A VC - Latest Comments in Donors Choose Blogger Challenge: Something's Wrong

Re: Donors Choose Blogger Challenge: Something's Wrong

David Fano — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 23:46:53 -0000

Perfect! Thanks again.

Re: Donors Choose Blogger Challenge: Something's Wrong

Oliver — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 15:51:06 -0000

Matt - Wanted to make sure you saw my reply to your note...I'm new to Disqus and not sure if you were notified since I replied to Fred's comment in this thread. Thx - Oliver

Re: Donors Choose Blogger Challenge: Something's Wrong

Oliver — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 15:48:14 -0000

Matt - I'm DonorsChoose.org's CTO and wanted to first off, thank you for answering Fred's challenge and helping these students!

Could you drop me a note at oliver (at) donorschoose (dot) org and let me know how best to reach you? I'd like to better understand the scenario you encountered so we can improve the DonorsChoose.org donor experience.

In short, every donor should be able to leave a msg for the classroom, regardless of whether they create an acct at our site, during the donation "check-out" flow. We do believe this is working smoothly in most circumstances.

So in connecting with you, I'm hoping to learn whether we have a bug in our check-out flow OR perhaps you were trying to leave a classroom msg in an interaction with our site that was distinct from your donation check-out.

If it was the latter, which is what I suspect, then your feedback will help us work the kinks out of that process.

Thanks for your assistance and thanks again for your generous donation!

Oliver Hurst-Hiller
CTO, DonorsChoose.org

Re: Donors Choose Blogger Challenge: Something's Wrong

fredwilson — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 12:43:57 -0000

I'll find out

Re: Donors Choose Blogger Challenge: Something's Wrong

kidmercury — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 11:39:19 -0000

lol, sounds great! i will let you know

Re: Donors Choose Blogger Challenge: Something's Wrong

Philip Baddeley — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 16:15:29 -0000

Looks like a donation has been taken but not sure! Well done to all. But I was not able to input my address in the UK - well, I don't think I did but see if I receive any post. Same debate about private and state schools in the UK and I guess all over the world. A good start in life makes all the difference. Has anyone else donated from outside the USA or have they not been able to? I presume that I am not the only reader from outside the USA!

Re: Donors Choose Blogger Challenge: Something's Wrong

fredwilson — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 14:48:40 -0000

Got it. I'll check it out

Re: Donors Choose Blogger Challenge: Something's Wrong

Dave Pinsen — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 13:07:26 -0000

I can imagine the first lesson one learns in a Goldman MBA: Make sure your alumni are ubiquitous in government. Maybe Goldman ought to offer an MPA instead.

There is another angle with MBAs, but no one has stumbled on it yet.

Re: Donors Choose Blogger Challenge: Something's Wrong

Dave Pinsen — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 13:03:21 -0000

OK, that makes more sense. I'm on board with your first paragraph. The other stuff sounds interesting, at least.

Re: Donors Choose Blogger Challenge: Something's Wrong

Morgan Warstler — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 11:39:29 -0000

BTW, I get signalling, but there's more coming. Imagine getting a Goldman MBA and earning $30k a year while you do it.

Re: Donors Choose Blogger Challenge: Something's Wrong

Ivan Kirigin — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 11:37:13 -0000

Yeah, I missed the meeetup first time through. You should record it
and give access to donors. That might be kind of hard. The long tail
of donor management should be easy though - not hard.

Re: Donors Choose Blogger Challenge: Something's Wrong

Morgan Warstler — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 11:28:01 -0000

K-8 needs to be public money and private schooling. Each student in needs to be worth the same dollar amount. Any and all institutions need to be able to compete for that student. After 8, we need to be training workers and corporations that will hire them need to be involved in that process.

But here's what I'm after: at 6 months old the kid gets his first TV remote control, a ball with different colors that light up. The colored clowns on the screen jump when he presses their color. Soon he sees only a blue clown and if he presses the blue on the ball the clown jumps. For the 10% who don't figure that out, a video is shown of a kid with the remote doing it correctly. We have now identified the "visual learners" and for the rest of the learners life, he will taught differently than say the TK learner.

Every toy sold needs an internal wifi remote that interacts with video lessons. We have barely begun the long transition to video based knowledge transfer. Two way video (backchannel video) will knock down most all walls, even the K-8.

Re: Donors Choose Blogger Challenge: Something's Wrong

Dave Pinsen — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 11:11:43 -0000

Again, that's going to have no impact on K-12 education. And it ignores the reason people are willing to pay so much in tuition at prestigious universities: for the signaling function. What you're advocating is similar to what Thomas Koch called for a few months ago in the Atlantic. As I pointed out at the time, he ignored the signaling function as well. In the real world, people don't hire Harvard alumni because they think Harvard is so great at educating undergrads; they hire Harvard alumni because they know Harvard only lets in the most intelligent students in the first place (with a few legacy, athletic, or affirmative action exceptions).

Decades ago, companies would just cut to the chase and give pencil & paper IQ tests to applicants, but Griggs v. Duke Power clamped down on that (some companies, e.g., Microsoft, have been known to turn their interviews into de facto oral IQ tests).

Re: Donors Choose Blogger Challenge: Something's Wrong

Morgan Warstler — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 10:57:24 -0000

I want to see $99 a month college:
http://www.straighterline.com/
blended with high end video lectures:
http://academicearth.org/courses/game-theory
AND all student questions posted twitter like along the time-line of the video. So that overtime the professor knows where his lecture fails, and he can begin to refine the video lectures 1,10,100,1000x - never again teaching live, never again answering the same question twice. Until there are only perhaps 3 lectures taught worldwide in Game Theory - those professors are millionaires, and all the other teachers have been fired.

That's what I mean by Napsterizing Education.

Re: Donors Choose Blogger Challenge: Something's Wrong

kidmercury — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 10:57:13 -0000

the plight of the K-12 students is really the plight of the parents. once you need two workers to get by financially, you have to find somewhere to put the kids. in comes government to offer the "solution" to the problem they created (two working parents are needed because moentary policy ensures perpetual devaluation of the currency).

in reality kids just need to learn a few core things and then can learn the rest on their own. society simply needs to give them the resources to find what they want to learn and the people they can learn from and with.

Re: Donors Choose Blogger Challenge: Something's Wrong

Morgan Warstler — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 10:56:15 -0000

Re: Donors Choose Blogger Challenge: Something's Wrong

Dave Pinsen — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 10:54:28 -0000

You can generally tell which communities those are by their average home prices. ;-)

Re: Donors Choose Blogger Challenge: Something's Wrong

Dave Pinsen — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 10:51:35 -0000

I can't see how that sort of thing is applicable to the plight of K-12 students. Look, as long as we've had public libraries, there have been opportunities for smart, motivated young people to educate themselves. The playwright August Wilson famously stopped going to high school and started going to the library instead every day. The autodidacts aren't really the problem in education though, are they?

Sometimes I think a lot of the misguided thinking on this subject stems from elites who didn't go to public schools growing up, so they assume most kids are like the ones they went to school with. Most kids don't have the aptitude or motivation to seek out a rigorous education on their own, and the ones that do are going to do fine without any charitable support anyway.

Re: Donors Choose Blogger Challenge: Something's Wrong

Dave Pinsen — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 10:46:44 -0000

He was soliciting donations for a charity from the show's protagonist and he was doggedly persistent about it. Below, Jarid posts a YouTube clip of his final bonus scene, that appeared after the show's end credits.

Re: Donors Choose Blogger Challenge: Something's Wrong

jarid — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 10:39:18 -0000

Brilliant, Dave.

http://www.youtube.com/watc...

Re: Donors Choose Blogger Challenge: Something's Wrong

fredwilson — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 10:37:01 -0000

don't worry about it. just email me when you are in NYC. i have got to meet you Kid.

Re: Donors Choose Blogger Challenge: Something's Wrong

fredwilson — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 10:35:11 -0000

yup. but the good news is after October, no more begging until August

Re: Donors Choose Blogger Challenge: Something's Wrong

fredwilson — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 10:34:25 -0000

great point on UX. they have been making it better and better. but they can still do more.

Re: Donors Choose Blogger Challenge: Something's Wrong

fredwilson — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 10:33:52 -0000

it really worked. i am stunned.

Re: Donors Choose Blogger Challenge: Something's Wrong

fredwilson — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 10:33:30 -0000

good points Ivan

i give all the ad revenue from this blog to charity. that's about $30k/year. so there are other ways to generate money to charity from blogs.

and i am giving back something by doing an invite only meetup for donors. i realize that is not very attractive to out of towners.