Continuations

For a couple of years now I have been complaining to folks in the Harvard administration that the school is woefully behind when it comes to embracing the Internet. So I was thrilled to see the announcement of the edX initiative with MIT yesterday. The two combined with a $60 million commitment will make a formidable force in higher education on the Internet. For people everywhere who want to learn there is an exciting competition starting between some formidable institutions with Coursera (P...

This morning I am meeting with the principal at our kids’ elementary school. I am hoping to convince him that touch typing is more important for the kids to learn than good hand writing. When I look at my total output these days, a tiny fraction of it involves pen and paper. But I do write a lot every day on a computer keyboard. I find that writing blog posts, answering emails, putting together presentations (and most of all coding) all benefit greatly from my ability to touch type. I did not...

A little while back I wrote a post describing how scale is the critical challenge for education on the web. I was reminded of that on my trip to Berlin, where I met with a couple of online education startups. Both of them have interesting (and very different) approaches and both of them are thinking hard about how to get to scale. The key questions they currently face are “whom to charge” (teachers? schools? students? parents?), “how soon to charge” (right away? later?), and “for what to char...

Since we held the Hacking Education event last year, I have continued to look at education as an area that will be deeply disrupted by the Internet. I recently cited the $7B or so annual college textbook market as a prime example. One of the trends that will contribute to this disruption is the still small but growing movement against getting a formal college degree in the first place. I am excited to read Anya Kamanetz’s upcoming book DIY U which is all about this trend. Until it comes out, ...

Andy has a great post over at the USV blog announcing our investment in Codecademy. Knowing how computers work and how to program them I believe will be quintessential knowledge for everyone. It is shocking to me that I had to enroll my kids separately to have them learn typing. While they have learned a bit of Scratch in school, it has been an afterthought as opposed to being integral to their curriculum. That’s why I am so excited to see the emergence of so many resources and services that ...

I love it when a plan comes together. The plan in question is the Edmodo Platform. When we invested in Edmodo in the fall of 2010, the company was just beginning to really grow its network of students and teachers. One frequently asked question was how Edmodo would be able to keep offering its features for free. I remember going to the ISTE conference in 2011 and having several teachers come up to me concerned that they would have to stop using Edmodo once it would start to charge. I assured ...

Couldn’t resist an attention grabbing headline here after spending yesterday morning with my daughter on the kind of homework that just completely takes the fun out of learning. In geography her class is learning about latitude and longitude. As homework they got a work sheet that made them look up about 15 cities in the US based on Lat/Long and write down the Lat/Long for another 15 based on a map in their social studies book (a ridiculously heavy tome by Pearson). It was an incredibly dull ...

Tonight I am giving a talk at the First NYC Digital Learning Meetup. The event is organized by the folks from Startl, which aims to support and accelerate the development of companies that apply technology to enable learner-centered education. I am very much looking forward to speaking, as “Hacking Education” has been a long-standing interest for me. My talk will be about the incredible opportunities that the web represents for learning and education, but also the challenges faced by startups...

My blog post for today is on “Innovation in Education” and you can find it over at the Union Square Ventures blog. Having three kids in school this is a topic that I care about personally not just from an investment perspective. Also think that education is an area in which the disconnect between what the Internet can help us accomplish and how (most) policy makers think about it could hardly be larger.

Last week I had the pleasure of teaching my first Skillshare class. The subject was “Bayesian Probability and a Theory of Life” and is one I am very passionate about. I hope that I was able to convey some of that passion but I can say for sure that I learned a lot: First, the saying that “you don’t understand something until you have taught it a dozen or more times” is definitely true. In preparing for my class and teaching it, I realized that my own grasp of some of the concepts was not as g...