A VC - Latest Comments in Hacking Education

Re: Hacking Education

fredwilson — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 03:47:02 -0000

My daughter sent me a text her second day at college about a new service we are looking at investing in. She said it was going viral all over campus. Her words to me were 'get on that one dad'

Re: Hacking Education

Barrett — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 09:11:28 -0000

Interesting article on the changing college landscape: http://www.washingtonpost.c...
A Virtual Revolution Is Brewing for Colleges

Re: Hacking Education

fredwilson — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 06:35:27 -0000

Good suggestion

Re: Hacking Education

daveschappell — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 19:48:44 -0000

Posting a link to the Hacking Education transcript (using Fred's earlier bit.ly URL), for ease of finding (may want to insert this in each of your/Albert's posts about Hacking Education):

http://bit.ly/eut25

Re: Hacking Education

fredwilson — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 17:39:29 -0000

I'll do that barrett. I have nothing against harvard.

Re: Hacking Education

Barrett — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 16:01:56 -0000

Just read this post again. Very timely for me as I work at Harvard Business Publishing in the corporate learning group and we are in the process of drastically changing our flagship product, Harvard Managementor. We just completed the business case and the research that went into it was very enlightening.

I believe that corporate learning is under going a sea change that mirrors some of the things you desire of the schools; collaboration, interaction, ratings, social learning. The funny thing about the corp. learning market is the existence of Learning Management Systems (LMS), that lock people into a traditional method of learning and stunts the ability to collaborate.

It is an interesting challenge trying to figure out if we can just bypass the LMS and use the SaaS model or will we have to build two products, one SaaS and one for an LMS.
Fred, if you are ever in the Boston area and can stomach seeing something Crimson :), I would love to talk to you.

Re: Hacking Education

fredwilson — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 08:36:11 -0000

The destruction will happen with or without me prokofy

And I agree with you about teachers, I think I said that they are the most
important part of the teaching equation

But we have to figure out how to do it less expensively and with more
control for the student and the parents

If that is technocommunist bolshevisim, then I accept the label

Re: Hacking Education

Prokofy — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 21:58:56 -0000

I'll bet I know a LOT more than you do about how broken the New York City public schools are because my child actually has to go to one. Do yours, Fred? Another child goes to poor man's private school -- the Catholic school system. Much better. But still, not enough of a challenge.

But your notion of applying all the sort of wiki culture/technocommunist thinking that's already destroyed culture, newspapers, the music industry, etc. -- and has urned out a badly-educated insolent and cynical generation of youth -- is hardly what will save the schools. Keep it away!

Games cannot teach children. Teachers can teach children. And books. Ideas. And the Socratic method. The Internet is a tool, nothing more. It's not true that "knowledge resides on the network". It resides in individuals -- individuals, Fred -- who learned and studied and thought in solitude with texts, not in collectives, and then passed on that knowledge. That really is how it worked -- for you, for anybody. Connectivism doesn't work; it's a fad.

Wikipedia contains "common" knowledge -- Andrew Keen is right about that -- and knowledge dictated by an oligarch as he explains. Not only is it filled with bias and errors and problems, only a handful of people really actually edit -- and make the decisions about controversies around -- the tens of thousands of articles. It's not the democratic institution you imagine -- it's the Politburo with as arcane and non-transparent and not democratic a process as the "democratic centralism" of the Kremlin. That's not the citadel of learning which should be the only source accessed by our children. It's *a* source, but an uncritical one that needs lots of challenging thought and analytical skills applied to it.

There's lots of ways that education could be changed without having to spend more money -- one key idea is to de-isolate the school building from the rest of the population, stop making it a literal armed camp. Let parents come in during the day to go to classes with their children. Let them come in the evening to learn, let them volunteer to help kids. Keep the library open and fill it more. Heating a building only to shut it down every day at 3 or 5 is ridiculous.

Every decade, we're subjected to some warmed-over theory of the last decade that has finally trickled down from foundations to disrupt schools. Ivan Illich. Fuzzy math. Child-centric education. And now silly wiki "hacking" education. Leave the schools along, don't impose your ideology.

I'm tired of reading about your desire to destroy institutions all the time, just because you have the money to actually acomplish this. It's morally and ethically wrong. No one has voted on having you do this. It's Bolshevism.

Re: Hacking Education

fredwilson — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 06:41:10 -0000

I am hoping for a tool that allows the community here to copy edit this blog

I understand and agree about the importance of grammar and spelling

Re: Hacking Education

JC Hewitt — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 12:16:53 -0000

Thank you for sharing your cogent observations. I agree with most of your points.

Hire a copy-editor for your posts to bolster the force of your arguments. I noticed more than one grammatical error.

I say this with all due sensitivity. I am not an editor. I am a freelance writer.

Academics will use any excuse they can grab hold of to dismiss attempts at reforming their institutions.

Inexpensive tools like the Kindle will be crucial to cut education costs and improve effectiveness, but the primary barriers that we face are legal and social.

Re: Hacking Education

fredwilson — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 15:20:12 -0000

We watched another of his videos at the event, but this one is great

Re: Hacking Education

Howard Rheingold — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 15:12:32 -0000

Maybe I missed it, but I haven't seen a reference in these comments to Mike Wesch's awesome video "A Portal To Media Literacy." I did see a link to his previous video "A vision of students today." Don't let the title of the more recent one fool you -- it's about inverting the old teaching as delivery of knowledge paradigm, using Web 2.0 tools and constructivist and student-centric teaching methods. http://www.youtube.com/watc...

Re: Hacking Education

Jon Sackler — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 13:01:31 -0000

To your first point, check out www.achievementfirst.org. AF is a charter management org creating great public charter schools in low income communities. They have the curriculum and data management piece down. The curriculum is well defined so teachers know what is expected. They do a computer-based formative assessment every 6 weeks to identify specific student remediation issues, and they act on that data. They also develop an aspirational culture where student achievement is cool. The result is dramatic -- within a couple of years, students who enter years behind grade level catch up. Visit the classrooms and you will see some inspired students. The kids read and write about 3 hours each day and demonstrate a sophisticated understanding of difficult material. The music program is outstanding. Town Meetings are like major sporting events, where kids cheer the winners of major academic contests (like the crowning of the King or Queen of Decimals, Fractions and Percentages).

Re: Hacking Education

fredwilson — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 10:15:10 -0000

Wow. That's awesome. Thanks for sharing it howard

Re: Hacking Education

Howard Rheingold — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 15:26:42 -0000

You should know about this: http://socialmediaclassroom... is the website for the social media teaching platform that was funded by an award from the MacArthur Foundation. http://socialmediaclassroom... is the online site for the course on virtual community and social media that I taught at Berkeley, using this platform and with the students enlisted as co-teachers and a methodology based on collaborative inquiry. http://socialmediaclassroom... is the digital journalism course I taught at Stanford using the same platform and teaching-learning methods. The students are co-designers of the course as well as co-teachers.

Re: Hacking Education

fredwilson — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 05:45:08 -0000

Thanks for those links

This is such an important topic

Glad to see it getting some more air time

Re: Hacking Education

the_infonaut — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 19:31:26 -0000

Fred,

Your post title lives on over on Jeff Jarvis' blog - http://www.buzzmachine.com/...

I think its great that you are looking at some of the opportunities in this space.

If there's one group who are comfortable with their position at the vanguard of the new technologies it is those who are in the education system at this very moment

Check out this amazing video for current students - http://www.youtube.com/watc...

Never before have the targets of innovation been so in control of the forces shaping that innovation

Re: Hacking Education

Joel Torres — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 09:55:39 -0000

Great information. As a future educator and father, it is great to see this movement beginning. The proper education is very vital to the success of our young children. Unfortunately, the politics involved in the education system focus more on standardized test scores and not on the knowledge that a child attains!

Re: Hacking Education

fredwilson — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 09:24:14 -0000

Good advice. For our 'hacking education' event in early march we have about half educators (teachers and adminstrators) and about half entrepreneurs and technologists

Clearly the solution is not just tech alone

Re: Hacking Education

csessums — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 09:13:48 -0000

I enjoyed reading your post. I do have a couple of comments though, that you may not like.

It is relatively easy to look at and offer advice to an institution you are not intimately a part of (think: armchair quarterbacking). I noticed that very few of the comments offered are by professional educators, people who work inside the system who, on a daily basis, experience and often work around the noted inadequacies. I think if you actually worked in a school or school system, you might be thinking about this issue differently.

Private enterprise can help by providing materials, however, real teaching and learning isn't only about materials. It's about teachers, as you wisely pointed out. There is a lot of good research which you probably have not been exposed to that might help reshape your thinking about addressing the needs of schools and learners. I recommend instead of assembling just businesspeople, that you also spend some time talking with expert educational researchers who can frame the issues in a way that could lead to some tangible results (just check with your friends at MIT for a start).

Schools and schooling will not be fixed by technology or more money. A school's success is directly tied to its teaching and support staff. The goal then is to figure out how to recruit and retain the best teachers, to weed out the bad ones, and reinvent the profession in a way that serves all stakeholders best.

Re: Hacking Education

Kyle Mathews — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 18:52:37 -0000

On this subject, Paul Graham's recent essay on the changing nature of credentials due to the increase in the number of small firms is quite interesting.
http://www.paulgraham.com/c...

Re: Hacking Education

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Re: Hacking Education

Realm Of Empire — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 03:20:23 -0000

This is such an amazing cause and I'm thrilled to see what you've done to help them! you know I was participating in their 29-Day Giving Challenge - it was so much fun! If you want to napsterize the educational establishment, focusing on availability of learning materials is helpful but not really "napster"-level disruption; there's already a plethora of freely available materials, and even if you personally do nothing further there's going to be even more such materials in the future. Kids were placed in classrooms for the retarded because of speech and language deficiencies! Think of how truly sick that was. They got speech therapy, and then A's! I'd love to participate in your event this winter if possible. I love that you are incorporating some of these ideas in your class. I love many of their professors and still buy a lot of them. After listening to two courses Greek and Roman history, our kids had no problems getting A's in history classes. These courses were way more interesting than the materials offered in high school. This pattern continued in college, because the lecturers are way better than most college other professors.I would even venture to say that I often learn more about technology, media, and culture from a day’s worth of shared information on my Twitter stream than from a day in the lecture hall. I think people with more money hang out here / know AVC (pun intended). And I thanks for all. keep up the work....!

Re: Hacking Education

Realm Of Empire — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 03:18:22 -0000

Re: Hacking Education

ari — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 00:02:06 -0000

I'm