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(2009-03-06) Union Sq Hacking Education Event

Union Square Ventures is having a "Hacking Education" event today. My invite must have been lost in the mail :)

Jon Bischke will be there, and has a great piece written in preparation. Almost all of the money currently being made in the space is being made by people enabling the wronger things to be done righter. And good rants about Credentialism.

  • hmm, dubious about this part: Wanna guess what the most in-demand skill on ODesk was in 2008? Word Press. How many people are teaching kids how to use Word Press effectively? We need to re-think how we teach and learn in an enviroment where the only constant is change. Note that link that was the biggest grower for the year not the highest-demand: items with higher demand were: Joomla, SEO, and CSS (actually, there are lots of skills with higher demand, they just weren't included at all in the table of top-10-growing skill). And that seems a bit Vo-Tech, at least at the High School level. I Commented.

You can follow in Twitter. It's the hot Hash Tag Of The Day. They even had the feed onscreen in the room (Back Channel). Only 3-4 people had laptops open; any other twittering was done by Mobile.

Attendees include : Danielle Allen; Charles Best (Donors Choose); Jon Bischke (Edu Fire); Danah Boyd; Asi Burak (ImpactGames); Brad Burnham; Gaston Caperton (College Board - Advanced Placement); Mike Caulfield (Open Course Ware); Nt Etuk (Tabula Digita); Jose Ferreira (Knew Ton); Teri Flemal (Quality Education By Design); Bing Gordon (EA); Alex Grodd (Better Lesson); Idit Harel Caperton; Scott Heiferman; Michael Horn (Innosight Institute); Chris Hughes (FaceBook, My Barack Obama); Jeff Jarvis; Lewis Johnson (Ale Lo); Steven Johnson; Rob Kalin (Etsy; ParaChutes); Bob Kerrey; Mark Loughridge (CreativeAcademies, Avatar Reality); Paul Miller (School Of Everything, School Innovation Camp); Charlie O Donnell; Nancy Peretsman; Shai Reshef (University Of The People, Cram Ster); Mitchel Resnick; Diana Rhoten (LearningNetworks; Hybrid Vigor); Ken Robinson; Jonathan Sackler (Conn Can; Revolution Learning); Katie Salen (Quest To Learn); Dave Schappell (Teach Street); Suzanne Seggerman (Games For Change); Jessie Shefrin; Jeff Shelstad (OpenCollegeTextbooks; Text-Book-s); Brian K Smith (Informal Learning); Tom Vander Ark (Revolution Learning); Albert Wenger; Brian Willison (PIIM); David Wiley; Fred Wilson.

Jeff Jarvis quotes Bing Gordon (link ): Teachers are the bank tellers of the 1970s. (Meaning we'll eventually be happier using our computers/ATM-s.)

Rob Kalin announces his new thing Parachutes Org.

Lots of talk about space design changes needed to schools and libraries.

Fred Wilson has a follow-up post. Some good bits on Home-School, Text-Book, etc.

Mar20 update: Fred Wilson has the Transcript, but it needs work.

May10 update: Brad Burnham summarizes the transcript from his perspective.

  • David Wiley broke education into these components, 1) content provisioning, 2) research - conducted, archived, and disseminated, 3) help provided to a student with a question on the content, 4) a social life, and 5) issuing credentials. (Per below, he's leaving out Day-Care as a component.)

  • Bing Gordon dropped a bombshell just before lunch when he proposed that we should work to drive the marginal cost (not price) of education to zero.

  • Danielle Allen: I've served on the board of the University of Chicago Charter School for a number of years. We had to quit handing out Lap Top-s because kids were getting attacked.

  • Fred Wilson: the problem is that the whole economics of that physical space breaks down as (students) opt out (of parts of traditional campus based education). Maybe this is just what we're going through in other industries... that they get crushed by the organizing efficiencies of the Internet. But I don't know how to get across that chasm. His point is that any "new" model that is physical may be doomed because it's capital-intensive. Other people there noted the importance of the physical service (Day-Care) for many families, and Bob Kerrey noted the political realities (esp in Public School Governance). To me this comes back to recognizing that one solution doesn't have to apply to all categories of students.

  • I Commented that I wish the event had included: Liza Sabater (Home-School-ing parent); Michael Strong; an UnSchooling advocate.

    • Brad replied: Teri Flemal who runs a business providing support and infrastructure to parents in New York City who home school their children did provide that perspective. If you go to the transcript and search for Teri you will see some important insights that just did not make it into the drastically edited summary.

Update: transcript is available here

  • Ken Robinson: ...one parent of the current system of education is industrialism. But there is a second parent of education, which is the intellectual culture of enlightenment, which is a view of intelligence that reduces intelligence and affects a certain type of deductive reasoning.

  • Rob Kalin: You know, there's people who just get rejected in the system. You can't go through it and they find other paths. And with the Web nowadays, I think there's never been more opportunity to find these other paths and connect with other people.

  • Jeff Jarvis: I was wondering why education does not have - like, Goog Le or 20 percent rule, that people use 20 percent of their time to create something and that education becomes an Incubator for that creation.

  • Danah Boyd: My feeling in a lot of education is that you may not be preparing people for the skills of service class labor -- although there's certain things that are done there -- but giving them the tools to be creative when they want to be creative in their personal lives; to create as a form of art or a form of fun, the things that they can do when they're not working 9:00 to 5:00.

  • Alex Grodd: The goals of the students, I think it's pretty universal, based on my experience with the students and teachers, is to be cool... Teachers invest so much time, so much energy trying to manage a class, and by the time they've done that, there's so little energy to actually differentiate the instruction, personalize instruction. So, I think that, to me, when thinking about, how do we really get into the core of the transformation, part of that is how do we create systems of discipline, whether it's sort of top-down, sort of authoritarian model that a lot of charter schools I've taught in use, and a lot more intrinsic sense of community. And it has got to be both and it's got to be on the table.

  • Lewis Johnson: The periods of my life when I actually felt in my educational development that I was kind of, the most formative periods, they were periods where, for whatever reason, I stumbled into a peer group where the cool kids were the smart kids. It's kind of an intrinsic reward of the group to be smarter and to be more passionate in some way, to get to Sir Ken's idea, that the group really rewarded people who really got obsessed with something and has something, whether writing plays or write short stories or doing art or whatever it was. And when you get to -- well, I think about a parent and I just try to think about how I can draw my kids towards kind of social groups, where there is that intrinsic award, you're clever, you are at the top of the pile, because you've done that, that's really smart.

  • Steven Johnson: But the most important thing about that was, I think I learned how to be obsessed with things. There's another way of saying that, which is passion. I got obsessed with these things and I had a series of stages in my life where I got obsessed with something else. And I just immersed myself to learn as much as I could. And it's that mechanism I used again and again and again in my professional life. So, how do you teach kids to be obsessed with things? I think one of the advantages we have with technology and particularly with games is that they have built-in structure, almost to a fault, as most parents would say. They have an addictive quality where people will just immerse themselves and become obsessed with them, something in that structure.

  • Danah Boyd: And one of the things I found out really quickly is that the people who are doing best at Brown (College Education) are those who figured out how to bend every rule available to them (Game Playing). They figured out what rule was there, they figured out how to work around it and how to leverage the different people to get what they wanted. And people view it as almost a game in and of itself.

  • Mitchel Resnick: I want to make sure we're not too drawn into everything being driven by some evaluation how well you succeeded or whether it's the highest score in the game or an award from the teacher (Extrinsic); just to give a different paradigm as opposed to some people are motivated by their high score in the game. But there's another paradigm that flourishes today, the maker (Hacker) community, the do it yourself (DIY) community.

  • (unknown): I'm going to plug the Scratch program that Mitch and his group created. So, we're doing an Experiment in Ha Waii, and I'd love to get feedback. We're finding kids to be very passionate about making their own games and there's all kinds of good learning stuff for these kids, measured quantitatively and also - this is what I made. This is where I want to go.

  • Lewis Johnson: More broadly, there is a set of metaskills that we want learners to learn. They need to learn how to reflect on their own knowledge or lack of it and to reflect on their own learning. And that is actually something which is not explicit anywhere into the curriculum or often in the classroom, but is an essential outlearning outcome, if you will. Some of that can be derived, you know, teachers can promote that, technology can promote that as well. But without that, then any technology you throw out is going to fail.

Edited:    |       |    Search Twitter for discussion

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