learn. create. share. reflect. iterate.
Treppin’ on Education
Education is a hotbed of entrepreneurship and innovation…said no one ever. Well, until recently. Over the past year, MOOCs have promised a revolution in how we learn; and yet they fail to deliver. As broad and intriguing as Coursera’s catalog is, as sleek and sexy as edX’s user interface looks, it seems these MOOC providers have only extended the capacity of colleges without reforming them. Furthermore, all efforts in this field have been fairly restricted to higher education, which is arguably our strongest educational institution. Where’s the love for primary and secondary school?
Our priorities seem to be inverted: we need stronger primary and secondary schools so more kids can get to college, and be better prepared when they get there — not stronger colleges for the kids who are probably gonna be alright.
The question is, what are the problems we can sustainably solve here? In higher education your market is simple: the people you’re selling to are the people using your product so the chicken and egg problem is minimized, and there’s a societal norm that college costs money, so charging for your services isn’t something that phases your customers — you just gotta get the price right. For primary and secondary school though, you wanna help parents, teachers, and students, but you’re gonna be hard-pressed to sell something to the kids, and if you’re trying to proliferate real institutional change then your customers will most likely be administrators, rather than your actual users. Administrators are notorious for being too far removed from the problem to give any real fucks, so if this is territory you want to tackle, you’ve got your work cut out for you.
(via emergentfutures)
Business Model Generation
Alexander Osterwald
Great book with lots of pictures! It does a really good job of visualizing most every aspect of a business, and communicating the important elements of building your own. This read was pretty quick, but I plan on going back over it very slowly with a whiteboard…
The Open Classroom
Herbert R. Kohl
A short book from the late ’60s on education: its state, its failings, suggested corrections, and its future. It’s painful to see how little has changed since Kohl wrote it, but promising to see that most of his commentary is still relevant today (both criticisms and suggestions).
It’s really fairly intuitive what he says. Don’t be controlling. Don’t follow curriculum. Don’t use punishment as a means of dealing with conflicts. Do create a space for students to explore and discover their interests. Do build relationships with students as real people, not as teacher-pupil. Do everything in your power to increase the accessibility of resources to students.
Currently, the priority of the school is the survival of the school. The survival of the students is secondary, and as a result students’ well-being is often sacrificed to sustain the monster. When students are the unassailable top priority, things will truly change.
Much of the text is instructional to teachers trying to operate within the system, and it sounded great to me, but I was reading from a more idyllic perspective. I’ll have to recommend The Open Classroom to some teachers I know, they might be able to do some damage…
And of course, no one is more capable of this than the students. If you consider yourself either, read this book.
Google, the search engine company that also happens to do 35 other things, is expanding its horizons once again with a new financial services division. On Monday, the multi-billion dollar corporation is set to launch a new credit business in the United Kingdom with plans to expand to other countries in the next few weeks, according to the Financial Times.
» via The Atlantic
When’s Google government coming around??
(via randomactsofchaos)
Good post by Mat Honan in the wake of a billion Steve Jobs tributes over the past few days. Honan tries to make sense of it all:
Even when we don’t discuss Jobs directly, he is still in our conversations. If you talk about mobile anything, you’re talking about Steve Jobs. Ditto Chinese manufacturing, digital animation, user interfaces, apps, hardware design — even the stock market itself, which is now firmly dominated by Apple, the metric against which all other companies are measured. There’s not an important mainstream technology product or service out there right now that isn’t a result of or response to Steve Jobs. It’s not so much that we want to keep talking about him; it’s that there’s no avoiding it.
Jobs, like the titans of industry before him, realized that when we think about how the world works, we are actually thinking about the way people have made it to work. And that means that if you don’t like the way the world works, you are free to change it. Which is exactly what he did.
There is no question that a hundred years from now, these stories will continue. As they should.
“It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough — it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing”
-Steve Jobs, Feb 24, 1955 - Oct 5, 2011
Imaging at a trillion frames per second
Wow.
A camera so unimaginably fast that it can take slow-motion video of light in motion. With this technology you can see around corners, or look inside a person’s body without x-rays. You could tell if an apple were ripe or if it had a worm in it, just by watching how the light behaves with the apple.
This is gonna be in your phone. Actually, by the time this technology is commercially viable for mass markets, they’ll probably just install femtocameras in your contact lenses so you can just incorporate these features into your day-to-day vision.
Who’s down?
So once 3D printers go through the same phases as computers and end up being appliances found in most households, the piracy problems we’ve been experiencing with digital media are gonna repeat themselves as people with 3D printers torrent blueprints for PS3s and guitars and all kinds of physical goods.
I’ma print me some swag, maybe a hat.
How to Recognize Disruptive Opportunities
And why Twitter is more disruptive than Facebook.
Mark Suster is such a g, getting into the difference between emerging and disruptive technologies, open versus closed, and how companies need to start taking advantage of these tools.
Emerging technologies are new and cool, but only the rich kids on the block get to play with them. Think computers, circa early 1960s. Or 3D printers today, you know, whatever. These technologies become disruptive when they become an order of magnitude cheaper and an order of magnitude lower quality, since at that point they become accessible to orders of magnitude more people.
The interesting thing about that change, where an emerging technology becomes disruptive, is that the quality of the disruptive technology continues to increase; and once it reaches a certain level, the established titans of the industry who’ve been selling high-quality versions at obscene margins are displaced. It is at this point that the emerging technology which used to be expensive and exclusive transforms into a disruptive technology that is accessible and open.
Mark Suster takes some time to criticize Apple and Facebook for being closed systems, and I love him for it (even though I fanboy pretty hard for the two). He believes that the future is getting more open, especially on the Internet, and that segues into why Twitter is more disruptive than Facebook — it’s more open.
3D printing is only getting more and more compelling…
I don’t know what Craft Coffee is gonna do or be, but they’ve got the best job offering ad I’ve ever seen.
So that German industrial control and automation company Festo was the one that build this robotic bird, the Festo SmartBird. Weighing in at 450 grams (about 1 pound), this thing can basically mimic the appearance of a real bird in flight.
Stick a video camera in that thing, give it a paint job, and *BOOM* you’ve got a multimillion dollar deal with DARPA.
I bet.
A couple of years ago at D8, Steve Jobs said on stage something like this: computers as we know them won’t go away, but they won’t be used nearly as much. They’ll be like trucks: most people don’t drive around in them all the time, but they’ll use them for special purposes, to get particular types of work done.
Ihaven’t always agreed with Jobs, and didn’t then, but I’ve since come around to this particular view of his, and come around pretty completely. I’m now convinced that what we think of as laptops and desktops today will be relegated to pretty nichey sorts of work tasks. The future, obviously at this point, belongs to other, more human & invisible, types of machines.
I’ve been living with just my tablet and phone recently — it feels clearer & clearer that many people will just skip the computer phase altogether.
I think many people believe that means that we’ll have a world of consumers, since tablets and phones so far aren’t great creation tools. But I think that is changing, and quickly. Apps like Paper, from Fifty-three, and Diet Coda, from Panic, not to mention Instagram, are letting people create things on the fly that aren’t just throwaway, but are legitimate creations.
I picked up a phrase some time ago that I think applies: “The next big thing is always beneath contempt.” Implication being that it is, of course, until it isn’t. Until it’s too big to ignore. This has happened over and over again in our society. In the middle ages, people assumed that no serious discussion could happen in anything but Latin — the so-called “vulgar” languages had no merit. And writers assumed that nothing interesting or lasting would come from this new medium of television. And, I think, people assume right now that nothing important will be created from a 10” touch screen without a keyboard (let alone a tiny 3.5” screen).
But I think that we already know that that’s a mistaken view of history, and of the future. That humans always find a way to create, and to make. Phones and tablets are right in the midst of becoming devices of incredible creation, and they’re going to let us create things on the go, in real time, that we never imagined.
We’re moving to mobile at breakneck pace. There’s enormous and exciting space there, and it’s only getting crazier. We’re already seeing significant numbers of people using their mobile device as their primary computing device, and with the progress cloud computing is making in consumer space it won’t be long before your phone will be like a remote control — a remote control to manipulate your virtual, and physical, world.
When it starts getting hard to tell the difference (between the virtual world and the physical), things are gonna get really fun.
The #SciFund Challenge
Crowdfunding science! So glad this exists, I really hope to see it expand soon. Research needs more money!
