Continuations

Yesterday, I had a fascinating lunch with some very bright folks from the Gates Foundation. In addition to public health, the Gates Foundation appears to be ramping up its activities in education. A key topic at the lunch was the impact of the web on education. The discussion really helped clarify my own thinking about what the critical missing element is (at least so far): scale. Scale on the web is unlike anything that we have seen before. Facebook recently announced that they crossed 300 m...

That would have to be the updated chorus line for Sam Cooke’s Wonderful World for many of today’s kids. Sure, they use the Internet “like all the time,” (sorry) but it is surprising to me how little many of them seem to know about its operation. I am basing this on giving an evening class recently to a bunch young folks from the publishing industry and then yesterday spending some time with the teenage son of friends of ours (he is doing an internship with Susan at DailyLit). All of them use ...

We don't do very well with predicting the future because we fail to anticipate non-linearity. This is apparent almost anywhere you look. Most people when they hear that the average temperature of the earth might rise by a couple of degrees, seem to have a mental image of a slightly warmer summer and maybe a bit less snow in winter (if you live in a place that has snow in winter). Very few people associate such a seemingly small change with the possibility of deserts in places that are lu...

Over the weekend, the New York Times had an article titled “What Has Driven Women out of Computer Science?” which had the following fairly dramatic chart in it: It shows female college freshman interested in computer science at an all time low of 0.3%. I studied computer science as an undergraduate at Harvard from 1987-90. There are a few things that I recall that might have something to do with this trend. At the time, there was a single female professor in the department (Meichun Hsu). Othe...

Disrupting Class is a book by Clayton Christensen, Curtis Johnson and Michael Horn that applies Christensen’s theories around disruptive innovation to schools. First up a confession: I started this book twice and did not get past the first chapter! But after having read the two books mentioned in yesterday’s post, I decided to give it another whirl. As soon as I got into the second chapter I really began to enjoy it and from there on it was a quick read. The basic premise of the book is that ...

I have been having a great time thinking about education and learning. My interest in this topic started with a blog post I wrote on the Union Square Ventures blog about the transformative power of the Internet. The process that unfolded from there is illustrative of what is possible today. The initial post and subsequent ones (including ones by Fred) attracted a lot of comments which pointed to interesting resources on the web. Through the comments I also discovered several books that otherw...

We have three kids in elementary school and yesterday I spent nearly 2 hours at Staples together with a bunch of other dazed and confused parents. The ritual of buying school supplies may have nostalgic value to some, but I find it appallingly inefficient. The ideal solution would be for the teachers to simply go ahead and order the supplies online and have them delivered to school. I suspect that if our entire school district signed up we could get a nice break from Staples. Short of that, i...

At the DLD panel on education – which was moderated well by Simon Levine from Accel – there was an interesting discussion about the role of teachers and motivation in learning. On one side was Shai Reshef, an education entrepreneur, who is preparing to launch a free online “University of the People." On the other was Alexander Olek, who has helped create a successful school program in Germany that is similar to the KIPP program in the US in that it emphasizes in school learning (longer days, ...

MultiplicationShooter1.0: I am a huge fan of MIT’s Scratch project. It is a visual programming environment for kids. Instead of writing code in a text editor, kids snap together templates to form scripts. The scripts are attached to sprites. Creating sprites is also super easy in the integrated graphics editor. Another wonderful thing about Scratch is that with the push of a button you can publish your project to the Web (where it runs as a Java Applet). My kids have created many projects wit...

Our kids are in a public school that is generally considered to be great (it better be, given the school taxes we are paying). Yet the math teaching is appalling compared to the teaching of English. In English there is a huge amount of repetition of basic exercises at every level. English is woven into other subject areas as well. Neither of these is true for math. There are ridiculous jumps from one level to the next. For instance, kids are introduced to subtraction and within short order ar...