision. You don't have -- you can't
efficiently go in and do a firsthand evaluation,all
the artifacts made by all the people over all the
lifetime, things you have done related to the
decision we are trying to make.
What we want is, we want a supposedly
objective third party to give you some proxy
statement, some statement that you have some
confidence in about the ability or the expertise.
MR. L. JOHNSON: Do I want the doctor
who is most certified, or the doctor who has the
most followers on Twitter?
(Laughter.)
MR. O'DONNELL: If you have other
doctors who are followed by other doctors, then
that to me is worthwhile.
MR. L. JOHNSON: That was a loaded
question.
MR. WILEY: This is why certification
and credentialing isn't going away. We need a way
to scale high stakes decisions in an efficient
manner.
MR. KALIN: Use technology, not a third
party board.
MR. WILEY: I'm not saying we have to
keep doing credentials in the same kind of way.
MR. WENGER: But I am trying to bring it
back to the question: What are the technologies
out there today that let us learn better, more
easily than ever before? And what, if anything, is
missing from that?
MR. ROSENTHAL: Albert, you are asking
what technology leverages. And the way I think it
leverages fantastic is, terrific, passionate
teachers. If I have passionate teacher Ph.D.s in
La Crosse, Wisconsin, who love CFAs.
With a credit card and a broadband
connection, you can be anywhere in the world, and
start learning from them in a minute. It's
incredibly powerful.
And to bring it down to the public
school, something that excites me, again, we are
very far from -- what Bob was talking about; when
we think of a backwater school system, that for
whatever reason, can't attract anybody good to
their math department. So, for whatever reason,
everybody in third grade math is poorly educated
and isn't learning math.
Now, if you could figure out -- and
this isn't as simple as some of my colleagues here
would like it to be -- if you could figure out how
to wipe out the department and put in a computer
and broadband connection into each kid's homes, all
of a sudden, they can be learning from unbelievably
passionate teachers anywhere in the world.
MS. BOYD: Technology does not determine
practice. I can give you any set of technologies
and find educational ways of using it, and I can
give you any set of technologies and find
dreadfully noneducational uses of it.
And so, just shoving broadband into a
group of kids, just giving them an iPhone, we can
think of a gazillion designs that are valuable.
Wiki, it is pretty useful for that.
But if you would have a culture that is
not embedded in it, this becomes just another toy
you can text your friends with.
And so, how do we actually think about
technology, not just as technologies themselves but
within that sort of ecology of how you actually
make this leverage work and to make it work for
you. Teachers are critical for this.
It is actually not learning from
teachers in another environment, but figuring out
how teachers can give you and work with you to
understand how you engage with these technologies
to do something important.
So, there are infrastructures, there
are definitely gateways, but they need to be
imbedded within a broader system. One of the
things I've been so infinitely frustrated with is,
saying, "Let's just dump a bunch of laptops off
onto a population and see what happens."
But that doesn't work. And we've watch
students ripped out the batteries and used them for
everything else under the sun.
So, how does that fit as part of a
broader system? Maybe I am just challenging the
question, but I don't think we can just think about
the technology. So, we have to think about it in a
broader system.
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: I can certainly
second that. I think it is very, very important in
the question of what technology is doing, if
something new, and maybe to just follow on what
Dana is saying. It's not about the technology but
the whole learning environment that you create with
the tool -- and she mentioned, for example,
Wikipedia or let's say, a media Wiki software.
You can really use it very creatively.
For the first time, we can put all of us on a Wiki
with profile pages, we can work on different
projects.
The learning environment becomes
transparent, and teachers are extremely important.
It can be a teacher that is physically with us in
the room, or it can be people who are coming from
outside of the room because of the network.
So, it is the network environment that
is transparent with tools that allow you to build
and construct digital media, to learn through
design, to learn by teaching; you teach and you
learn in the same environment and there is the
expert guidance.
So, to take this revolutionary idea
that Fred proposed before about home-schooling is,
I think, with the technology of this kind with the
right infrastructure, professional development, not
just physically but also virtually, can allow us to
do home-schooling-like environments for the
homeless, for those who don't have the opportunity,
for those who don't have their parents at home to
run the home-schooling.
And I think that is a huge, new
opportunity that can scale, that's not the
technology alone, it is the give and take with
people from both your physical community, state,
nation and world that come in a way that organizes
itself.
But the Wikipedians have a culture and
rule of how you go about doing this. And how to
learn to become a Wikipedian is the skill that that
structure can do. So, everybody can theoretically
be home-schooled, but not necessarily in their
home. And I think that's the revolution.
MR. L. JOHNSON: More broadly, there is
a set of metaskills that we want learners to learn.
They need to learn how to reflect on their own
knowledge or lack of it and to reflect on their own
learning. And that is actually something which is
not explicit anywhere into the curriculum or often
in the classroom, but is an essential outlearning
outcome, if you will.
Some of that can be derived, you know,
teachers can promote that, technology can promote
that as well. But without that, then any
technology you throw out is going to fail. With
that, lots of technologies can be effective.
MR. WILEY: Another thing that
technology can allow us to do much more
efficiently -- so much more efficiently than maybe
we could really do before, is to effectively
gather, visualize, and then make direct use of a
lot of data that was happening in the classroom.
Because as a teacher, the thing you
really want to know is who knows what, who is
struggling with what, who needs my help, whose way
do I need to get out of. And when you are standing
in front of a group of people like this, you don't
have direct access to that.
But in an online learning environment
where you can see how long people are spending
where, you can see how far behind you are, if
they're read it, did they fail the last thing, did
they do this, did they do that -- you can have them
all, a teacher can see on a dashboard, let's go to
that school and see who is behind, who is failing,
who needs help -- and can just get on the phone and
spend some one-on-one time with the people that
need one-on-one time, to spend time with them and,
that people who in this particular course, this
weak on this unit are doing kinds of --
Bring that data together and making it
usable by us to make good effective use of our
time; because you can't take teachers completely
out of the loop.
MR. GRODD: This is in video games from
Asteroids Pacman on. It's a game where the game is
acutely aware of your ability to play at every
point.
MR. JOHNSON: And so, you stayed in what
was called that zone of competence, right, where
you were like challenging -- not challenging. Then
it was like, gosh, I am going to figure this out,
but I will figure it out and I am going to get to
that.
MR. KALIN: People learn in different
ways. You don't want to test what we should be
learning in the first place.
MR. S. JOHNSON: The wonderful thing
about games is, now like Asteroids and Pacman,
there is one objective. The games are incredibly
rich now, it is like rich in relation or like how
can you create all sorts of objectives that are not
necessarily as score based as --
(Laughter.)
So, it isn't about metrics, it isn't
about points. Most people, I think, don't play
games for points. They play games in a much more
Etsy type feeling way, which is like, I want to
build this little thing or I have got this little,
you know, group, that we are going to go out and we
set goals for ourselves.
But, we're not necessarily trying to
win anymore. We are trying to do these things
along the way, but there's feedback constantly from
the environment saying, get better. You still need
to work on these skills but you have improved
yourself and it is very individualized for each
individual person playing.
MS. RHOTEN: I just want to add to that.
I think that you are right. I would like to extend
what you are saying further. I think about the
power, the back end of it, ways to understand how
the users or the game or the turns they take and
those things and the decisions they make. And then
there is a game development company called...
thinking hard about this and the back end of the
gaming platform.
And I think what we don't really know
is, we know in terms of gaming data leveling, we
know all the different things that are the obvious
explicit way in which a kid goes through games or
games.
What we haven't figured out yet and we
will soon, I think that you're right, and in turn,
and then what that tells us about cognitive inroads
and the cognitive aspects, which really will
empower the arguments that you are making. And we
are on the verge of that, but we haven't gotten it
yet.
MR. GORDON: I want follow on through
quickly. It assumes that as many girls as boys
would play it, probably more. Only a quarter of
the people who play it play it primarily as a game.
And the people who play it as a game tend to stop
playing after 20 hours.
And the people who play it for
four years, play it as a story-telling and creative
device. A quarter of the people play it primarily
as a creative tool and don't play the game at all.
MR. WILSON: It gives us access to
teaching moments. I found myself teaching my
daughter vector calculus, because her school can't
teach her vector calculus. Her vector calculus
teacher sucks.
So, I don't remember this stuff very
well. She came home with a problem which was the
cooling tower, and she had to calculate the volume
of the cooling tower based on the equation of the
curve. I said, God, I can't figure this out.
So, the first thing we did was go to
Google and we found the cooling tower and then,
okay, now we know what a cooling tower looks like.
Then we googled "cooling tower calculus problem,"
then all of a sudden, we found a problem that's
pretty similar to her problem.
We reverse engineered it, the two of us
did it, and she ended up solving the problem. And
it was a great learning moment. And we used the
Web to do that. We used freely available data on
the Web, images and equations and other solutions,
and it required some work on both of our parts to
figure it out. But there's just so much data out
there, and if you just get access to it, at the
right place at the right time, the teaching moments
reveal themselves.
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: But you did it with
her. That can be part of the occurrence of
technology --
MS. RHOTEN: Talking about learning
through technology. It is the practice, a large
part. It's not just the information push. It is
the practices around, what you do by navigating, by
negotiating, interpreting, evaluating and playing
with that information. And that's where it plays
an important role for whether it's the mentor or
the teacher or the staff or whatever term you use
when --
MR. WENGER: I think technology helps in
that portion, too, where you can discovery your
mentor in --
MS. BOYD: Remember that we have a
complete fear in the society of young people acting
as adults at every level. So, that's not easy,
unless you solved the predator panicked [sic],
could you please do? I beg you.
(Laughter.)
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: It doesn't have to
be an adult.
MS. BOYD: There are other dynamics if
you get -- but actually, kids, because of the
culture of fear, getting input to interact with
strange kids are also part of the problem right
now -- and I think that even within their already
existing networks, you can actually encourage --
there's a lot of opportunities for technology to
make obvious interventions that --
I love going in and watching how many
teachers still fill out paper material for every
little step along the way. This has come in as
easy to put technology and to give you some of the
feedback that goes on as a teacher. Now, the next
level is how do you get a teacher to connect to the
network of teachers?
They are allowed to network. That's a
statement. And why are they not sharing all sorts
of the problem sets and the way they're going about
this? Some of them are. And to me, it's to find a
cooling tower -- how do you search these learning
lessons that the teachers are doing? Now, how do
you create those tools that parents can --
MR. GRODD: That's my pleasure.
MS. BOYD: And how can the parent engage
with this, as well? Fred is smart enough that he
can figure it out, how to reverse engineer this
puzzle.
MR. WILSON: Actually, it was a
collaborative effort between me and my daughter.
MS. BOYD: One, you read English, which
is really helpful. It's a part of this. But how
do we give parents the tools which they can
actually engage with their kids across language,
across cultural barriers, across all these other
things, so you can make the partnerships much more
obvious?
It's not even just about how do we
intercept learning with directly with kids, but
affecting the larger ecology. And there's a lot
more opportunity for technology there, first and
foremost, and directly to the kids.
MR. RESNICK: One thing I think about
when Albert... what leverage... what Bob Kerry was
saying about access to information outside of
libraries. There's no doubt that leverage is
access to information.
Another thing, clearly, leverage is the
possibility of making things, whether making
videos, making music, there's new ways of making
things which we didn't have before.
And the third thing about it is
connecting to other people. None of these things
are totally new. In learning education from
millennia, we have accessed information, we
interacted with other people or we've been making
things. Technology extends all that.
But it doesn't by itself change the...
it expands the possibilities for active
information, making things in connection with other
people. But what the real role of teachers,
mentors, parents, is to guide -- how do you go
about active information and making things? That's
not obvious.
Some people will figure it out on their
own, you know, better than others. That's the real
support that's needed and better structure around
the people and materials, other ways in order to
support -- just the greater capabilities and all
those mentioned.
MR. LOUGHRIDGE: This might seem a
little freaky, but I think we are starting to
experiment with technology as a guide to how to
gain the right information at the right time.
There's a company I'm involved with,
Avatar Reality. It's a virtual world. And we have
expert learning systems that we're playing with and
chat engines. So, an expert can impart a series of
questions and answers to this Avatar and you can
pose to be Socrates, let's say, and you impart this
give and take.
The system is smart enough to
understand any sort of question that relates to the
questions in place. And so, for example, do you
like chocolate, or is chocolate good for you? It
can feel those kinds of questions and give that --
serve off that expert advice. It actually sucks
information, or it's about to, from Wikipedia.
I think there's an interesting new
horizon for technology where you have these agents
that can help the human interaction. And I think
back to -- if you're lucky enough to be a student
at Trinity College, Cambridge, you would study one
on one with Bertrand Russell at one time, or
Wittgenstein.
Now, I think we're on the cusp of
having the ability to impart your knowledge into a
Socratic machine that can carry on its sort of
personalized, one on one learning, with whatever
individual and whatever passion they may have. I
think, that should be incendiary. I don't think it
is right to intermediate humans from the learning.
I think it's a whole new really interesting tool.
MR. BURNHAM: To me, we're talking about
three basic thrusts for technology. One is just
the increasing liquidity of information, the web;
and access to information, access to other people
and access to adults who can help, whether they're
parents or others.
The second is this more structured
notion of, whether it's structuring a game or
including the feedback that they're requiring as
people interact with the system and then feeding
that back into a game or to another kind of
educational system. And that is more designed. I
would say the Web is not really particularly -- the
infrastructure is designed, but interaction, social
interactions are not.
And then the third is the point that
Mark brings up, which is that there may be a
possibility that technology in the form of
artificial intelligence in which you're learning to
get to a point where it could begin to behave like
a teacher.
And is there another category that
we're missing.
MR. MILLER: Yes, I think technology is
an organizing tool. We've been talking about it --
because the economy is bad, that's why we have
that. The schools and buildings and all that kind
of thing -- basic technology and everything to take
those economies of scale and mess with it.
So, it might be cheaper to have, you
know, a kid home-schooled part of the time and then
learning from somebody. And then in another
building, another time for a different subject,
because you can get more diversity.
The internet is great, but is it
necessary and actually great in organizing the real
world? I think that's where there's a lot of
opportunity education to be turned completely
upside down in new ways of organizing the system.
MR. WILSON: In light of that, I think
that's exactly right. When I think about where
we're going to be in 50 years, I think we're going
to have a marketplace model for education where the
student is in control of their education and they
determine who is going to educate them, when, where
and how, and the educational system can be built
into all of that.
But the problem with how to get from
here to there -- we have these physical spaces and
-- when I think about how I want my kids to ideally
learn, I'd like them to be able to avail themselves
of the quality classes and teachers they have in
their physical space, and then opt out of those
that they don't and go get those somewhere else.
But the problem is that the whole
economics of that physical space breaks down as
they sort of opt out. And maybe this is just what
we're going through in other industries that they
get crushed by the organizing efficiency powers in
the Internet. But I don't know how to get across
that chasm.
MR. SCHAPPELL: Maybe schools ought to
offer statements for expert to teach outside of a
formal curriculum of four years. And so, in
Seattle, we use Town Hall Seattle, the same things,
four times a day in New York. Paul... is in town.
I pay every time he is coming to town.
And so, rather than having education
systems that hire experts to get accredited and
paid and tenured, they're just a facility that
bring in people who are popular or who have big
followings or who are rated well, so you can go
pick and choose what you want do learn and when you
want to learn it.
And so, it takes some of the economics
out of it as a problem, because it is not about if
the students came to sign up for four years, and
the student could be you, and interested in
learning this one subject for just a brief period.
MR. MILLER: Getting kids to teach
kids... there probably are schools...
MR. HEIFERMAN: Like school camp?
MR. L. JOHNSON: One mechanism of
getting a little bit past the dilemma of curriculum
being focused towards this goal of accreditation.
It is now possible for the learners to define what
are the goals they want to achieve; and end up with
a personalized curriculum that meets those goals,
and it may meet the accreditation goals, too, or
not. But the access is very valuable both in its
own right also in terms of metaschool's skill of
encouraging learners to define their learning goals
and then try to achieve them.
MR. WILEY: I think you can slice that
into at least five pieces OF higher ed in any way.
One of the functions of the university right there,
there is some content provision, there's some
research conducted, archived and disseminated.
There's help that's provided when the student has a
question on the content, it wasn't enough. There's
a social life aspects and there's a credential
aspect.
And right now, all those things, plus
probably some others, they're all within a single
monolithic organization. They can point for each
one of those things... the course realm, the
content side, the public library from the research
side; Yahoo Answers is on the help side.
Western Governors University in
credentialing doesn't even offer classes. They
only offer exams. Social life on the Internet, we
really don't even have to talk about that.
Those are all starting to kind of fall
apart. And you could, right now, put together a
very small piece of this joined approach to higher
education, getting your content here, your research
there, your help there, your credential over here.
MR. WILSON: Sounds like Rob did.
MR. WILEY: As far as the path forward,
I think as people continue to work in the spaces,
what generally happens with credential is it a
better job of cost, which then means the people
will start going looking, may start to shop around
and say, "I'm going to get my content from here and
my support from there." If I want to buy
instructional contracts...
MR. LOUGHRIDGE: I think, to me, as a
teacher on the one hand, the technology
offers...access to amazing teachers in any subject.
I can find AN online facilitator.
But to me, number one, I think, K-12,
that's where my focus is, you can't overlook the
value of a human relationship in the person sitting
down next to a student and getting a red pen and
working together.
So, I think all the conversation, when
you're trying to think about skill, you need to
keep that in mind. In fact, as far as I've seen,
and I think a lot of people -- there's some debate,
but to me, the truest form of educating is the
teacher to student relationship and it is in person
and it is watching that relationship grow over
time.
MR. CAULFIELD: So, that doesn't
necessarily --
MR. GRODD: Like at my school, we
taught a Chinese class and it was all done through
online video, no teacher knew how to speak Chinese.
But there was a teacher in there facilitating the
12 students, making sure they're on task, creating
the curriculum, giving the assessments, managing
the classroom.
So, to me, the limit of the video
conference model is that in order to have the
effect, you always have to choose being there to
manage the class. It's one on one to manage the
class to make sure that kids are doing the work,
paying attention. And so, it really comes back to
the teacher, human being.
MR. CAULFIELD: Hopefully what happens
is, when you move to things and you sort of
disaggregate the content from the interaction from
the assessment is that you -- you don't get into a
situation where you have a person and they're
brilliant in that interaction piece, but not really
a builder of curriculum. But you don't lose the
talent of that person simply because they're not a
person that can build a 14-week or 20-week or
whatever week course.
So, I think, a lot of times when talk
we talk about pieces loosely joined, we start to
think this is sort of digital Utopianism. It
doesn't necessarily have to be. We can actually
use that to focus the pieces that are more personal
and make them more personal.
MR. WENGER: We have two more comments
from Daniel and Bing, and then we're going to break
for lunch.
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: Last two.
MS. ALLEN: I think we have a consensus
about what education's forward purposes are. As
long as we understand that would be the modular
form; right? You gave us five human interaction
pieces. Human development is six. I would put the
social one into the network citizenship piece. So
you've got seven modules. And the plan of the
university is always given, it's a sufficient way
of delivering all seven.
So, essentially, as people develop new
technology, they each need to ask itself which it
would be delivering, and how you articulate that
the efforts of other pieces to deliver some set of
those?
But then for me, the final and most
important thing is, actually, how do you teach
young people to understand that they need all seven
of these things, and to figure out to put them
together in a way that does give competence.
MR. GORDON: From an economic point of
view, I would say the goal of smart people like us
is to figure out how to get the education goals we
have down to a marginal cost of zero. And somebody
mentioned Oxford. I think the marginal cost for a
student at Oxford is probably $250,000; at a U.S.
university, it's probably $90,000.
SPEAKER: Per year?
MR. GORDON: Per year. That's what it
costs per student. It's not what they charge. And
public school, I think, they're trying to do it at
6- or $8,000.
And so, what if it had to get to zero?
We've seen technologies that get the marginal cost
to zero, plus bandwidth. And then on this notion
that you have to have a teacher to educate. In the
1970s, I did advertising for banks with ATMs and
100 percent of grownups said that ATM's are
impersonal and they would keep going to live
tellers because they're more personal. Around
1980, there was a flip-flop. And on average,
humans realized that ATMs were more personal than
tellers --
(Laughter.)
I would submit that the experience with
a lot of kids is that the teachers are bank tellers
of the 1970s.
(Laughter.)
MR. WENGER: With that, we will break
for lunch. There are two openings in the table
here on purpose so that people can take their
chairs and bring them inside up against smaller
groups that can actually sit across from each
other.
And if you haven't signed up, sign up
for one. And as I said, if you don't like any of
them, create your own.
(Time noted: 12:35 p.m.)
(Time noted: 1:30 p.m.)
Before lunch, we talked a little bit
about goals; we talked a little bit about
technology and leverage. And we want to spend the
afternoon, really, talking about what we can do and
what people are already doing to make this all
actually happen.
And it looks like -- we'll start again
with a little video that some of you may have seen.
The things we talked about, the things that are
possible, and the things that seem to be mostly
true, and that will happen --
(A brief video presentation was done.)
MR. WENGER: There's a lot of other
great videos on YouTube that are all worth
watching.
Now, the great thing, there are a bunch
of people in the room who are all building things
to help bridge that gap between what's
technologically possible and what's technically
useful today.
So, we have people talk this afternoon,
starting with what they are actually doing and why
they are doing it, and how that may help address
some of those things.
I will put some of you on the spot,
unless there's any volunteers.
MR. BISCHKE: So, I run a site called
edufire.com. It comes from the Yeats quote which
is, "Education is not the filling of a pail but the
lighting of a fire." And what we've done is,
basically, create a marketplace in the community on
live video learning.
So, people can come to eduFire, they
can create classes on whatever topics they want to.
Those classes are then available for anyone who
wants to take their class. It's a very open
format. They can choose to run the classes for
free or they can charge money for those classes as
well.
So, we're basically leveraging the free
markets with our idea, and we have right now over
2,000 teachers that are teaching at eduFire about
10,000 students, people from all around the world,
and really just simply trying to apply a lot of the
open principles that worked in other areas of the
Web, worked at sites like Etsy, a lot of stuff that
Jeff talks about in his book, just trying to apply
that stuff to education.
And we really feel that the biggest
opportunity is when you give teachers the
opportunity to innovate. And the best way to do
that is to give them financial incentives, give
them opportunities to scale, give them
opportunities for attention and appreciation. So,
that's a little bit of what we are trying to do.
MR. WILSON: And it was videos; right?
MR. BISCHKE: Live video.
MR. WILSON: Live video?
MR. BISCHKE: Live video.
MR. WILSON: Like YouTube or something
like that?
MR. BISCHKE: Yes. It's interactive.
So, the students can actually ask questions of the
teachers.
MR. WILSON: Who sets the price of these
classes?
MR. BISCHKE: The teachers do.
MR. WILSON: So, they set a price and
then the students -- they get students and
obviously if the price is too high or the class
is --
MR. BISCHKE: Supply and demand, yes.
MR. SHELSTAD: I'm Jeff Shelstad. I
founded a company called Flat World Knowledge,
which is trying to solve the textbook affordability
problem in higher education, competing with some
other chains.
So, our basic mission is -- we're
publishing great textbooks by renowned experts in
their fields, but we're letting publishers publish
it free and open, which means I give the
professional complete control over the content
deployment locally. They can modify the book any
way they want, any way they want, create common
relations. And we give them complete control over
their consumption.
Because we publish a free and open
book, we can consume it free. We're making a bet
that... altering the format, we provide the...
print being one of them. Some of the readers bring
others, study it and wrap it around that content.
David Wiley is actually our chief... officer --
which is two other companies we're watching right
now.
MR. WILEY: Best title ever, by the way,
Chief...
MS. SEGGERMAN: I'm Suzanne Seggerman.
I run Games for Change. We started about five and
a half, six years ago, and our model is something
like -- what early documentary film was originally
meant to do, where you use the video games to
address real world issues.
We have an online community of more
than a thousand people. We have an annual festival
that happens in the summer, which has been doubling
in size every year and is now, unbelievably, the
biggest game event in New York.
Some of the people in this room know
it. We have spoken with panels and our makeup is a
third educators, a third game developers, and a
third non-profits.
And what we aim to do is, really, to
help the non-profit -- help all of these sectors
understand better the power of games to do more
than just entertain, to put them, really, towards
things like poverty, the environment, civic
engagement, journalism.
But at least, we try to foster these...
by bringing everyone together and we share
resources and tools and ideas. It's a platform for
change and...
MR. WENGER: I think it consists of
three conversation. So, I think people should jump
in and ask questions, as some people are doing.
So, I should have probably clarified that up front.
MR. BURNHAM: I would like to know what
Shai is doing. I've read about it. You are
starting a global university?
MR. RESHEF: It is a non-profit,
tuition-free online university, which is basically
aimed at the third world student who graduated high
school and has decent English, decent enough to be
able to study at an American university. However
they couldn't get into university either because
they don't have the financial means or because they
are located in a place where there aren't enough
universities, the demand is much more than the
supply of universities where they live.
So, we offer them a tuition-free
university. The way it is going to operate is that
students are not going to pay for courses or
tuition. However, they pay admission and they pay
for exams that they take after each course, between
$10 to $100, depending on the country they come
from. And the idea is to open admission to
everyone around the globe.
MR. KALIN: Will you give a degree?
MR. RESHEF: It is going to be an
accredited American degree.
MR. KALIN: How do you get an accredited
American degree?
(Laughter.)
MR. KALIN: -- organization to grant
that?
MR. RESHEF: You can apply for
accreditation. First you set up your own
university. You need to operate for several years,
and then you apply for accreditation to the agency
to become accredited. And what you do and whether
you follow their rules and --
MR. KALIN: The rules are published?
MR. RESHEF: Yes.
MR. KALIN: What do they call it? I
think there's a credit instrument --
MR. RESHEF: There are six regional
accreditation agencies, and there are a few
measurements.
MR. WENGER: Where does the content come
from?
MR. RESHEF: Open source, open
courseware. It doesn't make the university tuition
free. Basically, everything that is available for
free. So, we take the content that is available
online, and we take open -- we use open source
technology.
And I think that what is actually very
unique about what we do is, we apply social
networking into that. So, there are not going to
be teachers in the classroom. Students are going
to teach each other. If you are teaching -- and
there will be a forum where they can get help or
professors. However, in the classroom itself, the
studies will be through discussion between the
students with each other on the topics.
MR. BURNHAM: All in English?
MR. RESHEF: Right now -- we started in
English. When we will be big enough, we will offer
other languages.
MR. BURNHAM: Do you have a sense of how
you solved the problem that Daniel was talking
about earlier, about some of the cultural
literacy -- not really cultural literacy, the
cultural framework within which these students are
operating and whether their parents -- you've got a
basic, kind of hidden problem in that -- certain
parts of the world where that seems to be a
problem.
When we assume that problem's solved,
then the second part of the problem is, even if
you're predisposed to finding this kind of
education and investing the time and energy, even
though it is free, do you think there are students
out there that -- do you think the demand already
exists, or do you have to bring along that kind of
cultural change in order to create the demand?
MR. RESHEF: The demand for the program
is there for sure. Let's go one step backward. We
hold only two programs right now, business
administration and computer science. The reason
for that is that these are the most-needed degrees
in order to get a job.
Remember that, unlike the discussion
that we had here at the beginning, this morning,
most of the people that we are actually approaching
are people who need money to live. They need to
find a job. We help them to find a better job than
they can get otherwise.
The people out there, we know because
we announced the program a month ago and we are
flooded with demand from all over the world, from
people who tried to register even though we haven't
opened our gates yet. We haven't started
admission.
I think -- we chose these two programs
that are both needed worldwide and they are not
studied -- computer science is the same wherever
you study. So, there is no cultural bias. We are
not trying very hard not to get into topics that
have cultural differences.
To give one example, the most needed
degree in the world is a teaching degree. Teachers
come out needed all over the world. We're not
getting there because teacher in Ghana is not a
teacher in the U.S. and is not a teacher in China.
So, we're trying to have those topics that -- they
are worldwide. Still, there will be a chance for
the student from different cultures together in one
class.
That will be an issue. I used to run
an online university in the Netherlands, which was
the International University, and it was a big
challenge. People from different cultures behave
differently and react differently to the way other
students discuss topics. So, it could be a
challenge.
MR. WILSON: And when you say
"classroom," this is some virtual space they are
going to or is that not --
MR. RESHEF: It is virtual.
MR. WILSON: They actually all go at the
same time?
MR. RESHEF: No.
MR. WILSON: So, there is some kind of
representation of space that they are all part
of -- are they dialoging or discussing or is it the
same content?
MR. RESHEF: You're presuming the same
lecture and then they discuss one after the other
the same topic. It is asynchronous and -- because
of the time difference and because of the there's
not going to be any video, but it's very, very
simple, to make sure that anyone around the world
can get it. Not in the beginning.
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: I think, from
conversations that we've had, it's important that
maybe you share the niche market you're after, the
lower middle class or the upper lower class.
And mainly international, because -- I
think slightly different than a lot of what we
discussed today in terms of, I think, somewhat more
national -- there is a need among the population
that, I think, you're targeting that is very
wonderful but very well-defined.
MR. RESHEF: You are right. It's a good
point because it's not for everyone. You need to
know English. You need to have a computer. You
need to graduate high school. So, that's the
requirement is there.
So, our assumption -- I think it varies
from one country to the other, but basically the
upper or the lower class -- or the lower of the
middle class, that's the population that we are
approaching. It's people who almost made it --
almost -- could have been in the university but
lost their chance.
MS. FLEMAL: Do You have some provision
for the people who didn't graduate high school?
MR. RESHEF: No.
MS. FLEMAL: No alternative?
MR. RESHEF: No, because we want
accreditation. In order to get accreditation, we
must make sure that they graduated high school.
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: Down the road,
probably, you will have programs, but not when you
launch?
MR. RESHEF: Right. When you think
about it, there's really no reason -- anyone who
has these two preconditions can get in. And it
takes two courses -- if they pass, then they become
a full-time student, with English 101 and Computer
Science 101. So, we think by then, they become
regular students.
Theoretically, there is no reason not
to let anyone in the world to take these two
classes. If they pass there, they can become
students. We can't do it because of accreditation.
MR. WENGER: What's the biggest hurdle
for you to be launched?
MR. RESHEF: I think we have only two
hours.
(Laughter.)
MR. WILSON: This conference is getting
in the way.
MR. WENGER: I would love to hear about
Katie's school, which is another school being
started.
MS. SALEN: I am working on a new 6th
grade through 12th grade public school that will
open in the fall. It's based on the idea of
game-based learning. And we were trying to look at
the question of that you couldn't just change one
part of the school, that in order to actually have
transformative change, you needed to work at a
systemic level.
So, that was the idea of trying to
design a school from the ground up. All aspects of
the school, the curriculum, the professional
development program, student recruitment, the kinds
of technology and communications platforms in the
school, the leadership model and all of that is
built around a pedagogy, which is the way that we
think kids learn best.
So, we've been working on it for about
two years. We wanted to open a public school
because we're really interested in the equity and
access question, making sure that -- in a lot of
our work, we found that kids that have struggled in
traditional schools do really well with some of the
work we've been doing around game-based learning.
So, we're interested in a classroom
that has a really diverse set of kids. And I have
to say that's been a struggle, to make that happen,
because there's all kinds of crazy politics, you
know, in the Department of Ed. So, we'll open in
the fall. We're recruiting students now --
MR. WILSON: How many students?
MS. SALEN: There'll be 81 in a single
class. So, it'll be a small -- it falls into the
small school model. Eventually, it'll have about
600 kids in the school.
And so, we're trying to look at this
notion of how we marry non-profits with industry
with schools. So, we have a set of industry
partners, we have a set of non-profit partners and
then we're kind of a public institution. And we're
trying to understand how we -- when we were talking
about that nodal system this morning, how do we
develop infrastructures that allow kids access to
resources in a range of spaces? We're trying to
blur ideas around college and career. So, kids
begin internships in the eighth grade, and
apprenticeships.
So, we're really interested, again, in
getting kids out into the world and figuring out
how to leverage different kinds of knowledge.
MR. WILSON: I really like that, I've
seen that work really well with my kids. How do
you do that? How do you facilitate these
interesting opportunities for internship at such a
young age so that for my kids who's about -- by the
time they get to the age of 16, 17 or 18, the
opportunities will start to present themselves.
But, at 14, it is hard.
MS. SALEN: That's where our
partnerships come in. So, we have a partnership
with these school universities, so kids -- and
we're working there with sets of academics that are
interested in having young people come for work
with graduate students. And then we have a set of
industry partnerships where kids can --
particularly in eighth and ninth grade, they're
going to have to sort of work in groups. So, we
can't sort of send sixth graders or seventh graders
out into the city. But we're looking at kinds of
programs that can sit inside some different
institutions that will support kids in that sort of
internship. So, it has to do with partnerships and
we've started trying to build those early on.
MR. KALIN: Do they have to be
institutions...
MS. SALEN: No. It is quite open and
internships may be virtual. They may be online
where kids are having a chance in some online
communities to intern in a virtual world, for
example, learn something about that.
MR. RESNICK: To make the walls a little
bit more permeable so that it gives off a portal
for the community; it could be part of the
community public?
MS. SALEN: Right.
MR. RESNICK: The community is a key to
all of the issues that are raised today.
MS. SALEN: Right; absolutely. So, the
question is good as not about all formal
institutions, we're trying to look at what -- where
a kid is at, what they're interested in and how we
can create some kind of internship work. We liked
the word "apprenticeship" because we want to look
at those models to look for, who kids might be sort
of studying with and learning from.
MR. KALIN: Do students get school
credit for the internship?
MS. SALEN: Yes.
MR. KALIN: So, is there any
accreditation issue that you're dealing with?
MS. SALEN: So, the other piece that
we're having to work on which has come up a lot
lately is the assessment issue. So, we have
received some opening of permissions from the State
to develop an alternative assessment model that
begins to look at competencies that can be granted
both within industry by academic institutions and
by other kinds of individuals. So, that's
something that will happen over time.
And our goal is to try to say kids
should be able to get credit by doing work in lots
of different kind of phases, not just within --
within an academic institution so that there would
be a process by which people will be able to be
considered accreditable or to be able to give a
credit in some sense; yes.
MR. KALIN: What I was asking you is the
same. If I get an intern, will the school even see
me as a legitimate enough business to... what is
relatively a business proprietorship.
MS. SALEN: Sure. Part of our model is
that online communities have their own appreciative
system. If you're successful within that
community, it's really clear that that community
values what you do and there's a whole set of
expectations around that. We think that community
should evaluate performance, not an outside
organization. So, we are trying to look at the
notion that if you have the common expert in a
community, that should be enough.
MR. GRODD: Did you say private school?
MS. SALEN: No, it's public school.
Public-public.
MR. GRODD: The charters are on public
school... The charts are for public schools?
MS. SALEN: Yes.
What do you mean "full autonomy"?
MR. GRODD: How do you start your own
public school without it being chartered?
MS. SALEN: You just ask if you can do
it.
(Laughter.)
There is a process. So, we had to go
through an application process.
MR. GRODD: New York has a process.
MS. SALEN: Yes, there's a process.
There's something called the Office of Portfolio
Development and you apply for -- you have to
provide sample curriculum. It's very rigorous and
then once you get approved, yes.
MR. GRODD: I think New York is not
unique.
MS. SALEN: Yes.
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: Is New York
interested in then making many schools like this?
Are you a model school for other schools in the
public school system to become similar?
MS. SALEN: We've been trying to stay
away from the scale question right now, because we
feel like schools are so context-specific. We
think there are maybe parts of the model that can
scale but we don't want to put that pressure on
right away.
But the DOE, to give them some credit,
they're deeply interested in innovation. They
recognized current structures are not working.
They did not run from us when we came with this
idea which is what I thought would happen. They've
been super supportive, which I also didn't think
would happen. But we haven't touched the scale
question yet.
MR. GORDON: Do you have any
non-traditional metrics for successful graduates?
MS. SALEN: In terms of what? Give me
an example of a non-traditional.
MR. GORDON: Non-traditional might be
passing tests and getting into college.
MS. SALEN: Yes, that's the assessment
model that I'm talking about. We have to give
grades of some sort because those are required.
But we are looking at an alternate model.
MR. GORDON: You're getting as much
support as the DOE --
MS. SALEN: Yes. An alternate model
around competencies. So, we have a model where
kids are earning badges. And so, it's some sort of
a portfolio model that by the time they graduate,
that the evidence of participation and of certain
kinds of excellence become a measure of their
success as a graduate.
MR. GORDON: So, they now become an
expert of something and get out of here?
MS. SALEN: Yes, exactly. Our whole
goal is to let kids be a master of something by the
time they graduate. We think that's a huge goal,
to allow every child to feel that they have become
an expert in something that they feel passionate
about.
And ideally, be supported around what
we would call "functional literacies" and we were
talking about within this group reading, writing,
math; yes, absolutely. But the other stuff, kids
become what they want to become and build what they
want to build with their lives, based on how they
gather knowledge and utilize it. So, that's the
model that we're aiming at.
THE SPEAKER: What would the enrollment
be and how many kids?
MS. SALEN: We'll first take in 81 in
the first year and we'll roll out a grade each
year. So, that will end up being about 600
students overall, yes.
MR. WILSON: Will it be seven grades?
MS. SALEN: Seven grades.
MR. WILSON: Middle and then high
school?
MS. SALEN: From 6 to 12. So, we're
really interested in -- we haven't talked much
today of the trajectory of learning. So, what
would it need to actually catch a kid in middle
school and be able to help them move into the upper
school without having to change -- necessarily
change schools, how do you develop a deep
understanding of literally their movement through
school rather than thinking about them just as in
grade to grade level?
So, we've been thinking about not
having grade levels. So, we're having sort of
phases that kids can move at their own pace, their
own pace within.
MR. BURNHAM: And does everything have
to be a game?
MS. SALEN: No.
MR. BURNHAM: Is the school itself, do
they think of their educational process as a game
or do they think of each course as a game that they
think of within a course that there are certainly
elements that are game-like?
MS. SALEN: Sure, now that's a good
question. So, the curriculum is disseminated
through a game-like structure. So, kids are given
a ten-week mission, and that mission drops them
into a complex problem space and then that mission
is broken down into a series of smaller quests that
allows kids to build skills and knowledge in order
to solve that problem.
So, that's the big game idea. And then
certain quests also have kids are making games or
playing games but it's not every --
MR. BURNHAM: Each of these had to be
created, this curriculum and the actual game
dynamic and the game structure and I assume some of
the programs that had to be created class by class?
MS. SALEN: Yes. And so, our curriculum
is co-developed by teachers and game designers.
So, that was the other model that we're looking at,
that it may be a new type of collaboration that
could be to invent a curriculum. It's not all
digital; there's a lot of non-digital steps.
MR. BURNHAM: Digital games?
MS. SALEN: Yes.
MS. ALLEN: You will fund it
philanthropically rather than the public school
system?
MS. SALEN: The schools themselves, no,
but our planning cost us -- we got some money
through MacArthur, the two-year planning grant.
But the school itself is funded by public moneys;
yes.
MR. GORDON: Do the kids always had one
identity, or do they get to mess around?
(Laughter.)
MS. SALEN: We have an online social
network that we built for the school called "Be Me"
and it's the idea that we want kids to play around
with multiple identities and to recognize that
they, at any one time, may be taking on different
identities. There's an "at model" in it called
"The Expertise Exchange."
We're also trying to get kids to
understand what they are experts in, what they want
to be experts in, what they're not good at. So,
this notion of how do you find other people to work
with, other kinds of mentors and that kind of
thing. So, the multiple identity thing is a big
one. The notion of the curriculum -- and then I'll
shut up because I don't want to dominate here -- is
allowing kids to step into identities.
MR. GORDON: Keep talking as long as you
are saying something better than the rest of us,
under the circumstances.
(Laughter.)
MS. ALLEN: Is there any ambition to
attract kids from private schools back to the
public system?
MS. SALEN: Obviously, that's already
happening because the economy crashed. So, we
suddenly have had people showing up at our open
houses that have been people that have been in
private schools that are now trying to enter public
school.
And so, it wasn't an intention, but I
think it's the reality today, particularly in
New York, because there are families that are
suddenly in a totally different place then they
were six months ago.
MR. KALIN: Is there any way to see
what's going on from the outside? Can we see this?
MS. SALEN: Right this second?
MR. JARVIS: Soon thereafter?
MR. GORDON: You can pass as a
seventh grader.
(Laughter.)
MR. KALIN: There is a program in
New York where if you can prove you're under 18 you
can get into all these theaters for $5; you just
flash a fake ID saying how young you are.
(Laughter.)
So, these other kids want to see and
learn from it in the context being created there.
It can seem to be a open course where in this side
of things, that's something that's stuck inside of
it there?
MS. SALEN: So, we have a big notion of
kids being given an opportunity to disseminate.
So, we have lots of channels out as well as
channels in. So, one thing we found with kids is
that the ability to give them that -- the idea to
give them the ability to share what they have done
is super critical to them and to make choices about
who they're sharing it with.
We're trying to build in mechanisms by
which they can export things that they were doing
in the space for more public kind of space; whether
if it's public in a sense of their small group of
friends or their parents or whether it's to the
world. So, the publication notion is a big one in
the school about outward facing.
MR. L. JOHNSON: What lessons did you
learn about things that you thought would be good
ideas that turned out not to work out and have
unintended effects?
MS. SALEN: We haven't opened the school
yet. But we'll probably learn a lot.
I think that there is an instinct to
always make it more complex than it really needs to
be. So, I think that a lot of -- I'm a designer.
So, part of what I do is to always strip things
down. So, I think a lot of our early work was way
too complicated, trying to over-design.
And so, I think we found that it's
really about stripping, stripping away and
understanding what, who are the participants in any
learning moment. So, trying not to get to
over-design what the teacher does, not to
over-design what the student does and understand
that the student brings things, the teacher brings
things.
So, what is this simple-as-possible
interface to connect those two? I think that's
been our big lesson. And also that parents are
very freaked out about their children's education,
do not underestimate that. So, that's a big
mistake we made, or I did.
MR. WILSON: Rob, I would like to ask
Rob to talk a little bit about what you are working
on.
MR. KALIN: I'm taking everything that
I've learned from Etsy and trying to create
essentially a framework that a lot of the things
you will hear people talking about fit into. And
the type of application does exists. So, I think
it's about the early stages.
And, they're just the experts here in
the articles where they had to implement these
software. The new types of software suddenly
enabled all these new interactions. So, I think,
blogs, forums, Wikis, private entities, all these
things aren't quite right for the educational
sector and there's essentially the new type of Web
education. So.
, I'm working on that and then,
specifically, to start with looking at how people
are home-schooling their kids; because I don't want
all the hurdles of the accreditation that are being
set back especially in the beginning.
And also specifically looking at kids,
three years and younger, how these people are going
to start using the Web and at what age we start
developing that literacy. There are people
actually on the Web before they can read and all
kinds of interfaces and how technology does that.
Again, we're talking about learning
here, we're talking what needs to be met more
about. And we should be ready in a couple of
months since the first to use is the Internet
component to it and to make sure that the
components you make maybe explained as adaptations
to the entire system.
It's not like this is a game and this
isn't a game, the whole space has that kind of
staple built into them. You've got some entities
where you -- you entice people to turn out and be
playful, I think that's the premise of it thus far
in the application.
And it will have potentially, there
would be an application arguably of using the right
things that exist inside of its framework and the
goal of the opportunity is to kind of build a
social business and explaining that it's not a
for-profit model.
There's a lot of restrictions the IRS
places on you in terms of what you can do and it's
non-profit tax code, it's not written in the
website where you can find it, that's for sure.
We're also talking of use of other means and other
ways to start this business step, something
successful that we keep giving back to the people
who are making it successful. Given that security
to do stuff that we're doing right now, we're kind
of placing a hold to be there but at least we want
to get by that in a month or two.
MR. WILSON: Anybody would able to use
this? A school could use this?
MR. KALIN: Completely open and in
public, and if you're teaching a class, if you're
figuring to teaching a class, you can restrict who
comes in through and then you can narrow through
those things that you see there documented where
you can see whatever content they want.
There's also the fact how people would
be connected with the others, so -- and have this
vision of a five-year-old American teaching English
to a five-year-old in Paris and vice versa and
creating something that's simple enough to connect
with each other.
So, it's a system where if there's
someone that definitely wants to teach a class,
they can do it or at least that they can do it
there as well. So, that's the design challenges
that we had that since we're doing this. And I
think a lot of the educational software out there
is really good and of smart design that we can use,
as well.
MR. WILSON: Have you tried to build
something out there that could be used at any part
of the educational establishment, everything from
very traditional school situations to someone who
is trying to teach themselves, to home-schooling,
adult education?
MR. KALIN: Right. The framework for
organizing the information facility and the
interaction itself, the people would actually have.
I think the Web as a whole enables to teach with a
learning framework, but it's not well-organized
enough to facilitate the instruction interaction
that happens as well and with computers.
MR. JARVIS: Are there metrics built in?
Are there commercial aspects built in? If somebody
wanted to use this as a platform to build an
educational business on top of it, could they?
MR. KALIN: Sure. It's going to
encompass the total range of learning. Coming from
the perspective of Etsy, for me, I worked in a
9,000 square foot warehouse... as Etsy started
growing... the sellers will be very successful
because the last dealings over the particular
businesses turned on to hobbies and I asked them if
they include any new things. One of the tools they
need to learn is -- and a lot of it comes back to
community as much as knowledge.
And so, we are working together, and
the first pilot program is basically going to be
kind of home-schooling for people or for the
employees as we home-school each other and figure
out how to create successful, very small business.
And we're going to be using the
platform to publish everything without ever
doing... Then I'm talking with a bunch of other
organizations. Again, some of the home-schoolings
under the university level to kind of get people
and testing it out.
Anyone here who is interested in trying
to get an entire... parachutes of that worth and
I'll be happy to give everyone your access.
MR. WILSON: Idit?
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: I'll bring the
kid's voices. I think we're lacking some kid
voices. I can connect it to my computer to the Web
or from yours, if yours is connected?
(Discussion off the record.)
So, this is La Gloria [sic]. We're
about social networks for learning how to design
games and simulations, teach science or global
social issues. Actually, it's very, very similar.
It is about people teaching and learning at the
same system, middle school, high school, community
college students.
And I, instead of telling you that --
it's a platform that is combining media, Wiki,
Blogger and a web resource, each piece within the
top of my sequel [sic]. It's an open source with a
very comprehensive year-long curriculum that works
both for teachers who are learning how to be
teachers in universities, community college
students.
And if you go to this (indicating
projection), students and educators both from the
field, we can pick just three, one from middle
school, one from high school, we can maybe exempt
people -- just played the first one, it would just
-- probably just start.
And that's Quianna and Alexi reflecting
about what they are doing. If you can just leave
the volume.
(Video presentation.)
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: So, now you can go
-- scroll down and you will find also different
features really from middle school or high school,
vocational school, community college.
And I think we talked a lot about these
ideas today, finding things that you need on Google
or in your community, and finding -- gain experts
or content experts or programming experts, design
experts on this network that we are putting and
that are starting to take each other, all for free
and available through the governor that is
financing it.
MR. WILSON: I'm just going to ask you,
how do the teachers and the schools and the
students find this tool? Word of mouth? How do
they find out about it?
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: Just word of mouth.
We started in five schools, we grew to eight, and
now we have a huge list of people who are just
registering, "We want to do this, we want to do
this."
We are proving that there is demand,
and therefore, we can probably plug it into the
Department of Education and they are using it to
transform the schools. So, we are now in 14
schools, and some schools are already teaching
these classes.
If we had time, I would have shown you
the curriculum and the Wikis and how it's
customized. So, we have teachers teaching science,
teachers teaching health, teachers teaching
drafting and architecture using this game, and all
different kinds of -- right now, it's based on our
budget.
But it really should be a work and play
type of environment of give and take, which is
really what the plans of it is now, but we just
wanted them to demonstrate the scalability and
demand.
MR. WILSON: Thank you.
MR. GRODD: About nine months ago, I
started Better Lesson, which is, hopefully, on the
way of becoming the social network for teachers.
It started in the United States and is aspiring to
be the social network for teachers internationally.
It is focused around sort of -- this first version
is focused around PowerPoint for teachers which is,
what do I teach tomorrow, how do I create it and
where do I find that.
So, I spent so much time over the past
four years reinventing the wheel, writing lessons
from scratch and then when I had done that, it
would waste away on my desktop. There's no way for
me to share my creations with other teachers.
And I think it is just so detrimental
to my instructions. I spent four hours. I would
spend on average three to four hours each night
writing lessons. My only option is to go with the
scripted textbook or reinvent the wheel. Those are
really the core options for most teachers today.
We have built and launched three months
ago the alpha, beta version of a social networking
site, with the sort of highest level of file
sharing technology. Some of it are files that are
from script and embedded with Facebook and are
rolling it out through high performing charter
schools, in pre-schools.
And now it's sort of, the main
difference between us and all of the other
initiatives that we're trying to do is, because
when I first came up with the idea about three
years ago, I thought it was totally not like the
others. It's like this is totally original and
teachers sharing files in the internet.
(Laughter.)
And over the past year, there's been
dozens of well-funded initiatives. One called...
Teachers just folded up two months ago after trying
for two years correcting these, and either Sun
MicroSystems people and sort of flailing out there,
trying to figure out who they are, what to do.
And so, my very brief take on the space
currently is that there's been two types of
attempts to correct this. Now, on one hand, we
have the open source movement represented by Wiki
of CC Learn; and on the other hand, we have
intranet, which are closed off internet.
And the open source -- the failure of
the open source initiative, it indicates -- in the
K-12 space well, it's not referring to open course
software.
In the K-12 space, there's been to go
from the isolated teacher, which is the status quo,
to the global revolution overnight. And so, that,
the open source movement failed to account for the
fact that teaching is best when it's done locally,
we have local standards, we have local protocols,
local rubrics.
And it's sharing better when you know
who you are sharing it with. And they failed to do
that literally. There's a global revolution
online. But I don't want a global revolution. I
want to share with the person down the hall.
And the closed internet is the failure
that every -- and this is -- it's tragic that every
major district, every state and every major charter
management organization has an intranet and it's
all defunct, literally, ineffective.
You've got millions and millions of
dollars invested in these intranets. And the
reason they're defunct is you can't initiate the
wisdom of the crowds without a crowd.
And so, you're talking to CMOs that
have 1,200 teachers. And you can't really create
sorts of the depth and breadth of content you need
to have it into the lessons, which is the substance
of what we aspire to be, when you're dealing with
1200 teachers.
So, our response, aside from creating a
totally unique interface and technology, is to
channel Chris over there, and do a Facebook that
did very well, roll out the real world community,
keeping it local and starting with one charter
management organization in May, and to roll out to
another and then maintain the integrity of local
sharing of files, while beginning to incrementally
graduate an approach to that open source vision and
have the sharing crossover to communities.
I think the Facebook analog is a very
good one for us and it's really been highly
influential, so, thank you, Chris.
MR. WILSON: The essential element today
is a class, one class worth of several things.
MR. GRODD: What about 180 days to the
core for most K-12 teachers is 180 days of
instruction. What we allow you to do is see... If
you are learning yourself as you finance out from
high performing teacher to one lesson, one
50-minute lesson out of those 180 days, as we have
introduced today, that teachers that is using
multiple -- also to be using video games, they're
PBS PowerPoint and YouTube courses.
One 50-minute lesson, we allow you to
aggregate that content on a one-page, sequence in
an order, then you drag and drop one unit, and then
sequence those units into the 180 days. And that's
the way teachers teach now. So, our organizational
hierarchy is really resources, which are primarily
files, that is now, to a lesson to a unit to a
course.
And we allow you to do that really in a
nice, intuitive way. And so, as opposed to going
to -- not to pick on these open sources, but if you
go to open sources and you find the resource.
That resource helps you for the
one-third of one class under the 180 days. When
you come in with a better lesson and you find the
highest performance sixth-grade social studies
teachers in the country, then you have their 180
days mapped out for you.
And you can -- instead of having all
your time reinventing, trying to recreate those 180
days, you can take that foundational knowledge now
to tailor that instruction to the needs of your
students.
MR. WILSON: But the thing that's
interesting for me is that you've got a whole
semester's worth of the teaching, but each lesson
is its own unit. And then each lesson, there's
units within that.
And don't you really want to facilitate
sharing the most atomic elements and not the whole
thing?
MR. GRODD: We do. I think the goal is
to be able to have people mix and match in those --
every -- not just atomic, everything. Mix and
match and have two of your lessons in my unit, two
of your lessons in one unit, two of your files in
one of my lessons.
And so, that's the goal and that's what
we facilitate here. It's like favor, favor of
something to understand. It's very specific to do
in a lesson and also in a unit.
MS. BOYD: How does the network work?
MR. GRODD: The social network is a
Facebook right now.
And so, it's similar to Facebook. When
you find someone that you're really interested in
sharing your community with them, and our site
you'll become a colleague with someone, they can
then use your curriculum and they -- they can do
their own.
So, it's really meaningful, so --
MS. BOYD: But then you have to be
willing to colleague everybody for them to share?
It could be yourself?
MR. GRODD: No. There's two for this.
Great question.
Each individual artifact, when you
upload a file, you can set sharing permissions.
So, this is another core to friendships. So, you
can -- it would open to all of the other lessons.
And you can share just to your colleagues or keep
it private because you have many organizational
tools. Some people just use them and not to share
it, to organize their stuff online.
And then -- so, that's for each
individual object. But in order to share your full
recipe book, your full 180 days, you've got to be
on top of it. Some people really like that because
it gives people a sense of ownership of their
curriculum. It forces them to just always meet new
people in order to share.
MS. BOYD: So, is it required to confirm
that we are colleagues? Basically, there are
politics with these things. It's like, I think we
are colleagues, but you don't think the same.
(Laughter.)
MR. GRODD: Yeah, that's an issue. It
hadn't been an issue thus far because we rolled it
out to 300 other teachers. And I anticipate that
being an issue. And so, I think, in any sort of
project in the social network, and slightly, they
just quote from a UI standpoint, the technical
standpoint, is issue permissioning and trying to
replicate real roles in that network.
MS. BOYD: This made me wonder early
about this. So, they're going to be much more
friendly in this? And there is more of a direct to
draft element, when you have to deal with one
network.
If only we'd be talking about social
situations for whatever these professional networks
come into play, you actually have so many levels of
politics for this.
MR. GRODD: I agree.
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: I think it's a
fantastic idea and we were wondering if educator's
Wiki, that it could probably benefit by sending
educators to what you're facilitating.
What I can see coming is a need
for -- first of all, there is no high bandwidth in
a lot of the schools. And a lot of these educators
that you're trying to reach may not have both the
access or the knowledge of how to upload and
download and remake and whatever. And I wonder if
you have virtual Web based training sections?
MR. GRODD: Yes. But that's what we're
doing. We're kind of rolling out the individual
schools, literally; one school at a time.
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: Yes.
MR. GRODD: We're working with those
schools, mostly in Boston and New York, primarily
charter schools going in there, training teachers,
working with instructional coaches.
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: But that means to
also become virtual, what you just said.
MR. GRODD: Yes, sure. One step at a
time.
MR. L. JOHNSON: Are you inviting course
work publishers to participate in this network?
MR. GRODD: Yes. We invite those. We
just want good quality content to work in this open
source curriculum, organizations working with Larry
Berger and of FreeReading.net, which is something
you might have heard of more...
So, we are totally open. And I mean,
it's kind of a -- Fred, you were saying that you
were trying to find the deep set of it. Teachers
are so much tougher on the internet.
And it just -- but to go through Google
for a teacher, then you need to figure out the day
of the platform and try to figure out what you're
teaching tomorrow, spend three hours googling to
get to the good stuff, which is really, really
hard.
And for everybody, we're thanking you
for the questions.
The stuff is there. But we're trying
to aggregate and doing it in a way -- we're trying
to organize it, make it searchable and play the
matchmaker to -- when you register with us, you
know what grade level you teach, what subject you
teach and try to sort of matchmake you and give you
the best stuff that we can give you.
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: But also, you are
giving -- other teachers can help you form this,
the new way of teaching and learning. And I think
that may be even more important. Having a team of
teachers who are doing the same thing in different
classrooms together.
MR. GRODD: Yes. I was shocked. When I
was teaching sixth-grade social studies, and I
said, Well, I don't really know what I'm doing with
that, so I'm trying to find another middle school
social studies teacher in Georgia that knows what
they're doing. It just doesn't exist.
Like, literally, you have to guess,
scour blogs. It just doesn't exist. So, the
ability to find other people teaching what you are
teaching, being able to have some sort of dialogue.
There's a massive need for it.
MR. O'DONNELL: What do you think is the
most effective motivation for getting the
individual teacher to share? Is it the access to
-- if I share this, then I can get somebody else's
thing? Is it the reputation of, I want to be the
teacher who gets the community credit of forming
the best lesson? Or is there a potential -- and I
don't know if you are doing this -- so that I could
literally sell a lesson perhaps to -- if I have the
best lesson on the causes of World War II?
Other people might want to buy that at
two bucks a pop or something.
MR. GRODD: I will say three things.
One is the direct correlation between age and
comfortableness. So, first off, the sort younger
generation teachers, the 25 to 35, it's generally
much more comfortable with sharing things in
general, we don't have much of the concerns that
you might think teachers would have.
The second thing is that the best
teachers are lesson artists. They can create --
someone talked about this earlier -- they can
create amazing works of art. You can spend
five hours, which I have, on a mind history
PowerPoint Jeopardy game. That's -- you create
whatever -- you want to share it. It's helping --
you're helping a hundred students, right now, a
year with that kind of history PowerPoint. You
show the 600 teachers you're helping the 600
students.
So, this is a strong desire, and then
that ties into things that -- that how many Twitter
followers, are fundamentally wanting to be
recognized. So, we are just using the Web tool for
metrics. Each file would be tracking the number of
views, the number of downloads, the number of
shares. It's amazing how a teacher is all ready to
give to 300 teachers, and those teachers come back
everyday to see how many people viewed the web and
taught in it.
So, it is a fundamentally, teachers
want to share and, like any artist, want to share
and they want to be recognized. So, we're trying
to use the Web to recognize. And if they were
teachers, our Web will target rock stars.
MR. ETUK: How difficult is it to
overcome that full questionnaire? How do I use
this level?
MR. GRODD: What we have done is, we've
tried to take almost no point of view, we tried to
be an agnostic platform instead of a sharing
platforms with point of views that we have taken
than organizational hierarchy. So, people, when
they're uploading or creating the lessons on our
site, they create a lesson that has objective, it
has a plan and it has resources.
So, people generally -- they view and
browse throughout the site. It is pretty much the
way most teachers are delivering instructions and
probably presentations; am I right?
MR. WILSON: About a week ago, I gave a
talk to a bunch of television executives and I
published 22 slides on the Web, on Slide Share.
And I got a couple of messages from people who had
downloaded my talk and had delivered the talk.
But there's no audio. So, they took my
22 slides and they delivered the same talk. The
slides had no words on them; right?
So, they literally had to be -- spread
on it one word at the top and then a picture. So,
there was no -- and they just delivered it.
And I think there is something really
interesting about the idea that you can take, in
effect, a framework for a lesson or a presentation
and different people will have a different slant on
it, but the framework is pretty consistent piece of
organization.
MR. GRODD: Again, we did a lot of user
testing and a lot of focus groups on how teachers
generally organize their content to lessons.
Lessons are generally organized into units. That's
it. Lessons are made up of multiple resources,
diverse multiple media.
MR. BURNHAM: I think that's a wake-up
call here. And I think Paul and Dave are both
constructing sites where teachers can reach
audiences in probably different ways and ultimately
perhaps make a living in a different way. In some
ways,if somebody's motivated by some of the same
objectives, they would also be motivated by the
possibility of making a living.
MR. MILLER: I run the School of
Everything, which is a very simple way of matching
up people who have something to teach and focus
primarily on their local area. It's about trying
to find somebody to teach you something
face-to-face in your local area.
And then, the thing that we found very,
very quickly is that there are already lots and
lots of people doing this. So, there's a kind of
market of self-employed freelance teachers that are
teaching music lessons or language lessons or
whatever it might be. And so, those are the people
who are using the School of Everything at the
moment.
And it is really interesting that,
basically, it's a growing group, made up of an
economically driven -- I don't know. There's so
many people that are turning their passions,
supporting their passions by teaching them. And
so, they may have a day job, but they are finding a
way to make that leap out of a job that they don't
like into maybe they're teaching something that
they do like as a way of supporting -- doing what
they like.
And that's something that's seeing an
increase. And so, we get so many stories of people
doing that. That's really wonderful to see that
happen.
MR. BURNHAM: Is what you have just a
marketplace? There's no curriculum or notion of
curriculum? It's just a matching function?
MR. MILLER: Yes. It's just a matching
function. What you find is, people already sign up
to some particular curriculum. It's like, for
example, I didn't know about painting, but there's
a technique for learning oil painting is called
the... oil painting technique.
It's really -- this learning lesson
will teach using the particular method of teaching
oil painting. And so, now we have pretty much
every... oil painting technique teacher in the UK
on the site.
MR. JARVIS: Off of PBS 15 years ago.
Like all good educators, you make it
look easy.
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: What I see is that
you have a very nice transparent system of looking
at how many people are teaching and how many are
learning. But it looks like it's the same teacher
teaching two groups. Can you explain how that
works?
MR. MILLER: How do you mean?
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: It says, like
teaching to learning. What does that mean?
MR. MILLER: So, we ask people what they
want to learn as they sign up, as well. So, we're
going to have demand and supply for every local
area. We are not big enough to be able to be kind
of, properly demonstrating exactly what a
particular town wants to learn.
We have supply and demand in place.
And an interesting one that we have noticed is that
we have far more people who are wanting to learn
photography than there are teachers. And I say
that's kind of function of -- digital photography
has, kind of, exploded and the number of people who
can teach it hasn't caught up yet.
MR. JARVIS: So, what do you do about
that? How do you create --
MR. MILLER: We try to find people to
teach digital photography.
MR. JARVIS: So, what are the best tools
to find them? Craig's List, or what?
MR. MILLER: We don't have Craig's List
in the UK. Photography shops, we have notice
boards --
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: And is it only
one-to-one, or one-to-many?
MR. MILLER: Most of the teaching is
one-to-one, but there are quite a lot of classes,
as well. It depends on the subject. The music
classes are almost always one-to-one. Some things,
like art classes, tend to be a group.
MR. BURNHAM: And is there a reputation
system?
MR. MILLER: Yes. Basically,
endorsements. One thing we found is that teachers
were very wary of five-star systems around
teaching, because they think it is a bad
relationship with a student and that that's
basically subjective. So, teachers are suspicious,
we found, when we talked to them of objective
representation systems when it comes to teaching.
MR. WILSON: You can only give an
endorsement?
MR. JARVIS: Not an "undorsement."
MR. MILLER: At the moment, we placed
that at the top. We actually haven't had any
complaints about the teachers at all.
MR. L. JOHNSON: There are existing
platforms for social networking, such as Facebook.
They're existing platforms for management such as
Noodle [sic], and why are you going your own way in
this regard?
MR. GRODD: I get that question every
day. So, I think, for me, it is fundamentally --
to do this well, we will have to create a sense of
real privacy for of teachers.
If they're exchanging their tests and
quizzes and exchanging their instructional content,
for the first version, we want to ensure that we do
our best to make them feel that sense of privacy.
You really can't do it now on Facebook.
And the other thing is, teachers go to
Facebook to get away from their professional life.
It is an escape in many ways. So, we prefer to let
it be that escape, have our site be focused around
professionals.
MR. BISCHKE: I think it's similar to
Etsy and eBay. You know what I mean? You look at
Etsy and you look at eBay and some way it's similar
functions. But in other ways, they are very
different.
And I think that some of the stuff that
has been talked about here, the notion of education
is just so fundamentally different from a lot of
other things that are happening on the Web, that
you really need to tap into that to leverage that.
I think that the best platforms are
built by people who have actually taught, who
understand how difficult it is to be a teacher,
what some of the challenges are, and can build
systems from the ground up to address those
challenges.
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: But in our case, we
really couldn't use any of the existing systems
that had advertising on it, because when we did
some tests with the -- especially the economically
underprivileged and technologically underserved
populations -- especially in public schools, they
don't see the ad.
So, we have to create something that is
open source, clean, noncommercial for them to adopt
it. This is why we created our own platform, not
because it didn't exist in other forms. And a
commercial version of this probably will be
different.
MR. BURNHAM: And how is what you are
doing different than what Paul is doing?
MR. SCHAPPELL: I think it's exactly the
same. Our mission is to crush Paul.
(Laughter.)
I would say we're about as perfectly
aligned on a mission as two organizations can be.
And there probably aren't any other -- it is a very
weird space that we are in, that this is fairly
absent. And what the TeachStreet team brings to
the game, we are basically an ex-Amazon group, with
some other folks thrown in, with experience
building marketplaces.
So, we look at what Rob -- and I'll use
Scott as an example. The idea that somebody could
launch a company like... to bring together
disparate groups of people to learn things is
really what, in my opinion -- what goes on with...
And so, when I went to learn about
podcasting, I started this podcasting and Second
Life meetups in Seattle. And within days, upon
hours of podcasting, the first group was set up and
meeting. And my wife thinks that's mildly odd,
like people get together at a bar to talk about
Second Life. And they were odd.
(Laughter.)
What we are trying to build we think is
a massive marketplace around things that people are
passionate about. And so, a lot of what was being
discussed today, I hope you all figured it out, and
it's sort of like the learning up to age 22, 23,
when you get the confidence to go and learn
whatever it is that you are excited about.
Some people can start when you're 10,
and some people it never starts. But the idea for
TeachStreet came from really, I'm a class taker,
and it really hasn't improved that much with all
that the Web's done. You go and search online and
the people that win those searches are online video
bloggers. They're not the person that lives within
a mile of you who's a great piano teachers.
And so, we're trying to get them a
platform where they can list themselves as a
teacher or as an expert. They can be reviewed and
negatively reviewed by the people that take the
classes. It doesn't happen often, very much like
Amazon. You don't get any negative reviews. And
then you can pay to take them off of our sites.
(Laughter.)
I'm kidding.
(Laughter.)
It is really is about learning --
that's the difference, the accreditation issue
isn't something we're trying to tackle. We don't
really go after the college education or even the
grades K to 12.
We're really about creating platforms
so that if you're an expert in something -- I need
another example. I listed a class in Twitter, and
within 24 hours I had three people contact me for
this class that I put up as a joke a little bit, I
wanted to teach people to teach people who wanted
to learn Twitter.
Three people, totally randomly, had
contacted me about it and I had to let it expire.
So, I don't want to keep teaching this class. But
you could make money teaching a class about how to
teach Twitter, because it is a common search term.
MR. JARVIS: Finally, a business model.
(Laughter.)
MR. WILSON: This is largely for the
adult community. It is not like -- my kids have
piano teachers and drum teachers and computer guys
come over to teach my son how to write computer
software.
MR. SCHAPPELL: For all that, too.
Anything you want to learn, experts set themselves
up online. They indicate that they teach children
to adults.
MR. WILSON: You said something about K
through 12, you go figure that out. I think this
might be more -- what's like going to come -- we're
going to start realizing that we and our kids are
just realizing that if they're not going to get it
in school, they'll have to get it somewhere.
MR. SCHAPPELL: I think that you can
supplement a lot of the learning places, the
piecing together, what's the thing you're excited
about this week? And that sort of stuff drives my
wife nuts. I go through a month where I want to
learn about photography, and I'll go through a
month where I might learn to cook and never cook,
and you just sort of piece these things together,
whether TeachStreet or MeetUp. It's all the tools
that are out there and how you patch them together.
MR. JARVIS: This is how to do vouchers.
If you gave people vouchers for that. That's
vouchers that are working.
THE SPEAKER: Paul, Can you tell the
story of how you came to this idea and the
historical perspective on this?
MR. MILLER: In 1965 a group of students
at Stanford wanted to learn computer science. The
curriculum hadn't caught up. So, they set up their
own university, a message board, which is a piece
of paper and you write at the top of that the sheet
what you can teach and people would sign up. It
had two courses for the first week and they agreed
to have 300 courses every week. At it's a big book
that was going around.
John reckons that at its peak, it had
50,000 students. It changed the way that Stanford
was organized, as far as the way that John
explained it.
And to wrap it up, if you're going to
do that today, you wouldn't use a pinboard and some
pieces of paper; you'd use the inter-Webs.
MR. BISCHKE: One question for Dave and
Paul. It seems right now with the economy, there's
this massive structural shift. If Detroit goes
under -- you have all these people now we need to
get them trained.
So, my question to you guys is, how
much of what you guys are seeing right now in
schools and TeachStreet is what you guys call
continuing professional education versus hobbies,
crafts, entertainment, passions --
MR. SCHAPPELL: We're a lot more toward
the latter, probably; just being real honest. When
we launched we didn't know. So, we threw
everything up and probably the five of the
eight main categories where there's just a lot more
energy is around creative, language, sports. I
don't think it will stay there.
How to build a non fuel-efficient car
hadn't showed up yet. It's a lot more on the
aspirational learning, which is great, because it
really has a lot of tools. We just launched
two weeks ago. It's a little laughable -- much
blogging, potential articles. Teachers can write
articles.
It's amazing, people just writing about
everything and uploading videos. It's not
surprising. But compared to the classes and their
reputations and reviews, it is exactly what we
thought would happen, and it is happening.
MR. MILLER: And it's pretty similar to
us. Our three main categories are crafts, music,
languages and arts. But what surprises us is, kind
of sustainable environmental stuff. That really
seems to be that passionate people -- the teaching
people about environment and the sustainability
that we haven't expected.
MR. WENGER: What about E-fire?
MR. MILLER: Language and test prep are
our two biggest categories. But it's interesting
because we have seen, like what was mentioned,
sustainability. There's a guy who teaches a class
called the Green House, and it's one of our most
popular classes.
We've also had a class on how to use
Twitter, which ended up on the top 10 searches on
Twitter for a while, because everyone in the class
was tweeting at the same time.
So, it's been an interesting kind of
hybrid of pushing certain areas that we know have
well-defined markers, like, language and test prep;
and then also having an open platforms where we can
say, you know what, teach whatever you want to
teach. Anybody can start a class in whatever
they're passionate about. It's similar to what
Dave and Paul are doing. That's a real option that
we are seeing.
THE SPEAKER: A 21st century Madoff
scheme, we may have seen behavior like twittering
and then have a whole industry of teaching how to
behave --
(Laughter.)
MR. WENGER: Schools are teaching a lot
of things that are very obscure and not politically
useful.
MR. KALIN: A college degree -- you just
gave us all this money to get a degree and it just
qualifies us to give more money to the school;
because we go back to school and they keep you in
grad school.
MR. WILSON: I want to ask Terry a
question.
Do you think that some of these
marketplace models like the School of Everything
and TeachStreet will be useful in the
home-schooling movement? Can you imagine using
these services to identify specific teachers that
you can use?
MS. FLEMAL: I absolutely can, because
right now we often use Craig's List, honestly. For
us, it's economical. And oftentimes, if we are
looking for a Spanish teacher -- we've gone to
Craig's List to find someone good at philosophy --
like somebody would come in and talk with the child
about philosophy --
MR. BURNHAM: You found somebody
advertising this?
MS. FLEMAL: Yes, absolutely. For
philosophy, we just happened to find somebody who
knew, who had a doctorate in philosophy and didn't
have a job. And the guy was just incredible. And
it happened that he was perfect for what we were
looking for.
Yes, there is an absolute need for
that. And so, yes, I think definitely, and I'm
thinking and hearing that it is something that's a
perfect match, absolutely.
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: I think that a lot
of the home-schooling, we're getting a lot of
e-mails and people using us although we're not
really marketing or trying to reach this
population, and because it's open source, they can
just come and they are telling us how they are
using it so down the road we will launch it for
them.
But to relate to the other question of
what takes off in a network, we realize there is a
small network of innovators and it relates to some
of what I have said. They really need to figure
out how to create these innovative things that they
are willing to jump in and trying to take a risk
and connect it to what they call the content
standards that -- the things that are out there.
And once you give them a lot of support
with all these innovative platforms and a very
comprehensive curriculum that we have on
step-by-step, how to use it, and you match it with
where they are, they really adopt it.
And they are willing to come to, with
exceptions and virtual tutorials on how -- so for
those of you who are innovating and trying to
create communities, I think the more you create
tutorials for them so they have the answer for
their system, the more loyal they will become.
That's my experience.
MS. FLEMAL: I love the idea of
connecting teachers, because so many teachers are
isolated in their classrooms, whether they are, for
us our home-schooling teachers, who are very
isolated in different homes. But also the teachers
in the classrooms often are in that room all day
and the only place they see other teachers is in
the faculty room and some teachers don't even go to
faculty rooms.
So, they would be open to that life
sharing; there's got a lot of release time to
teachers to be able to share. So, the opportunity
to do that in a platform such as that would be a
wonderful thing. You really have the
opportunity --
I think from the outside, there is this
imagination that teachers share a lot more than
they do. So the opportunity to do that tenfold
magnifies the learning that teachers can continue
to do that as they continue their career.
MR. WILEY: I want to say a thing or two
about the Open High School in Utah. And we talked
a little bit this morning about ways we're using
technology. Open High School of Utah is an open
charter school. And in our charter, we committed
ourselves to exclusively using open educational
resources.
So, in terms of teachers sharing items
as opposed to sharing lesson plans and resources,
we've done a complete textbook replacement, all the
material on everything you need to run the course
is what we're providing with open source for
everyone.
So, working in a manner that's not
dissimilar from the University of the People, we're
going around and finding material, aggregating,
state standards, building standards identifying,
matching, building content, putting that together.
And also, I have a mission, not to
scale our individual school out to the world; but
when there's a completely open curriculum available
and a charter application documents and budgets and
things are available, other people just pick up and
start these schools. We don't have to be involved
and the curriculum is free, things like that.
In addition to the personalization and
the individualization I was talking about earlier
today, the point of open source.
MR. BURNHAM: Dave brings us back to
what the theme was for the last hour, which we
didn't really touch on, which is the relationship
between everything that we have talked about and
where we are today.
And by putting the template out there,
it is going to create a vehicle that will allow us
to begin to influence the current educational
system. There will be leakage that we talked about
and people educating themselves, many of the tools
we have talked about.
I would like to put Chris on the spot
here for a second. If there is another vehicle
that we might be able to use. Chris is the
architect of Obama's "My Obama" website, and that
was a very effective political advocacy vehicle.
And the question is, If you think about
the Web as a platform, is there any way of creating
a credible and effective political advocacy towards
trying to address the failures of the current
educational system?
MR. HUGHES: I think it's interesting,
listening to the conversation, particularly the
second-half of it. I think essentially what we're
talking about here, this service market online
which happens to be in context of education,
because that's what a lot of people here specialize
in. And there are good examples of people starting
to solve the problem.
So, that is one piece of a much broader
market of different people who have different
services and you can frame that as education or any
other services that someone is trying to provide.
So, I feel like that's the direction
things are going in. But if that doesn't
deconverge, then I think that, the question you are
asking about political organizing, or whether or
not that has an implications for it -- I think it
does, but it requires a sort of a historical,
cultural moment when people realize when things are
broken.
And that's a question that I don't know
when it comes to education. It seems to me pretty
clear that the way that kids are still being taught
these days, and the fact that there's a computer
that's over there in the corner of the classroom,
but that's only the extent to which technology may
play a role, it sort of seems like it is broken to
me.
And I feel like, as more and more
people understand that something isn't right, that
we are using technology all throughout the day but
our students aren't using it on a hands on way in
the classroom; then it opens up a real opportunity
for starting integrating office tools that people
are starting to develop now, actually in the
classroom, in students' hands.
MR. WENGER: Could you build a novel
item community of events as part of the question
that brings this dialogue, takes this kind of
dialogue and makes it -- a more actual change
function?
MR. BURNHAM: The school board is the
issue right here, that's the mechanism. And the
politics of the school board, and you were very
clever in figuring out how to create advocacy for
national politics -- but is there some way that
these issues to the degree that parents have more
direct access to a conversation about the issues
and that could be used to create leverage, to
create change?
MR. HUGHES: Yes. I think we can create
that infrastructure and people would use it. I
don't think it's enough. Until there's a cultural
movement, until it's understood in a broader
content that our schools aren't working.
I think that people are disappointed,
but I think it's very different when -- I think
that's really required for any type of real
organizing infrastructure to matter. But as far as
whether or not you could create it, unless people
care about it, I'm not sure of that.
MR. JARVIS: Will it ever come? Fred
was proposing the revolution of the importance of
home-schooling. You're saying, and I think it's
right, unless there's enough of a movement, the
rest doesn't matter.
Are we ever going to get there or?
MR. CAULFIELD: I think ultimately, the
first drop to fall is going to be cost -- if you
look even at open access political movements where
some inroads are being made as, Hey, we paid for
this research, open up this research.
And I think that's -- if you're looking
for -- like this is a niche crowd. We want to
change education in terms of what it does. But I
think the broader movement that we're going to see
is -- people talk about the tuition bubble, and
we're really up against the upper bound of being
able to do this at all at the price that we're
hitting.
I think as that bubble bursts, the
important thing is there are numerous ways to
address the expense of education and some of them
are detrimental to how education is done. And some
of them create opportunities for a better
education. I think the real challenge is going to
be -- as we start to bump up against that cost,
especially in hard economic times, how do we steer
that?
And there's some models around the
world in terms of government involvement with open
resources, sharing, things like that, that we could
emulate. But there are also the ways of political
camp, just slash it, just remove, keep the system
the same, just remove a bunch of pieces.
MS. BOYD: One of the things -- I was
reading about the history of education in the U.S.,
And It's funny how downturns in the economy always
involve upturns in what happen in schools, and we
get more motivated and more directed about it. And
we're seeing it in terms of energy about people
thinking of teaching as a stable, reasonable job
and all sorts of things.
MR. JARVIS: Our applications are up
40 percent.
MR. CAULFIELD: For example, in open
courseware, one of the opportunities here, I think,
is that you have a lot of state universities. You
have a lot of people in state universities on
taxpayer dollars who are creating curriculum. And
so, there is a question there, if we are paying the
bills that -- those curricula, and we could more
broadly disseminate it and educate more people for
less, then --
MS. BOYD: Can we actually explicitly
target the places where things are cracking the
worst? We're seeing these two different ruptures
happening simultaneously. It's super intensive,
it's so local, there are so many different effects.
So, can things specifically go after an ideal test
that...
For example, you're watching
California's state budget not balance. So, is
there a way in which you actually come in and use
as an ideal intervention point around community
colleges, around schools or --
MR. CAULFIELD: I think that's kind of
what David is doing -- it's on a state-by-state
level. Eventually, some state -- because I don't
think it could be on the school board level, I
don't think it's going to happen in K-12 because
it's 9,000 institutions.
So, you can't do it on the K-12 level.
But on the state college level or on the state
charter school level, on the state level things, if
there is a successful model and it's done below
cost, I think that's where it is going to happen.
And if someone proposed something in California
right now, yes, that might be a perfect example.
MR. WILEY: In the State of Utah, I can
tell you, if we got this curriculum rolled out.
And the kids will get it this fall and are going to
make a YP at the end of the year. The next summer,
there's conversations about what to do with the
textbooks we have to replace and with the money
supposed to be spent on curriculum?
And there's a completely open source
curriculum, and we can show kids YP when they use
it. It kind of forces a lot of really interesting
conversations and that is a very strong secondary
goal. Obviously, after the goal of the kids in
school --
MR. WENGER: The curriculum development,
is that open course already as well in -- can
people contribute to that already?
MR. WILEY: The way you can contribute
right now, you help us fill the bag. We're
currently trying to identify all the resources
there and the state standard for writing. And
that's what we are doing right now. People can
contribute to that.
MR. WENGER: That in and of itself is an
open process .
MR. RESNICK: I think it's still be -- a
greater effort to understand the real problems and
challenges of education. We're looking at three
things to talk about, we observe three priorities
of health care, energy and education.
I do think, my sense as a general
consensus of the public, is they recognize that
healthcare as a crisis, energy is in crisis. I
don't think there's as much of an understanding of
what this group has that education needs to be
hacked. Somehow there has to be a better
education, to help us understand the billing
challenges.
MR. WILSON: Maybe not. Because when
the government goes about hacking something, we are
all toast.
(Laughter.)
MR. RESNICK: The government doesn't
have to hack it, but --
MR. WILSON: I think we have to put the
government out of education business. If we could
bankrupt those schools in that system, and create
something that's better, then we can beat it.
That's what happens when hacking --
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: I don't agree.
MR. GORDON: We need the eight-year old
vote.
MR. WILEY: Buckminster Fuller says you
can't make the existing reality obsolete. I think
there's something new that makes the existing
reality obsolete.
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: I really would like
to argue that you can -- also, in fact, the
revolution and state of the revolution from within
that existing system and build models that really
force them to change from within. And, otherwise,
you will not get funded. To fund education,
because you don't fund that.
MR. WILSON: I don't want to fund that.
I want to fund these kinds of people.
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: Exactly. But you
don't, not yet.
(Laughter.)
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: So, we will be
delighted to actually form a good strategy to how
things like this can get funded. But right now,
the way the funding goes to solve the crisis,
especially with this population that Dana was
pointing towards, those that are really in a crisis
and also the places where they are in a crisis and
the ability to fund it.
I think you have to reach people in the
school system because -- they don't have Starbucks
in their neighborhood. They have just a school
with high speed Internet and maybe a library with
high speed Internet. Most of them have dial-up, if
at all, at home.
And if we really want to reach them and
get that funded, you have to figure out that open
source participation from outside of the community
to contribute to those disadvantaged communities.
And I think that's a way of thinking about it, that
you cannot really just say "trash government."
Because government right now, they have
a lot of money. They may not tell us what to do,
but if we approach it right, we can take little
pieces of the fact that the $7 billion into wiring
the state. And what will we do with this?
MR. BURNHAM: Both extremes are --
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: I'm not extreme.
MR. BURNHAM: You're not extreme.
Fred's taking a extreme position. But I think what
David said, it's a really interesting point and
that is that we can force change by just showing
them the raw economics of alternatives, in a
situation where economics are real and meaningful
and there's not a lot to go around.
And that's probably the moment that
Chris is talking about. It may not be a public
perception moment, but in those individual
decisions, if we can get a great example out there
where you can do this more efficiently.
There's a problem with the notion that
we are going to fund the solution to this problem,
and that is that what was what Bing talked about
earlier which is the zero marginal cost
implementation. If David is right, then what it is
going to do ideally is drive down the cost of
education for everybody in a way that maybe
diminishes the opportunity for investment in that
space. But that's a problem for us.
MR. WILSON: Craig's List is in the
classified business. That's the opportunity for
us.
MR. KALIN: It's a $6 billion year
industry, the textbook industry. If you could get
a fifth of that, you'd be in pretty good shape.
MR. HEIFERMAN: I don't know anything
about education or schools. I recognize seeing
through the years, in the past 15 years, every sort
of big, big industry or big part of the world that
you really couldn't hack it, that -- like, who
would have really thought that YouTube would be
where it is relative to TV networks? Or Craig's
List to newspapers?
I think that the idea of things
bubbling up have -- seems crazy and farfetched
and -- they don't really cease to surprise.
My favorite Barack Obama line is that,
"We are the ones we have been waiting for." And
it's a surprise that that comes out of these
platforms like Dave's and Paul's -- and what I've
experienced at meet-ups is -- never thought that it
was a platform for education, but in fact, what --
that's sort of the base function that is actually
providing with -- all the people are going
to entrepreneur meet-sup, small business meet-up,
whether, you know, language meet-ups and moms'
meet-ups.
They want to learn about
entrepreneurship or -- some of these women say they
learned how to potty-train their kids at the moms'
meet-up.
So, this is not necessarily a
market-based model, like there's a transaction of
I'm going to teach it, I'm going to learn it. That
model is great, but it's just a classic history of
the human idea of it taking a village or just
people learning in the context of the community.
So, it's a long way of trying to say
that, I think, is the decentralized, emergent
systems and behaviors. They can hack at a big
system -- now, maybe that's in 20 years. Does that
fit -- I'm with Fred. I would look at things 10,
20 years from now, and I think there would be some
seismic shifts and we --
MR. SACKLER: I think this is important,
right now, with government-run monopolies, we get
to the very different beast of diving into private
enterprise for socioeconomic --
MR. KALIN: Because you're looking at
education, looking at learning, and the government
can't have a monopoly on learning.
MR. HEIFERMAN: No, they don't. But
they have a monopoly on kids' time and it's a
trillion dollars a year spent across the country.
So, I think there is a role for political action to
organize, none of which was talked about these
sessions, which is very critical if we're really
going to connect.
Because it's $500 billion a year run
through that monopoly which is politically-driven,
not marketplace-driven. And if we're really going
to impact it, we're going to have to act pretty
good at starting to nibble away at that --
MS. RHOTEN: I think it's also a matter
of getting examples out there which are
demonstrative. Right now a lot of what we're
talking about, TeachStreet has come up, and all
these different things come up.
We can't yet demonstrate a lot of the
ideas, which are important. I guess I
fundamentally believe in. But I think part of our
challenge --
MR. GRODD: I would posit that the
biggest problem facing K-12 right now is human
capital. It is talent, and it's not a great thing
to talk about. But having spent a lot of time in
the system and those who have -- there is a big
issue with the fact that the talent pool is not
deep. And I'm not talking about teachers, I'm
talking about principals, administrators, policy
people. People making a decision -- the most
important decisions -- in fact, our students, are
not necessarily people you would hire, and that's
the reality. And until we --
MR. BURNHAM: Is that in part because
it's not an inspiring place to work?
MR. GRODD: It's because the incentives
aren't there. My buddies graduated from good
schools, go to McKenzie, because it's prestige.
Like, who wants to go -- the reason I taught for
Teach For America, because that gave me a
prestigious way to become a teacher, probably I
wouldn't have had it not been for Teach For
America.
So, what Teach For America is doing --
there are few other places. What they're doing is
figuring out a way to get ambitious, creative,
innovative thinkers into K-12.
MR. WILEY: What is the stay rate?
MR. GRODD: It is high, 60 percent.
SPEAKER: Up to what period?
MR. JARVIS: For two years.
MS. FLEMAL: Teachers are underpaid.
The teachers coming to us are -- mainly teachers
who don't like being in the system. And the
teachers who are staying are largely underpaid.
They are staying because they are tenured and they
have protection. So, when --
MR. WENGER: When you tie all of these
things together, the questions are: Is the
existing system so badly broken that the time and
effort spent on it -- we've got to figure out a way
to get young people to start teaching in the
schools that are not working.
It's where we should be spending our
time or -- we can be spending our time completely
hacking the system by building new structures on
the side, either in the completely unregulated
model of the School of Everything, or TeachStreet,
or in the sort of shorter model of radically
different charter --
MS. BOYD: Again, it's a matter of
timing. I go back to the fact that the economy is
crap right now. You have an opportunity to
actually do a high-prestige, high-status shift
within the talent pool.
And this even happened with the tech
bubble. If you look at what happened when the bust
happened, unbelievable numbers of people in the
tech industry went into teaching math and computer
science at the high school level, and it actually
speeds the ramped-up CS at the high school level
because it was like all of this talent would be
like, Now I'm going to do something I can give
back, right. But whatever that narrative is that
you can leverage.
So, I think that there's social
service -- I think that we give them that -- this
organization is your investment. In trying to hack
education at a different level, it makes sense, but
there's that collective -- there's so many people
in this room. We have to go both directions.
And I do think we have to actually have
to work to think about that talent pool and to
think about a way, in the society -- that we reach
into the narrative around it. It's driving me
crazy about it all.
When women went to work outside of the
nursing and the teaching world, it basically was an
escape where you try to get out of education. So,
the gender politicking that happened in the 1970s
around education meant that we lost the prestige of
education in a whole different way that we don't
really like to talk about.
And now we finally have a whole
different gender dynamic in the workforce. We now
rethink the way traditional women's work and how
nurses and teachers and a whole variety of
traditional women's work are now considered low
prestige, even though they were always high
prestige when they were a women's only thing.
And so, there is that cultural
reworking that has to happen. And now is the time
to do that at the same time as a sort of hacking
culture.
MR. BISCHKE: I think your point about
talent, I think that's an interesting story...
There's a company in Korea called... Study. And
what they do is, they're one of the... schools
industry in Korea, but their top teachers currently
make over a million dollars a year. They sell out
sports stadiums -- it's called "Megastudy."
And they sell out sports stadiums. Ten
thousand people will come and they'll watch these
rock star English teachers. And I think that one
of the things that we like to think about is, How
do you turn teachers into rock stars? How do you
give them the attention, the appreciation that a
Mick Jagger, a Tiger Woods -- and it sounds
ridiculous right now, but there're starting to be
examples of that.
And then what happens is that a kid in
Korea grows up and sees that teacher on a billboard
when he's driving on the freeway in Korea, and he
says, "I want to be like that guy someday, I want
to be like that girl someday."
MR. WILSON: Jimmy is gone, but he told
me he's got one guy who teaches a CFA course that
sells out every -- there's a waiting -- there's a
queue to get into that guy's class. It's like 600
people sitting, you know, in an online education
platform watching this guy teach, and he's a rock
star. He makes a lot of money.
Because -- and I think the reasons why
education -- hacking education is not going to be
any harder than hacking media business... it's
about information, it's about talent, it's about
getting... out there.
I think you can actually infect the
school system from within, from things like better
lessons. When you start putting the power in the
hands of the teachers, start collaborating around
lesson plans, and you start to create teachers who
are stars because they make the best lesson plans.
All of a sudden they say, "Hey, you
know what, I'm a star." And then they're going to
start doing whatever stars in the media business
do. They say, Screw you, school, I'm a star. I'm
getting paid.
MR. JARVIS: Bob, Teri and I talked once
about that, that when you have those stars -- what
role was there for him. We talked about it, a
virtual distributed Cambridge model. He had a
lecturer and a tutor.
And to build on top of that is that at
a local level, you have the tutor who will work
one-on-one with the big-star lecturer. And there's
a new economic structure that allows the stars to
support -- because they have wide distribution; and
the tutor to support, because they have a different
relationship with the community.
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: And also the trick
is when you have a star teacher, it can also be
dangerous because the revolution could actually
make it contagious for other teachers in the same
school, for the tipping point to really happen.
So, you have to create an
infrastructure that really allows it to be
legislative. There are simple things where you
don't even think about -- a course number, I want
to do this Globaloria thing; right? What is the
course number that will officially allow me to do
this as part of what I need to cover?
And then these teachers show that, the
star quality of figuring it out, and then you right
away have to put five more teachers in the same
school, in the same star atmosphere so, they would
all succeed. Because one star teacher in school
will not create the tipping point...
So, there is a system out there and it
worked. The model that worked about it, that -- it
also, all the time, has to be working with the
legislature at the top, whether through funding,
through really giving it the credit that it can
work in a system and transform.
And also from the bottom, the students
has to succeed, show up, attend, get good grades,
perform really well. More teachers than one want
to do it if everybody wants to engage students, and
it all works together like that.
So, that star thing is complicated,
much more complicated than you think.
THE SPEAKER: You said that rock star
teacher had made a lot of money. There's really no
incentive for teachers to be rock stars, again,
because -- there is no incentive because teachers
get the same amount of money.
MR. WILSON: My point is, Jim's business
is professional education; right? So, that teacher
is in the free market system and is very valuable.
And he makes Kaplan a lot of money and he makes
himself a lot of money, and that's an open
marketplace model.
I don't think we will reinvent
education without getting rid of this monopolistic
system where teachers are undervalued and good
teachers get paid the same as bad teachers.
THE SPEAKER: And that's my point.
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: By the way, one
thing that we do, practically stipend all of the
teachers that work with us.
MS. SEGGERMAN: You didn't have hundreds
applications for fabulous teachers for your school?
Why do you think that was? A lot of people are
pointing out there are not good teachers around.
MS. SALEN: Because I think there's a
lot of amazing teachers out there. I think there's
a lot of amazing teachers stuck within systems that
don't let them be amazing teachers. And I think if
we provide opportunities for those teachers -- that
may be online spaces, that may be new kinds of
schools -- I think they are out there.
One thing that I -- I think we are
still stuck in this model that school is the only
-- we're trying to stuff all of the learning back
in school. I think we need to take the pressure
off the school and sort of re-imagine, Well, what
do schools do well, because they've been charged
with doing so much.
Can we take some of it out of the
schools, distribute it in the places where it is
actually done better and, again, allow the learning
to happen in most places? Because we can't fix the
school by keeping it, charging it with all that
it's still doing. It's busted. It simply cannot
support all of our expectations about what has to
happen there.
So, I think if we can figure out -- we
can figure it out, lighten the load, that might
help, and provide market opportunities for these
other kinds of innovations to begin to happen.
MR. O'DONNELL: It's feature creep.
MS. SALEN: Feature creep. Well, it's
got to do with what Diane had said earlier -- in
the early part of the century, there was this
configuration between home, church and school. And
it was understood that kids learned in those three
different places and it was really clear what was
learned in each of those three places.
And over time, the Web infrastructure
between those things split and all of it got stuck
back in the school. And so, it is too much. Yeah,
the features creeped into one space. So, yes.
MS. RHOTEN: The schools got burdened
with all of the responsibilities that were once in
a distributed set of institutions, and then they
got retrenched.
And so, they're burdened with all of
the big responsibilities but not endowed with money
to provide... we lost arts, we lost vocational.
And so, it's been shifted off, ideally, to these
other institutions who are struggling.
I looked at -- in this case of
New York, very, very hard to compliment and augment
what happens in the school. And simple things,
whether it's a virtual environment, they're finding
they can't get to the firewall in school, can't
augment... can't get standards in a way that makes
the chancellor happy; those problems, we are trying
to rebuild that network. That's the place. We'll
try to --
MR. WENGER: I want to go back to
John's comment on that. One of the key leverage
points would be to have more opportunities for
alternative systems to evolve. So, if there is one
political thing that could happen, it is the
political thing that lets more people create the
ultimate realities of schools more rapidly.
MR. WILEY: The charter movement is one
area?
THE SPEAKER: Well, it would be one.
But I think in the same way that the Internet
itself, as a collection of pipes and protocols,
provide free, relatively low-risk places to
experiment as an infrastructure, I think -- one of
the reasons we're doing this in open high schools
is because it feels like free educational content
is an important piece of infrastructure around
which these later educational innovations can
happen.
They're always paying for this per kid
every year, leasing access to it, renting access
from ...com or whoever. Starting something like
this is very expensive and there's a great cost and
risk there. So, content, I think, is one of the
most important pieces of infrastructure that needs
to be freely available to allow other these other
innovations to happen.
MR. CAULFIELD: The content conversation
get contentious, but it's important to note that if
you look at areas like the textbook industry, there
have been places where free market solutions,
albeit run through government-run schools, have
been just remarkably inefficient.
The inefficiency of when you consider
what is needed out of a textbook, K through 12,
even at college level -- and how much money has to
go into actually providing to these kids
textbooks -- it is kind of staggering. So, you
start to look at things like, in California, there
is a group of community colleges that are getting
together.
They're trying to put together a set of
open textbooks that can be shared among community
colleges. I think it comes down to this idea of
having this common infrastructure that's available
to anybody that wants to set up shop and teach.
But I think where the effort really should be put
into is developing this infrastructure, whether
it's physical infrastructure or whether it's
information infrastructure.
So that, if someone wants to set up
shop and teach, or if a institution wants to
transform how they teach, they can pool through a
common pool, and it's not this rival pool which is
creating this unnecessary expense and these
unnecessary permutations of textbooks and so forth.
Obviously, I'm biased here, being from
Open Coursework Consortium. But if I was going to
pick out a place where I think we could have a lot
of effect, it is in providing common sets of
materials open to everybody.
They either approach zero cost or are
free through subsidization of government, in some
way approach through one of those --
MR. RESHEF: Content is expensive.
However, when you look at the cost of education,
this is not the most expensive thing.
What I'm saying is that lowering it,
that says thank you, because you're enabling me to
use this free. This is very important. But the
main cost is the people, mostly teachers and the
administration and the building.
Now, if you want to save, you really
need to save on these. I think that looking at
teachers, there may be -- having less teachers,
maybe using the Internet more, maybe in the
classroom actually -- people that cost you less but
are more effective in doing other things than
teaching the student, I don't know, different ways
to look at it, that's the way to lower the
expenses.
MR. CAULFIELD: My point is kind of
along the lines of what you're saying.
If you open up to everybody that base
level infrastructure much as of a courseware is
available to people that want to try different
models with it, then you can have experimentation
with those different models on top of that. And
the experimentation, you're right, the cost that
you save by making the content freely available is
not necessarily your big savings.
But by enabling people to try different
models on top of that content, that's where you're
going to get the experimentation, that's where
you're going to get, I think, the new ideas in the
real -- in the hacking.
But you need that first level because,
again, obviously, if everybody had to come in from
the ground floor, build this up -- some people
around here have done that, but I'm sure those
people will tell you it's very expensive and very
challenging. You could make it less challenging by
building a common pool of resources.
MR. WILSON: Diana, what do you mean by
Text Shop model?
MS. RHOTEN: Are you familiar with Text
Shop?
I'm a huge, huge fan of Text Shop and I
feel like it's optimized for the downturn in the
economy, frankly. Text Shop is actually a
for-profit model, it's classified as a retail
model. But it's essentially a storefront place and
you go in and it's a maker's shop, essentially --
you can go in and you can build anything, whether
it's building up wood or building up metal --
MR. RESNICK: For fabrication purposes,
you go in and make -- you rent materials and that
should be a better maker. I think with other
people as well, it's not just the tools.
MS. RHOTEN: It's not as real, but
knowing about Text Shop and a line of advocating it
in everywhere I go. It is not -- it's really
thinking hard about the community aspect of it.
So, it's not just putting... into that space, but
thinking hard about courses, why they have the
courses, who teaches the class, who gets to teach
what. It's perfect... on Teach Street and people
are signing up. It's incredibly empowering --
MR. BURNHAM: But there are online
companions to the space?
MS. RHOTEN: We're working on the --
MR. SCHAPPELL: I never heard of Text
Shop. We have a knitting store that a friend
opened. I said, how will this work? And she has a
bunch of big sewing machines and tables and
fabrics. The place is packed. It's called
Stitches, in Seattle. And it's one of those like,
"oh, you're going to fail." To "oh, my gosh, it's
just happening with all these people, a huge online
community that are saying, I don't think -- I'm
thinking Text Shop, that would be awesome. At the
moment, you have to sign a waiver before you let me
on the chain saw.
MS. RHOTEN: Your point is good. We're
having a meeting this spring to think exactly how
to -- we're trying to help Text Shop from a variety
of angles. To bring in the legislators, to
understand Text Shop's economic development
innovation. To bring in stimulus dollars.
MR. WILSON: To teach or make stuff?
MS. RHOTEN: Yes.
MR. HEIFERMAN: How can we move further?
You know, Jeff and I are having second thoughts.
MS. RHOTEN: I just wanted to add we're
trying to getting the policy level, but we're also
really thinking about how do we build a virtual
aspect of communities. And Text Shop, should it
go, should it be successful. Well, eventually, a
network of a different types of...
MR. HEIFERMAN: Jeff and I talked for a
couple of hours, but the question of using dead
retail space for a new network of organizing
centers -- an entrepreurial effort, it can be like,
you know, new schools. I see that.
The number one problem -- there's been
two million meet-ups. The number one problem is
the space, space surveys. Starbucks won't cut the
open basement, the church won't cut it. Real good
surveys are a group of not three, four or five, but
kind of 10 to 20 people.
Like I said, how much did this space
cost? Can a group of parents that care about
coming together and making their school better,
just rent this space? Space simply doesn't exist
out there.
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: In New York, it's
very hard. But yesterday, I was in Winston-Salem
and in Greensboro and High Point. These are places
that are empty, no tobacco, no wood, no furniture,
no textile; huge spaces are available, waiting.
MR. HEIFERMAN: They are padlocked.
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: They're just
waiting for economic development at this time.
MR. JARVIS: We have the River Rouge of
Starbucks, you know, the world's largest. But it's
probably also that need a new second place; right?
People leave offices and jobs, they need a new
second place and there's a business there. And
Starbucks is good at coffee and mediocre at space.
You have the inverse of that.
MR. RESNICK: The school buildings
should be community centers, but there are all
these rules and regulations.
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: There's also
factories.
MR. JARVIS: Google would create a
platform -- thank you for the plug. Google would
create a platform that would treat it as a platform
where you can create business on top of this, the
space maybe. And then discussion on Twitter while
other people from the outside say that the space
should be free.
But if you want to reserve the space,
it would cost you. If you want the broadband, it
would cost you. If you want the social services,
there are maybe ways to make a good business of
this. I think, Fred, we will be putting it before
we know it.
MR. SHEFRIN: There's a start up in
Seattle. They're building a platform including 50
others just like that. But they're creating a
platform for people to list their rooms. The
companies can list their conference rooms, they
have somebody to manage them. You can choose to
have overhead projectors, coffee, any amounts that
-- you basically --
MR. HEIFERMAN: If anyone wants to
develop that business as a retail developer, we'll
license the name.
MR. WILSON: You know, Rob, you have
done this right now. You did this with Etsy's
offices in Brooklyn. And then you did it again in
Red Hook, where you actually put in saws and --
MR. KALIN: It's a 9,000 foot work
space, but a space to make stuff isn't enough...how
to make a living. And education isn't available in
Text Shop... through board here. There's a huge
space in Brooklyn, they have something --
What I'm trying to do is create what I
call Parachute, there's thousands of Parachutes
around the country... with a name in it. And the
stuff made by the Parachute, you have a little
Parachute icon and a number. You can go to
Parachute and look at number of it, see where,
what, you bought the name. This shirt has a little
Parachute in the back and 101.
But each one of these Parachutes can
have a variety of resources. You can have this
studio space or it can have sewing machines. You
can have Text Shop. And it all gets listed in the
directory.
But I've found landlords who were
interested in giving free, low rent for these large
spaces. And I know three such landlords. One who
owns half of Kingston. What are you buying... in
upstate New York.
And they want to economically
revitalize these towns by putting these Parachutes
in them. That's one of the group of projects I'm
playing on. There's a huge demand for it.
So, the demand for the education side,
this is as much about learning how to make stuff
and learning how to make a living.
Its like the aphorism, give a man a
fish and you'll feed him for a day; but teach him
how to fish, and he'll have fish for a lifetime.
We've got to teach them how to sell fish so they
can --
(Laughter.)
MR. RESNICK: And when the lake dries
up, teach them how to do something else, as well.
MR. CAULFIELD: And teach those people
how to fish.
MR. KALIN: Teach them how to teach
other people how to fish. There's more to life
than eating and fishing.
(Laughter.)
MR. GRODD: I'll say one thing about the
monopoly issue. I think that is the fundamental
issue, sort of the detriment to creating a good
school culture in K through 12. And I think a good
school culture is key to the teachings and
learning. And so, I think the only way to hack the
monopoly is through competitions and creating good
schools and giving parents a choice.
So, the charter movement -- and I think
the charter school is doing a lot of good stuff.
Whether or not it can scale it is a good question.
I'm not convinced that it can.
MR. WILSON: Stop there. You can't
scale because there's not enough charters out there
or there's not enough people?
MR. GRODD: There are the schools that
get a lot of press, sort of these incredible
schools with really high student achievement, based
on standardized tests, in the narrowest sense of
the term. Is the system there in place which you
can tell the system, but it's the people
implementing the system. You will find people like
me, 20 something, Ivy League.
MR. KALIN: But that's the old system.
If you reinvent it to what Dave Wiley is saying --
that human capital problem, and you will be able to
scale.
MR. GRODD: I'm talking about my current
charter.
MR. BURNHAM: What Rob is saying is
that -- well, I don't know what Rob is saying.
(Laughter.)
MR. BURNHAM: The point is that if you
create an environment that's an inspiring place to
work, that's attracted to a 20 something from an an
Ivy League, where it's a meaningful way to invest
your life and not become a drone in the bureaucracy
where there's a lot of uninspiring people
surrounding you, then there's a real chance that
you'll solve that human capital problem, as well.
MR. HEIFERMAN: It's how do you appeal
to the 98 percent of college graduates who are not
graduating from Ivy League schools and turning them
into great teachers by letting the best practices
emerge through systems like Alex's?
And in general, my take from Fred's
point was the rock star. The rock star teacher
isn't about teaching at Yankee Stadium like the
story over here and making a million bucks. It's
about having their reputation in the teaching world
be the rock star, because people are using their
lesson plan, using their --
MR. GRODD: We are trying to do that
without a platform to do it, but we're arguing
that.
I think charter schoolss, the reason I
don't think their current scalable in the current
form because is they're currently driven by 20
something, Ivy League types for two for
three years.
MR. SACKLER: And so, High Tech High is
a 2,000-seat school as an extension of their
program. It's going to be an interesting
experiment.
MR. WILSON: I think if we're going to
do political advocacy, I think we should try to
make it legal for kids to opt out of classes in the
public school system that suck, and take the
classes online instead and be able to get credit
for that. In that way, my kids would opt out --
either you send a kid to the private school or the
public school, you can't opt out on a class by
class basis.
MR. JARVIS: That's the voucher system.
MS. SALEN: That is happening. There's
a school, a public high school called the I School
opening this fall. And that's their model, that
kids are able to take online courses as part of
their course work. So, that, I don't think that is
a dream, that's a reality. That's happening now.
MR. WILEY: In Utah, at our charter
school, we're not allowed to require students to
attend more than three-quarters time. They can use
the rest of that time to take online classes or to
go to a second school --
MR. WILSON: And they can get credit for
online classes?
MR. WILEY: Yes.
MR. WILSON: I don't think that exists
in New York.
MS. SALEN: It is. The high school
does.
MS. FLEMAL: The teacher is
intrinsically rewarding or somehow recognized or
somehow empowering for you. And typically what
happens, and this is a story I hear over and over
when I'm interviewing teachers for the private
jobs, is, "I'm a good teacher, I do a great job,
and what happens? I get all the difficult cases
put into my classroom. I get all the tough kids.
I have got 30 kids now in my classroom and 25 of
them are the problem kids. After three or four or
five years, I'm beaten down, I can't handle it
anymore."
So the best teachers are the ones that
get all the problem kids, and the least capable
teachers are the ones who don't. Those teachers
aren't being rewarded. Whatever you want to call
"being rewarded," whether it's a pat on the back,
whether it's a showcase, whatever the reward is,
theyre not getting rewarded.
MR. KALIN: The system that does
succeed, the system that is the dominant system in
20 years, is going to be one that solves the hum
capital problem. When it create more teachers, it
will be a successful system.
MR. GORDON: I disagree. Here is why I
disagree. I'm going to disagree with numbers
rather than adjectives and tone of voice. I would
submit that an independent school of 15 kids per
class costs $30,000 a year tuition with the capital
cost of the school for free.
If you build in the capital cost of the
school and depreciate it over 30 years and you put
in the outside cost, I would submit a kid going to
an independent high school in a city costs $60,000
a year.
And those kids, about a third of the
teachers that they get are not good enough. So,
you can get a third of the teachers who are kind of
public-school-quality teacher for 60 grand a year
all in, and the public schools, not including the
cost of -- they don't include the capital cost of
the buildings, which they should, because most
public school districts should be selling buildings
now, in my opinion. But $60,000, we need to get it
to $5,000 a year to scale.
MR. KALIN: You're thinking inside the
current system.
MR. GORDON: No, not quite. I'm saying,
if you decide to do it with people and you go to a
school where there is one adult for every six kids,
that costs $60,000 a year, fully loaded.
MR. KALIN: If the teachers doing
nothing but teaching those kids.
MR. GORDON: No, if there's six adults
per student.
THE SPEAKER: But that's not a necessary
number.
MR. GORDON: Okay. Well, if you do any
kind of ways. So, yes. So, take it to 15 -- so,
you can take it to 30, I would submit. So, take it
to some number. You could take it to one, it's
$250,000. If you take it 50, then it's $5,000 plus
the cost of the --
So, to try to argue the numbers, I'm
saying I know really well independent school --
MR. KALIN: The music industry's kind of
a way on how much to record an album when, people
didn't have laptops, they could record at home.
MR. GORDON: I'm sorry. Try to talk
with numbers. I'm trying to take it with numbers.
MR. BURNHAM: Well, the way Rob -- the
disagreement here is, one is facilities-based and
one is not facilities-based.
MR. GORDON: Facilities plus materials
plus people; if you pay the people. So, we need to
get it to $5,000.
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: Why five?
MR. GORDON: Because that's the
number -- I think that's the number that the State
of California thinks they pay on average
out-of-pocket per student; 5 to $6,000. So, pick a
number or take -- who knows how many students are
per year --
MR. JARVIS: Who says we have classes
the way we have?
MR. GORDON: That's not the point to all
of this.
MR. JARVIS: Where the cost can come way
down, where the rock star teacher can teach
thousands with minimal support and get better
education out there; and the support comes from
fellow students and you get radically new models,
they're supported by frameworks to do things that
reduce the cost way down and make maybe a lot of
the space irrelevant.
MR. GORDON: Perfect.
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: But there's always
professional development.
MR. GORDON: We need to get the full
cost per person, about $5,000 of the US GNP that
can't afford arbitrage.
MR. JARVIS: We may arbitrage that.
MS. ALLEN: Why don't we just have --
why does space return in the conversation? Because
you're right. Everybody is talking about the
concept of space for the last 15 minutes, it's how
important it is.
MR. JARVIS: Open and flexible space
that people can use in various ways, that you can
hold a class at any way. You don't necessarily --
the community doesn't have to own --
MR. BISCHKE: I think there's some
courses that drive the cost way down. One of my
friends runs a site called Grocket, which is a
benchmark company, and they're focused on students
to learn. So, it's a game you play alongside other
people.
When you get the question all right,
the game moves on to the next question. When one
person gets the question wrong, the game stops.
Everybody discusses amongst each other without
knowing what the right answer is, what the learning
concepts are.
Now, that's something where there's so
much knowledge locked up in student's heads that as
we develop systems and software to allow students
to teach each other, you can drop the cost way
down.
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: But I think the
cost of virtual, even virtually nonphysical
professional development and training for and
innovation, when you have to take -- all the range,
from not very qualified or talented to the most
talented and faster learner type of instructors or
teachers to really scale is the largest cost.
You said "people," but I don't know if
you meant that. Even if you run a one hour once a
week session for people to come and learn how to
teach and learn in a new way in the system, even if
they don't end up in a physical space; that's from
my analysis of budget in the last three years when
we were running Globaloria, is the largest cost
item.
MR. KALIN: On the people side, why
don't you just require as a requirement to graduate
high school, you have to teach other people. You
show that you've learned best when you're teaching
something to other people. So, just require high
school students to teach --
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: The thesis on
teaching, on learning by teaching, but to teach
daily, a two-hour workshop, tech shop style that
we're talking about, where you really create a year
or two-year or three-year program when you start as
a beginner, you advance to the next story.
In fact, the programmatic way, it's not
something people just do. They may be very good at
it but they always need some training and that
training still costs money even if it's not
physical or virtual. And you have to consider that
in your numbers when you think about your very
creative idea.
MR. BISCHKE: I have a cousin with seven
kids who home schools them. It's like, the
15-year-old teaches the 13-year-old, who teaches
the 11-year-old, who teaches the 9-year-old. Rob's
point is right on which is, again, the best way to
learn something, to understand something, is to
teach it to someone else. And yet, in schools, we
don't do that at all.
MS. SALEN: Some of your training is
simply just -- the student who is teaching you is
also training you to teach the next student, so
there's some training involved.
MR. KALIN: And some people are better
teachers. It's also like some people are better
learners.
MR. JARVIS: I teach a course on
entrepreneurial journalism, and a business out of
this last term was a structure for teachers and
students to share video instructions in Physics
because there was a niche.
And then the community, if this works
and it takes off, will judge the best and worse and
easyest and hardest and then you'll have a platform
for more. That's one small idea and I'm sure there
are others here doing the same thing. The point is
that there is a business opportunity in that.
My fear is -- I'm on the one hand, I'm
jazzed by this, but on the other, I'm profoundly
depressed because my son is a Junior and it's
almost -- it's too late for him, I fear, and my
daughter is 12 years old and I watch her going
through the system and I don't know what to do.
And I feel like I've made terrible
mistake in saying that, yes, son, get good grades
because that's why -- because that's what we expect
in getting a good college and I'm touring them
around right now.
And he's a creator, they're both
creators and they're being taken away from
creation. And I almost feel like Rob would tell me
have them drop out tomorrow. My wife would kill
you but --
(Laughter.)
What I fear here is time, and what I
see happening in school boards politically is that
while you have the kids in, you care deeply; as
soon as your kids are out, that's somebody else's
problem.
Or while you're out of school some
people here care deeply for teaching; but the care
factor here, to get the critical mass to make the
change, I just fear, is not there yet. What we
need in great measure is P.R., is a movement, is
writing, is stuff.
MR. RESNICK: One model that I like --
citizen schools that started in Boston and other
cities as well, where it's using school buildings
in having people from the community come and teach
specialized workshops at the school, and
volunteering, people, architects, participate in
workshops after school.
And I think it's really getting people
who are engaged in expanding the things that they
do. They are expanding their role... So, this is
not a replacement for school. It can do some the
role that Katy was talking about, redefining what
the teacher needs to do and what the rest of the
community is being part of.
And I think the citizen schools' role
for new start-ups -- there's also a role right now
in the country, pouring out the possibilities for
the community services, public service, and a
lot... schools for 20 somethings, 30 somethings
after work all day at their investing banking firm,
law firm and people who still have their job, will
spend some time in the community school.
That's just one example. But I do
think that's an example showing how we can try to
reframe who it is doing it -- it's not just the
latch teacher, there are other people in the
community. But I think you need a whole collection
of other ways to engage the whole community in the
education effort.
MR. LOUGHRIDGE: I think there is a
really simple approach that maybe can be hatched
here now with some of the folks and their
talents -- I'm thinking of Chris -- I know in
Hawaii there's enough pain with how the public
schools are not working out.
I think it's harder to get into a
private school in Hawaii than it is to get into
Harvard literally. So many people want to get out
of that system. But there's a super simple tool,
SST, where you can get involved -- it's something
that the PTA can use, for maybe a goal setting with
teachers and principals.
I feel that the tough things that we
have now to effect change or problems in
accountability and transparency -- and if there is
a way to tackle that with a social networking tool
that's inclusive versus...
Some way to engage teachers and
principals locally, school by school, using this
tool, where a parent can sit down with the
teachers, administrations and say, "This is what we
are going to work on; because we have a problem
with math in your school or we want to bring in
robotics," whatever it is, just be a part of --
MR. HUGHES: I think that's a fine idea.
But what I'm more interested in is what tools can
actually enter the classroom to make it so that
students can learn from other students who are in
the same room or halfway across the world; or
engage with games that people have begun to
create --
How does that integrate with the rest
of the curriculum that the teacher or facilitator
can be categorized. I think that's where the real
paradigm shift is here now, where people can learn
from other experts regardless of their age,
regardless of their background, and be judged or
assessed on what they actually take in or what they
put out. I think that's where --
MR. BURNHAM: You have to get into the
classroom. I think what we're hearing about -- to
answer Jeff's questions about what do you do with
your children is, you begin to work around the
limitations of the classroom and you find a tutor,
and Fred's hired a guy to teach his kids how to
code.
That's the kind of perspective that you
can have when you sit in this room and you have the
education that you had and the resources that you
have. But I think that to the degree that we can
make these resources more broadly acceptable, what
Shai is doing, what David is doing and then begin
to make parents more aware of them. You can begin
to work around that.
I think the hardest problem that we
have is not whether or not the technology could
create real value inside the classroom; the hardest
problem is how you get it inside the classroom.
MR. KALIN: A million student march.
All the students get together and say, We're sick
of this education, we don't like it --
MR. BURNHAM: No school administrator
ever said that Facebook is now allowed on our
campus.
(Laughter.)
MR. O'DONNELL: In fact, the opposite --
MR. HUGHES: If you give everybody a $200
computer, not just the use of technology but the
new structured history lesson around whatever the
given topic is... not the major things that we
keep talking about, like force kids to, like,
interact with and tell me was that truthful, what
was actually, you know, bullshit, and actually make
all of the decisions and then integrate into some
type of creative work letter, say paper or
presentation of video or whatever.
But I think that's the challenge, it's
getting that technology in the classroom and using
teachers as being facilitators rather than -- which
is a whole paradigm shift from everything else.
MR. WENGER: When you think about how
much it costs to every student in the United States
a net book with full Internet access compared to
the cost of the AIG bail out.
MR. O'DONNELL: I disagree. I don't
think it should be in this classroom at all. The
worst thing I've ever done is teach a class in a
computer room where everyone is sitting in front of
a computer that's connected; because absolutely
nobody pays attention, they were just instant
messaging with their friends or whatever.
I think outside the classroom,
especially in situations where you are teaching the
kids how to access resources, the content, other
students who are learning the same thing, on the
off hours, when the teachers might not be able to
reach or wait for the teachers to reach them on
their own time.
Because in the classroom, I think it
can be a distraction; but outside, if there is a
support systems especially in situations where
maybe parents don't know the same language as the
kids in the classroom, they don't have the parental
support around the education, stuff like that, to
be able to access those resources.
MR. HUGHES: I understand where you're
coming from, and there's a debate raging around the
country about whether or not students should be
able to have laptops. I think the problem there is
just -- you just need to build a software that does
real time assessment.
So, if you have given a task or given a
problem or you're trying to teach a given topic you
should be able to know which of your students are
actually engaging with that topic or whatever
they're doing online.
MR. JARVIS: Or at some point it's up to
them. At some point they're responsible.
MR. HUGHES: I'm talking about younger.
MR. JARVIS: Graduate students.
MR. HUGHES: Twelve-year-olds who are on
Facebook. But maybe you have those different
channels where you also see software development so
you can assess what --
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: I think that you
don't realize that most public schools don't have
computers in the classroom and maybe -- but also
they don't have it at home, and to answer your
question in this debate, the only way is to really
post in a place where teachers are looking, that
there is this innovation and what you're looking
for teachers to be patient about it and want to do
it; and you work with them and then try to advance
to get the principals and decision makers and the
school.
That's what we are doing and it works
really, really well; but you really have to make
sure that they have the bandwidth, the
infrastructure, the computers and everything in
order to work with them from within.
Once it works, then after a year the
school sees that something did happen, they may
actually -- whether it's writing for grants or
asking for funding to bring more computers, more
productivity, but they have to see that that
configuration is monitored towards the classroom is
happening.
And that is happening all around. It's
an old trick. And this is -- so far, my knowledge
is how innovation spreads in schools. The answer
to the question "how did we get it there" is really
to identify those teachers. So, not necessarily
techie but passionate as to what extra time to make
it work and demonstrate because they're excited
about doing something new. And that's really how
it works so far in the research.
MR. GORDON: Fred, to add to your idea
about the vouchers. How about the idea of about a
$100,000 check to a family who successfully gets a
kid a GED home school? Just thanks, and here's a
hundred thousand. That would probably create
activity.
MR. WILSON: Who is funding those
$100,000 checks? You and me?
MR. GORDON: We already are, Dude. With
half a billion dollars we're paying $10,000.
MR. WILSON: We're not going to get the
government do it; right? They are not going to do
it.
MR. GORDON: They already are. Instead
of doing it by credit, here's the only outcome we
care about -- we want the kids in jail until
they're 18 or until they're 16, and they're run
down jails and we want the GED. That's all we
really care about.
We don't care is they're smart enough
to vote, obviously. We don't care if they
understand science, obviously. All we want is a
GED and get the government out of it. Sell the
jails.
MS. ALLEN: A small anecdote on the
issue of technology in all schools and to
underscore the fact that any conversation on
education needs to take a whole bunch of other
factors into account, which are pretty absent from
our conversations.
I've served on a board of the
University of Chicago Charter Schools for a number
of years. We had to quit because kids were getting
attacked. First, we tried school buses so that
they didn't have to walk home, but that wasn't
enough and it's super expensive. So, it wasn't a
sustainable program, just because of various social
factors.
MS. FLEMAL: I live for technology, but
I'm not sure that it is worthwhile putting it into
any more classrooms.
MR. KALIN: Technology is the software,
not the hardware.
MS. FLEMAL: And you have to keep
updating the technology instructors. What I do is
tell kids -- I keep sending people to the Apple
store, that's where I send my students. "Go to the
Apple store and sit there for free classes and you
will get the most up to date instruction." I'm not
sure it's worthwhile.
MS. SEGGERMAN: I always ask, why does
education seem to be the last thing we're going to
get a handle on? Technology seems really well used
in the corporate sector, in health corporations,
the military obviously knows how to do it, politics
is starting to totally get it.
Why, when most of us are parents, we
care about education, why is it that technology and
education as a marriage is like the last?
MR. WENGER: That may be the perfect
way to wind up. I think what they refer to is that
the hacking that is taking place is taking place on
the outside and that's, I guess, where innovation
tends to come from, largely.
And the reason, I think, that the
school itself is going to be last place it takes
place, is it's the system that's the most tightly
controlled by lots of different interests; and that
slows down innovation because the big system and
the innovation doesn't fit inside the existing
system and the system changes slowly.
MR. SHEFRIN: I think this idea of the
inside and the outside is really critical and I
think the role of education really is to make a
porous wall between those things. That's what
schools and education really should be about right
now.
We're living in a time where we have
access to all of those things, and we're moving
back and forth. So, what's happening on the
outside needs to be able to move in a revolving
door and be brought into the inside and back out
again.
And I really do think that's the role
of education. And I also want to say that lots of
conversations today were about what's happening in
the public schools and also at that level of
education. And I think the next teachers, to think
about teachers as innovators, innovators as
teachers in the relationship, the paradigm between
those two things.
And what happens all the way through,
the next teachers and innovators are the kids in
kindergarten right now and the kids that are
graduating college right now.
And what the continuum is between that
whole range I think is critical to be able to
understand and to know also that it goes both ways,
that it's not just kindergarten up to college, that
that learning goes back and forth in a continuum.
So, I do really think that the inside,
outside -- as the outside becomes more acceptable,
things that would happen in the after-school
programs and what students and teachers have access
to now are easier to fold back in in may ways.
What the classroom is, the idea about
what the classroom is, is the real question, what
is it, where is it, what happens inside and then
outside of this and maybe to not be able to think
about inside and outside as two separate worlds.
So, I think a lot of what needs to be
happening in education is that what happens to the
students is, they are finding a way to be in the
world that's meaningful. And then I think the way
we begin to think through these things is what
makes that happen and then tell the students to
really empower so that what happens is also
initiated from them. We have to find a way to do
that.
MR. WENGER: We have promised more time
to talk in smaller groups. I want to thank
everybody for being here but I also want to
encourage everybody to continue the conversation
with the part of the group or on the Wiki or just
through connections established today. I think
that's how ultimately we will carry out the
ultimate hack of education, creativity in all of
us. Thank you all.
(Time noted: 4:10 p.m.)
(Applause.)
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, Marc Prensky makes this
interesting distinction between digital natives and
digital immigrants I know it's the best distinction. But
the essential idea is if you are 25, you were born
before the digital revolution began. And some of
those people -- not all, but most adults have a
kind of passing relationship with digital culture.
I do myself, and I have started tweeting at the
urging of my kids.
I'm on Twitter and I have a thousand
followers. I can't tell you how great this makes
me feel. These people are interested in what I had
for breakfast.
(Laughter.)
I think that it's a great system
because my kids understand this far better than I
do. But the thing is, these technologies are
transformative, not just economically but
culturally.
So my take on this is that education
has three main purposes. One of them is
economical. There is no doubt in my mind that
education of all sorts has clear and powerful and
essential economic purposes, and any attempt to
transform education has to take account of it.
The problem is that the old economic
model doesn't work and none of us can figure out
how new economic models would fall out. So, that,
to me, puts a premium on innovation and creativity.
We have to think hard about that.
The second big purpose of education is
cultural. Everybody expects education will enable
kids to engage with the culture out of their own
sense of identity, and be part of the culture in
the global sense.
But how do you do that?
The third big part of education is
personal. Education has to focus also on personal
capability and what makes us distinct, as well as
what we have in common. And that, for the moment,
flattens out in the current systems of education.
Because the way in which we're promoting schools is
through standardizing rather than through
personalizing, customizing.
So, I see a vast potential in these new
technologies, not only within the system, but as a
way of creating breakouts in the system, new forms
in formal education.
This book, just very briefly, is based
on the premise that most people haven't discovered
their talents, but many people do. And a part of
education is a different sense of personal growth
and development.
The figures in America are, I think,
15,000 school districts in America. There are
90,000 schools. The dropout rate in public
education is 30 percent. There are growing numbers
of graduates who are unemployed.
And also, among the people who are at
school, there's growing levels of disaffection, not
only among students but among their teachers,
because they find that whole creative process, as
teachers, is being flattened out. And the normal
response in political circles is to demand control
methods.
And the whole point about these
technologies is they are not... control. They are
vernacular, they are grassroots and they are
cross-fertilizing technologies. How you stimulate
those, how you make them grow, is, of course, a big
challenge to the conversation.
But I just wanted to say that I think
that this conversation is not a fringe
conversation, although it's happening on the
fringes of education. I think what we're all here
to talk about today is a process of educational
development which could, I think, create a new
sentiment across the whole system.
But it would take, I think, not only
your knowledge of the technologies, but your being
willing to challenge who you're addressing. Is it
just the kids? Is it the students? Is it the
teachers? Is it the parents?
So, what are the things that you
reflect on your own education, that you have made,
that have held you back? I think it's worth
reflecting on those, in particular the sense of
intelligence.
My point about giving these numbers
about the schools is that when these numbers are
trotted out, it all gives the impression that this
is still a bit like...
My point is, you can't understand
education if you only think statistically. For
every child who drops out of school, for every kid
who doesn't succeed, even though he eventually
does, there is a personal story. Education is
always and inevitably personal. And the great
thing about these technologies is a way of
calibrating the personal involvement in the way
that they never did before.
So, I just wanted to mention the
conversation that we're about to have. I think
it's important, not just for you but the students
that we'll serve. And it could, I think, be a
historic moment in terms of the collaborations
being at least cultivated around the table.
So, I want to -- if I could stay for
this bit, really, is to hang on to the bit in the
middle.
And I just want to end with this.
There was a fantastic booklet a few years ago by a
guy called Peter Brooke. He's a theater director,
if you ever come across it. He wrote a book called
"The Empty Space." And he asked himself this
question. He was concerned most theater and is --
loose entertainment -- it's not invigorating. It's
like a passing time.
His thing is theater as a vibrant,
social and cultural force. So, he also analyzed
what goes wrong with the theater. So, he asked
himself this question. He said, What is the heart
of the theater? What is it? What is this thing we
are talking about? And to get to it, he started
the process of subtraction. He said, "What can you
take away from it and still have it?"
And he said, well, you can take away
the stage. Take away the script. You can take
away the lighting. See what's going on, you take
away the curtains, and you can take away the
building. You can take away all the crew, and you
can certainly take away the director. All of that
is very easy. Take it all out.
The only thing you cannot remove from
theater is an actor in a space and somebody
watching. That's the heart of it. And if either
of those parts is missing, there is no theater.
You need a performer and an audience. Theater is
that relationship.
And he said you should never add
anything to that relationship unless it improves
it. If it gets in the way, if it encumbers it, if
it makes it more difficult, you shouldn't have it.
And that's his problem with theater. Everything is
a distraction from the main business.
And that's, I suppose, what I want to
suggest here, that part of the conversation should
be about what's the heart of education? What is
the irreducible minimum? In public education, I
think we've lost sight of it. The heart of
education is what happens in the hearts and minds
of individual learners. You cannot make anybody
learn anything that they're not interested in
learning, if they don't see and feel the relevance
of it.
And what we've got now in this
industrialized system is a multitude of
distractions from this central purpose. The heart
of it is falling out of it because kids aren't
interested. What we have here is, an opportunity
to really engage kids' imaginations by giving them
education, using these technologies not to get in
the way but to enhance and properly develop --
collaboratively and creatively.
So, I want to thank Albert for the
tremendous conversation. I think it's a really
important one. I want to wish you well. I wish I
could be here longer, but I have another conference
to attend.
Thank you.
(Applause.)
MR. WENGER: So we're going to go home
and work hard on all of those things.
Thank you, Sir Ken.
I raised my hand when Ken asked who is
here who's not from the United States. I'm a U.S.
citizen, but I grew up in Germany. So, I want to
open this up for everybody. What are the goals
worth pursuing? Everybody should jump right in on
that.
MR. KALIN: I was at the economic forum
in Davos. The world is changing. I think it's
created a massive amount of opportunity. And I
started a company four years ago called Etsy.com...
people who make a living making things.
And it's four years now, there are
about 350,000 sellers, 97 percent women. And these
are one to three person businesses for the most
part. And one of the talks in Davos is about how
you would get engaged... Sir Ken said something
and I think this really illuminated how education
is going to change.
He said, people graduating from school
now, their goal should not be to get a job; their
goal should be to create jobs for other people.
And when you look at that type of
entrepreneurialism, now, you can't teach that as a
disciplin because it's inherently
interdisciplinary.
The word "interdisciplinary" is
actually slapstick humorous to me. This is life,
the fact that you could think otherwise is humorous
to me.
And there is this other irony that all
these younger kids who spend so much of their time
online and then have to spend time online for
school using blackboard, software or anything, the
have to be forced to do it, and they don't enjoy
it.
They just do it by spending all that
time outside of school on the web. So, I think
that there's some connection there in terms of how
you empower students. You're not going to teach it
like that, and how the school curriculum could
change that or if that could be even part of the
curriculum.
MR. WENGER: Rob, how well did you do in
high school?
MR. KALIN: I graduated high school with
a D minus. I had an interesting argument with my
guidance counselor. My guidance counselor said,
"Drop out of high school, you'll have an easier
time getting into college if you just get a GED."
Then he said, "Not only am I not getting a GED --
(Laughter.)
-- but I'm going to graduate with this
D minus, and see how it does for me.
And it didn't get me into any
accredited school. I got a diploma program in an
art school in Boston, and it was near MIT. And
actually I used the art school to make a fake ID to
go to MIT.
(Laughter.)
Somebody said it was expensive, but I
said No, it is free, you just won't get credit for
it.
But the other part is, to do a college
degree. And if you're in college for four years --
in my experience, college degrees, their value in
the job market is getting less and less, but their
cost is increasing.
So, you have these two things are quite
at odds with each other. And that's going to
balance itself out. People are going to find
another way. I think that's the beauty of
humanity, you can't have systems that are so
monolithic now that you can say this completely
stifles creativity.
You know, there's people who just get
rejected in the system. You can't go through it
and they find other paths. And with the Web
nowadays, I think there's never been more
opportunity to find these other paths and connect
with other people.
MR. WENGER: Mr. Jarvis, you have
something to say?
MR. JARVIS: Just to play off what Rob
said -- and I didn't mean to plug my book, but as
Sir Ken did, I'll follow up. I wrote a book called
"What Would Google Do?" And in looking at that, I
came to two great conclusions myself.
One is that -- and I called this
"creation generation," but I realized that we
always want to create. And everyone wants to
create. We want to leave our hands on things. And
we have a system that doesn't enable this.
One survey, for the 81 percent of
Americans, I think, they have a book in them. We
can probably be grateful most don't come out, but
we should be sad that people don't have the chance
to try. And so, all I want to say is that the one
bing moment from me was wondering why education
does not have -- like, Google or 20 percent rule,
that people use 20 percent of their time to create
something and that education becomes an incubator
for that creation, because like what Rob said, it's
not a class I teach.
I teach entrepreneurial journalism,
which is not an oxymoron, at the City University of
New York. And it's all about them creating
whatever they can create and helping them do that.
And so, how can we help students create and, in
that process, learn? And we are not built to do
that at all. We are built to put out cookie
cutters and make them pass tests.
MR. WENGER: But don't you need skills?
Is teaching skills an important goal of school?
MS. BOYD: I think a lot of us in the
room are really interesting success cases, a lot of
people who also didn't play by the rules, any sort
of changes to the rules or -- may end up why we're
in this room to begin with.
I spent most of my time running around
the United States, interacting with teens who don't
necessarily have that mind set, don't necessarily
have those opportunities, and their priorities are
fundamentally different.
And one of the biggest priorities that
I hear, that strikes me as so different from my
own, was what it meant to make certain that you
stay with your family, you stay in your community
and that you're a part of a local social system and
they're watching as the jobs fall out of the local
economy.
Sir Ken, as a point of going back to
thinking, he -- about the industrial era and how
education perished. The industrialist is really
interesting. And we're still stuck in that. We're
watching as the industrial structures have fallen
out and, of course, it's devastating.
And we have these great opportunities.
And sitting in Manhattan, having those great
conversations about the creative cultures and what
all the awesome possibilities are for people who
are super motivated.
But at the end of the day I keep
wondering, what do we think about the vast majority
of people who are frankly being trained in the
service class labor?
And what is that training look like?
Do we prepare them for service class labor or
should we be thinking about how we prepare people
to find stuff that's not just about labor per se,
but about enjoying their life more broadly? And
this is where the creativity comes in.
My feeling in a lot of education is
that you may not be preparing people for the skills
of service class labor -- although there's certain
things that are done there -- but giving them the
tools to be creative when they want to be creative
in their personal lives; to create as a form of art
or a form of fun, the things that they can do when
they're not working 9:00 to 5:00.
Many of us in the room get to live --
you know, our work and leisure are sort of blended
into one. We love what we are doing. But can we
really truly expect everybody to be in that kind of
job mind set? And when do we have to actually
think about the balancing of the work and pleasure
and how we actually educate people to be happy?
MR. O'DONNELL: One thing that really
strikes me, anytime -- I teach an entrepreneurship
class at Fordham. And when I encourage students to
find something they really like doing -- and I tell
them, Look, as a finance major, I can tell you from
all my investment banker friends that the money is
not worth it if you don't like what you do.
And the assumption -- on behalf of the
students, and I don't know where they got this
idea -- they can't find what they really want to do
because they need to make money.
And I said, Well, I don't really
understand why, for some reason, all of the jobs
people would like to do are somehow
disproportionately underpaid. And I said, there
are lots of jobs for finance I wouldn't necessarily
want to do, but they make a lot of money.
And so, somehow, the education system
is teaching students along the way that the pursuit
of doing something you really want to do is not
economically viable. And I think that's the real
problem.
MR. WENGER: Well, I think that may well
be the reality for a lot of people.
MS. BOYD: If you look at the job market
in the United States, there's certain things we're
not going to export, and a lot of that is service
labor. And the fact of the matter is we do need to
put people to fill those jobs. And those jobs
aren't always fun. And so, how do we balance those
different dynamics?
I think it's great that we train and
educate people to really succeed and go and do the
things that they're passionate about. But I think
that if we only focus on that and we don't focus on
the reality of the labor market where not
everything is fun -- but we really want people to
clean our sewers, but that might not be the most
enjoyable job. But how do we actually create those
kinds of balances so that the fun might not be just
necessarily your job?
And there's certain things where
getting paid takes the fun out of it. I love
talking to people who are amateur chefs. And
they're amateur chefs because when they tried to go
and work in a restaurant, they hated it. It wasn't
fun anymore. And it was fun when they can cook for
their friends.
And so, how do we balance these kinds
of engagements where it's not just an obsession of
labor? And I think as American society, we obsess
over labor. And we obsess over making everything
without fun labor. That may not be the way the
society goes.
MR. L. JOHNSON: I'm not sure how this
is relevant to education, but I would point out,
what is wrong with serving fries? The notion of
serving people by cleaning their sewage systems or
serving fries is to be abuse and --
MS. BOYD: But it's a form of prestige.
It has no prestige, which makes it a miserable
experience.
MR. L. JOHNSON: Prestige is deep with
the abuse. And in education I think that's the
notion of -- I agree with a lot of what you said,
but the idea that service as a profession is
something that must be societally avoided is -- I
don't really get.
When I sold a company eight years ago,
I went to work in McDonald's because I felt I
needed to kind of connect with human beings. I was
spending too much time with investment bankers and
lawyers and such.
I would throw out one sentence. The
thing I'm most interested today, and I've talked to
Dave about this -- the idea of broadening the
notion of education to be a lifelong idea and
how the work that Paul -- the school, everything --
and Dave are doing around, saying that everyone's
got something to teach, everyone's got something to
learn.
We live in this crazy connected world,
how does education -- how do you expand education?
And I guess the other things which we're talking
about today is -- which I don't know much about
is -- it's just really hitting hard at the broken
public educational system and what to do about
that.
MR. WENGER: Let's think about that.
Let's just stick with that point, number one. Is
it the goal of education to enable people to find
the job that makes them happy? Or is it a goal at
a large scale to have people to somehow figure out
how they can lead happy lives even if they have
jobs that today they don't consider -- it's a very
fundamental difference on what we're going to wind
up focusing on, not for the education but for the
large majority, depending which of those goals.
MR. KALIN: There are now jobs out
there; that's the other part of it. I got my BA
and I taught my friends with similar degrees, and I
was studying literature at the time. My dad's
saying, "Go to go work in the book publishing
industry." And I saw my friends who had Master's,
Ph.D.s in the book publishing industry, and they're
doing alphabetizing, copy editing.
I started my own company because I
found that the only way to avoid wasting my
education --
MS. FLEMAL: But that's just this
moment. But I think the broader question and I
think it's good what you're saying, talking about
this expanding the concept of education, and what
Sir Ken is saying about, I don't know if he said
vocational, but also the cultural aspect and
personal aspect is that.
I work with families here in Manhattan,
what we do is we take kids off that track of,
whether they're 36 months or whether they're in
fifth grade or sixth grade, taking them off the
school track and bringing them home and home-school
them for a while and then whether they choose to go
back or not.
Parents will often say, okay, you know,
they are more concerned with sometimes the social
aspect than, what is my child really going to be
interested in academically? What is their real
interest academically? I.
Think people have gotten so caught up
in the social aspect of school that they've
forgotten really about what we're really there for,
that we're there to learn and we're there to find a
passion and maybe find a vocational skill, a useful
skill.
But this whole social piece that we're
getting in school, which is ultimately, I think,
secondary to everything else, has sort of taken
precedence. This social interaction of who likes
me and who doesn't like me, and all the other
things we see on TV.
So to think of the part of it that
brings the focus definitely to education is so
important. I'd love to hear more and learn more
and focus more about that.
MS. RHOTEN: Historically, education's
had three primary objectives (Inaudible.) Economic
development and vocational skill trainings. And
then human development, the ability to create and
ability to pursue what you are interested in and
have a sense of yourself.
I think we've lost two of the
(inaudible). There's too much pressure around the
question of vocational economic development. What
job will you get? What college will you go to?
The question of civic responsibility
into a nonformal learning institution, which I'm
currently spending a lot of time. And what I see
happening in the nonformal learning institutions
are development organizations that shoulder two
other areas of responsibilities. And they are
currently losing their ability to provide -- to
serve those two responsibilities.
Where are those going to be met? They
are not being met in the large part because of what
Sir Ken mentioned. The child left behind.
Hopefully, this administration will reverse that,
but that will not happen within the next
six months, I can assure you.
So, what I hope for in this
conversation and the work that all of you are
doing, is how can the private sector, along with
the public sector, try to bolster the missing
objectives and start school learning? If you can't
do that, I think we are in very, very deep trouble.
MR. WENGER: I know that Alex has taught
in schools.
What are the goals of the students?
MR. GRODD: Well, thank you for putting
me on the spot.
The goals of the students, I think it's
pretty universal, based on my experience with the
students and teachers, is to be cool.
Fundamentally, when you are a middle school child
and you are in a social setting where there's all
sorts of social pressures to fit in, I think the
driving force in the life of a child, starting much
earlier than it used to be, is to be cool, to fit
in, to be accepted by peers.
And so, that, it is a very compelling
force to the child. And so, when combined with the
fact that it also can be pretty universally it's
generally cool to be bad and it's cool to rebel,
and I think a lot of people in this room probably
have experienced those instincts.
It creates a lot of challenges for
teachers. And so, I don't know if that's where you
were going, but I think it is an important point
for me, as a teacher, in all this conversation, to
think about the fact that when you are alone in a
room with 30 11-year-olds -- and we can talk a lot
about personalized instruction and unlocking
creativity, but a lot of what need to take place --
to me, one of the fundamental flaws in our K-12
education now is the amount of discipline.
Teachers invest so much time, so much
energy trying to manage a class, and by the time
they've done that, there's so little energy to
actually differentiate the instruction, personalize
instruction.
So, I think that, to me, when thinking
about, how do we really get into the core of the
transformation, part of that is how do we create
systems of discipline, whether it's sort of
top-down, sort of authoritarian model that a lot
of charter schools I've taught in use, and a lot
more intrinsic sense of community. And it has got
to be both and it's got to be on the table.
That's one answer.
MR. L. JOHNSON: I think the cool thing
that's really important, when I look back on the
moments of my life, the periods of my life when I
actually felt in my educational development that I
was kind of, the most formative periods, they were
periods where, for whatever reason, I stumbled into
a peer group where the cool kids were the smart
kids.
It's kind of an intrinsic reward of the
group to be smarter and to be more passionate in
some way, to get to Sir Ken's idea, that the group
really rewarded people who really got obsessed with
something and has something, whether writing plays
or write short stories or doing art or whatever it
was.
And when you get to -- well, I think
about a parent and I just try to think about how I
can draw my kids towards kind of social groups,
where there is that intrinsic award, you're clever,
you are at the top of the pile, because you've done
that, that's really smart.
And I think that's one of the things
you see in kind of talking about hacking education,
kind of like a nerd culture. It's very valuable.
There is going to be an intrinsic award in that
society like whoever makes the best program are in
this group, like it is the coolest on some level.
And I don't know how you work that into an
educational institution, but it's an incredibly
powerful force.
MR. GRODD: Creating a school culture
wherein students were cool and smart is what very
few schools do in this country, one or two at best,
the best schools in the country --
MR. SACKLER: And it's very doable. You
do it through a series of programs so adults can
feel the... of the program to celebrate its
success... students and the hard work and teamwork
and initiative.
And just looking on those incentives in
place in a school for the kids, the kids respond,
in that culture. And I have seen that in every
great school I worked in.
It is not reasonably -- it is not done
idly... organizational discipline on these
teachers.
MR. WENGER: Try to jump in. People
queue up --
MR. RESNICK: They could be smart. It's
all about what you mean by "smart." But I think
the way that the culture is smart, it's
problematic. Well, I think the way -- I link this
with some of the earlier conversations, Sir Ken,
Jeff said, the word "create" came up a lot. And
part of what people wanted to do is to have their
voice heard, mainly develop their own voice. And
that's where a lot of the passion comes from,
developing your voice, because that's important, to
give you the opportunity to create, create the rule
of creativity. And we don't give enough
opportunities for people to create.
I think what we have seen is we've
started after school centers, the network of after
school; because the kids were unsuccessful at
school and uninterested in school and unmotivated
by the school. And then we said, lots of times --
create their own, you know, animations,
simulations, you know, other things you want to
hear to keep up their creating something.
It is not just you're seeing that as
intellectual leaders. When they're creating games,
when they're developing their voices, I think it's
both important to their personal life.
As Dana was saying, to be able to
express about -- personally, develop your voice
accordingly. And increasingly, I feel very
fortunate that in some way, I think we're lucky
that we're luck -- what I would want for people,
their personal life is better aligned with what the
society's needs and the economy's needs in the
past.
I would hope that if we were meeting a
hundred years ago, there would still be a part for
the development of personal expression and ability
to create. That is not well aligned with the
economy at all. Today it is better aligned, yet
there are some jobs -- there is a certain
percentage of jobs in rising creative paths, part
of the documented growing percentage.
So, there is this better alignment of
what is needed. I felt fortunate we have better
alignment of what is needed for personal
satisfaction and economic success. And yet still,
the system does not support the -- for the
development of letting the kids create design, to
be able to --
MR. ETUK: What I just want to say to
you is that going back, one of the goals are -- I
think that one of the goals have to be that
education has to evolve with the user; right? And
what I mean by that is that at the end of the day,
the format in which you present information right
now is everything that we used to believe with the
way to present information and shoving it down
kids' throats, and they don't like it.
What are the tools that can be created
for presentation that have input into that process
so that they can evolve as the kids evolve?
Today it might be something like
Twitter. Tomorrow it might be something explicitly
different. How does that information get back to
the system that lets teachers become the
facilitators, put knowledge in here that the
students then know how to work?
Does that make a lot of sense? I think
that's one of the things structurally we need to
build in.
MS. SHEFRIN: I wanted to just go back
for a minute to Peter Brooks. One of the things
that Peter said -- and when he was rehearsing, it
was an exercise with the actors. And he often
found that when they came to start work, they
actually weren't there, even when they were all
there.
And so, he would often do an exercise
called "double bond, double time" which was to do
the rehearsal in twice the normal speed of the
conversation, and go through that.
And what would happen in the course of
doing that was, of course, is that the subtext of
the play would all of a sudden become visible and
tangible through tonality and nuances in the voice,
in the speed.
Another exercise that he would do to
sort of get people there was a masking exercise.
And you just put everybody in a white mask. And it
allowed people to kind of arrive without their
personas there. And all of a sudden, this
imaginative space became rendered visible.
And I think some of the conversation
has a lot to do with how we create the conditions
necessary for imaginative space because I think it
is from that space that we move from transformation
to translation.
I'm not sure how my bio arrived on the
paper, but it didn't go through me and it didn't
say what I actually do. And just for the sake of
everybody's information, I would just like to say
that I'm currently the provost of the Rhode Island
School of Design, which has informed a lot of my
thinking about all of these things.
I think the relationship -- somebody
talked about skills and the necessity some skills,
somehow separate from thinking or making. And I
think -- I'd like to think about, and I understand
it from working with the students, the relationship
between making and thinking is that making is a
kind of thinking and thinking is a kind of making.
The idea of asking questions as opposed
to making questions, which I think the students are
engaged in.
I think how education is delivered has
changed dramatically; and I think it has started to
create another kind of path which has to do with
teachers teaching students, students teaching
teachers, teachers teaching teachers and students
teaching students.
And I think all of those things are now
occupying the same territory. And through those
different kinds of exchanges, they're all ways of
engaging imaginative space; which ultimately I
think really allows for the crossover from all of
these various domains, which opens up all kinds of
other possibilities.
MR. WENGER: Jump in, Ms. Salen.
MS. SALEN: I've been working on a
project to open a new school in the fall that's try
to tackle some of these questions. And what I
found in doing that is that there's a fundamental
tension between the ideas of education and the
notion of learning.
And I think that what we are really
trying to talk about is learning as the space of
innovation and transformation and not so much
education. Because we see innovation in the space
of learning all over the place today, in terms of
how people are coming to learn things, how people
are sharing information. We are not seeing
innovation in the space of education because of its
institutionalization.
So, I think that the space that we
really want to begin to understand is how learning
itself is a form of currency today for young
people. It's actually valued, and this is what you
were talking about.
Learning is actually valued in very
interesting ways by young people today; not so much
in school, but in spaces outside of school where
they're really learning how to do things. And it
goes to the conversation of, if one of our goals is
to allow people to move into a future; that they
are able to learn, able to adapt to any kind of
change, whether they're changing jobs, whether
they're changing what they're passionate about.
That, I think, is the best thing that we can do for
people is to give them that kind of skill set.
And so, for me, that, I think, is the
space of transformation -- it will get to
education, but it is so systemic, the problems with
education, that I feel like we have to come in the
back door. But if you talk to educators they say
they're in the learning business, but it is,
actually, they are not. You don't see that so much
when you get down to the nuts and bolts.
MR. BURNHAM: There's a great story that
comes out of your work with... and I think the
kid's name is Giapetto, the Brazilian kid who -- I
don't know if you've seen this piece of work. But
there is a Brazilian kid, I think, like 17 years
old who was passionate about animated music videos,
and there was nothing in the educational system
that he was in that would help him in any way to
figure that out.
But he found a site on the Web, began
to download the tools and figure out how to
manipulate the stuff and began to interact with
people on that site. He began to upload videos
that he created to that site. He was welcomed in
as a peer in that site, ultimately worked his way
up to the site to the point that he was respected
within that community and was beginning to educate
others who were coming into that community.
Eventually, his teachers figured out
that this kid knew how to edit video and asked him
to come back to the school system, and teach a
course on editing video. And all of that took
place with absolutely no infrastructure and no
support.
And I think that's what you are getting
at -- you're talking about something that was
self-directed, completely outside of the system,
but enabled by the medium that we are now all
swimming in and it either creates an opportunity to
help people learn even if we don't figure out how
to reform the system.
MR. CAULFIELD: I think there is an
important point there too, that comes back to the
peer group observations you were making. Something
that is relatively new is the ease of creating a
nonlocal reputation. This is something that's
available to a nine-year-old that wasn't available
before; that nonlocal reputation, that global
reputation of a niche reputation on the web.
In cases where the peer group influence
may be a little suffocating or a little limiting or
constricting, that can serve as a balance, as a
corrective, if it is encouraged, or sometimes if
not encouraged at all, it just happens.
And I think that's relatively -- I
think it's always hard to separate out in these
conferences what is new and what is really not new
but just sort of redundant. But I think it is
relatively new, the ease with which, especially
younger kids, can create global reputations and how
that can really broaden their sense.
I think that also related to Diana's
point, in that people now can have jobs which may
not be the best jobs, may not be the jobs that they
would prefer to have; and they still have an option
of pursuing, fulfilling artistic or academic life
with others on the Web, once again, through these
tools.
So, I may work this job, but I also
publish through Creative Commons, a bunch of folk
songs. And that may not have been an opportunity
before to actually have any sort of audience for
that.
MS. BOYD: Connecting this and Diana,
actually it's really important that we recognize
that status and validation and reputation are not
just means to get skill sets, but there's also
value that that is something that we actually
learn. We kind of forget how much we have learned
that until you see and you have to figure out to
negotiate the social world.
I mean, here we are in this environment
where there's a great deal of -- we want to be
smart, we want to be seen as cool in this room.
We're an environment that values that.
We're also in a room where people have
negotiated and networked their way to here. You
wouldn't be here if you weren't somehow connected
to other people in this room.
And one of the things that takes place,
especially at the teenage years, starting in middle
and high school, is that people actually learn how
to network; they learn how the social world works.
If you look at what they're doing on
the social network, such a lot of social media,
they're trying to make sense of those social
structures. Who your friends are, what happens
when you have to articulate the social dramas of
that? How do you make sense of social dramas?
We pooh-pooh this often as like
something that's fully irrelevant education, but we
all, as adults, rely on those skills, those very
social skills they've gotten us into this room,
that we have to learn.
One of the things that's sort of
scaring me is I'm looking at a lot of class
differences around the social network patterns and
whatnot, is that young people who are from
wealthier environments are actually encouraged to
network with people in other factors, other than
their schools, and with adults in very formal
situations.
Young people who are from more working
class environments are less likely to be encouraged
to network outside of their peer group and their
families. This has dramatic effects on their
abilities to get jobs and their abilities to find
validation and also other factors.
So, we ignore all of this sort of cool
stuff as sort of extra-curricular and unnecessary;
but we also might want to think of embracing it as
actually a set skills, that we all use it. And we
actually have networking classes as adults when so
much of that takes place at those formative years.
MR. WILSON: Dana, I want to read you an
e-mail. This is from a kid, an 18-year-old kid
named Michael Yuretcho, I never met him. He may
not go to college. He left a comment on the blog
post I read about a week ago, saying that a lot of
entrepreneurs don't go to college.
And he wrote a comment and he said,
"I'm not going to college, and I'm going to work
for a start-up."
In this e-mail, he said something
today, "Thank you. Fred, I really never got a
chance to say this, but thank you. I'm the kid who
commented on your post about successful
entrepreneurs and not going to college. From that
one comment, I had two job offers -- well, two
potential job offers."
(Laughter.)
"I was contacted a couple of days ago by
a friend of yours, Boris Wertz. I was also
contacted over Twitter by a guy from Boot-up Labs.
I'm meeting with both of themthis week. I want to
thank you for taking time out in your schedule to
e-mail some people."
I actually I only e-mailed one. The
other guy he contacted directly.
"I'm truly grateful that something came
out of this. So, it's because of you."
I wrote back to him, it's not because
of me, but because of him. He had the balls, an
18-year-old kid, to wade through a comment thread
brought between a bunch of creative, influential
people. He made a smart comment and found, as he
said, two potential job offers.
So, what you are saying is, that these
kids do know these networking skills. And they
figured this out; and I think there is a great
equalizer here. I don't know if the kid comes from
a wealthy background or not, but I'm not sure it
really matters. He just figured it out and weighed
in, left a comment, and he's making his way into
the world.
MR. JARVIS: Did his mother also e-mail
you?
(Laughter.)
MR. JOHNSON: He's dragging kids away
from college.
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: To build on that,
there were a lot of other comments on that
connecting, because it's so impressive that you and
Dana pointing out that kids can network now.
But if we go back to what Sir Ken
started for us, you know, he asked a great
question: "What is at the heart of education?"
And actually, I'm using that tag '06,
because it is entitled "Schools, Skills,
Creativities" that he gave a tag in 2006. So, I
think he used it yesterday to jump off of a keynote
that I gave.
And the thing that I really like about
that is, what is at the heart of education? He's
talking about the child who is sitting in a
classroom and doodling and the teacher who is
passing by say, "Samantha, what is this?
She's looking at her and she's saying,
"It's a picture of God."
And the teacher says, "But no one knows
how God looks."
And that student says, "Well, in a
minute they will."
(Laughter.)
So, I think that's kind of at the heart
of education, as so many amazing comments are being
put there. And so, when you have that insight
about whether it's a picture of God or what is the
climate change or why is obesity happening and
anything that we want to kind of understand about
the importance of the First Amendment.
All these conflicts, things and
mathematics and physics and science that are out
there, I think what Sir Ken was trying to say is
that schools, as we know them today, are naturally
not enticing people or facilitating the kinds of
things we're even doing today; which is starting
from where the learner is and expressing the
learner's kind of ideas and allowing them to take a
stance and allowing them to express themselves and
allowing them to enter a conversation; preferably,
also as Mitch was going to ask, building something
that is expressing their ideas and growing it
through that social networking.
And I think what's at the heart of that
kind of education is very, very different than
what's at the heart of most of the education that
we see out there.
And I think it -- I don't know how
today is going to be, but as I finally figured out
how to unlock the fact that my comments are private
and participate in a twittering, not everybody here
is using it. Just like the the millions and
millions of kids out there, they don't know how to
use it.
So, they're not part of that
conversation with Fred or with many other people --
and I'm really worried about that because the
knowledge and skill that it takes to, first of all,
culturally be able to express yourself and then to
be able to participate in that social -- empowering
social media technology, is not available to all
equally right now.
And so, what's at the heart of that
education that we can all celebrate here is not
really accessible yet to a lot of people out there
in our nation, rural and poor communities, in urban
communities that don't have the benefits, that
don't have the tools.
And even if they do, they don't really
have the cultural ability to take the stance,
express themselves, connect to people below, above,
and on the side, and build stuff. And I think we
have to really worry about that here today. I hope
we will.
MR. KERREY: I'm going to add a little
about the politics of all this. Sir Ken had talked
about the 16,000 school districts, and that's where
governance occurs, and the civic responsibility and
cultural mission of the schools.
It is worth remembering that the
history of the common school in the United States
is a history of people attempting to pass state
laws mandating education at an early age, mandating
the creation of public schools.
And up until the 1920s, when there began
to be the a rise of the nativist movement, as a
result of the enactment of the openly racist
Immigration Act of 1924 and the creation of the
American Legion, that resulted in the rapid
expansion of public schools in the United States of
America for the purpose of teaching citizenship.
That's why the Pledge of Allegiance is
mandated in all schools. If one of your
11-year-olds is found out on the streets of Atlanta
this afternoon, they can be arrested and found in
the juvenile justice system for violating their --
as an offender of their status. They're required,
for approximately a thousand hours a year in all 50
states, to be in schools. So, that's the context.
Secondly, you've got to sort of imagine
yourself -- I have a 7-year-old in the largest
public school district in the country, the New York
public school system. If you're trying to have an
impact on PS41 where he goes to school, to put it
mildly, that's a hell of a challenge. Just to try
to have an impact upon the arrival of
air-conditioners in June, let alone the curriculum
and the budget and other sorts of things.
So, I think you have to separate the conversation
between the effort to improve the public schools
and the effort to improve the non-public school
environment. These are two completely different
things.
And finally, you have to get used to the
idea that you have to bring an argument inside the
context -- you haven't been in a room full of
parents. There are 2 million parents in the
New York public school system that might, I should
say, have a slightly different attitude about what
they want the New York public school system to
accomplish than I do.
And these board meetings can be raucous,
dispiriting and at times counterproductive. You
find yourself saying, Gee, I don't want to do that
anymore. You can find yourself fighting the battle
to get curriculum imposed and brought to the
schools and it's exactly what you wanted and,
two years later, the board of election occurs and
the people you supported get turned out.
As a great example, the state board of
education in Florida, not what I would consider
for the most part a backwater state, last year,
just voted to allow the theory of evolution to be
taught by five to four votes.
Kansas caught a lot of attention a
couple of years ago when they took a vote saying it
couldn't be taught. That got reversed again by a
five to four vote. So, there are arguments that
have to be brought, and you can't get timid in
bringing these arguments and you can't give up
after you have lost a battle.
But I think it's terribly important in a
discussion like this to separate the public school
argument, which is an intense one, from what you
want to occur outside of the school environment,
which oftentimes, in my view, is more important
than what's going on and mandated and brought
inside of the school.
MR. KALIN: But Bob, you can opt out,
couldn't you? You could home-school your kids and
then you're not breaking the law. You can do that;
right?
MR. KERREY: I broke into a cold sweat
earlier with Alex talking about facing 30
11-year-olds; and now you're talking about facing a
single 7-year-old all day long?
(Laughter.)
MR. WILSON: My point is this: Instead
of bringing an argument in this country, we could
simply have a revolution. We can simply take our
kids out of the school systems and come up with
alternate ways of teaching.
MR. KALIN: But they don't have the
framework that exists yet.
MR. RESNICK: There's are families -- a
single parent who is working round the clock. So,
how can they be doing that? It's fine for us to
say we can do it.
MS. RHOTEN: School is a safe place for
a lot of kids. It's not only the single parent
argument. But it's also the school represents the
eight hours of your day wherein you actually are
warm and have food. Not every kid can opt out of
that.
MR. SACKLER: The charter school -- the
district monopoly is being challenged all over the
country by the charter school. That's going to
open public education to enormous entrepreneurial
opportunities and energy; and it's happening in 41
states.
MR. BISCHKE: It's really up to us to
develop alternative models and set an example for
the public school system. And one of the
advantages of where we are today is that there are
lots of opportunities for initiatives to be
exploited of alternative models.
MR. HUGHES: I think that's exactly
right. I think there's a structural question here.
It says the classroom has 30 students and one
teacher in front of it. Even if it's for
eight hours a day and that's a safe place, that
just isn't working anymore.
And I think that what's really
interesting, what are the models in which teachers
can interact with students, and sort of adapt to
their different ways of learning throughout the
course of the day or throughout a year, so that
they actually are able to flourish and be happy and
also be good citizens.
MR. WENGER: This last bit of
conversation actually kind of prefigures the
structure of the day quite a bit. So, the
structure of the day -- I think this was very, very
good to start with goals.
It is clear even around this table that
it is not easy to come up with unanimous agreement
on what the goals might be. I think it's something
very, very important about learning. And we were
tempted to call this Hacking Learning, but it
didn't sound as good as calling it Hacking
Education; for that reason.
So, the structure of the day is that
actually -- after taking a short break now. We
will come back and talk first about how learning --
how hacking education can occur completely outside
of the existing system.
So, what are things that are happening,
what are tools, what is the leverage available to
us today, and maybe shortly? And then after lunch,
bring that back to the point that Bob was raising
about.
So, then, there's the schools. So,
there are things outside of schools which are
already taking place; and what is the interface
between old and new and how does that happen? That
will be the focus of the afternoon.
MR. GORDON: I wanted to throw something
out. I've asked people for a decade and I've never
heard a good answer.
Has anybody ever seen a coherent
description or definition of what "well-educated"
means, that they didn't write themselves?
(Laughter.)
If so, I would love to be pointed at it.
Because I haven't heard one, even in universities.
I have asked what a great university head is and
got a 50-page speech from Rick Levin, about the
president of Harvard in the 1800s; but I've never
seen a definition of "well-educated."
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: I don't know if we
want that --
MR. KERREY: I have something written in
1905 with several great descriptions of what
"well-educated" means; not by me, but somebody
else.
MR. KALIN: You can be dead and
well-educated would be a question? It's not
static, staying in one place.
MR. JARVIS: It's different for
everyone. We do have to write our own. If we
don't want to write it, that's a different
question. Chicken/egg, but it has to be -- the
problem is that we'd make every student take the
same frigging test and come up with the same
frigging answers. That is no way for a creativity
to begin.
But it comes out of the idea that there
is a definition of "well-educated." The same way
that there's this mass view in news, if there is
one newspaper that can serve, everyone is the same.
It's absurd.
MR. GRODD: I will only say that I've
been part of many, many of those conversations, but
I think, on a fundamental level, kids need to read,
write and do math. They need to know how to read,
they need to know how to write and they need to
know basic math.
So, after that, then critical thinking,
and the holistic concept of an educated
humanitarian; I think that is all relevant, and I
would love to participate in that, but
fundamentally, there's millions of children who
can't read, can't write, can't do math.
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: But the problem is
that the way to reach the literacy, the old
literacy of reading, writing and arithmetic that
you're talking about, has new methodologies. And
so, that's really the fundamental thing we are
discussing today.
And probably, it's not just one
definition, but many, and many ways for different
people to really reach that literacy. But there
are also a lot of new literacies; your ability to
imagine something and make it up, express yourself
with media, remixed media, participate in media
like the one we're using today.
I wonder how you would use what we are
posting. I'm trying to generate a lot of noise --
MR. WENGER: I think one of the great
things, I keep looking up there (indicating
overhead projection). It's other people already
not in this room, so --
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: But how are we
going to integrate that into the conversation,
because sometimes people summarize what's being
said and sometimes they comment on what's being
said, how are we going to model, how this can be
used effectively? It's hard to use it effectively
in a conversation.
MR. WENGER: That's going to take us to
the next session. We'll take a five-minute break
for people to grab a coffee, go to the bathroom.
And there are sign-up sheets over there for lunch,
and we're having a self-organizing lunch called
"Birds of a Feather."
So, there's five topics that people
have already created. So, if you don't like the
topics, there's room to create a sixth topic or add
more sheets also. And then we're going to have to
continue in about ten minutes.
(Time noted: 11:15 a.m.)
(Time noted: 11:30 a.m.)
As I have promised earlier, we are going
to try to start each section off with a little
video. And so, this is a video on YouTube.
(Discussion off the record.)
Check this out, and we'll put links out
on Wiki. But here is why this caught our
attention, to preface this section. This section
is all about how is learning occurring, how do we
get leverage on learning from technology? How do
we get social leverage from the web for learning?
And, actually, leaving existing schools aside,
until the afternoon.
And this is a kid, clearly, maybe a 14-
or 15-year-old kid, who put this video up
explaining how to do something to have a blendered
water effect. So, one of the great things is that
this video's been viewed almost 50,000 times.
There are a lot of responses that actually explain
how to do it better, including video responses that
show how to do this.
And I think that it is, in my mind, a
great illustration of how this can happen. And so,
Bob, we'll use that as a kick-off point for how can
technology provide leverage in learning in both
technology leverage and social leverage.
MR. WILSON: I wanted to ask
Jim Rosenthal a question. Jim is a long time
friend of mine who runs a piece of Kaplan's
business. Do you teach adults professional
education -- your business teaches adults
professional education on the Web; right?
MR. ROSENTHAL: On the Web and in
school.
MR. WILSON: What percentage is online,
and what percentage is in schools?
MR. ROSENTHAL: It varies, probably more
than 50 percent in schools, but it's moving in the
other direction; faster in the U.S. than overseas.
MR. WILSON: You actually give people
degrees? You give people accreditation via online
classes?
MR. ROSENTHAL: Yes. I'm not granting
degrees, although Kaplan University certainly does.
My area is test prep for real estate and financial
services, for insurance, for accounting.
MR. WILSON: And are these live classes
that they participate in? They log in and a
there's a teacher sitting there?
MR. ROSENTHAL: Yes, there's live
scheduled classes. And all of those are archived.
So, you can go back. Or if it doesn't work,
reschedule, you can go and check it all. It's
always online.
MR. WILSON: Is there any data about the
performance of -- in the tests of the people who do
the learning online versus the people who do it
face-to-face?
MR. ROSENTHAL: I know what you are
looking for, but I don't have it.
MR. KALIN: Do you think that the
founders of YouTube, said we're going to reinvent
education?
MR. ROSENTHAL: No.
MR. KALIN: But they do more to change
the way education works than anybody in this room
right now, and that's something --
MR. WENGER: Speak for yourself.
(Laughter.)
MR. KALIN: In terms of reaching people,
gauge it in terms of purely numbers. I'm sure that
people would qualify it. So, I think that's the
beauty of the Web and technology. You don't create
a pedagogical -- you just created the tools for
them to teach each other.
MR. L. JOHNSON: Think how much more you
could have a learning paradigm, based upon the
content --
MR. HUGHES: There's Twitter and
Facebook; you learn all types of social
information. The vast majority might be that, but
it doesn't mean that doesn't tell you something
about the sender or what that means for you
socially and that doesn't mean you don't
necessarily learn about content.
I think the challenge is in figuring
out the technologies, and the one's that are
existing and the ones that are coming into the
classroom -- which was, what I was trying to get at
earlier, the structural problem is that a teacher
in front of 30 people with no computers, it will
not work anymore.
MR. WILSON: Albert, Brad and I and, I
think, Andrew and Eric here all sat with an
entrepreneur, probably about four or five months
ago, who had taken YouTube, just brought it in and
built a layer on top of it, and was delivering
English language learning to Chinese kids.
And they were doing it in internet
cafes. They would -- it's basically somewhat like
a game. Kids would go into an internet cafe in
China and they would watch popular YouTube videos
and they would try to say the words in English.
And then they would record it and then they would
get rated by other kids.
So, basically, it just took the raw
material that's already on YouTube, pop on the
videos, put a little technology layer on top of it,
and they were teaching millions of Chinese kids how
to speak English.
MR. ROSENTHAL: It's a better version of
how they used to learn it, which is by just going
to the movies.
MR. GORDON: I'll ask Lewis. You helped
invent a pretty good after action review. So,
there's kind of pedagogical -- teaching that's
automated, without humans involved. What did you
learn from doing that? How do we take humans out
of the scalable education process?
MR. L. JOHNSON: The goal wasn't to take
humans out of the loop. But so people understand,
we've created video games, help people learn a
foreign language. And part of our rationale is
that we weren't satisfied by the type of
interaction we saw in the classroom, for obvious
reasons; nor were we satisfied with the type of
interaction that we saw on the Web, which typically
presumes a certain level of language proficiency
and tends to be text-based, whereas a lot of
learners have difficulties speaking the language.
So, we saw a lot of value helping people
get up to the point where they can utilize these
other technologies to help learn. But just to say,
here you go on YouTube and learn from that, I'm
glad to see that that is having so much success.
But I think there are a lot of kids who aren't
reached well, skills that aren't well-taught just
by relying on the technologies out there.
MS. SALEN: I want to build on that a
second, because I think one danger is to start to
begin to imagine that learning happens in
isolation, that there is a single platform or a
single tool that is going to teach. Learning is
ecological, and it happens in many places
simultaneously.
So, I was talking to a parent last week
about a model of sort of nodal learning, and
thinking about what are the configurations of
spaces that we are making available for kids to
learn in and across? And he wasn't understanding,
mostly because I was not communicating well.
And I said, "Let's talk about your
daughter. I know she loves to play basketball.
So, where did she learn to play basketball?"
And he said, "Well, she learns at
practice."
I said, "Oh, but I bet she talks to you
at home about it."
He said, "Yeah."
And I said, "I bet she has conversations
with her friends about it on the phone and they
work through plays. Does she ever go online? Does
she watch basketball games? Does she go to
basketball games?"
He said, "Yeah, yeah, she does all those
things."
And I said, "Well, yeah, learning is
happening across all of those spaces."
And so, what I think we want to begin to
understand is, what are the kinds of
infrastructures that we need to build to help
leverage the movement of that child across those
kinds of learning spaces?
And it may be the invention of certain
kinds of technologies, but I think there's larger
things, what Dana was talking about in terms of how
do we enable social capital for kids? What are the
mechanisms by which we make that possible? How do
we enable just connectors between some of these
different spaces, whether they're content
connectors or mentor connectors or even a
validation that what a kid might be doing in an
after-school space is relevant and valid within an
in-school space?
So, I think we need to remember the
configuration and the ecological question because
we're in a networked world. Our model of learning
has to exist within that certain networked idea, as
well.
MR. HEIFERMAN: Can we articulate more
about what problems need solving? And why isn't it
just the Web? Why isn't this solving this problem
all by itself?
MR. HERROD: What other questions?
MR. BISCHKE: I think one thing is
there's a big disconnect between learning and
credentials. And so, we're moving to a world where
you can learn anything; you can go to Yale and you
can watch their courses as you can do all different
types of things, but the credentialing system is
one that hasn't changed at all.
And I think there's been a few people
who have written some very interesting stuff, I
know Fred a little bit, about how can you look at
whether the testing is standardized testing,
whether it's degrees, accreditation, and change
that system? Because without that, the rest of
this stuff is not nearly as meaningful.
MR. WILSON: My son is a big video
gamer. He understands credentialing in a video
game, and he knows what his score is. And he knows
what his friend's score is and he knows that he's
better than anybody else at Caller Duty 5.
When he gets credentialed in school, he
goes home and say, "Dad, it's not fair, you know.
I got such and such on a test. And this kid
didn't -- he went up after class and had a chitchat
with the teach. All of a sudden he ended up with a
better grade than me."
And he appreciates the raw power of
Caller Duty 5. I beat that kid one on one, you
know. And he didn't get it in school.
MR. GORDON: There are a couple of other
parts to video game credentialing. So, one is
having more parallel reward paths is useful. Video
game credentialing has to succeed by motivating.
And clearly, academics don't stay in power by
motivating, but have to succeed by motivating. And
so, there is a feedback loop and it has to be
considered fair.
But a video gaming system, that's the
most motivating, it's going to have four or five
parallel tracks, the motivation of all clients, all
on different time cycles.
MR. WILSON: But that means you can get
your scores in different ways?
MR. GORDON: People that are playing,
are usually playing, trying to accomplish a couple
of different things, usually that have different
time cycles. You want something that takes
one minute and something that takes a month.
MR. S. JOHNSON: When I think about the
skills that I had that I got when I was a young kid
that are still valuable, I think back to when I was
10 or 11 when I spent thousands of hours playing
baseball games and designing better baseball games.
And I got a huge amount out of that in
terms of the map that are creating the whole
statistical model of how baseball works and stats,
and a lot of collateral learning experience,
building simulations and things like that that
they're using to this day.
But the most important thing about that
was, I think I learned how to be obsessed with
things. There's another way of saying that, which
is passion. I got obsessed with these things and I
had a series of stages in my life where I got
obsessed with something else. And I just immersed
myself to learn as much as I could. And it's that
mechanism I used again and again and again in my
professional life.
So, how do you teach kids to be
obsessed with things? I think one of the
advantages we have with technology and particularly
with games is that they have built-in structure,
almost to a fault, as most parents would say.
They have an addictive quality where people will
just immerse themselves and become obsessed with
them, something in that structure.
When you look at the games that most of
these kids are playing, the amount of information
that they have to accumulate and master to perform
well in these games is a mess compared to the
amount of information they're willing to reinforce
to learn at school.
And so, somehow, there's something in
this formula, this kind of platform, without
anybody telling them to do it, they are going out
learning all this information and becoming really
skilled at it.
So, they have to kind of figure out
what is the cocktail there that's allowing them to
do that, and then maybe take that and actually,
causing them to learn other things that perhaps
they aren't getting from the games.
MR. CAULFIELD: One of the things that
differentiates some of those activities is that the
referee in the interaction, in the coaching, are
separate. That allows, I think, for a much more
intensive experience than one where people feel the
game is rigged.
And so this person goes and talks to
the referee and gets a better grade. My daughter
plays Castle Crashers incessantly. And she is on
the headset to her friends and she's trying to pull
up YouTube videos to figure out how to get the
achievements.
But the sense is that here's her
interaction. And then there's a separate sort of
referee that is somehow objective. So, she's not
playing to the referee.
For me, one of the moments of teaching
that really got to me is when I was teaching
English composition and you tell students, Oh, it
was a 90. So, you did gun control essays and
things like that.
And so, we go through rhetoric and at
the end of class, you say, "Write your gun control
essay." And one of the students comes up and says,
"What's your thoughts on gun control?" And I feel,
"silly student." Come on, you know. "You're not
writing this for me. You're writing for your
audience." And he says, "I'm writing it for the
grade, so doesn't that mean the audience is you?"
And I realized that yeah, it's a fraud,
you know. It's really kind of scam that we're
perpetrating here. And so, I think things
where those two things are separated, where there's
a separate referee and a separate coach allows the
referee to be more fair, allows the coach to really
focus on the success of the student.
The referee doesn't have to be this
abstract rule-based thing. The referee can just
help someone engage with an audience as a writer.
MS. BOYD: But are referees always fair
outside of games? When I was in Brown, I was
obsessed with who was succeeding and who wasn't at
Brown. I went and talked to the dean about what
was going on, how things are playing out.
And one of the things I found out
really quickly is that the people who are doing
best at Brown are those who figured out how to bend
every rule available to them. They figured out
what rule was there, they figured out how to work
around it and how to leverage the different people
to get what they wanted.
And people view it as almost a game in
and of itself. And one of the things that's
been -- in talking to people who do research on
kids with autism, there is this set of rules where
we can sit and formalize it. We can create and
formulate structures and we can say this is how you
succeed and this is how you avoid.
And certain kids, such as kids along
the autistic spectrum, do tremendously well with
this set of rules. Other kids do extremely well
when given the set of rules, figuring out how to
work around it.
And there's this interesting thing to
your son's point. I totally agree that the school
system isn't fair. But how may of you have tried
to get a raise at work? Is that process fair? Is
that process about who is getting rewarded in a
direct manner that you can evaluate, or is it about
figuring out how you can ease around and manipulate
that to get that raise?
And so, each of these are different
skill set, and we can't say one skill set is better
or worse than another, but how are we thinking of
it in the ecology of saying, "These are the things
that we want to mix in; and some kids learn to
figure out which personalities are going which
way." But if we go for one system or another, we
end up breaking down.
And if we want a more fair system, we
have to think about a more fair adult society, not
just a more fair kid society.
MR. RESNICK: I want to make sure we're
not too drawn into everything being driven by some
evaluation how well you succeeded or whether it's
the highest score in the game or an award from the
teacher; just to give a different paradigm as
opposed to some people are motivated by their high
score in the game.
But there's another paradigm that
flourishes today, the maker community, the do it
yourself community. There's a huge maker fair
going on. And people don't go there to get the
award with the best exhibit at the maker fair.
They build what they're excited about. They became
obsessed with something and they want to share it
with others, to get feedback from others. Wow,
that's incredible. That's the excitement, and to
see what others have done.
So, I just want to make -- not that the
paradigm is right for everybody or for all
contexts, for all people. But at some point we get
too drawn into what's the best way of getting for
the competition paradigm, just a little overblown.
MR. GORDON: We did this in sincity.com.
Once you find that there are people who want to
share, you can give them a more rewarding
experience if you give them a platform to share on.
And they feel like there's a chance you're going to
be looked at.
So, I would argue that something like
Etsy or craft fairs are platforms that can be more
motivating, because when people are halfway done,
they think, If I just finish, I've got a way to
share. So, creating platforms that seem like open
ways to share, I think, are another way to
motivate.
MR. RESNICK: Yes. I agree. This is
true. To promote my own thing a little bit, we
have this project called Scratch, where kids are
programming their interactive stories and games and
sharing online which, there are more than a
thousand new projects each day. And kids see what
others are doing and then making things together,
just open, they grab what others have done, remix
and add other things.
There is some external motivation, the
ones that get featured on the home page where lots
of other people are using it.
MR. GORDON: And they probably have to
believe that there's fairness in deciding who gets
top of the box and how you get to remix somebody
else's stuff. So, that's the referee, which
doesn't necessarily have to be a person.
THE SPEAKER: I'm going to plug the
Scratch program that Mitch and his group created.
So, we're doing an experiment in Hawaii, and I'd
love to get feedback. We're finding kids to be
very passionate about making their own games and
there's all kinds of good learning stuff for these
kids, measured quantitatively and also -- this is
what I made. This is where I want to go.
We've run these after school programs
with Scratch, kids make their own games. Some of
the games and some of the themes are, make games
that are about math or about creating stories. You
can tackle any kind of learning with this sort of
tool.
Essentially, it's world making. You
define your own world, what's important to you, and
you share it with kids that are in this group
together. And we've got coaches, older kids who
have gone through it and are now teaching the
younger kids. To me, it's really working. And I
would love to propagate that.
But I think the approach that Mitch
talks about for having -- I guess your phrase is
"playful invention." And I think that's what going
on in these courses. And I think that's what goes
in internship. And I think that's what leads to
new cultural developments.
MR. BURNHAM: The product is becoming
the credential. In the old days, I went to school,
I got a grade, I presented the grade and I got a
job. And now, what happens is, you create this
game; and that game is what creates your
reputation. And there's no grade there.
And it's not important, because you've
created a great game and hopefully, that game is
bubbled up to the top of the board, because others
have linked into it.
And if you think about the Web as a
medium in a way, that's the way people are creating
their own credentials. It has a lot to do with how
many links there are into your blog, into your
voice, into your opinion about what's going on in
the world.
And I think it's fundamentally changing
what we need from education, to Scott's question.
What we need is to become familiar with the tools
that we use to promote our ideas and really,
basically, to search engine optimize our products
or the things we created. And I think that's what
people are doing.
MR. JARVIS: They have a faith in the
marketplace and the marketplace, which I share.
But, you're from the educational world, and it
says -- the authority says this is right and that's
success. A game world shows some danger and it
systematizes a one victory, one definition again.
I prefer creation as a new framework,
personally. But how do you certify that? I also
like the idea of the public doing it, but there's
some danger there, too.
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: I think we are
developing methodologies that you are describing,
that Mitch is describing, that we're doing. I
think Katy's doing a lot of that kind of work.
There are several people in the room that are
really working very hard to create an assessment
that relates to imagination, innovation,
creativity, coming up with an idea, beginning a
project from the beginning, middle, end; delivering
this in digital form, sharing, exposing,
presenting.
All of us are trying to transform
education through those playing games or making
games and doing both which is the new reading and
writing. I think they're working very hard and
there's a lot of research out there for assessments
that are beginning to work.
I'm right now working with 350 students
and teachers in 14 schools. They are using it,
they are evaluating it in a whole new way. And
it's project-based daily --
MR. JARVIS: The assessment may be less
thinking of a product than a process, and saying
we'll make this better and better and better.
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: Both. The
assessment is about the process, it's about the
product and even about how it relates to other
grades. It relates to the content of what the
games of the teamwork or the project is about.
There are ways. And I want people to know that
there are ways to do it. And it works. It works
on the ground.
MR. KALIN: How many people here have
hired people? How important is what degrees you
have in terms of hiring? If you hire an engineer,
you want to see samples and quizzes and tests.
There were people who were doing the media stuff
for Etsy, they have a site and video showing videos
you've made. I don't care what degrees these
people have. It's something that's becoming less
and less meaningful in the job marketplace, as
well, and you talk so much about how important the
degree is in getting a job.
But talk to people who are creating
jobs right now. There may be degrees that are
important for people who want to work at Citibank,
but Citibank isn't exactly hiring right now.
MR. L. JOHNSON: I care about degrees
for the people I hire.
MS. FLEMAL: I can think of someone
right now, an artist who did so well with her
videos on YouTube that she took a site on... and
delivered lessons and the students did incredibly
well and has quite a business for herself. She has
no given credentials, at all.
MR. KALIN: She has lots of
credentials in the eyes of other people, I'm sure.
-
MS. FLEMAL: But her credentials are --
what I'm saying is, we were talking about giving
credentials in terms of degree and so forth. It's
exactly what she needed to present. And she has a
huge audience and a huge business.
MR. WENGER: There are a couple of
different things about how technology provides
leverage -- provides leverage, because it allows
you to publish your work product and allows more
objective referees. It's about a new form of
credentialing.
I wonder, in this section, what other
types of leverage does technology provide us?
MR. GORDON: When I've taught classes, I
throw this out for somebody else to use, tell the
students you can't get an A from the teacher. The
best you can get from the teacher is a B+, because
the teacher-student grading relationship is
corrupting.
So, if you want to get an A, you've got
to get somebody outside. And in a video game
class, you got to get 10,000 downloads as an A. I
would suggest in journalism, somebody's doing
entrepreneurial journalism, that you've got to get
a certain amount of blog readers per a month to get
an A and --
MR. JARVIS: Which I love, but there's
the Paris Hilton factor.
(Laughter.)
I still like it. There is a corruption
there, too.
MR. GORDON: I had one student get to a
million in a month. So, that, a million downloads.
That was an A.
MR. JARVIS: With what?
MR. RESHEF: Technology does enable us
to bring education everywhere. And that's
something we should remember because, if you look
at the world, most of the world doesn't have the
proper tools and system.
And technology enables us to overcome
and reach most -- not necessarily most of the
people yet, but many people that were unable to get
education and get proper education.
Second, we're talking about the school
system. Education basically makes schools what
they have been for the last few hundred years; a
place for the kid to go, stay out of the street and
for the parent -- to enable the parent to go and
work. They work in a babysitting place.
Now, we had a notion that they get --
the teachers -- we used to consider the teachers as
the source of the knowledge. Well, I'm not sure if
they ever were, but definitely they're not right
now. And the technology enables the kids to go and
get all the information that they need outside of
the classroom.
I think that one of the main problems
that we're facing right now is that the school
system resists this change. And the school system
refused and says, "Okay; we still have a rule.
Without a rule in the school, it will be totally
different than what it used to be."
And the information the kid should get
somewhere else, maybe bring it to school, maybe use
it in school, maybe exchange knowledge between the
students, but get it somewhere else. And I think
that that's where the school system is now fighting
all over the world, staying as it used to be and
there will be a real change in the next few years,
because it can't stay as it was.
MR. WENGER: We'll trying to get back to
the schools in the afternoon. But you made the
point, one, the key to technology leverage is
access, simple access. You can read an article and
be anywhere else in the world, and that's a big
technology leverage that we didn't have.
MR. ETUK: One of the things, and I
think they're related to, is the ability to
increase what we call efficiency to learn, when the
kids start to teach each other. That also has an
effect on labor costs, because if you don't have to
spend as much on teachers, the normal one teacher
and twenty students, thirty students; if you create
these multi-user environments and start to help
each other, it's four or five kids.
One of the big things that we saw
during the educational games was, high school
students love to teach the younger kids and get
points and credit for that. It's one of those
things if you could leverage that, you can actually
tap in and you'll fight with the teacher
federation; because you can actually either reduce
the number of substitute teachers, which is an
economic impact.
MR. KERREY: To be specific on the
question of leverage. You can see how leverage is
occurring in one big area, and that's in the
library. And you can see it either in the higher
education environment or the on public side, in
public libraries, where librarians themselves are
increasingly use technology to leverage access.
And universities, for example, they're not building
libraries like they used to. Our libraries have
become Starbucks or the library becomes wherever
the student is moving with a wireless tool.
We're using software increasingly to
get students access to materials, and it's leading
the university to change substantially, largely
through the open curriculum issue. It's leading
students in a different direction than before.
But if you want to see the leverage of
the technology, this kind of technology, any
library you go into today, talk to students about
what they are doing and see where it is going.
The other thing I wanted to address is
Fred's question about home-schooling. Because I do
think, at some point, as uncomfortable as it may be
to get them to examine these sort of things, I do
think there is a question of different kinds of
regulatory structure that needs to be addressed.
In fact, in the old days, it was
entirely appropriate to say I'm going to have a
roll at the local school and that's as far as it's
going to go. But the problem is today the students
have migrated way beyond the localities, and you
really can't allow -- I don't think -- I think the
regulatory structure of both the K to 12 and the
post secondary levels, is limiting the use of
technology, particularly in the home environment.
And leaving aside for the moment, Rob's
argument that credentials don't really matter,
credentialing is still -- and the question about
whether or not I get credit or not -- I just played
a multiplayer game.
I know a language, let's say, I
acquired a language question is, is there a
regulatory structure that allows me to be tested
and get a credit for that without having to enroll
in some institution, an accrediting institution
that satisfies the middle stage, that stage in
Nebraska, or wherever.
I think we need to have to get into the
regulatory environment, because I think the
regulatory environment today, unless it's changed,
will continue to frustrate and limit the leveraging
capacity you can have with technology.
MR. KALIN: You don't need a board of
people to say, this is the legit, let's just put it
out there. It's up to the people to judge it.
MR. KERREY: I love your free spirit.
(Laughter.)
MR. KALIN: What is the accreditation
issue?
MR. KERREY: Is it a rhetorical question
or a real question?
MR. KALIN: It is a body of people that
are elected to a board and have --
MR. KERREY: If the regulatory structure
comes off, the law, the laws are passed that people
pass, specific law would have to be changed. And
the barriers to the law are the institutions that
don't want the barriers to be limited.
I will give you a very specific
example. Let's say you value the degree as you
were going through the school system, and you did
pay for a course at MIT. And you were at MIT and
wanted to transfer somewhere else.
Now, the transferring entity, the
entity you're transferring into, is making its
decision about whether or not it wants to accept
you. It's a tremendous barrier and it's allowed
under the law, unless the law changed. So, the
barriers themselves, the regulatory barriers, are
creatures of law. They begin with the law and the
law hasn't changed. The laws were written at a
time when none of this was possible.
MR. KALIN: And your schools follow
laws?
MR. KERREY: Yes.
MR. KALIN: If I'm at the School of Fine
Arts and want to transfer to the New School, I
found out the School of Fine Arts weren't
officially accredited.
MR. KERREY: The challenge of operating
an institution, you have to follow the law.
MR. WENGER: I want to come back to the
discussion about changing the existing
institutions, later in the afternoon, and just talk
more broadly about what we are seeing in technology
today.
But I would love to hear from David,
because we are using a lot of technology and the
school is going to impose it.
MR. WILEY: I was going to say we are
doing something in the school that we're opening in
the fall, an online high school. But it is
ridiculously simple. It seems to me it was
radical, as well. In terms of using technology as
a leverage point, by taking content and assessments
in the system that we are using, the students work
within and there is an alignment ofto standards.
We can do this completely revolutionary
thing in giving a student a pretest and then
pulling out the materials that they already know
and creating a personalized path instead of
four weeks training, maybe, let's say, two and a
half or maybe, let's say, three weeks in one and a
half. Maybe you finish the course in a four-week
period instead of the whole semester.
The idea then of a pre-test, based on
what the students already know, is older than dirt,
probably. But this is one place that technology
gives us a leverage point. With something as
simple as aligning the assessment with the content
and the standard in the middle to connect them to
each other. Pre-assessment, pass the standard, and
I'll just pull the content out to build path for
you.
MR. KALIN: The teacher can give the
student a test on the first day of class.
MR. WILEY: But this is much more
efficient way to do it.
MR. BURNHAM: You can't deliver
personalized curriculum after the fact. Once
you've done the testing, the teacher can't handle
that.
MR. JARVIS: The test should be
reversed. We should test what we need to know
rather than what we supposedly know. It should be
entering into the process rather than coming out of
the process. We are so tied up in certification.
It doesn't feed education, in fact, it stifles it.
MR. L. JOHNSON: There's something
called Time dollars, time banking. It's like
helping each other out like community service,
there is a trading of dollars. There is something
that feels wrong about time making and time
dollars. It feels wrong. It is like it is sort of
certification of credentials or learning as we have
been talking about.
Even the words "product" and
"marketplace" don't feel right, that people -- that
if I get 10,000 downloads in my thing, does that
mean I'm more virtuous than the thing that only
gets 5,000 downloads? That sort of a metrication
of everything, net certification, that thing, and
it can be dangerous in that way.
But ultimately it is -- I think what is
ultimately important is, are you -- it doesn't feel
right. It is just -- ultimately, like the value on
creativity and that sort of self expression,
personal expression.
But simply like -- sorry to repeat the
phrase I said before -- but like to be of use, to
be helpful to other people, or let's say, this is
an era of responsibility. These are things that
ultimately are hard to measure and are about norms
and mores and virtues that are not game-like, but
yet have real material like -- my credibility, my
trust with people I love and who love me and who
care about me are grounded in that, but not
grounded in a point system.
And that happens naturally within
communities. That happens in -- some of you know
the work of Douglas Rushkopf, who just wrote a
book. I just read through it. It was fascinating.
He talks about how -- you become obsessed about how
people are following you on Twitter. I hate the
idea that I am becoming obsessed with how many
people are following me on Twitter.
(Laughter.)
It is a measure of my worth. And
that's not good. That's not an argument for
quality over quantity and all of that bullshit I
usually spew about this kind of thing. It is
really, you know, who are you, what are you good
for, and it does not necessarily like, you know,
amassing the point and the followers. I wish I had
a more --
MR. KALIN: We're talking about
assessment, the education lingo fo assessment.
Today you are still talking about that type of
tests for assessment. Assessment is one thing
that's more qualitative and less quantitative.
This should take years to develop.
MR. WILEY: Let's be clear. How about
the role of what the role of credential is; right?
Just pop up the level of abstraction and say, if
you have got one or two or three or four people
that you wanted to evaluate, you can get into the
material that has been produced and you can do a
firsthand evaluation and hire someone.
But when you've got thousands of people
or -- when you're trying to scale this kind of
decision, there is a mission decision or a hiring
decision. We are trying to scale some kind of a
high stake decision. You don't have -- you can't
efficiently go in and do a firsthand evaluation,all
the artifacts made by all the people over all the
lifetime, things you have done related to the
decision we are trying to make.
What we want is, we want a supposedly
objective third party to give you some proxy
statement, some statement that you have some
confidence in about the ability or the expertise.
MR. L. JOHNSON: Do I want the doctor
who is most certified, or the doctor who has the
most followers on Twitter?
(Laughter.)
MR. O'DONNELL: If you have other
doctors who are followed by other doctors, then
that to me is worthwhile.
MR. L. JOHNSON: That was a loaded
question.
MR. WILEY: This is why certification
and credentialing isn't going away. We need a way
to scale high stakes decisions in an efficient
manner.
MR. KALIN: Use technology, not a third
party board.
MR. WILEY: I'm not saying we have to
keep doing credentials in the same kind of way.
MR. WENGER: But I am trying to bring it
back to the question: What are the technologies
out there today that let us learn better, more
easily than ever before? And what, if anything, is
missing from that?
MR. ROSENTHAL: Albert, you are asking
what technology leverages. And the way I think it
leverages fantastic is, terrific, passionate
teachers. If I have passionate teacher Ph.D.s in
La Crosse, Wisconsin, who love CFAs.
With a credit card and a broadband
connection, you can be anywhere in the world, and
start learning from them in a minute. It's
incredibly powerful.
And to bring it down to the public
school, something that excites me, again, we are
very far from -- what Bob was talking about; when
we think of a backwater school system, that for
whatever reason, can't attract anybody good to
their math department. So, for whatever reason,
everybody in third grade math is poorly educated
and isn't learning math.
Now, if you could figure out -- and
this isn't as simple as some of my colleagues here
would like it to be -- if you could figure out how
to wipe out the department and put in a computer
and broadband connection into each kid's homes, all
of a sudden, they can be learning from unbelievably
passionate teachers anywhere in the world.
MS. BOYD: Technology does not determine
practice. I can give you any set of technologies
and find educational ways of using it, and I can
give you any set of technologies and find
dreadfully noneducational uses of it.
And so, just shoving broadband into a
group of kids, just giving them an iPhone, we can
think of a gazillion designs that are valuable.
Wiki, it is pretty useful for that.
But if you would have a culture that is
not embedded in it, this becomes just another toy
you can text your friends with.
And so, how do we actually think about
technology, not just as technologies themselves but
within that sort of ecology of how you actually
make this leverage work and to make it work for
you. Teachers are critical for this.
It is actually not learning from
teachers in another environment, but figuring out
how teachers can give you and work with you to
understand how you engage with these technologies
to do something important.
So, there are infrastructures, there
are definitely gateways, but they need to be
imbedded within a broader system. One of the
things I've been so infinitely frustrated with is,
saying, "Let's just dump a bunch of laptops off
onto a population and see what happens."
But that doesn't work. And we've watch
students ripped out the batteries and used them for
everything else under the sun.
So, how does that fit as part of a
broader system? Maybe I am just challenging the
question, but I don't think we can just think about
the technology. So, we have to think about it in a
broader system.
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: I can certainly
second that. I think it is very, very important in
the question of what technology is doing, if
something new, and maybe to just follow on what
Dana is saying. It's not about the technology but
the whole learning environment that you create with
the tool -- and she mentioned, for example,
Wikipedia or let's say, a media Wiki software.
You can really use it very creatively.
For the first time, we can put all of us on a Wiki
with profile pages, we can work on different
projects.
The learning environment becomes
transparent, and teachers are extremely important.
It can be a teacher that is physically with us in
the room, or it can be people who are coming from
outside of the room because of the network.
So, it is the network environment that
is transparent with tools that allow you to build
and construct digital media, to learn through
design, to learn by teaching; you teach and you
learn in the same environment and there is the
expert guidance.
So, to take this revolutionary idea
that Fred proposed before about home-schooling is,
I think, with the technology of this kind with the
right infrastructure, professional development, not
just physically but also virtually, can allow us to
do home-schooling-like environments for the
homeless, for those who don't have the opportunity,
for those who don't have their parents at home to
run the home-schooling.
And I think that is a huge, new
opportunity that can scale, that's not the
technology alone, it is the give and take with
people from both your physical community, state,
nation and world that come in a way that organizes
itself.
But the Wikipedians have a culture and
rule of how you go about doing this. And how to
learn to become a Wikipedian is the skill that that
structure can do. So, everybody can theoretically
be home-schooled, but not necessarily in their
home. And I think that's the revolution.
MR. L. JOHNSON: More broadly, there is
a set of metaskills that we want learners to learn.
They need to learn how to reflect on their own
knowledge or lack of it and to reflect on their own
learning. And that is actually something which is
not explicit anywhere into the curriculum or often
in the classroom, but is an essential outlearning
outcome, if you will.
Some of that can be derived, you know,
teachers can promote that, technology can promote
that as well. But without that, then any
technology you throw out is going to fail. With
that, lots of technologies can be effective.
MR. WILEY: Another thing that
technology can allow us to do much more
efficiently -- so much more efficiently than maybe
we could really do before, is to effectively
gather, visualize, and then make direct use of a
lot of data that was happening in the classroom.
Because as a teacher, the thing you
really want to know is who knows what, who is
struggling with what, who needs my help, whose way
do I need to get out of. And when you are standing
in front of a group of people like this, you don't
have direct access to that.
But in an online learning environment
where you can see how long people are spending
where, you can see how far behind you are, if
they're read it, did they fail the last thing, did
they do this, did they do that -- you can have them
all, a teacher can see on a dashboard, let's go to
that school and see who is behind, who is failing,
who needs help -- and can just get on the phone and
spend some one-on-one time with the people that
need one-on-one time, to spend time with them and,
that people who in this particular course, this
weak on this unit are doing kinds of --
Bring that data together and making it
usable by us to make good effective use of our
time; because you can't take teachers completely
out of the loop.
MR. GRODD: This is in video games from
Asteroids Pacman on. It's a game where the game is
acutely aware of your ability to play at every
point.
MR. JOHNSON: And so, you stayed in what
was called that zone of competence, right, where
you were like challenging -- not challenging. Then
it was like, gosh, I am going to figure this out,
but I will figure it out and I am going to get to
that.
MR. KALIN: People learn in different
ways. You don't want to test what we should be
learning in the first place.
MR. S. JOHNSON: The wonderful thing
about games is, now like Asteroids and Pacman,
there is one objective. The games are incredibly
rich now, it is like rich in relation or like how
can you create all sorts of objectives that are not
necessarily as score based as --
(Laughter.)
So, it isn't about metrics, it isn't
about points. Most people, I think, don't play
games for points. They play games in a much more
Etsy type feeling way, which is like, I want to
build this little thing or I have got this little,
you know, group, that we are going to go out and we
set goals for ourselves.
But, we're not necessarily trying to
win anymore. We are trying to do these things
along the way, but there's feedback constantly from
the environment saying, get better. You still need
to work on these skills but you have improved
yourself and it is very individualized for each
individual person playing.
MS. RHOTEN: I just want to add to that.
I think that you are right. I would like to extend
what you are saying further. I think about the
power, the back end of it, ways to understand how
the users or the game or the turns they take and
those things and the decisions they make. And then
there is a game development company called...
thinking hard about this and the back end of the
gaming platform.
And I think what we don't really know
is, we know in terms of gaming data leveling, we
know all the different things that are the obvious
explicit way in which a kid goes through games or
games.
What we haven't figured out yet and we
will soon, I think that you're right, and in turn,
and then what that tells us about cognitive inroads
and the cognitive aspects, which really will
empower the arguments that you are making. And we
are on the verge of that, but we haven't gotten it
yet.
MR. GORDON: I want follow on through
quickly. It assumes that as many girls as boys
would play it, probably more. Only a quarter of
the people who play it play it primarily as a game.
And the people who play it as a game tend to stop
playing after 20 hours.
And the people who play it for
four years, play it as a story-telling and creative
device. A quarter of the people play it primarily
as a creative tool and don't play the game at all.
MR. WILSON: It gives us access to
teaching moments. I found myself teaching my
daughter vector calculus, because her school can't
teach her vector calculus. Her vector calculus
teacher sucks.
So, I don't remember this stuff very
well. She came home with a problem which was the
cooling tower, and she had to calculate the volume
of the cooling tower based on the equation of the
curve. I said, God, I can't figure this out.
So, the first thing we did was go to
Google and we found the cooling tower and then,
okay, now we know what a cooling tower looks like.
Then we googled "cooling tower calculus problem,"
then all of a sudden, we found a problem that's
pretty similar to her problem.
We reverse engineered it, the two of us
did it, and she ended up solving the problem. And
it was a great learning moment. And we used the
Web to do that. We used freely available data on
the Web, images and equations and other solutions,
and it required some work on both of our parts to
figure it out. But there's just so much data out
there, and if you just get access to it, at the
right place at the right time, the teaching moments
reveal themselves.
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: But you did it with
her. That can be part of the occurrence of
technology --
MS. RHOTEN: Talking about learning
through technology. It is the practice, a large
part. It's not just the information push. It is
the practices around, what you do by navigating, by
negotiating, interpreting, evaluating and playing
with that information. And that's where it plays
an important role for whether it's the mentor or
the teacher or the staff or whatever term you use
when --
MR. WENGER: I think technology helps in
that portion, too, where you can discovery your
mentor in --
MS. BOYD: Remember that we have a
complete fear in the society of young people acting
as adults at every level. So, that's not easy,
unless you solved the predator panicked [sic],
could you please do? I beg you.
(Laughter.)
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: It doesn't have to
be an adult.
MS. BOYD: There are other dynamics if
you get -- but actually, kids, because of the
culture of fear, getting input to interact with
strange kids are also part of the problem right
now -- and I think that even within their already
existing networks, you can actually encourage --
there's a lot of opportunities for technology to
make obvious interventions that --
I love going in and watching how many
teachers still fill out paper material for every
little step along the way. This has come in as
easy to put technology and to give you some of the
feedback that goes on as a teacher. Now, the next
level is how do you get a teacher to connect to the
network of teachers?
They are allowed to network. That's a
statement. And why are they not sharing all sorts
of the problem sets and the way they're going about
this? Some of them are. And to me, it's to find a
cooling tower -- how do you search these learning
lessons that the teachers are doing? Now, how do
you create those tools that parents can --
MR. GRODD: That's my pleasure.
MS. BOYD: And how can the parent engage
with this, as well? Fred is smart enough that he
can figure it out, how to reverse engineer this
puzzle.
MR. WILSON: Actually, it was a
collaborative effort between me and my daughter.
MS. BOYD: One, you read English, which
is really helpful. It's a part of this. But how
do we give parents the tools which they can
actually engage with their kids across language,
across cultural barriers, across all these other
things, so you can make the partnerships much more
obvious?
It's not even just about how do we
intercept learning with directly with kids, but
affecting the larger ecology. And there's a lot
more opportunity for technology there, first and
foremost, and directly to the kids.
MR. RESNICK: One thing I think about
when Albert... what leverage... what Bob Kerry was
saying about access to information outside of
libraries. There's no doubt that leverage is
access to information.
Another thing, clearly, leverage is the
possibility of making things, whether making
videos, making music, there's new ways of making
things which we didn't have before.
And the third thing about it is
connecting to other people. None of these things
are totally new. In learning education from
millennia, we have accessed information, we
interacted with other people or we've been making
things. Technology extends all that.
But it doesn't by itself change the...
it expands the possibilities for active
information, making things in connection with other
people. But what the real role of teachers,
mentors, parents, is to guide -- how do you go
about active information and making things? That's
not obvious.
Some people will figure it out on their
own, you know, better than others. That's the real
support that's needed and better structure around
the people and materials, other ways in order to
support -- just the greater capabilities and all
those mentioned.
MR. LOUGHRIDGE: This might seem a
little freaky, but I think we are starting to
experiment with technology as a guide to how to
gain the right information at the right time.
There's a company I'm involved with,
Avatar Reality. It's a virtual world. And we have
expert learning systems that we're playing with and
chat engines. So, an expert can impart a series of
questions and answers to this Avatar and you can
pose to be Socrates, let's say, and you impart this
give and take.
The system is smart enough to
understand any sort of question that relates to the
questions in place. And so, for example, do you
like chocolate, or is chocolate good for you? It
can feel those kinds of questions and give that --
serve off that expert advice. It actually sucks
information, or it's about to, from Wikipedia.
I think there's an interesting new
horizon for technology where you have these agents
that can help the human interaction. And I think
back to -- if you're lucky enough to be a student
at Trinity College, Cambridge, you would study one
on one with Bertrand Russell at one time, or
Wittgenstein.
Now, I think we're on the cusp of
having the ability to impart your knowledge into a
Socratic machine that can carry on its sort of
personalized, one on one learning, with whatever
individual and whatever passion they may have. I
think, that should be incendiary. I don't think it
is right to intermediate humans from the learning.
I think it's a whole new really interesting tool.
MR. BURNHAM: To me, we're talking about
three basic thrusts for technology. One is just
the increasing liquidity of information, the web;
and access to information, access to other people
and access to adults who can help, whether they're
parents or others.
The second is this more structured
notion of, whether it's structuring a game or
including the feedback that they're requiring as
people interact with the system and then feeding
that back into a game or to another kind of
educational system. And that is more designed. I
would say the Web is not really particularly -- the
infrastructure is designed, but interaction, social
interactions are not.
And then the third is the point that
Mark brings up, which is that there may be a
possibility that technology in the form of
artificial intelligence in which you're learning to
get to a point where it could begin to behave like
a teacher.
And is there another category that
we're missing.
MR. MILLER: Yes, I think technology is
an organizing tool. We've been talking about it --
because the economy is bad, that's why we have
that. The schools and buildings and all that kind
of thing -- basic technology and everything to take
those economies of scale and mess with it.
So, it might be cheaper to have, you
know, a kid home-schooled part of the time and then
learning from somebody. And then in another
building, another time for a different subject,
because you can get more diversity.
The internet is great, but is it
necessary and actually great in organizing the real
world? I think that's where there's a lot of
opportunity education to be turned completely
upside down in new ways of organizing the system.
MR. WILSON: In light of that, I think
that's exactly right. When I think about where
we're going to be in 50 years, I think we're going
to have a marketplace model for education where the
student is in control of their education and they
determine who is going to educate them, when, where
and how, and the educational system can be built
into all of that.
But the problem with how to get from
here to there -- we have these physical spaces and
-- when I think about how I want my kids to ideally
learn, I'd like them to be able to avail themselves
of the quality classes and teachers they have in
their physical space, and then opt out of those
that they don't and go get those somewhere else.
But the problem is that the whole
economics of that physical space breaks down as
they sort of opt out. And maybe this is just what
we're going through in other industries that they
get crushed by the organizing efficiency powers in
the Internet. But I don't know how to get across
that chasm.
MR. SCHAPPELL: Maybe schools ought to
offer statements for expert to teach outside of a
formal curriculum of four years. And so, in
Seattle, we use Town Hall Seattle, the same things,
four times a day in New York. Paul... is in town.
I pay every time he is coming to town.
And so, rather than having education
systems that hire experts to get accredited and
paid and tenured, they're just a facility that
bring in people who are popular or who have big
followings or who are rated well, so you can go
pick and choose what you want do learn and when you
want to learn it.
And so, it takes some of the economics
out of it as a problem, because it is not about if
the students came to sign up for four years, and
the student could be you, and interested in
learning this one subject for just a brief period.
MR. MILLER: Getting kids to teach
kids... there probably are schools...
MR. HEIFERMAN: Like school camp?
MR. L. JOHNSON: One mechanism of
getting a little bit past the dilemma of curriculum
being focused towards this goal of accreditation.
It is now possible for the learners to define what
are the goals they want to achieve; and end up with
a personalized curriculum that meets those goals,
and it may meet the accreditation goals, too, or
not. But the access is very valuable both in its
own right also in terms of metaschool's skill of
encouraging learners to define their learning goals
and then try to achieve them.
MR. WILEY: I think you can slice that
into at least five pieces OF higher ed in any way.
One of the functions of the university right there,
there is some content provision, there's some
research conducted, archived and disseminated.
There's help that's provided when the student has a
question on the content, it wasn't enough. There's
a social life aspects and there's a credential
aspect.
And right now, all those things, plus
probably some others, they're all within a single
monolithic organization. They can point for each
one of those things... the course realm, the
content side, the public library from the research
side; Yahoo Answers is on the help side.
Western Governors University in
credentialing doesn't even offer classes. They
only offer exams. Social life on the Internet, we
really don't even have to talk about that.
Those are all starting to kind of fall
apart. And you could, right now, put together a
very small piece of this joined approach to higher
education, getting your content here, your research
there, your help there, your credential over here.
MR. WILSON: Sounds like Rob did.
MR. WILEY: As far as the path forward,
I think as people continue to work in the spaces,
what generally happens with credential is it a
better job of cost, which then means the people
will start going looking, may start to shop around
and say, "I'm going to get my content from here and
my support from there." If I want to buy
instructional contracts...
MR. LOUGHRIDGE: I think, to me, as a
teacher on the one hand, the technology
offers...access to amazing teachers in any subject.
I can find AN online facilitator.
But to me, number one, I think, K-12,
that's where my focus is, you can't overlook the
value of a human relationship in the person sitting
down next to a student and getting a red pen and
working together.
So, I think all the conversation, when
you're trying to think about skill, you need to
keep that in mind. In fact, as far as I've seen,
and I think a lot of people -- there's some debate,
but to me, the truest form of educating is the
teacher to student relationship and it is in person
and it is watching that relationship grow over
time.
MR. CAULFIELD: So, that doesn't
necessarily --
MR. GRODD: Like at my school, we
taught a Chinese class and it was all done through
online video, no teacher knew how to speak Chinese.
But there was a teacher in there facilitating the
12 students, making sure they're on task, creating
the curriculum, giving the assessments, managing
the classroom.
So, to me, the limit of the video
conference model is that in order to have the
effect, you always have to choose being there to
manage the class. It's one on one to manage the
class to make sure that kids are doing the work,
paying attention. And so, it really comes back to
the teacher, human being.
MR. CAULFIELD: Hopefully what happens
is, when you move to things and you sort of
disaggregate the content from the interaction from
the assessment is that you -- you don't get into a
situation where you have a person and they're
brilliant in that interaction piece, but not really
a builder of curriculum. But you don't lose the
talent of that person simply because they're not a
person that can build a 14-week or 20-week or
whatever week course.
So, I think, a lot of times when talk
we talk about pieces loosely joined, we start to
think this is sort of digital Utopianism. It
doesn't necessarily have to be. We can actually
use that to focus the pieces that are more personal
and make them more personal.
MR. WENGER: We have two more comments
from Daniel and Bing, and then we're going to break
for lunch.
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: Last two.
MS. ALLEN: I think we have a consensus
about what education's forward purposes are. As
long as we understand that would be the modular
form; right? You gave us five human interaction
pieces. Human development is six. I would put the
social one into the network citizenship piece. So
you've got seven modules. And the plan of the
university is always given, it's a sufficient way
of delivering all seven.
So, essentially, as people develop new
technology, they each need to ask itself which it
would be delivering, and how you articulate that
the efforts of other pieces to deliver some set of
those?
But then for me, the final and most
important thing is, actually, how do you teach
young people to understand that they need all seven
of these things, and to figure out to put them
together in a way that does give competence.
MR. GORDON: From an economic point of
view, I would say the goal of smart people like us
is to figure out how to get the education goals we
have down to a marginal cost of zero. And somebody
mentioned Oxford. I think the marginal cost for a
student at Oxford is probably $250,000; at a U.S.
university, it's probably $90,000.
SPEAKER: Per year?
MR. GORDON: Per year. That's what it
costs per student. It's not what they charge. And
public school, I think, they're trying to do it at
6- or $8,000.
And so, what if it had to get to zero?
We've seen technologies that get the marginal cost
to zero, plus bandwidth. And then on this notion
that you have to have a teacher to educate. In the
1970s, I did advertising for banks with ATMs and
100 percent of grownups said that ATM's are
impersonal and they would keep going to live
tellers because they're more personal. Around
1980, there was a flip-flop. And on average,
humans realized that ATMs were more personal than
tellers --
(Laughter.)
I would submit that the experience with
a lot of kids is that the teachers are bank tellers
of the 1970s.
(Laughter.)
MR. WENGER: With that, we will break
for lunch. There are two openings in the table
here on purpose so that people can take their
chairs and bring them inside up against smaller
groups that can actually sit across from each
other.
And if you haven't signed up, sign up
for one. And as I said, if you don't like any of
them, create your own.
(Time noted: 12:35 p.m.)
(Time noted: 1:30 p.m.)
Before lunch, we talked a little bit
about goals; we talked a little bit about
technology and leverage. And we want to spend the
afternoon, really, talking about what we can do and
what people are already doing to make this all
actually happen.
And it looks like -- we'll start again
with a little video that some of you may have seen.
The things we talked about, the things that are
possible, and the things that seem to be mostly
true, and that will happen --
(A brief video presentation was done.)
MR. WENGER: There's a lot of other
great videos on YouTube that are all worth
watching.
Now, the great thing, there are a bunch
of people in the room who are all building things
to help bridge that gap between what's
technologically possible and what's technically
useful today.
So, we have people talk this afternoon,
starting with what they are actually doing and why
they are doing it, and how that may help address
some of those things.
I will put some of you on the spot,
unless there's any volunteers.
MR. BISCHKE: So, I run a site called
edufire.com. It comes from the Yeats quote which
is, "Education is not the filling of a pail but the
lighting of a fire." And what we've done is,
basically, create a marketplace in the community on
live video learning.
So, people can come to eduFire, they
can create classes on whatever topics they want to.
Those classes are then available for anyone who
wants to take their class. It's a very open
format. They can choose to run the classes for
free or they can charge money for those classes as
well.
So, we're basically leveraging the free
markets with our idea, and we have right now over
2,000 teachers that are teaching at eduFire about
10,000 students, people from all around the world,
and really just simply trying to apply a lot of the
open principles that worked in other areas of the
Web, worked at sites like Etsy, a lot of stuff that
Jeff talks about in his book, just trying to apply
that stuff to education.
And we really feel that the biggest
opportunity is when you give teachers the
opportunity to innovate. And the best way to do
that is to give them financial incentives, give
them opportunities to scale, give them
opportunities for attention and appreciation. So,
that's a little bit of what we are trying to do.
MR. WILSON: And it was videos; right?
MR. BISCHKE: Live video.
MR. WILSON: Live video?
MR. BISCHKE: Live video.
MR. WILSON: Like YouTube or something
like that?
MR. BISCHKE: Yes. It's interactive.
So, the students can actually ask questions of the
teachers.
MR. WILSON: Who sets the price of these
classes?
MR. BISCHKE: The teachers do.
MR. WILSON: So, they set a price and
then the students -- they get students and
obviously if the price is too high or the class
is --
MR. BISCHKE: Supply and demand, yes.
MR. SHELSTAD: I'm Jeff Shelstad. I
founded a company called Flat World Knowledge,
which is trying to solve the textbook affordability
problem in higher education, competing with some
other chains.
So, our basic mission is -- we're
publishing great textbooks by renowned experts in
their fields, but we're letting publishers publish
it free and open, which means I give the
professional complete control over the content
deployment locally. They can modify the book any
way they want, any way they want, create common
relations. And we give them complete control over
their consumption.
Because we publish a free and open
book, we can consume it free. We're making a bet
that... altering the format, we provide the...
print being one of them. Some of the readers bring
others, study it and wrap it around that content.
David Wiley is actually our chief... officer --
which is two other companies we're watching right
now.
MR. WILEY: Best title ever, by the way,
Chief...
MS. SEGGERMAN: I'm Suzanne Seggerman.
I run Games for Change. We started about five and
a half, six years ago, and our model is something
like -- what early documentary film was originally
meant to do, where you use the video games to
address real world issues.
We have an online community of more
than a thousand people. We have an annual festival
that happens in the summer, which has been doubling
in size every year and is now, unbelievably, the
biggest game event in New York.
Some of the people in this room know
it. We have spoken with panels and our makeup is a
third educators, a third game developers, and a
third non-profits.
And what we aim to do is, really, to
help the non-profit -- help all of these sectors
understand better the power of games to do more
than just entertain, to put them, really, towards
things like poverty, the environment, civic
engagement, journalism.
But at least, we try to foster these...
by bringing everyone together and we share
resources and tools and ideas. It's a platform for
change and...
MR. WENGER: I think it consists of
three conversation. So, I think people should jump
in and ask questions, as some people are doing.
So, I should have probably clarified that up front.
MR. BURNHAM: I would like to know what
Shai is doing. I've read about it. You are
starting a global university?
MR. RESHEF: It is a non-profit,
tuition-free online university, which is basically
aimed at the third world student who graduated high
school and has decent English, decent enough to be
able to study at an American university. However
they couldn't get into university either because
they don't have the financial means or because they
are located in a place where there aren't enough
universities, the demand is much more than the
supply of universities where they live.
So, we offer them a tuition-free
university. The way it is going to operate is that
students are not going to pay for courses or
tuition. However, they pay admission and they pay
for exams that they take after each course, between
$10 to $100, depending on the country they come
from. And the idea is to open admission to
everyone around the globe.
MR. KALIN: Will you give a degree?
MR. RESHEF: It is going to be an
accredited American degree.
MR. KALIN: How do you get an accredited
American degree?
(Laughter.)
MR. KALIN: -- organization to grant
that?
MR. RESHEF: You can apply for
accreditation. First you set up your own
university. You need to operate for several years,
and then you apply for accreditation to the agency
to become accredited. And what you do and whether
you follow their rules and --
MR. KALIN: The rules are published?
MR. RESHEF: Yes.
MR. KALIN: What do they call it? I
think there's a credit instrument --
MR. RESHEF: There are six regional
accreditation agencies, and there are a few
measurements.
MR. WENGER: Where does the content come
from?
MR. RESHEF: Open source, open
courseware. It doesn't make the university tuition
free. Basically, everything that is available for
free. So, we take the content that is available
online, and we take open -- we use open source
technology.
And I think that what is actually very
unique about what we do is, we apply social
networking into that. So, there are not going to
be teachers in the classroom. Students are going
to teach each other. If you are teaching -- and
there will be a forum where they can get help or
professors. However, in the classroom itself, the
studies will be through discussion between the
students with each other on the topics.
MR. BURNHAM: All in English?
MR. RESHEF: Right now -- we started in
English. When we will be big enough, we will offer
other languages.
MR. BURNHAM: Do you have a sense of how
you solved the problem that Daniel was talking
about earlier, about some of the cultural
literacy -- not really cultural literacy, the
cultural framework within which these students are
operating and whether their parents -- you've got a
basic, kind of hidden problem in that -- certain
parts of the world where that seems to be a
problem.
When we assume that problem's solved,
then the second part of the problem is, even if
you're predisposed to finding this kind of
education and investing the time and energy, even
though it is free, do you think there are students
out there that -- do you think the demand already
exists, or do you have to bring along that kind of
cultural change in order to create the demand?
MR. RESHEF: The demand for the program
is there for sure. Let's go one step backward. We
hold only two programs right now, business
administration and computer science. The reason
for that is that these are the most-needed degrees
in order to get a job.
Remember that, unlike the discussion
that we had here at the beginning, this morning,
most of the people that we are actually approaching
are people who need money to live. They need to
find a job. We help them to find a better job than
they can get otherwise.
The people out there, we know because
we announced the program a month ago and we are
flooded with demand from all over the world, from
people who tried to register even though we haven't
opened our gates yet. We haven't started
admission.
I think -- we chose these two programs
that are both needed worldwide and they are not
studied -- computer science is the same wherever
you study. So, there is no cultural bias. We are
not trying very hard not to get into topics that
have cultural differences.
To give one example, the most needed
degree in the world is a teaching degree. Teachers
come out needed all over the world. We're not
getting there because teacher in Ghana is not a
teacher in the U.S. and is not a teacher in China.
So, we're trying to have those topics that -- they
are worldwide. Still, there will be a chance for
the student from different cultures together in one
class.
That will be an issue. I used to run
an online university in the Netherlands, which was
the International University, and it was a big
challenge. People from different cultures behave
differently and react differently to the way other
students discuss topics. So, it could be a
challenge.
MR. WILSON: And when you say
"classroom," this is some virtual space they are
going to or is that not --
MR. RESHEF: It is virtual.
MR. WILSON: They actually all go at the
same time?
MR. RESHEF: No.
MR. WILSON: So, there is some kind of
representation of space that they are all part
of -- are they dialoging or discussing or is it the
same content?
MR. RESHEF: You're presuming the same
lecture and then they discuss one after the other
the same topic. It is asynchronous and -- because
of the time difference and because of the there's
not going to be any video, but it's very, very
simple, to make sure that anyone around the world
can get it. Not in the beginning.
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: I think, from
conversations that we've had, it's important that
maybe you share the niche market you're after, the
lower middle class or the upper lower class.
And mainly international, because -- I
think slightly different than a lot of what we
discussed today in terms of, I think, somewhat more
national -- there is a need among the population
that, I think, you're targeting that is very
wonderful but very well-defined.
MR. RESHEF: You are right. It's a good
point because it's not for everyone. You need to
know English. You need to have a computer. You
need to graduate high school. So, that's the
requirement is there.
So, our assumption -- I think it varies
from one country to the other, but basically the
upper or the lower class -- or the lower of the
middle class, that's the population that we are
approaching. It's people who almost made it --
almost -- could have been in the university but
lost their chance.
MS. FLEMAL: Do You have some provision
for the people who didn't graduate high school?
MR. RESHEF: No.
MS. FLEMAL: No alternative?
MR. RESHEF: No, because we want
accreditation. In order to get accreditation, we
must make sure that they graduated high school.
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: Down the road,
probably, you will have programs, but not when you
launch?
MR. RESHEF: Right. When you think
about it, there's really no reason -- anyone who
has these two preconditions can get in. And it
takes two courses -- if they pass, then they become
a full-time student, with English 101 and Computer
Science 101. So, we think by then, they become
regular students.
Theoretically, there is no reason not
to let anyone in the world to take these two
classes. If they pass there, they can become
students. We can't do it because of accreditation.
MR. WENGER: What's the biggest hurdle
for you to be launched?
MR. RESHEF: I think we have only two
hours.
(Laughter.)
MR. WILSON: This conference is getting
in the way.
MR. WENGER: I would love to hear about
Katie's school, which is another school being
started.
MS. SALEN: I am working on a new 6th
grade through 12th grade public school that will
open in the fall. It's based on the idea of
game-based learning. And we were trying to look at
the question of that you couldn't just change one
part of the school, that in order to actually have
transformative change, you needed to work at a
systemic level.
So, that was the idea of trying to
design a school from the ground up. All aspects of
the school, the curriculum, the professional
development program, student recruitment, the kinds
of technology and communications platforms in the
school, the leadership model and all of that is
built around a pedagogy, which is the way that we
think kids learn best.
So, we've been working on it for about
two years. We wanted to open a public school
because we're really interested in the equity and
access question, making sure that -- in a lot of
our work, we found that kids that have struggled in
traditional schools do really well with some of the
work we've been doing around game-based learning.
So, we're interested in a classroom
that has a really diverse set of kids. And I have
to say that's been a struggle, to make that happen,
because there's all kinds of crazy politics, you
know, in the Department of Ed. So, we'll open in
the fall. We're recruiting students now --
MR. WILSON: How many students?
MS. SALEN: There'll be 81 in a single
class. So, it'll be a small -- it falls into the
small school model. Eventually, it'll have about
600 kids in the school.
And so, we're trying to look at this
notion of how we marry non-profits with industry
with schools. So, we have a set of industry
partners, we have a set of non-profit partners and
then we're kind of a public institution. And we're
trying to understand how we -- when we were talking
about that nodal system this morning, how do we
develop infrastructures that allow kids access to
resources in a range of spaces? We're trying to
blur ideas around college and career. So, kids
begin internships in the eighth grade, and
apprenticeships.
So, we're really interested, again, in
getting kids out into the world and figuring out
how to leverage different kinds of knowledge.
MR. WILSON: I really like that, I've
seen that work really well with my kids. How do
you do that? How do you facilitate these
interesting opportunities for internship at such a
young age so that for my kids who's about -- by the
time they get to the age of 16, 17 or 18, the
opportunities will start to present themselves.
But, at 14, it is hard.
MS. SALEN: That's where our
partnerships come in. So, we have a partnership
with these school universities, so kids -- and
we're working there with sets of academics that are
interested in having young people come for work
with graduate students. And then we have a set of
industry partnerships where kids can --
particularly in eighth and ninth grade, they're
going to have to sort of work in groups. So, we
can't sort of send sixth graders or seventh graders
out into the city. But we're looking at kinds of
programs that can sit inside some different
institutions that will support kids in that sort of
internship. So, it has to do with partnerships and
we've started trying to build those early on.
MR. KALIN: Do they have to be
institutions...
MS. SALEN: No. It is quite open and
internships may be virtual. They may be online
where kids are having a chance in some online
communities to intern in a virtual world, for
example, learn something about that.
MR. RESNICK: To make the walls a little
bit more permeable so that it gives off a portal
for the community; it could be part of the
community public?
MS. SALEN: Right.
MR. RESNICK: The community is a key to
all of the issues that are raised today.
MS. SALEN: Right; absolutely. So, the
question is good as not about all formal
institutions, we're trying to look at what -- where
a kid is at, what they're interested in and how we
can create some kind of internship work. We liked
the word "apprenticeship" because we want to look
at those models to look for, who kids might be sort
of studying with and learning from.
MR. KALIN: Do students get school
credit for the internship?
MS. SALEN: Yes.
MR. KALIN: So, is there any
accreditation issue that you're dealing with?
MS. SALEN: So, the other piece that
we're having to work on which has come up a lot
lately is the assessment issue. So, we have
received some opening of permissions from the State
to develop an alternative assessment model that
begins to look at competencies that can be granted
both within industry by academic institutions and
by other kinds of individuals. So, that's
something that will happen over time.
And our goal is to try to say kids
should be able to get credit by doing work in lots
of different kind of phases, not just within --
within an academic institution so that there would
be a process by which people will be able to be
considered accreditable or to be able to give a
credit in some sense; yes.
MR. KALIN: What I was asking you is the
same. If I get an intern, will the school even see
me as a legitimate enough business to... what is
relatively a business proprietorship.
MS. SALEN: Sure. Part of our model is
that online communities have their own appreciative
system. If you're successful within that
community, it's really clear that that community
values what you do and there's a whole set of
expectations around that. We think that community
should evaluate performance, not an outside
organization. So, we are trying to look at the
notion that if you have the common expert in a
community, that should be enough.
MR. GRODD: Did you say private school?
MS. SALEN: No, it's public school.
Public-public.
MR. GRODD: The charters are on public
school... The charts are for public schools?
MS. SALEN: Yes.
What do you mean "full autonomy"?
MR. GRODD: How do you start your own
public school without it being chartered?
MS. SALEN: You just ask if you can do
it.
(Laughter.)
There is a process. So, we had to go
through an application process.
MR. GRODD: New York has a process.
MS. SALEN: Yes, there's a process.
There's something called the Office of Portfolio
Development and you apply for -- you have to
provide sample curriculum. It's very rigorous and
then once you get approved, yes.
MR. GRODD: I think New York is not
unique.
MS. SALEN: Yes.
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: Is New York
interested in then making many schools like this?
Are you a model school for other schools in the
public school system to become similar?
MS. SALEN: We've been trying to stay
away from the scale question right now, because we
feel like schools are so context-specific. We
think there are maybe parts of the model that can
scale but we don't want to put that pressure on
right away.
But the DOE, to give them some credit,
they're deeply interested in innovation. They
recognized current structures are not working.
They did not run from us when we came with this
idea which is what I thought would happen. They've
been super supportive, which I also didn't think
would happen. But we haven't touched the scale
question yet.
MR. GORDON: Do you have any
non-traditional metrics for successful graduates?
MS. SALEN: In terms of what? Give me
an example of a non-traditional.
MR. GORDON: Non-traditional might be
passing tests and getting into college.
MS. SALEN: Yes, that's the assessment
model that I'm talking about. We have to give
grades of some sort because those are required.
But we are looking at an alternate model.
MR. GORDON: You're getting as much
support as the DOE --
MS. SALEN: Yes. An alternate model
around competencies. So, we have a model where
kids are earning badges. And so, it's some sort of
a portfolio model that by the time they graduate,
that the evidence of participation and of certain
kinds of excellence become a measure of their
success as a graduate.
MR. GORDON: So, they now become an
expert of something and get out of here?
MS. SALEN: Yes, exactly. Our whole
goal is to let kids be a master of something by the
time they graduate. We think that's a huge goal,
to allow every child to feel that they have become
an expert in something that they feel passionate
about.
And ideally, be supported around what
we would call "functional literacies" and we were
talking about within this group reading, writing,
math; yes, absolutely. But the other stuff, kids
become what they want to become and build what they
want to build with their lives, based on how they
gather knowledge and utilize it. So, that's the
model that we're aiming at.
THE SPEAKER: What would the enrollment
be and how many kids?
MS. SALEN: We'll first take in 81 in
the first year and we'll roll out a grade each
year. So, that will end up being about 600
students overall, yes.
MR. WILSON: Will it be seven grades?
MS. SALEN: Seven grades.
MR. WILSON: Middle and then high
school?
MS. SALEN: From 6 to 12. So, we're
really interested in -- we haven't talked much
today of the trajectory of learning. So, what
would it need to actually catch a kid in middle
school and be able to help them move into the upper
school without having to change -- necessarily
change schools, how do you develop a deep
understanding of literally their movement through
school rather than thinking about them just as in
grade to grade level?
So, we've been thinking about not
having grade levels. So, we're having sort of
phases that kids can move at their own pace, their
own pace within.
MR. BURNHAM: And does everything have
to be a game?
MS. SALEN: No.
MR. BURNHAM: Is the school itself, do
they think of their educational process as a game
or do they think of each course as a game that they
think of within a course that there are certainly
elements that are game-like?
MS. SALEN: Sure, now that's a good
question. So, the curriculum is disseminated
through a game-like structure. So, kids are given
a ten-week mission, and that mission drops them
into a complex problem space and then that mission
is broken down into a series of smaller quests that
allows kids to build skills and knowledge in order
to solve that problem.
So, that's the big game idea. And then
certain quests also have kids are making games or
playing games but it's not every --
MR. BURNHAM: Each of these had to be
created, this curriculum and the actual game
dynamic and the game structure and I assume some of
the programs that had to be created class by class?
MS. SALEN: Yes. And so, our curriculum
is co-developed by teachers and game designers.
So, that was the other model that we're looking at,
that it may be a new type of collaboration that
could be to invent a curriculum. It's not all
digital; there's a lot of non-digital steps.
MR. BURNHAM: Digital games?
MS. SALEN: Yes.
MS. ALLEN: You will fund it
philanthropically rather than the public school
system?
MS. SALEN: The schools themselves, no,
but our planning cost us -- we got some money
through MacArthur, the two-year planning grant.
But the school itself is funded by public moneys;
yes.
MR. GORDON: Do the kids always had one
identity, or do they get to mess around?
(Laughter.)
MS. SALEN: We have an online social
network that we built for the school called "Be Me"
and it's the idea that we want kids to play around
with multiple identities and to recognize that
they, at any one time, may be taking on different
identities. There's an "at model" in it called
"The Expertise Exchange."
We're also trying to get kids to
understand what they are experts in, what they want
to be experts in, what they're not good at. So,
this notion of how do you find other people to work
with, other kinds of mentors and that kind of
thing. So, the multiple identity thing is a big
one. The notion of the curriculum -- and then I'll
shut up because I don't want to dominate here -- is
allowing kids to step into identities.
MR. GORDON: Keep talking as long as you
are saying something better than the rest of us,
under the circumstances.
(Laughter.)
MS. ALLEN: Is there any ambition to
attract kids from private schools back to the
public system?
MS. SALEN: Obviously, that's already
happening because the economy crashed. So, we
suddenly have had people showing up at our open
houses that have been people that have been in
private schools that are now trying to enter public
school.
And so, it wasn't an intention, but I
think it's the reality today, particularly in
New York, because there are families that are
suddenly in a totally different place then they
were six months ago.
MR. KALIN: Is there any way to see
what's going on from the outside? Can we see this?
MS. SALEN: Right this second?
MR. JARVIS: Soon thereafter?
MR. GORDON: You can pass as a
seventh grader.
(Laughter.)
MR. KALIN: There is a program in
New York where if you can prove you're under 18 you
can get into all these theaters for $5; you just
flash a fake ID saying how young you are.
(Laughter.)
So, these other kids want to see and
learn from it in the context being created there.
It can seem to be a open course where in this side
of things, that's something that's stuck inside of
it there?
MS. SALEN: So, we have a big notion of
kids being given an opportunity to disseminate.
So, we have lots of channels out as well as
channels in. So, one thing we found with kids is
that the ability to give them that -- the idea to
give them the ability to share what they have done
is super critical to them and to make choices about
who they're sharing it with.
We're trying to build in mechanisms by
which they can export things that they were doing
in the space for more public kind of space; whether
if it's public in a sense of their small group of
friends or their parents or whether it's to the
world. So, the publication notion is a big one in
the school about outward facing.
MR. L. JOHNSON: What lessons did you
learn about things that you thought would be good
ideas that turned out not to work out and have
unintended effects?
MS. SALEN: We haven't opened the school
yet. But we'll probably learn a lot.
I think that there is an instinct to
always make it more complex than it really needs to
be. So, I think that a lot of -- I'm a designer.
So, part of what I do is to always strip things
down. So, I think a lot of our early work was way
too complicated, trying to over-design.
And so, I think we found that it's
really about stripping, stripping away and
understanding what, who are the participants in any
learning moment. So, trying not to get to
over-design what the teacher does, not to
over-design what the student does and understand
that the student brings things, the teacher brings
things.
So, what is this simple-as-possible
interface to connect those two? I think that's
been our big lesson. And also that parents are
very freaked out about their children's education,
do not underestimate that. So, that's a big
mistake we made, or I did.
MR. WILSON: Rob, I would like to ask
Rob to talk a little bit about what you are working
on.
MR. KALIN: I'm taking everything that
I've learned from Etsy and trying to create
essentially a framework that a lot of the things
you will hear people talking about fit into. And
the type of application does exists. So, I think
it's about the early stages.
And, they're just the experts here in
the articles where they had to implement these
software. The new types of software suddenly
enabled all these new interactions. So, I think,
blogs, forums, Wikis, private entities, all these
things aren't quite right for the educational
sector and there's essentially the new type of Web
education. So.
, I'm working on that and then,
specifically, to start with looking at how people
are home-schooling their kids; because I don't want
all the hurdles of the accreditation that are being
set back especially in the beginning.
And also specifically looking at kids,
three years and younger, how these people are going
to start using the Web and at what age we start
developing that literacy. There are people
actually on the Web before they can read and all
kinds of interfaces and how technology does that.
Again, we're talking about learning
here, we're talking what needs to be met more
about. And we should be ready in a couple of
months since the first to use is the Internet
component to it and to make sure that the
components you make maybe explained as adaptations
to the entire system.
It's not like this is a game and this
isn't a game, the whole space has that kind of
staple built into them. You've got some entities
where you -- you entice people to turn out and be
playful, I think that's the premise of it thus far
in the application.
And it will have potentially, there
would be an application arguably of using the right
things that exist inside of its framework and the
goal of the opportunity is to kind of build a
social business and explaining that it's not a
for-profit model.
There's a lot of restrictions the IRS
places on you in terms of what you can do and it's
non-profit tax code, it's not written in the
website where you can find it, that's for sure.
We're also talking of use of other means and other
ways to start this business step, something
successful that we keep giving back to the people
who are making it successful. Given that security
to do stuff that we're doing right now, we're kind
of placing a hold to be there but at least we want
to get by that in a month or two.
MR. WILSON: Anybody would able to use
this? A school could use this?
MR. KALIN: Completely open and in
public, and if you're teaching a class, if you're
figuring to teaching a class, you can restrict who
comes in through and then you can narrow through
those things that you see there documented where
you can see whatever content they want.
There's also the fact how people would
be connected with the others, so -- and have this
vision of a five-year-old American teaching English
to a five-year-old in Paris and vice versa and
creating something that's simple enough to connect
with each other.
So, it's a system where if there's
someone that definitely wants to teach a class,
they can do it or at least that they can do it
there as well. So, that's the design challenges
that we had that since we're doing this. And I
think a lot of the educational software out there
is really good and of smart design that we can use,
as well.
MR. WILSON: Have you tried to build
something out there that could be used at any part
of the educational establishment, everything from
very traditional school situations to someone who
is trying to teach themselves, to home-schooling,
adult education?
MR. KALIN: Right. The framework for
organizing the information facility and the
interaction itself, the people would actually have.
I think the Web as a whole enables to teach with a
learning framework, but it's not well-organized
enough to facilitate the instruction interaction
that happens as well and with computers.
MR. JARVIS: Are there metrics built in?
Are there commercial aspects built in? If somebody
wanted to use this as a platform to build an
educational business on top of it, could they?
MR. KALIN: Sure. It's going to
encompass the total range of learning. Coming from
the perspective of Etsy, for me, I worked in a
9,000 square foot warehouse... as Etsy started
growing... the sellers will be very successful
because the last dealings over the particular
businesses turned on to hobbies and I asked them if
they include any new things. One of the tools they
need to learn is -- and a lot of it comes back to
community as much as knowledge.
And so, we are working together, and
the first pilot program is basically going to be
kind of home-schooling for people or for the
employees as we home-school each other and figure
out how to create successful, very small business.
And we're going to be using the
platform to publish everything without ever
doing... Then I'm talking with a bunch of other
organizations. Again, some of the home-schoolings
under the university level to kind of get people
and testing it out.
Anyone here who is interested in trying
to get an entire... parachutes of that worth and
I'll be happy to give everyone your access.
MR. WILSON: Idit?
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: I'll bring the
kid's voices. I think we're lacking some kid
voices. I can connect it to my computer to the Web
or from yours, if yours is connected?
(Discussion off the record.)
So, this is La Gloria [sic]. We're
about social networks for learning how to design
games and simulations, teach science or global
social issues. Actually, it's very, very similar.
It is about people teaching and learning at the
same system, middle school, high school, community
college students.
And I, instead of telling you that --
it's a platform that is combining media, Wiki,
Blogger and a web resource, each piece within the
top of my sequel [sic]. It's an open source with a
very comprehensive year-long curriculum that works
both for teachers who are learning how to be
teachers in universities, community college
students.
And if you go to this (indicating
projection), students and educators both from the
field, we can pick just three, one from middle
school, one from high school, we can maybe exempt
people -- just played the first one, it would just
-- probably just start.
And that's Quianna and Alexi reflecting
about what they are doing. If you can just leave
the volume.
(Video presentation.)
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: So, now you can go
-- scroll down and you will find also different
features really from middle school or high school,
vocational school, community college.
And I think we talked a lot about these
ideas today, finding things that you need on Google
or in your community, and finding -- gain experts
or content experts or programming experts, design
experts on this network that we are putting and
that are starting to take each other, all for free
and available through the governor that is
financing it.
MR. WILSON: I'm just going to ask you,
how do the teachers and the schools and the
students find this tool? Word of mouth? How do
they find out about it?
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: Just word of mouth.
We started in five schools, we grew to eight, and
now we have a huge list of people who are just
registering, "We want to do this, we want to do
this."
We are proving that there is demand,
and therefore, we can probably plug it into the
Department of Education and they are using it to
transform the schools. So, we are now in 14
schools, and some schools are already teaching
these classes.
If we had time, I would have shown you
the curriculum and the Wikis and how it's
customized. So, we have teachers teaching science,
teachers teaching health, teachers teaching
drafting and architecture using this game, and all
different kinds of -- right now, it's based on our
budget.
But it really should be a work and play
type of environment of give and take, which is
really what the plans of it is now, but we just
wanted them to demonstrate the scalability and
demand.
MR. WILSON: Thank you.
MR. GRODD: About nine months ago, I
started Better Lesson, which is, hopefully, on the
way of becoming the social network for teachers.
It started in the United States and is aspiring to
be the social network for teachers internationally.
It is focused around sort of -- this first version
is focused around PowerPoint for teachers which is,
what do I teach tomorrow, how do I create it and
where do I find that.
So, I spent so much time over the past
four years reinventing the wheel, writing lessons
from scratch and then when I had done that, it
would waste away on my desktop. There's no way for
me to share my creations with other teachers.
And I think it is just so detrimental
to my instructions. I spent four hours. I would
spend on average three to four hours each night
writing lessons. My only option is to go with the
scripted textbook or reinvent the wheel. Those are
really the core options for most teachers today.
We have built and launched three months
ago the alpha, beta version of a social networking
site, with the sort of highest level of file
sharing technology. Some of it are files that are
from script and embedded with Facebook and are
rolling it out through high performing charter
schools, in pre-schools.
And now it's sort of, the main
difference between us and all of the other
initiatives that we're trying to do is, because
when I first came up with the idea about three
years ago, I thought it was totally not like the
others. It's like this is totally original and
teachers sharing files in the internet.
(Laughter.)
And over the past year, there's been
dozens of well-funded initiatives. One called...
Teachers just folded up two months ago after trying
for two years correcting these, and either Sun
MicroSystems people and sort of flailing out there,
trying to figure out who they are, what to do.
And so, my very brief take on the space
currently is that there's been two types of
attempts to correct this. Now, on one hand, we
have the open source movement represented by Wiki
of CC Learn; and on the other hand, we have
intranet, which are closed off internet.
And the open source -- the failure of
the open source initiative, it indicates -- in the
K-12 space well, it's not referring to open course
software.
In the K-12 space, there's been to go
from the isolated teacher, which is the status quo,
to the global revolution overnight. And so, that,
the open source movement failed to account for the
fact that teaching is best when it's done locally,
we have local standards, we have local protocols,
local rubrics.
And it's sharing better when you know
who you are sharing it with. And they failed to do
that literally. There's a global revolution
online. But I don't want a global revolution. I
want to share with the person down the hall.
And the closed internet is the failure
that every -- and this is -- it's tragic that every
major district, every state and every major charter
management organization has an intranet and it's
all defunct, literally, ineffective.
You've got millions and millions of
dollars invested in these intranets. And the
reason they're defunct is you can't initiate the
wisdom of the crowds without a crowd.
And so, you're talking to CMOs that
have 1,200 teachers. And you can't really create
sorts of the depth and breadth of content you need
to have it into the lessons, which is the substance
of what we aspire to be, when you're dealing with
1200 teachers.
So, our response, aside from creating a
totally unique interface and technology, is to
channel Chris over there, and do a Facebook that
did very well, roll out the real world community,
keeping it local and starting with one charter
management organization in May, and to roll out to
another and then maintain the integrity of local
sharing of files, while beginning to incrementally
graduate an approach to that open source vision and
have the sharing crossover to communities.
I think the Facebook analog is a very
good one for us and it's really been highly
influential, so, thank you, Chris.
MR. WILSON: The essential element today
is a class, one class worth of several things.
MR. GRODD: What about 180 days to the
core for most K-12 teachers is 180 days of
instruction. What we allow you to do is see... If
you are learning yourself as you finance out from
high performing teacher to one lesson, one
50-minute lesson out of those 180 days, as we have
introduced today, that teachers that is using
multiple -- also to be using video games, they're
PBS PowerPoint and YouTube courses.
One 50-minute lesson, we allow you to
aggregate that content on a one-page, sequence in
an order, then you drag and drop one unit, and then
sequence those units into the 180 days. And that's
the way teachers teach now. So, our organizational
hierarchy is really resources, which are primarily
files, that is now, to a lesson to a unit to a
course.
And we allow you to do that really in a
nice, intuitive way. And so, as opposed to going
to -- not to pick on these open sources, but if you
go to open sources and you find the resource.
That resource helps you for the
one-third of one class under the 180 days. When
you come in with a better lesson and you find the
highest performance sixth-grade social studies
teachers in the country, then you have their 180
days mapped out for you.
And you can -- instead of having all
your time reinventing, trying to recreate those 180
days, you can take that foundational knowledge now
to tailor that instruction to the needs of your
students.
MR. WILSON: But the thing that's
interesting for me is that you've got a whole
semester's worth of the teaching, but each lesson
is its own unit. And then each lesson, there's
units within that.
And don't you really want to facilitate
sharing the most atomic elements and not the whole
thing?
MR. GRODD: We do. I think the goal is
to be able to have people mix and match in those --
every -- not just atomic, everything. Mix and
match and have two of your lessons in my unit, two
of your lessons in one unit, two of your files in
one of my lessons.
And so, that's the goal and that's what
we facilitate here. It's like favor, favor of
something to understand. It's very specific to do
in a lesson and also in a unit.
MS. BOYD: How does the network work?
MR. GRODD: The social network is a
Facebook right now.
And so, it's similar to Facebook. When
you find someone that you're really interested in
sharing your community with them, and our site
you'll become a colleague with someone, they can
then use your curriculum and they -- they can do
their own.
So, it's really meaningful, so --
MS. BOYD: But then you have to be
willing to colleague everybody for them to share?
It could be yourself?
MR. GRODD: No. There's two for this.
Great question.
Each individual artifact, when you
upload a file, you can set sharing permissions.
So, this is another core to friendships. So, you
can -- it would open to all of the other lessons.
And you can share just to your colleagues or keep
it private because you have many organizational
tools. Some people just use them and not to share
it, to organize their stuff online.
And then -- so, that's for each
individual object. But in order to share your full
recipe book, your full 180 days, you've got to be
on top of it. Some people really like that because
it gives people a sense of ownership of their
curriculum. It forces them to just always meet new
people in order to share.
MS. BOYD: So, is it required to confirm
that we are colleagues? Basically, there are
politics with these things. It's like, I think we
are colleagues, but you don't think the same.
(Laughter.)
MR. GRODD: Yeah, that's an issue. It
hadn't been an issue thus far because we rolled it
out to 300 other teachers. And I anticipate that
being an issue. And so, I think, in any sort of
project in the social network, and slightly, they
just quote from a UI standpoint, the technical
standpoint, is issue permissioning and trying to
replicate real roles in that network.
MS. BOYD: This made me wonder early
about this. So, they're going to be much more
friendly in this? And there is more of a direct to
draft element, when you have to deal with one
network.
If only we'd be talking about social
situations for whatever these professional networks
come into play, you actually have so many levels of
politics for this.
MR. GRODD: I agree.
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: I think it's a
fantastic idea and we were wondering if educator's
Wiki, that it could probably benefit by sending
educators to what you're facilitating.
What I can see coming is a need
for -- first of all, there is no high bandwidth in
a lot of the schools. And a lot of these educators
that you're trying to reach may not have both the
access or the knowledge of how to upload and
download and remake and whatever. And I wonder if
you have virtual Web based training sections?
MR. GRODD: Yes. But that's what we're
doing. We're kind of rolling out the individual
schools, literally; one school at a time.
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: Yes.
MR. GRODD: We're working with those
schools, mostly in Boston and New York, primarily
charter schools going in there, training teachers,
working with instructional coaches.
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: But that means to
also become virtual, what you just said.
MR. GRODD: Yes, sure. One step at a
time.
MR. L. JOHNSON: Are you inviting course
work publishers to participate in this network?
MR. GRODD: Yes. We invite those. We
just want good quality content to work in this open
source curriculum, organizations working with Larry
Berger and of FreeReading.net, which is something
you might have heard of more...
So, we are totally open. And I mean,
it's kind of a -- Fred, you were saying that you
were trying to find the deep set of it. Teachers
are so much tougher on the internet.
And it just -- but to go through Google
for a teacher, then you need to figure out the day
of the platform and try to figure out what you're
teaching tomorrow, spend three hours googling to
get to the good stuff, which is really, really
hard.
And for everybody, we're thanking you
for the questions.
The stuff is there. But we're trying
to aggregate and doing it in a way -- we're trying
to organize it, make it searchable and play the
matchmaker to -- when you register with us, you
know what grade level you teach, what subject you
teach and try to sort of matchmake you and give you
the best stuff that we can give you.
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: But also, you are
giving -- other teachers can help you form this,
the new way of teaching and learning. And I think
that may be even more important. Having a team of
teachers who are doing the same thing in different
classrooms together.
MR. GRODD: Yes. I was shocked. When I
was teaching sixth-grade social studies, and I
said, Well, I don't really know what I'm doing with
that, so I'm trying to find another middle school
social studies teacher in Georgia that knows what
they're doing. It just doesn't exist.
Like, literally, you have to guess,
scour blogs. It just doesn't exist. So, the
ability to find other people teaching what you are
teaching, being able to have some sort of dialogue.
There's a massive need for it.
MR. O'DONNELL: What do you think is the
most effective motivation for getting the
individual teacher to share? Is it the access to
-- if I share this, then I can get somebody else's
thing? Is it the reputation of, I want to be the
teacher who gets the community credit of forming
the best lesson? Or is there a potential -- and I
don't know if you are doing this -- so that I could
literally sell a lesson perhaps to -- if I have the
best lesson on the causes of World War II?
Other people might want to buy that at
two bucks a pop or something.
MR. GRODD: I will say three things.
One is the direct correlation between age and
comfortableness. So, first off, the sort younger
generation teachers, the 25 to 35, it's generally
much more comfortable with sharing things in
general, we don't have much of the concerns that
you might think teachers would have.
The second thing is that the best
teachers are lesson artists. They can create --
someone talked about this earlier -- they can
create amazing works of art. You can spend
five hours, which I have, on a mind history
PowerPoint Jeopardy game. That's -- you create
whatever -- you want to share it. It's helping --
you're helping a hundred students, right now, a
year with that kind of history PowerPoint. You
show the 600 teachers you're helping the 600
students.
So, this is a strong desire, and then
that ties into things that -- that how many Twitter
followers, are fundamentally wanting to be
recognized. So, we are just using the Web tool for
metrics. Each file would be tracking the number of
views, the number of downloads, the number of
shares. It's amazing how a teacher is all ready to
give to 300 teachers, and those teachers come back
everyday to see how many people viewed the web and
taught in it.
So, it is a fundamentally, teachers
want to share and, like any artist, want to share
and they want to be recognized. So, we're trying
to use the Web to recognize. And if they were
teachers, our Web will target rock stars.
MR. ETUK: How difficult is it to
overcome that full questionnaire? How do I use
this level?
MR. GRODD: What we have done is, we've
tried to take almost no point of view, we tried to
be an agnostic platform instead of a sharing
platforms with point of views that we have taken
than organizational hierarchy. So, people, when
they're uploading or creating the lessons on our
site, they create a lesson that has objective, it
has a plan and it has resources.
So, people generally -- they view and
browse throughout the site. It is pretty much the
way most teachers are delivering instructions and
probably presentations; am I right?
MR. WILSON: About a week ago, I gave a
talk to a bunch of television executives and I
published 22 slides on the Web, on Slide Share.
And I got a couple of messages from people who had
downloaded my talk and had delivered the talk.
But there's no audio. So, they took my
22 slides and they delivered the same talk. The
slides had no words on them; right?
So, they literally had to be -- spread
on it one word at the top and then a picture. So,
there was no -- and they just delivered it.
And I think there is something really
interesting about the idea that you can take, in
effect, a framework for a lesson or a presentation
and different people will have a different slant on
it, but the framework is pretty consistent piece of
organization.
MR. GRODD: Again, we did a lot of user
testing and a lot of focus groups on how teachers
generally organize their content to lessons.
Lessons are generally organized into units. That's
it. Lessons are made up of multiple resources,
diverse multiple media.
MR. BURNHAM: I think that's a wake-up
call here. And I think Paul and Dave are both
constructing sites where teachers can reach
audiences in probably different ways and ultimately
perhaps make a living in a different way. In some
ways,if somebody's motivated by some of the same
objectives, they would also be motivated by the
possibility of making a living.
MR. MILLER: I run the School of
Everything, which is a very simple way of matching
up people who have something to teach and focus
primarily on their local area. It's about trying
to find somebody to teach you something
face-to-face in your local area.
And then, the thing that we found very,
very quickly is that there are already lots and
lots of people doing this. So, there's a kind of
market of self-employed freelance teachers that are
teaching music lessons or language lessons or
whatever it might be. And so, those are the people
who are using the School of Everything at the
moment.
And it is really interesting that,
basically, it's a growing group, made up of an
economically driven -- I don't know. There's so
many people that are turning their passions,
supporting their passions by teaching them. And
so, they may have a day job, but they are finding a
way to make that leap out of a job that they don't
like into maybe they're teaching something that
they do like as a way of supporting -- doing what
they like.
And that's something that's seeing an
increase. And so, we get so many stories of people
doing that. That's really wonderful to see that
happen.
MR. BURNHAM: Is what you have just a
marketplace? There's no curriculum or notion of
curriculum? It's just a matching function?
MR. MILLER: Yes. It's just a matching
function. What you find is, people already sign up
to some particular curriculum. It's like, for
example, I didn't know about painting, but there's
a technique for learning oil painting is called
the... oil painting technique.
It's really -- this learning lesson
will teach using the particular method of teaching
oil painting. And so, now we have pretty much
every... oil painting technique teacher in the UK
on the site.
MR. JARVIS: Off of PBS 15 years ago.
Like all good educators, you make it
look easy.
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: What I see is that
you have a very nice transparent system of looking
at how many people are teaching and how many are
learning. But it looks like it's the same teacher
teaching two groups. Can you explain how that
works?
MR. MILLER: How do you mean?
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: It says, like
teaching to learning. What does that mean?
MR. MILLER: So, we ask people what they
want to learn as they sign up, as well. So, we're
going to have demand and supply for every local
area. We are not big enough to be able to be kind
of, properly demonstrating exactly what a
particular town wants to learn.
We have supply and demand in place.
And an interesting one that we have noticed is that
we have far more people who are wanting to learn
photography than there are teachers. And I say
that's kind of function of -- digital photography
has, kind of, exploded and the number of people who
can teach it hasn't caught up yet.
MR. JARVIS: So, what do you do about
that? How do you create --
MR. MILLER: We try to find people to
teach digital photography.
MR. JARVIS: So, what are the best tools
to find them? Craig's List, or what?
MR. MILLER: We don't have Craig's List
in the UK. Photography shops, we have notice
boards --
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: And is it only
one-to-one, or one-to-many?
MR. MILLER: Most of the teaching is
one-to-one, but there are quite a lot of classes,
as well. It depends on the subject. The music
classes are almost always one-to-one. Some things,
like art classes, tend to be a group.
MR. BURNHAM: And is there a reputation
system?
MR. MILLER: Yes. Basically,
endorsements. One thing we found is that teachers
were very wary of five-star systems around
teaching, because they think it is a bad
relationship with a student and that that's
basically subjective. So, teachers are suspicious,
we found, when we talked to them of objective
representation systems when it comes to teaching.
MR. WILSON: You can only give an
endorsement?
MR. JARVIS: Not an "undorsement."
MR. MILLER: At the moment, we placed
that at the top. We actually haven't had any
complaints about the teachers at all.
MR. L. JOHNSON: There are existing
platforms for social networking, such as Facebook.
They're existing platforms for management such as
Noodle [sic], and why are you going your own way in
this regard?
MR. GRODD: I get that question every
day. So, I think, for me, it is fundamentally --
to do this well, we will have to create a sense of
real privacy for of teachers.
If they're exchanging their tests and
quizzes and exchanging their instructional content,
for the first version, we want to ensure that we do
our best to make them feel that sense of privacy.
You really can't do it now on Facebook.
And the other thing is, teachers go to
Facebook to get away from their professional life.
It is an escape in many ways. So, we prefer to let
it be that escape, have our site be focused around
professionals.
MR. BISCHKE: I think it's similar to
Etsy and eBay. You know what I mean? You look at
Etsy and you look at eBay and some way it's similar
functions. But in other ways, they are very
different.
And I think that some of the stuff that
has been talked about here, the notion of education
is just so fundamentally different from a lot of
other things that are happening on the Web, that
you really need to tap into that to leverage that.
I think that the best platforms are
built by people who have actually taught, who
understand how difficult it is to be a teacher,
what some of the challenges are, and can build
systems from the ground up to address those
challenges.
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: But in our case, we
really couldn't use any of the existing systems
that had advertising on it, because when we did
some tests with the -- especially the economically
underprivileged and technologically underserved
populations -- especially in public schools, they
don't see the ad.
So, we have to create something that is
open source, clean, noncommercial for them to adopt
it. This is why we created our own platform, not
because it didn't exist in other forms. And a
commercial version of this probably will be
different.
MR. BURNHAM: And how is what you are
doing different than what Paul is doing?
MR. SCHAPPELL: I think it's exactly the
same. Our mission is to crush Paul.
(Laughter.)
I would say we're about as perfectly
aligned on a mission as two organizations can be.
And there probably aren't any other -- it is a very
weird space that we are in, that this is fairly
absent. And what the TeachStreet team brings to
the game, we are basically an ex-Amazon group, with
some other folks thrown in, with experience
building marketplaces.
So, we look at what Rob -- and I'll use
Scott as an example. The idea that somebody could
launch a company like... to bring together
disparate groups of people to learn things is
really what, in my opinion -- what goes on with...
And so, when I went to learn about
podcasting, I started this podcasting and Second
Life meetups in Seattle. And within days, upon
hours of podcasting, the first group was set up and
meeting. And my wife thinks that's mildly odd,
like people get together at a bar to talk about
Second Life. And they were odd.
(Laughter.)
What we are trying to build we think is
a massive marketplace around things that people are
passionate about. And so, a lot of what was being
discussed today, I hope you all figured it out, and
it's sort of like the learning up to age 22, 23,
when you get the confidence to go and learn
whatever it is that you are excited about.
Some people can start when you're 10,
and some people it never starts. But the idea for
TeachStreet came from really, I'm a class taker,
and it really hasn't improved that much with all
that the Web's done. You go and search online and
the people that win those searches are online video
bloggers. They're not the person that lives within
a mile of you who's a great piano teachers.
And so, we're trying to get them a
platform where they can list themselves as a
teacher or as an expert. They can be reviewed and
negatively reviewed by the people that take the
classes. It doesn't happen often, very much like
Amazon. You don't get any negative reviews. And
then you can pay to take them off of our sites.
(Laughter.)
I'm kidding.
(Laughter.)
It is really is about learning --
that's the difference, the accreditation issue
isn't something we're trying to tackle. We don't
really go after the college education or even the
grades K to 12.
We're really about creating platforms
so that if you're an expert in something -- I need
another example. I listed a class in Twitter, and
within 24 hours I had three people contact me for
this class that I put up as a joke a little bit, I
wanted to teach people to teach people who wanted
to learn Twitter.
Three people, totally randomly, had
contacted me about it and I had to let it expire.
So, I don't want to keep teaching this class. But
you could make money teaching a class about how to
teach Twitter, because it is a common search term.
MR. JARVIS: Finally, a business model.
(Laughter.)
MR. WILSON: This is largely for the
adult community. It is not like -- my kids have
piano teachers and drum teachers and computer guys
come over to teach my son how to write computer
software.
MR. SCHAPPELL: For all that, too.
Anything you want to learn, experts set themselves
up online. They indicate that they teach children
to adults.
MR. WILSON: You said something about K
through 12, you go figure that out. I think this
might be more -- what's like going to come -- we're
going to start realizing that we and our kids are
just realizing that if they're not going to get it
in school, they'll have to get it somewhere.
MR. SCHAPPELL: I think that you can
supplement a lot of the learning places, the
piecing together, what's the thing you're excited
about this week? And that sort of stuff drives my
wife nuts. I go through a month where I want to
learn about photography, and I'll go through a
month where I might learn to cook and never cook,
and you just sort of piece these things together,
whether TeachStreet or MeetUp. It's all the tools
that are out there and how you patch them together.
MR. JARVIS: This is how to do vouchers.
If you gave people vouchers for that. That's
vouchers that are working.
THE SPEAKER: Paul, Can you tell the
story of how you came to this idea and the
historical perspective on this?
MR. MILLER: In 1965 a group of students
at Stanford wanted to learn computer science. The
curriculum hadn't caught up. So, they set up their
own university, a message board, which is a piece
of paper and you write at the top of that the sheet
what you can teach and people would sign up. It
had two courses for the first week and they agreed
to have 300 courses every week. At it's a big book
that was going around.
John reckons that at its peak, it had
50,000 students. It changed the way that Stanford
was organized, as far as the way that John
explained it.
And to wrap it up, if you're going to
do that today, you wouldn't use a pinboard and some
pieces of paper; you'd use the inter-Webs.
MR. BISCHKE: One question for Dave and
Paul. It seems right now with the economy, there's
this massive structural shift. If Detroit goes
under -- you have all these people now we need to
get them trained.
So, my question to you guys is, how
much of what you guys are seeing right now in
schools and TeachStreet is what you guys call
continuing professional education versus hobbies,
crafts, entertainment, passions --
MR. SCHAPPELL: We're a lot more toward
the latter, probably; just being real honest. When
we launched we didn't know. So, we threw
everything up and probably the five of the
eight main categories where there's just a lot more
energy is around creative, language, sports. I
don't think it will stay there.
How to build a non fuel-efficient car
hadn't showed up yet. It's a lot more on the
aspirational learning, which is great, because it
really has a lot of tools. We just launched
two weeks ago. It's a little laughable -- much
blogging, potential articles. Teachers can write
articles.
It's amazing, people just writing about
everything and uploading videos. It's not
surprising. But compared to the classes and their
reputations and reviews, it is exactly what we
thought would happen, and it is happening.
MR. MILLER: And it's pretty similar to
us. Our three main categories are crafts, music,
languages and arts. But what surprises us is, kind
of sustainable environmental stuff. That really
seems to be that passionate people -- the teaching
people about environment and the sustainability
that we haven't expected.
MR. WENGER: What about E-fire?
MR. MILLER: Language and test prep are
our two biggest categories. But it's interesting
because we have seen, like what was mentioned,
sustainability. There's a guy who teaches a class
called the Green House, and it's one of our most
popular classes.
We've also had a class on how to use
Twitter, which ended up on the top 10 searches on
Twitter for a while, because everyone in the class
was tweeting at the same time.
So, it's been an interesting kind of
hybrid of pushing certain areas that we know have
well-defined markers, like, language and test prep;
and then also having an open platforms where we can
say, you know what, teach whatever you want to
teach. Anybody can start a class in whatever
they're passionate about. It's similar to what
Dave and Paul are doing. That's a real option that
we are seeing.
THE SPEAKER: A 21st century Madoff
scheme, we may have seen behavior like twittering
and then have a whole industry of teaching how to
behave --
(Laughter.)
MR. WENGER: Schools are teaching a lot
of things that are very obscure and not politically
useful.
MR. KALIN: A college degree -- you just
gave us all this money to get a degree and it just
qualifies us to give more money to the school;
because we go back to school and they keep you in
grad school.
MR. WILSON: I want to ask Terry a
question.
Do you think that some of these
marketplace models like the School of Everything
and TeachStreet will be useful in the
home-schooling movement? Can you imagine using
these services to identify specific teachers that
you can use?
MS. FLEMAL: I absolutely can, because
right now we often use Craig's List, honestly. For
us, it's economical. And oftentimes, if we are
looking for a Spanish teacher -- we've gone to
Craig's List to find someone good at philosophy --
like somebody would come in and talk with the child
about philosophy --
MR. BURNHAM: You found somebody
advertising this?
MS. FLEMAL: Yes, absolutely. For
philosophy, we just happened to find somebody who
knew, who had a doctorate in philosophy and didn't
have a job. And the guy was just incredible. And
it happened that he was perfect for what we were
looking for.
Yes, there is an absolute need for
that. And so, yes, I think definitely, and I'm
thinking and hearing that it is something that's a
perfect match, absolutely.
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: I think that a lot
of the home-schooling, we're getting a lot of
e-mails and people using us although we're not
really marketing or trying to reach this
population, and because it's open source, they can
just come and they are telling us how they are
using it so down the road we will launch it for
them.
But to relate to the other question of
what takes off in a network, we realize there is a
small network of innovators and it relates to some
of what I have said. They really need to figure
out how to create these innovative things that they
are willing to jump in and trying to take a risk
and connect it to what they call the content
standards that -- the things that are out there.
And once you give them a lot of support
with all these innovative platforms and a very
comprehensive curriculum that we have on
step-by-step, how to use it, and you match it with
where they are, they really adopt it.
And they are willing to come to, with
exceptions and virtual tutorials on how -- so for
those of you who are innovating and trying to
create communities, I think the more you create
tutorials for them so they have the answer for
their system, the more loyal they will become.
That's my experience.
MS. FLEMAL: I love the idea of
connecting teachers, because so many teachers are
isolated in their classrooms, whether they are, for
us our home-schooling teachers, who are very
isolated in different homes. But also the teachers
in the classrooms often are in that room all day
and the only place they see other teachers is in
the faculty room and some teachers don't even go to
faculty rooms.
So, they would be open to that life
sharing; there's got a lot of release time to
teachers to be able to share. So, the opportunity
to do that in a platform such as that would be a
wonderful thing. You really have the
opportunity --
I think from the outside, there is this
imagination that teachers share a lot more than
they do. So the opportunity to do that tenfold
magnifies the learning that teachers can continue
to do that as they continue their career.
MR. WILEY: I want to say a thing or two
about the Open High School in Utah. And we talked
a little bit this morning about ways we're using
technology. Open High School of Utah is an open
charter school. And in our charter, we committed
ourselves to exclusively using open educational
resources.
So, in terms of teachers sharing items
as opposed to sharing lesson plans and resources,
we've done a complete textbook replacement, all the
material on everything you need to run the course
is what we're providing with open source for
everyone.
So, working in a manner that's not
dissimilar from the University of the People, we're
going around and finding material, aggregating,
state standards, building standards identifying,
matching, building content, putting that together.
And also, I have a mission, not to
scale our individual school out to the world; but
when there's a completely open curriculum available
and a charter application documents and budgets and
things are available, other people just pick up and
start these schools. We don't have to be involved
and the curriculum is free, things like that.
In addition to the personalization and
the individualization I was talking about earlier
today, the point of open source.
MR. BURNHAM: Dave brings us back to
what the theme was for the last hour, which we
didn't really touch on, which is the relationship
between everything that we have talked about and
where we are today.
And by putting the template out there,
it is going to create a vehicle that will allow us
to begin to influence the current educational
system. There will be leakage that we talked about
and people educating themselves, many of the tools
we have talked about.
I would like to put Chris on the spot
here for a second. If there is another vehicle
that we might be able to use. Chris is the
architect of Obama's "My Obama" website, and that
was a very effective political advocacy vehicle.
And the question is, If you think about
the Web as a platform, is there any way of creating
a credible and effective political advocacy towards
trying to address the failures of the current
educational system?
MR. HUGHES: I think it's interesting,
listening to the conversation, particularly the
second-half of it. I think essentially what we're
talking about here, this service market online
which happens to be in context of education,
because that's what a lot of people here specialize
in. And there are good examples of people starting
to solve the problem.
So, that is one piece of a much broader
market of different people who have different
services and you can frame that as education or any
other services that someone is trying to provide.
So, I feel like that's the direction
things are going in. But if that doesn't
deconverge, then I think that, the question you are
asking about political organizing, or whether or
not that has an implications for it -- I think it
does, but it requires a sort of a historical,
cultural moment when people realize when things are
broken.
And that's a question that I don't know
when it comes to education. It seems to me pretty
clear that the way that kids are still being taught
these days, and the fact that there's a computer
that's over there in the corner of the classroom,
but that's only the extent to which technology may
play a role, it sort of seems like it is broken to
me.
And I feel like, as more and more
people understand that something isn't right, that
we are using technology all throughout the day but
our students aren't using it on a hands on way in
the classroom; then it opens up a real opportunity
for starting integrating office tools that people
are starting to develop now, actually in the
classroom, in students' hands.
MR. WENGER: Could you build a novel
item community of events as part of the question
that brings this dialogue, takes this kind of
dialogue and makes it -- a more actual change
function?
MR. BURNHAM: The school board is the
issue right here, that's the mechanism. And the
politics of the school board, and you were very
clever in figuring out how to create advocacy for
national politics -- but is there some way that
these issues to the degree that parents have more
direct access to a conversation about the issues
and that could be used to create leverage, to
create change?
MR. HUGHES: Yes. I think we can create
that infrastructure and people would use it. I
don't think it's enough. Until there's a cultural
movement, until it's understood in a broader
content that our schools aren't working.
I think that people are disappointed,
but I think it's very different when -- I think
that's really required for any type of real
organizing infrastructure to matter. But as far as
whether or not you could create it, unless people
care about it, I'm not sure of that.
MR. JARVIS: Will it ever come? Fred
was proposing the revolution of the importance of
home-schooling. You're saying, and I think it's
right, unless there's enough of a movement, the
rest doesn't matter.
Are we ever going to get there or?
MR. CAULFIELD: I think ultimately, the
first drop to fall is going to be cost -- if you
look even at open access political movements where
some inroads are being made as, Hey, we paid for
this research, open up this research.
And I think that's -- if you're looking
for -- like this is a niche crowd. We want to
change education in terms of what it does. But I
think the broader movement that we're going to see
is -- people talk about the tuition bubble, and
we're really up against the upper bound of being
able to do this at all at the price that we're
hitting.
I think as that bubble bursts, the
important thing is there are numerous ways to
address the expense of education and some of them
are detrimental to how education is done. And some
of them create opportunities for a better
education. I think the real challenge is going to
be -- as we start to bump up against that cost,
especially in hard economic times, how do we steer
that?
And there's some models around the
world in terms of government involvement with open
resources, sharing, things like that, that we could
emulate. But there are also the ways of political
camp, just slash it, just remove, keep the system
the same, just remove a bunch of pieces.
MS. BOYD: One of the things -- I was
reading about the history of education in the U.S.,
And It's funny how downturns in the economy always
involve upturns in what happen in schools, and we
get more motivated and more directed about it. And
we're seeing it in terms of energy about people
thinking of teaching as a stable, reasonable job
and all sorts of things.
MR. JARVIS: Our applications are up
40 percent.
MR. CAULFIELD: For example, in open
courseware, one of the opportunities here, I think,
is that you have a lot of state universities. You
have a lot of people in state universities on
taxpayer dollars who are creating curriculum. And
so, there is a question there, if we are paying the
bills that -- those curricula, and we could more
broadly disseminate it and educate more people for
less, then --
MS. BOYD: Can we actually explicitly
target the places where things are cracking the
worst? We're seeing these two different ruptures
happening simultaneously. It's super intensive,
it's so local, there are so many different effects.
So, can things specifically go after an ideal test
that...
For example, you're watching
California's state budget not balance. So, is
there a way in which you actually come in and use
as an ideal intervention point around community
colleges, around schools or --
MR. CAULFIELD: I think that's kind of
what David is doing -- it's on a state-by-state
level. Eventually, some state -- because I don't
think it could be on the school board level, I
don't think it's going to happen in K-12 because
it's 9,000 institutions.
So, you can't do it on the K-12 level.
But on the state college level or on the state
charter school level, on the state level things, if
there is a successful model and it's done below
cost, I think that's where it is going to happen.
And if someone proposed something in California
right now, yes, that might be a perfect example.
MR. WILEY: In the State of Utah, I can
tell you, if we got this curriculum rolled out.
And the kids will get it this fall and are going to
make a YP at the end of the year. The next summer,
there's conversations about what to do with the
textbooks we have to replace and with the money
supposed to be spent on curriculum?
And there's a completely open source
curriculum, and we can show kids YP when they use
it. It kind of forces a lot of really interesting
conversations and that is a very strong secondary
goal. Obviously, after the goal of the kids in
school --
MR. WENGER: The curriculum development,
is that open course already as well in -- can
people contribute to that already?
MR. WILEY: The way you can contribute
right now, you help us fill the bag. We're
currently trying to identify all the resources
there and the state standard for writing. And
that's what we are doing right now. People can
contribute to that.
MR. WENGER: That in and of itself is an
open process .
MR. RESNICK: I think it's still be -- a
greater effort to understand the real problems and
challenges of education. We're looking at three
things to talk about, we observe three priorities
of health care, energy and education.
I do think, my sense as a general
consensus of the public, is they recognize that
healthcare as a crisis, energy is in crisis. I
don't think there's as much of an understanding of
what this group has that education needs to be
hacked. Somehow there has to be a better
education, to help us understand the billing
challenges.
MR. WILSON: Maybe not. Because when
the government goes about hacking something, we are
all toast.
(Laughter.)
MR. RESNICK: The government doesn't
have to hack it, but --
MR. WILSON: I think we have to put the
government out of education business. If we could
bankrupt those schools in that system, and create
something that's better, then we can beat it.
That's what happens when hacking --
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: I don't agree.
MR. GORDON: We need the eight-year old
vote.
MR. WILEY: Buckminster Fuller says you
can't make the existing reality obsolete. I think
there's something new that makes the existing
reality obsolete.
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: I really would like
to argue that you can -- also, in fact, the
revolution and state of the revolution from within
that existing system and build models that really
force them to change from within. And, otherwise,
you will not get funded. To fund education,
because you don't fund that.
MR. WILSON: I don't want to fund that.
I want to fund these kinds of people.
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: Exactly. But you
don't, not yet.
(Laughter.)
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: So, we will be
delighted to actually form a good strategy to how
things like this can get funded. But right now,
the way the funding goes to solve the crisis,
especially with this population that Dana was
pointing towards, those that are really in a crisis
and also the places where they are in a crisis and
the ability to fund it.
I think you have to reach people in the
school system because -- they don't have Starbucks
in their neighborhood. They have just a school
with high speed Internet and maybe a library with
high speed Internet. Most of them have dial-up, if
at all, at home.
And if we really want to reach them and
get that funded, you have to figure out that open
source participation from outside of the community
to contribute to those disadvantaged communities.
And I think that's a way of thinking about it, that
you cannot really just say "trash government."
Because government right now, they have
a lot of money. They may not tell us what to do,
but if we approach it right, we can take little
pieces of the fact that the $7 billion into wiring
the state. And what will we do with this?
MR. BURNHAM: Both extremes are --
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: I'm not extreme.
MR. BURNHAM: You're not extreme.
Fred's taking a extreme position. But I think what
David said, it's a really interesting point and
that is that we can force change by just showing
them the raw economics of alternatives, in a
situation where economics are real and meaningful
and there's not a lot to go around.
And that's probably the moment that
Chris is talking about. It may not be a public
perception moment, but in those individual
decisions, if we can get a great example out there
where you can do this more efficiently.
There's a problem with the notion that
we are going to fund the solution to this problem,
and that is that what was what Bing talked about
earlier which is the zero marginal cost
implementation. If David is right, then what it is
going to do ideally is drive down the cost of
education for everybody in a way that maybe
diminishes the opportunity for investment in that
space. But that's a problem for us.
MR. WILSON: Craig's List is in the
classified business. That's the opportunity for
us.
MR. KALIN: It's a $6 billion year
industry, the textbook industry. If you could get
a fifth of that, you'd be in pretty good shape.
MR. HEIFERMAN: I don't know anything
about education or schools. I recognize seeing
through the years, in the past 15 years, every sort
of big, big industry or big part of the world that
you really couldn't hack it, that -- like, who
would have really thought that YouTube would be
where it is relative to TV networks? Or Craig's
List to newspapers?
I think that the idea of things
bubbling up have -- seems crazy and farfetched
and -- they don't really cease to surprise.
My favorite Barack Obama line is that,
"We are the ones we have been waiting for." And
it's a surprise that that comes out of these
platforms like Dave's and Paul's -- and what I've
experienced at meet-ups is -- never thought that it
was a platform for education, but in fact, what --
that's sort of the base function that is actually
providing with -- all the people are going
to entrepreneur meet-sup, small business meet-up,
whether, you know, language meet-ups and moms'
meet-ups.
They want to learn about
entrepreneurship or -- some of these women say they
learned how to potty-train their kids at the moms'
meet-up.
So, this is not necessarily a
market-based model, like there's a transaction of
I'm going to teach it, I'm going to learn it. That
model is great, but it's just a classic history of
the human idea of it taking a village or just
people learning in the context of the community.
So, it's a long way of trying to say
that, I think, is the decentralized, emergent
systems and behaviors. They can hack at a big
system -- now, maybe that's in 20 years. Does that
fit -- I'm with Fred. I would look at things 10,
20 years from now, and I think there would be some
seismic shifts and we --
MR. SACKLER: I think this is important,
right now, with government-run monopolies, we get
to the very different beast of diving into private
enterprise for socioeconomic --
MR. KALIN: Because you're looking at
education, looking at learning, and the government
can't have a monopoly on learning.
MR. HEIFERMAN: No, they don't. But
they have a monopoly on kids' time and it's a
trillion dollars a year spent across the country.
So, I think there is a role for political action to
organize, none of which was talked about these
sessions, which is very critical if we're really
going to connect.
Because it's $500 billion a year run
through that monopoly which is politically-driven,
not marketplace-driven. And if we're really going
to impact it, we're going to have to act pretty
good at starting to nibble away at that --
MS. RHOTEN: I think it's also a matter
of getting examples out there which are
demonstrative. Right now a lot of what we're
talking about, TeachStreet has come up, and all
these different things come up.
We can't yet demonstrate a lot of the
ideas, which are important. I guess I
fundamentally believe in. But I think part of our
challenge --
MR. GRODD: I would posit that the
biggest problem facing K-12 right now is human
capital. It is talent, and it's not a great thing
to talk about. But having spent a lot of time in
the system and those who have -- there is a big
issue with the fact that the talent pool is not
deep. And I'm not talking about teachers, I'm
talking about principals, administrators, policy
people. People making a decision -- the most
important decisions -- in fact, our students, are
not necessarily people you would hire, and that's
the reality. And until we --
MR. BURNHAM: Is that in part because
it's not an inspiring place to work?
MR. GRODD: It's because the incentives
aren't there. My buddies graduated from good
schools, go to McKenzie, because it's prestige.
Like, who wants to go -- the reason I taught for
Teach For America, because that gave me a
prestigious way to become a teacher, probably I
wouldn't have had it not been for Teach For
America.
So, what Teach For America is doing --
there are few other places. What they're doing is
figuring out a way to get ambitious, creative,
innovative thinkers into K-12.
MR. WILEY: What is the stay rate?
MR. GRODD: It is high, 60 percent.
SPEAKER: Up to what period?
MR. JARVIS: For two years.
MS. FLEMAL: Teachers are underpaid.
The teachers coming to us are -- mainly teachers
who don't like being in the system. And the
teachers who are staying are largely underpaid.
They are staying because they are tenured and they
have protection. So, when --
MR. WENGER: When you tie all of these
things together, the questions are: Is the
existing system so badly broken that the time and
effort spent on it -- we've got to figure out a way
to get young people to start teaching in the
schools that are not working.
It's where we should be spending our
time or -- we can be spending our time completely
hacking the system by building new structures on
the side, either in the completely unregulated
model of the School of Everything, or TeachStreet,
or in the sort of shorter model of radically
different charter --
MS. BOYD: Again, it's a matter of
timing. I go back to the fact that the economy is
crap right now. You have an opportunity to
actually do a high-prestige, high-status shift
within the talent pool.
And this even happened with the tech
bubble. If you look at what happened when the bust
happened, unbelievable numbers of people in the
tech industry went into teaching math and computer
science at the high school level, and it actually
speeds the ramped-up CS at the high school level
because it was like all of this talent would be
like, Now I'm going to do something I can give
back, right. But whatever that narrative is that
you can leverage.
So, I think that there's social
service -- I think that we give them that -- this
organization is your investment. In trying to hack
education at a different level, it makes sense, but
there's that collective -- there's so many people
in this room. We have to go both directions.
And I do think we have to actually have
to work to think about that talent pool and to
think about a way, in the society -- that we reach
into the narrative around it. It's driving me
crazy about it all.
When women went to work outside of the
nursing and the teaching world, it basically was an
escape where you try to get out of education. So,
the gender politicking that happened in the 1970s
around education meant that we lost the prestige of
education in a whole different way that we don't
really like to talk about.
And now we finally have a whole
different gender dynamic in the workforce. We now
rethink the way traditional women's work and how
nurses and teachers and a whole variety of
traditional women's work are now considered low
prestige, even though they were always high
prestige when they were a women's only thing.
And so, there is that cultural
reworking that has to happen. And now is the time
to do that at the same time as a sort of hacking
culture.
MR. BISCHKE: I think your point about
talent, I think that's an interesting story...
There's a company in Korea called... Study. And
what they do is, they're one of the... schools
industry in Korea, but their top teachers currently
make over a million dollars a year. They sell out
sports stadiums -- it's called "Megastudy."
And they sell out sports stadiums. Ten
thousand people will come and they'll watch these
rock star English teachers. And I think that one
of the things that we like to think about is, How
do you turn teachers into rock stars? How do you
give them the attention, the appreciation that a
Mick Jagger, a Tiger Woods -- and it sounds
ridiculous right now, but there're starting to be
examples of that.
And then what happens is that a kid in
Korea grows up and sees that teacher on a billboard
when he's driving on the freeway in Korea, and he
says, "I want to be like that guy someday, I want
to be like that girl someday."
MR. WILSON: Jimmy is gone, but he told
me he's got one guy who teaches a CFA course that
sells out every -- there's a waiting -- there's a
queue to get into that guy's class. It's like 600
people sitting, you know, in an online education
platform watching this guy teach, and he's a rock
star. He makes a lot of money.
Because -- and I think the reasons why
education -- hacking education is not going to be
any harder than hacking media business... it's
about information, it's about talent, it's about
getting... out there.
I think you can actually infect the
school system from within, from things like better
lessons. When you start putting the power in the
hands of the teachers, start collaborating around
lesson plans, and you start to create teachers who
are stars because they make the best lesson plans.
All of a sudden they say, "Hey, you
know what, I'm a star." And then they're going to
start doing whatever stars in the media business
do. They say, Screw you, school, I'm a star. I'm
getting paid.
MR. JARVIS: Bob, Teri and I talked once
about that, that when you have those stars -- what
role was there for him. We talked about it, a
virtual distributed Cambridge model. He had a
lecturer and a tutor.
And to build on top of that is that at
a local level, you have the tutor who will work
one-on-one with the big-star lecturer. And there's
a new economic structure that allows the stars to
support -- because they have wide distribution; and
the tutor to support, because they have a different
relationship with the community.
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: And also the trick
is when you have a star teacher, it can also be
dangerous because the revolution could actually
make it contagious for other teachers in the same
school, for the tipping point to really happen.
So, you have to create an
infrastructure that really allows it to be
legislative. There are simple things where you
don't even think about -- a course number, I want
to do this Globaloria thing; right? What is the
course number that will officially allow me to do
this as part of what I need to cover?
And then these teachers show that, the
star quality of figuring it out, and then you right
away have to put five more teachers in the same
school, in the same star atmosphere so, they would
all succeed. Because one star teacher in school
will not create the tipping point...
So, there is a system out there and it
worked. The model that worked about it, that -- it
also, all the time, has to be working with the
legislature at the top, whether through funding,
through really giving it the credit that it can
work in a system and transform.
And also from the bottom, the students
has to succeed, show up, attend, get good grades,
perform really well. More teachers than one want
to do it if everybody wants to engage students, and
it all works together like that.
So, that star thing is complicated,
much more complicated than you think.
THE SPEAKER: You said that rock star
teacher had made a lot of money. There's really no
incentive for teachers to be rock stars, again,
because -- there is no incentive because teachers
get the same amount of money.
MR. WILSON: My point is, Jim's business
is professional education; right? So, that teacher
is in the free market system and is very valuable.
And he makes Kaplan a lot of money and he makes
himself a lot of money, and that's an open
marketplace model.
I don't think we will reinvent
education without getting rid of this monopolistic
system where teachers are undervalued and good
teachers get paid the same as bad teachers.
THE SPEAKER: And that's my point.
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: By the way, one
thing that we do, practically stipend all of the
teachers that work with us.
MS. SEGGERMAN: You didn't have hundreds
applications for fabulous teachers for your school?
Why do you think that was? A lot of people are
pointing out there are not good teachers around.
MS. SALEN: Because I think there's a
lot of amazing teachers out there. I think there's
a lot of amazing teachers stuck within systems that
don't let them be amazing teachers. And I think if
we provide opportunities for those teachers -- that
may be online spaces, that may be new kinds of
schools -- I think they are out there.
One thing that I -- I think we are
still stuck in this model that school is the only
-- we're trying to stuff all of the learning back
in school. I think we need to take the pressure
off the school and sort of re-imagine, Well, what
do schools do well, because they've been charged
with doing so much.
Can we take some of it out of the
schools, distribute it in the places where it is
actually done better and, again, allow the learning
to happen in most places? Because we can't fix the
school by keeping it, charging it with all that
it's still doing. It's busted. It simply cannot
support all of our expectations about what has to
happen there.
So, I think if we can figure out -- we
can figure it out, lighten the load, that might
help, and provide market opportunities for these
other kinds of innovations to begin to happen.
MR. O'DONNELL: It's feature creep.
MS. SALEN: Feature creep. Well, it's
got to do with what Diane had said earlier -- in
the early part of the century, there was this
configuration between home, church and school. And
it was understood that kids learned in those three
different places and it was really clear what was
learned in each of those three places.
And over time, the Web infrastructure
between those things split and all of it got stuck
back in the school. And so, it is too much. Yeah,
the features creeped into one space. So, yes.
MS. RHOTEN: The schools got burdened
with all of the responsibilities that were once in
a distributed set of institutions, and then they
got retrenched.
And so, they're burdened with all of
the big responsibilities but not endowed with money
to provide... we lost arts, we lost vocational.
And so, it's been shifted off, ideally, to these
other institutions who are struggling.
I looked at -- in this case of
New York, very, very hard to compliment and augment
what happens in the school. And simple things,
whether it's a virtual environment, they're finding
they can't get to the firewall in school, can't
augment... can't get standards in a way that makes
the chancellor happy; those problems, we are trying
to rebuild that network. That's the place. We'll
try to --
MR. WENGER: I want to go back to
John's comment on that. One of the key leverage
points would be to have more opportunities for
alternative systems to evolve. So, if there is one
political thing that could happen, it is the
political thing that lets more people create the
ultimate realities of schools more rapidly.
MR. WILEY: The charter movement is one
area?
THE SPEAKER: Well, it would be one.
But I think in the same way that the Internet
itself, as a collection of pipes and protocols,
provide free, relatively low-risk places to
experiment as an infrastructure, I think -- one of
the reasons we're doing this in open high schools
is because it feels like free educational content
is an important piece of infrastructure around
which these later educational innovations can
happen.
They're always paying for this per kid
every year, leasing access to it, renting access
from ...com or whoever. Starting something like
this is very expensive and there's a great cost and
risk there. So, content, I think, is one of the
most important pieces of infrastructure that needs
to be freely available to allow other these other
innovations to happen.
MR. CAULFIELD: The content conversation
get contentious, but it's important to note that if
you look at areas like the textbook industry, there
have been places where free market solutions,
albeit run through government-run schools, have
been just remarkably inefficient.
The inefficiency of when you consider
what is needed out of a textbook, K through 12,
even at college level -- and how much money has to
go into actually providing to these kids
textbooks -- it is kind of staggering. So, you
start to look at things like, in California, there
is a group of community colleges that are getting
together.
They're trying to put together a set of
open textbooks that can be shared among community
colleges. I think it comes down to this idea of
having this common infrastructure that's available
to anybody that wants to set up shop and teach.
But I think where the effort really should be put
into is developing this infrastructure, whether
it's physical infrastructure or whether it's
information infrastructure.
So that, if someone wants to set up
shop and teach, or if a institution wants to
transform how they teach, they can pool through a
common pool, and it's not this rival pool which is
creating this unnecessary expense and these
unnecessary permutations of textbooks and so forth.
Obviously, I'm biased here, being from
Open Coursework Consortium. But if I was going to
pick out a place where I think we could have a lot
of effect, it is in providing common sets of
materials open to everybody.
They either approach zero cost or are
free through subsidization of government, in some
way approach through one of those --
MR. RESHEF: Content is expensive.
However, when you look at the cost of education,
this is not the most expensive thing.
What I'm saying is that lowering it,
that says thank you, because you're enabling me to
use this free. This is very important. But the
main cost is the people, mostly teachers and the
administration and the building.
Now, if you want to save, you really
need to save on these. I think that looking at
teachers, there may be -- having less teachers,
maybe using the Internet more, maybe in the
classroom actually -- people that cost you less but
are more effective in doing other things than
teaching the student, I don't know, different ways
to look at it, that's the way to lower the
expenses.
MR. CAULFIELD: My point is kind of
along the lines of what you're saying.
If you open up to everybody that base
level infrastructure much as of a courseware is
available to people that want to try different
models with it, then you can have experimentation
with those different models on top of that. And
the experimentation, you're right, the cost that
you save by making the content freely available is
not necessarily your big savings.
But by enabling people to try different
models on top of that content, that's where you're
going to get the experimentation, that's where
you're going to get, I think, the new ideas in the
real -- in the hacking.
But you need that first level because,
again, obviously, if everybody had to come in from
the ground floor, build this up -- some people
around here have done that, but I'm sure those
people will tell you it's very expensive and very
challenging. You could make it less challenging by
building a common pool of resources.
MR. WILSON: Diana, what do you mean by
Text Shop model?
MS. RHOTEN: Are you familiar with Text
Shop?
I'm a huge, huge fan of Text Shop and I
feel like it's optimized for the downturn in the
economy, frankly. Text Shop is actually a
for-profit model, it's classified as a retail
model. But it's essentially a storefront place and
you go in and it's a maker's shop, essentially --
you can go in and you can build anything, whether
it's building up wood or building up metal --
MR. RESNICK: For fabrication purposes,
you go in and make -- you rent materials and that
should be a better maker. I think with other
people as well, it's not just the tools.
MS. RHOTEN: It's not as real, but
knowing about Text Shop and a line of advocating it
in everywhere I go. It is not -- it's really
thinking hard about the community aspect of it.
So, it's not just putting... into that space, but
thinking hard about courses, why they have the
courses, who teaches the class, who gets to teach
what. It's perfect... on Teach Street and people
are signing up. It's incredibly empowering --
MR. BURNHAM: But there are online
companions to the space?
MS. RHOTEN: We're working on the --
MR. SCHAPPELL: I never heard of Text
Shop. We have a knitting store that a friend
opened. I said, how will this work? And she has a
bunch of big sewing machines and tables and
fabrics. The place is packed. It's called
Stitches, in Seattle. And it's one of those like,
"oh, you're going to fail." To "oh, my gosh, it's
just happening with all these people, a huge online
community that are saying, I don't think -- I'm
thinking Text Shop, that would be awesome. At the
moment, you have to sign a waiver before you let me
on the chain saw.
MS. RHOTEN: Your point is good. We're
having a meeting this spring to think exactly how
to -- we're trying to help Text Shop from a variety
of angles. To bring in the legislators, to
understand Text Shop's economic development
innovation. To bring in stimulus dollars.
MR. WILSON: To teach or make stuff?
MS. RHOTEN: Yes.
MR. HEIFERMAN: How can we move further?
You know, Jeff and I are having second thoughts.
MS. RHOTEN: I just wanted to add we're
trying to getting the policy level, but we're also
really thinking about how do we build a virtual
aspect of communities. And Text Shop, should it
go, should it be successful. Well, eventually, a
network of a different types of...
MR. HEIFERMAN: Jeff and I talked for a
couple of hours, but the question of using dead
retail space for a new network of organizing
centers -- an entrepreurial effort, it can be like,
you know, new schools. I see that.
The number one problem -- there's been
two million meet-ups. The number one problem is
the space, space surveys. Starbucks won't cut the
open basement, the church won't cut it. Real good
surveys are a group of not three, four or five, but
kind of 10 to 20 people.
Like I said, how much did this space
cost? Can a group of parents that care about
coming together and making their school better,
just rent this space? Space simply doesn't exist
out there.
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: In New York, it's
very hard. But yesterday, I was in Winston-Salem
and in Greensboro and High Point. These are places
that are empty, no tobacco, no wood, no furniture,
no textile; huge spaces are available, waiting.
MR. HEIFERMAN: They are padlocked.
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: They're just
waiting for economic development at this time.
MR. JARVIS: We have the River Rouge of
Starbucks, you know, the world's largest. But it's
probably also that need a new second place; right?
People leave offices and jobs, they need a new
second place and there's a business there. And
Starbucks is good at coffee and mediocre at space.
You have the inverse of that.
MR. RESNICK: The school buildings
should be community centers, but there are all
these rules and regulations.
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: There's also
factories.
MR. JARVIS: Google would create a
platform -- thank you for the plug. Google would
create a platform that would treat it as a platform
where you can create business on top of this, the
space maybe. And then discussion on Twitter while
other people from the outside say that the space
should be free.
But if you want to reserve the space,
it would cost you. If you want the broadband, it
would cost you. If you want the social services,
there are maybe ways to make a good business of
this. I think, Fred, we will be putting it before
we know it.
MR. SHEFRIN: There's a start up in
Seattle. They're building a platform including 50
others just like that. But they're creating a
platform for people to list their rooms. The
companies can list their conference rooms, they
have somebody to manage them. You can choose to
have overhead projectors, coffee, any amounts that
-- you basically --
MR. HEIFERMAN: If anyone wants to
develop that business as a retail developer, we'll
license the name.
MR. WILSON: You know, Rob, you have
done this right now. You did this with Etsy's
offices in Brooklyn. And then you did it again in
Red Hook, where you actually put in saws and --
MR. KALIN: It's a 9,000 foot work
space, but a space to make stuff isn't enough...how
to make a living. And education isn't available in
Text Shop... through board here. There's a huge
space in Brooklyn, they have something --
What I'm trying to do is create what I
call Parachute, there's thousands of Parachutes
around the country... with a name in it. And the
stuff made by the Parachute, you have a little
Parachute icon and a number. You can go to
Parachute and look at number of it, see where,
what, you bought the name. This shirt has a little
Parachute in the back and 101.
But each one of these Parachutes can
have a variety of resources. You can have this
studio space or it can have sewing machines. You
can have Text Shop. And it all gets listed in the
directory.
But I've found landlords who were
interested in giving free, low rent for these large
spaces. And I know three such landlords. One who
owns half of Kingston. What are you buying... in
upstate New York.
And they want to economically
revitalize these towns by putting these Parachutes
in them. That's one of the group of projects I'm
playing on. There's a huge demand for it.
So, the demand for the education side,
this is as much about learning how to make stuff
and learning how to make a living.
Its like the aphorism, give a man a
fish and you'll feed him for a day; but teach him
how to fish, and he'll have fish for a lifetime.
We've got to teach them how to sell fish so they
can --
(Laughter.)
MR. RESNICK: And when the lake dries
up, teach them how to do something else, as well.
MR. CAULFIELD: And teach those people
how to fish.
MR. KALIN: Teach them how to teach
other people how to fish. There's more to life
than eating and fishing.
(Laughter.)
MR. GRODD: I'll say one thing about the
monopoly issue. I think that is the fundamental
issue, sort of the detriment to creating a good
school culture in K through 12. And I think a good
school culture is key to the teachings and
learning. And so, I think the only way to hack the
monopoly is through competitions and creating good
schools and giving parents a choice.
So, the charter movement -- and I think
the charter school is doing a lot of good stuff.
Whether or not it can scale it is a good question.
I'm not convinced that it can.
MR. WILSON: Stop there. You can't
scale because there's not enough charters out there
or there's not enough people?
MR. GRODD: There are the schools that
get a lot of press, sort of these incredible
schools with really high student achievement, based
on standardized tests, in the narrowest sense of
the term. Is the system there in place which you
can tell the system, but it's the people
implementing the system. You will find people like
me, 20 something, Ivy League.
MR. KALIN: But that's the old system.
If you reinvent it to what Dave Wiley is saying --
that human capital problem, and you will be able to
scale.
MR. GRODD: I'm talking about my current
charter.
MR. BURNHAM: What Rob is saying is
that -- well, I don't know what Rob is saying.
(Laughter.)
MR. BURNHAM: The point is that if you
create an environment that's an inspiring place to
work, that's attracted to a 20 something from an an
Ivy League, where it's a meaningful way to invest
your life and not become a drone in the bureaucracy
where there's a lot of uninspiring people
surrounding you, then there's a real chance that
you'll solve that human capital problem, as well.
MR. HEIFERMAN: It's how do you appeal
to the 98 percent of college graduates who are not
graduating from Ivy League schools and turning them
into great teachers by letting the best practices
emerge through systems like Alex's?
And in general, my take from Fred's
point was the rock star. The rock star teacher
isn't about teaching at Yankee Stadium like the
story over here and making a million bucks. It's
about having their reputation in the teaching world
be the rock star, because people are using their
lesson plan, using their --
MR. GRODD: We are trying to do that
without a platform to do it, but we're arguing
that.
I think charter schoolss, the reason I
don't think their current scalable in the current
form because is they're currently driven by 20
something, Ivy League types for two for
three years.
MR. SACKLER: And so, High Tech High is
a 2,000-seat school as an extension of their
program. It's going to be an interesting
experiment.
MR. WILSON: I think if we're going to
do political advocacy, I think we should try to
make it legal for kids to opt out of classes in the
public school system that suck, and take the
classes online instead and be able to get credit
for that. In that way, my kids would opt out --
either you send a kid to the private school or the
public school, you can't opt out on a class by
class basis.
MR. JARVIS: That's the voucher system.
MS. SALEN: That is happening. There's
a school, a public high school called the I School
opening this fall. And that's their model, that
kids are able to take online courses as part of
their course work. So, that, I don't think that is
a dream, that's a reality. That's happening now.
MR. WILEY: In Utah, at our charter
school, we're not allowed to require students to
attend more than three-quarters time. They can use
the rest of that time to take online classes or to
go to a second school --
MR. WILSON: And they can get credit for
online classes?
MR. WILEY: Yes.
MR. WILSON: I don't think that exists
in New York.
MS. SALEN: It is. The high school
does.
MS. FLEMAL: The teacher is
intrinsically rewarding or somehow recognized or
somehow empowering for you. And typically what
happens, and this is a story I hear over and over
when I'm interviewing teachers for the private
jobs, is, "I'm a good teacher, I do a great job,
and what happens? I get all the difficult cases
put into my classroom. I get all the tough kids.
I have got 30 kids now in my classroom and 25 of
them are the problem kids. After three or four or
five years, I'm beaten down, I can't handle it
anymore."
So the best teachers are the ones that
get all the problem kids, and the least capable
teachers are the ones who don't. Those teachers
aren't being rewarded. Whatever you want to call
"being rewarded," whether it's a pat on the back,
whether it's a showcase, whatever the reward is,
theyre not getting rewarded.
MR. KALIN: The system that does
succeed, the system that is the dominant system in
20 years, is going to be one that solves the hum
capital problem. When it create more teachers, it
will be a successful system.
MR. GORDON: I disagree. Here is why I
disagree. I'm going to disagree with numbers
rather than adjectives and tone of voice. I would
submit that an independent school of 15 kids per
class costs $30,000 a year tuition with the capital
cost of the school for free.
If you build in the capital cost of the
school and depreciate it over 30 years and you put
in the outside cost, I would submit a kid going to
an independent high school in a city costs $60,000
a year.
And those kids, about a third of the
teachers that they get are not good enough. So,
you can get a third of the teachers who are kind of
public-school-quality teacher for 60 grand a year
all in, and the public schools, not including the
cost of -- they don't include the capital cost of
the buildings, which they should, because most
public school districts should be selling buildings
now, in my opinion. But $60,000, we need to get it
to $5,000 a year to scale.
MR. KALIN: You're thinking inside the
current system.
MR. GORDON: No, not quite. I'm saying,
if you decide to do it with people and you go to a
school where there is one adult for every six kids,
that costs $60,000 a year, fully loaded.
MR. KALIN: If the teachers doing
nothing but teaching those kids.
MR. GORDON: No, if there's six adults
per student.
THE SPEAKER: But that's not a necessary
number.
MR. GORDON: Okay. Well, if you do any
kind of ways. So, yes. So, take it to 15 -- so,
you can take it to 30, I would submit. So, take it
to some number. You could take it to one, it's
$250,000. If you take it 50, then it's $5,000 plus
the cost of the --
So, to try to argue the numbers, I'm
saying I know really well independent school --
MR. KALIN: The music industry's kind of
a way on how much to record an album when, people
didn't have laptops, they could record at home.
MR. GORDON: I'm sorry. Try to talk
with numbers. I'm trying to take it with numbers.
MR. BURNHAM: Well, the way Rob -- the
disagreement here is, one is facilities-based and
one is not facilities-based.
MR. GORDON: Facilities plus materials
plus people; if you pay the people. So, we need to
get it to $5,000.
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: Why five?
MR. GORDON: Because that's the
number -- I think that's the number that the State
of California thinks they pay on average
out-of-pocket per student; 5 to $6,000. So, pick a
number or take -- who knows how many students are
per year --
MR. JARVIS: Who says we have classes
the way we have?
MR. GORDON: That's not the point to all
of this.
MR. JARVIS: Where the cost can come way
down, where the rock star teacher can teach
thousands with minimal support and get better
education out there; and the support comes from
fellow students and you get radically new models,
they're supported by frameworks to do things that
reduce the cost way down and make maybe a lot of
the space irrelevant.
MR. GORDON: Perfect.
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: But there's always
professional development.
MR. GORDON: We need to get the full
cost per person, about $5,000 of the US GNP that
can't afford arbitrage.
MR. JARVIS: We may arbitrage that.
MS. ALLEN: Why don't we just have --
why does space return in the conversation? Because
you're right. Everybody is talking about the
concept of space for the last 15 minutes, it's how
important it is.
MR. JARVIS: Open and flexible space
that people can use in various ways, that you can
hold a class at any way. You don't necessarily --
the community doesn't have to own --
MR. BISCHKE: I think there's some
courses that drive the cost way down. One of my
friends runs a site called Grocket, which is a
benchmark company, and they're focused on students
to learn. So, it's a game you play alongside other
people.
When you get the question all right,
the game moves on to the next question. When one
person gets the question wrong, the game stops.
Everybody discusses amongst each other without
knowing what the right answer is, what the learning
concepts are.
Now, that's something where there's so
much knowledge locked up in student's heads that as
we develop systems and software to allow students
to teach each other, you can drop the cost way
down.
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: But I think the
cost of virtual, even virtually nonphysical
professional development and training for and
innovation, when you have to take -- all the range,
from not very qualified or talented to the most
talented and faster learner type of instructors or
teachers to really scale is the largest cost.
You said "people," but I don't know if
you meant that. Even if you run a one hour once a
week session for people to come and learn how to
teach and learn in a new way in the system, even if
they don't end up in a physical space; that's from
my analysis of budget in the last three years when
we were running Globaloria, is the largest cost
item.
MR. KALIN: On the people side, why
don't you just require as a requirement to graduate
high school, you have to teach other people. You
show that you've learned best when you're teaching
something to other people. So, just require high
school students to teach --
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: The thesis on
teaching, on learning by teaching, but to teach
daily, a two-hour workshop, tech shop style that
we're talking about, where you really create a year
or two-year or three-year program when you start as
a beginner, you advance to the next story.
In fact, the programmatic way, it's not
something people just do. They may be very good at
it but they always need some training and that
training still costs money even if it's not
physical or virtual. And you have to consider that
in your numbers when you think about your very
creative idea.
MR. BISCHKE: I have a cousin with seven
kids who home schools them. It's like, the
15-year-old teaches the 13-year-old, who teaches
the 11-year-old, who teaches the 9-year-old. Rob's
point is right on which is, again, the best way to
learn something, to understand something, is to
teach it to someone else. And yet, in schools, we
don't do that at all.
MS. SALEN: Some of your training is
simply just -- the student who is teaching you is
also training you to teach the next student, so
there's some training involved.
MR. KALIN: And some people are better
teachers. It's also like some people are better
learners.
MR. JARVIS: I teach a course on
entrepreneurial journalism, and a business out of
this last term was a structure for teachers and
students to share video instructions in Physics
because there was a niche.
And then the community, if this works
and it takes off, will judge the best and worse and
easyest and hardest and then you'll have a platform
for more. That's one small idea and I'm sure there
are others here doing the same thing. The point is
that there is a business opportunity in that.
My fear is -- I'm on the one hand, I'm
jazzed by this, but on the other, I'm profoundly
depressed because my son is a Junior and it's
almost -- it's too late for him, I fear, and my
daughter is 12 years old and I watch her going
through the system and I don't know what to do.
And I feel like I've made terrible
mistake in saying that, yes, son, get good grades
because that's why -- because that's what we expect
in getting a good college and I'm touring them
around right now.
And he's a creator, they're both
creators and they're being taken away from
creation. And I almost feel like Rob would tell me
have them drop out tomorrow. My wife would kill
you but --
(Laughter.)
What I fear here is time, and what I
see happening in school boards politically is that
while you have the kids in, you care deeply; as
soon as your kids are out, that's somebody else's
problem.
Or while you're out of school some
people here care deeply for teaching; but the care
factor here, to get the critical mass to make the
change, I just fear, is not there yet. What we
need in great measure is P.R., is a movement, is
writing, is stuff.
MR. RESNICK: One model that I like --
citizen schools that started in Boston and other
cities as well, where it's using school buildings
in having people from the community come and teach
specialized workshops at the school, and
volunteering, people, architects, participate in
workshops after school.
And I think it's really getting people
who are engaged in expanding the things that they
do. They are expanding their role... So, this is
not a replacement for school. It can do some the
role that Katy was talking about, redefining what
the teacher needs to do and what the rest of the
community is being part of.
And I think the citizen schools' role
for new start-ups -- there's also a role right now
in the country, pouring out the possibilities for
the community services, public service, and a
lot... schools for 20 somethings, 30 somethings
after work all day at their investing banking firm,
law firm and people who still have their job, will
spend some time in the community school.
That's just one example. But I do
think that's an example showing how we can try to
reframe who it is doing it -- it's not just the
latch teacher, there are other people in the
community. But I think you need a whole collection
of other ways to engage the whole community in the
education effort.
MR. LOUGHRIDGE: I think there is a
really simple approach that maybe can be hatched
here now with some of the folks and their
talents -- I'm thinking of Chris -- I know in
Hawaii there's enough pain with how the public
schools are not working out.
I think it's harder to get into a
private school in Hawaii than it is to get into
Harvard literally. So many people want to get out
of that system. But there's a super simple tool,
SST, where you can get involved -- it's something
that the PTA can use, for maybe a goal setting with
teachers and principals.
I feel that the tough things that we
have now to effect change or problems in
accountability and transparency -- and if there is
a way to tackle that with a social networking tool
that's inclusive versus...
Some way to engage teachers and
principals locally, school by school, using this
tool, where a parent can sit down with the
teachers, administrations and say, "This is what we
are going to work on; because we have a problem
with math in your school or we want to bring in
robotics," whatever it is, just be a part of --
MR. HUGHES: I think that's a fine idea.
But what I'm more interested in is what tools can
actually enter the classroom to make it so that
students can learn from other students who are in
the same room or halfway across the world; or
engage with games that people have begun to
create --
How does that integrate with the rest
of the curriculum that the teacher or facilitator
can be categorized. I think that's where the real
paradigm shift is here now, where people can learn
from other experts regardless of their age,
regardless of their background, and be judged or
assessed on what they actually take in or what they
put out. I think that's where --
MR. BURNHAM: You have to get into the
classroom. I think what we're hearing about -- to
answer Jeff's questions about what do you do with
your children is, you begin to work around the
limitations of the classroom and you find a tutor,
and Fred's hired a guy to teach his kids how to
code.
That's the kind of perspective that you
can have when you sit in this room and you have the
education that you had and the resources that you
have. But I think that to the degree that we can
make these resources more broadly acceptable, what
Shai is doing, what David is doing and then begin
to make parents more aware of them. You can begin
to work around that.
I think the hardest problem that we
have is not whether or not the technology could
create real value inside the classroom; the hardest
problem is how you get it inside the classroom.
MR. KALIN: A million student march.
All the students get together and say, We're sick
of this education, we don't like it --
MR. BURNHAM: No school administrator
ever said that Facebook is now allowed on our
campus.
(Laughter.)
MR. O'DONNELL: In fact, the opposite --
MR. HUGHES: If you give everybody a $200
computer, not just the use of technology but the
new structured history lesson around whatever the
given topic is... not the major things that we
keep talking about, like force kids to, like,
interact with and tell me was that truthful, what
was actually, you know, bullshit, and actually make
all of the decisions and then integrate into some
type of creative work letter, say paper or
presentation of video or whatever.
But I think that's the challenge, it's
getting that technology in the classroom and using
teachers as being facilitators rather than -- which
is a whole paradigm shift from everything else.
MR. WENGER: When you think about how
much it costs to every student in the United States
a net book with full Internet access compared to
the cost of the AIG bail out.
MR. O'DONNELL: I disagree. I don't
think it should be in this classroom at all. The
worst thing I've ever done is teach a class in a
computer room where everyone is sitting in front of
a computer that's connected; because absolutely
nobody pays attention, they were just instant
messaging with their friends or whatever.
I think outside the classroom,
especially in situations where you are teaching the
kids how to access resources, the content, other
students who are learning the same thing, on the
off hours, when the teachers might not be able to
reach or wait for the teachers to reach them on
their own time.
Because in the classroom, I think it
can be a distraction; but outside, if there is a
support systems especially in situations where
maybe parents don't know the same language as the
kids in the classroom, they don't have the parental
support around the education, stuff like that, to
be able to access those resources.
MR. HUGHES: I understand where you're
coming from, and there's a debate raging around the
country about whether or not students should be
able to have laptops. I think the problem there is
just -- you just need to build a software that does
real time assessment.
So, if you have given a task or given a
problem or you're trying to teach a given topic you
should be able to know which of your students are
actually engaging with that topic or whatever
they're doing online.
MR. JARVIS: Or at some point it's up to
them. At some point they're responsible.
MR. HUGHES: I'm talking about younger.
MR. JARVIS: Graduate students.
MR. HUGHES: Twelve-year-olds who are on
Facebook. But maybe you have those different
channels where you also see software development so
you can assess what --
MS. HAREL-CAPERTON: I think that you
don't realize that most public schools don't have
computers in the classroom and maybe -- but also
they don't have it at home, and to answer your
question in this debate, the only way is to really
post in a place where teachers are looking, that
there is this innovation and what you're looking
for teachers to be patient about it and want to do
it; and you work with them and then try to advance
to get the principals and decision makers and the
school.
That's what we are doing and it works
really, really well; but you really have to make
sure that they have the bandwidth, the
infrastructure, the computers and everything in
order to work with them from within.
Once it works, then after a year the
school sees that something did happen, they may
actually -- whether it's writing for grants or
asking for funding to bring more computers, more
productivity, but they have to see that that
configuration is monitored towards the classroom is
happening.
And that is happening all around. It's
an old trick. And this is -- so far, my knowledge
is how innovation spreads in schools. The answer
to the question "how did we get it there" is really
to identify those teachers. So, not necessarily
techie but passionate as to what extra time to make
it work and demonstrate because they're excited
about doing something new. And that's really how
it works so far in the research.
MR. GORDON: Fred, to add to your idea
about the vouchers. How about the idea of about a
$100,000 check to a family who successfully gets a
kid a GED home school? Just thanks, and here's a
hundred thousand. That would probably create
activity.
MR. WILSON: Who is funding those
$100,000 checks? You and me?
MR. GORDON: We already are, Dude. With
half a billion dollars we're paying $10,000.
MR. WILSON: We're not going to get the
government do it; right? They are not going to do
it.
MR. GORDON: They already are. Instead
of doing it by credit, here's the only outcome we
care about -- we want the kids in jail until
they're 18 or until they're 16, and they're run
down jails and we want the GED. That's all we
really care about.
We don't care is they're smart enough
to vote, obviously. We don't care if they
understand science, obviously. All we want is a
GED and get the government out of it. Sell the
jails.
MS. ALLEN: A small anecdote on the
issue of technology in all schools and to
underscore the fact that any conversation on
education needs to take a whole bunch of other
factors into account, which are pretty absent from
our conversations.
I've served on a board of the
University of Chicago Charter Schools for a number
of years. We had to quit because kids were getting
attacked. First, we tried school buses so that
they didn't have to walk home, but that wasn't
enough and it's super expensive. So, it wasn't a
sustainable program, just because of various social
factors.
MS. FLEMAL: I live for technology, but
I'm not sure that it is worthwhile putting it into
any more classrooms.
MR. KALIN: Technology is the software,
not the hardware.
MS. FLEMAL: And you have to keep
updating the technology instructors. What I do is
tell kids -- I keep sending people to the Apple
store, that's where I send my students. "Go to the
Apple store and sit there for free classes and you
will get the most up to date instruction." I'm not
sure it's worthwhile.
MS. SEGGERMAN: I always ask, why does
education seem to be the last thing we're going to
get a handle on? Technology seems really well used
in the corporate sector, in health corporations,
the military obviously knows how to do it, politics
is starting to totally get it.
Why, when most of us are parents, we
care about education, why is it that technology and
education as a marriage is like the last?
MR. WENGER: That may be the perfect
way to wind up. I think what they refer to is that
the hacking that is taking place is taking place on
the outside and that's, I guess, where innovation
tends to come from, largely.
And the reason, I think, that the
school itself is going to be last place it takes
place, is it's the system that's the most tightly
controlled by lots of different interests; and that
slows down innovation because the big system and
the innovation doesn't fit inside the existing
system and the system changes slowly.
MR. SHEFRIN: I think this idea of the
inside and the outside is really critical and I
think the role of education really is to make a
porous wall between those things. That's what
schools and education really should be about right
now.
We're living in a time where we have
access to all of those things, and we're moving
back and forth. So, what's happening on the
outside needs to be able to move in a revolving
door and be brought into the inside and back out
again.
And I really do think that's the role
of education. And I also want to say that lots of
conversations today were about what's happening in
the public schools and also at that level of
education. And I think the next teachers, to think
about teachers as innovators, innovators as
teachers in the relationship, the paradigm between
those two things.
And what happens all the way through,
the next teachers and innovators are the kids in
kindergarten right now and the kids that are
graduating college right now.
And what the continuum is between that
whole range I think is critical to be able to
understand and to know also that it goes both ways,
that it's not just kindergarten up to college, that
that learning goes back and forth in a continuum.
So, I do really think that the inside,
outside -- as the outside becomes more acceptable,
things that would happen in the after-school
programs and what students and teachers have access
to now are easier to fold back in in may ways.
What the classroom is, the idea about
what the classroom is, is the real question, what
is it, where is it, what happens inside and then
outside of this and maybe to not be able to think
about inside and outside as two separate worlds.
So, I think a lot of what needs to be
happening in education is that what happens to the
students is, they are finding a way to be in the
world that's meaningful. And then I think the way
we begin to think through these things is what
makes that happen and then tell the students to
really empower so that what happens is also
initiated from them. We have to find a way to do
that.
MR. WENGER: We have promised more time
to talk in smaller groups. I want to thank
everybody for being here but I also want to
encourage everybody to continue the conversation
with the part of the group or on the Wiki or just
through connections established today. I think
that's how ultimately we will carry out the
ultimate hack of education, creativity in all of
us. Thank you all.
(Time noted: 4:10 p.m.)
(Applause.)
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