Never let a good crisis go to waste. That is the adage that universities should take to heart as they confront the threats of the Trump administration. Because the reality is that universities have been lost for decades and require dramatic changes if they want to survive at all in the future. Here are a series of major issues that universities urgently need to address:Frontal teaching, high stakes testing, even traditional essays are all outmoded. The rapid progress of AI is making many of t...

A bit over a decade ago, Susan and I stumbled over a piece in the New York Times that announced plans for a “Free Global University That Will Be Online Only.” We reached out to Shai Reshef, the entrepreneur who had announced this audacious idea, and have been supporters ever since. “Talent is equally distributed, opportunity is not” is a great summary of the problem that University of the People is helping to address. And from those early days when it was really just a glimmer in the eyes of ...

I have been getting a large number of requests for help with internships. Many students either never got one for this summer or had theirs canceled. My advice to them is: create your own. Figure out what it is you want to learn, start learning it, write about it online and find others to join your effort. These days there are amazing resources online on almost any topic plus you can social networks to find like minded DIYers. I propose that everyone who pursues this path use the same hashtag ...

It is a common idea that we should learn from our mistakes. In practice though I see many people making the same mistakes repeatedly. I myself have found that it often takes me making the same mistake at least twice before I really learn from it. Leading a startup is about personal growth and mistakes are that opportunity for growth, so how come it is so difficult to do? The framing of “learn from your mistakes” suggests that this is entirely about a rational process. It is too easy to think ...

NOTE: Today’s excerpt from my book World After Capital continues the discussion of Psychological Freedom by examining how we can make ourselves free to learn.Freedom to LearnYoung kids ask upwards of three hundred questions a day. [122] Humans are naturally curious, and it’s precisely this curiosity that has driven so much of our progress. At the same time, our curiosity in some ways didn’t match well with the Industrial Age. If you want to employ people in a factory job that has them perform...

I am excited about a new open source project called idyll. Here is how Matthew Conlen, the lead author, describes idyllIdyll is a tool that makes it easier to author interactive narratives for the web. The goal of the project is to provide a friendly markup language — and an associated toolchain — that can be used to create dynamic, text-driven web pages. Idyll helps you create documents that use common narrative techniques such as embedding interactive charts and graphs, responding to scroll...

I recently listened to a talk by David Autor about employment and technology. He praised the high school movement as being incredibly forward looking for addressing the rapid decline in farm employment. When asked about what the equivalent would be today, David answered “vocational schools.” Now as it turns out my Dad was a teacher at a vocational school in Germany where the apprenticeship system has been maintained throughout the Industrial Age. I learned a ton from my Dad about technical dr...

Both individually and collectively we learn more from our failures than from our successes. Failures make us question our assumptions, successes generally don’t. I therefore welcome the hack of the DAO (even if I wind up losing the 0.5 BTC I had converted to Ether and invested). It is exposing a lot of assumptions and that is the path to learning. The hack will not be the end of smart contracts or blockchains. Instead it will be more like the early failures in aviation. They are what gave us ...

On Saturday, Susan and I taught our one day workshop called Learn To Commit for the second time. The event was organized by Makaela Kingsley from the Petricelli Center for Social Entrepreneurship. We had a terrific group of undergraduate women attend who showed up well prepared and were super engaged throughout the day. Having now taught this twice we will adjust the curriculum based on the lessons learned which includeBuilding your own personal web site is highly motivating. It is surprising...

This past Saturday Susan, our daughter Katie and I (with help from our son Michael) taught a one day computer bootcamp for women at Cornell. Susan, who is a Cornell alum, had come up with the idea a few months earlier as she noticed how many more male than female students showed up at hackathons. Ami Stuart who organizes tech events for Cornell liked the idea and did an amazing job pulling together the actual event which wound up being sponsored by both Ziggeo (Susan’s company) and Accenture....