Joel Liu's List: Changing education

• Use the resources and technical competencies of Google to expand from an information provider to an education provider. “Schoogle the world”

• We do the same for USV and a couple of weeks ago took a day off to discuss how we think the web itself is changing, how the web is changing industries and society, and as a result how opportunities for startups are changing. One of the best ways we have found to think about change is to identify those principles that appear to drive the change and that themselves can provide a bit of a constant. In other words to understand what’s changing, you need to understand what is staying the same.
• To us, this appears to be one of the great constants of the web. It is taking power away from existing large institutions and pushing it out to smaller entities and often all the way to individuals. In the process it is building up new institutions (such as Google), but the net result appears to be a distinct shift of “power to the people.” We see this at work in many of our existing investments: Etsy’s marketplace for handmade goods lets artists connect directly with buyers; Covestor enables investors to share their track records and discover each other; Wesabe puts folks in control of their finances; Tumblr facilitates sharing oneself; BugLabs lets anyone create a custom network-connected device. In each case, individuals are empowered in ways that simply were not possible prior to the web.

• Education is one area ripe for Web innovation. Harley of WorldLearningTree recently submitted his suggestions on how to revolutionalize online education to Google's "Project10ToThe100" contest.

   

  Sandra Foyt is looking for a "better learning/connecting hub". She elaborates: "I want a command center where it's easy to share all kinds of digital media, while being able to chat or microblog. An all in one home base, with Twitter/Flock/Ning/Wiki/Flickr/YouTube elements."

   

  Influential VC Fred Wilson pointed to a post from his venture firm recently, which was on the theme of the Web shifting power to individuals. Fred noted that "we are particularly interested in "disrupting and improving" education and energy markets".
• We think part of the problem (?) Web 2.0 creates is that it generates exponentially growing amounts of information, which becomes harder and harder to efficiently get off the screen and into our brains. Intermz is building an educational platform that will hopefully dramatically improve learning speed, retention, recollection, and understanding, to help handle the rising tide of Web 2.0 output. We hope it becomes an example of where Web 3.0 might go.

• In this post I looked at ways in which Powerpoint presentations can be saved as a series of images of a size and format suitable for screens of mobile phones or iPods. This is especially useful for revision purposes as teens tend to ‘play’ with their phones when waiting or bored. This gives them something productive to look at!

• Teemu Arina: Well, it is very hard to define what is  informal learning… For some people it is “non formal learning”, which means learning outside school, outside formal structures. For me informal learning is something that is more social, more student-driven and not teacher-driven. Well, it’s life: life is informal learning.
• Say, you can build piazzas like here in Rome, where people can meet and share informal conversations. But you can’t really draw a map or a clear path on how people are going to learn informally. It’s just about building an environment that supports informal interaction.
• When you do something you have to stop and reflect, you have to learn something: wikis are about putting those reflections together in the collective action. That’s important for building new knowledge, new ideas and understand what to do next.

• Teemu Arina: Some years ago, Finland was very strong in the mobile side and people where laughing at the idea of mobile learning. But I think it’s coming. I think it’s integrating with the informal learning space, because being mobile means that the context is around you.

   

  You are not saying things in a classroom out of context, you are not sitting in a formal course within an organization but you are actually there, where you need to be. You need to apply the context to the context itself. I think that’s what mobile learning does: it enables us to utilize the context in a better way.
• It’s kind of connecting the virtual and the physical spaces, and that’s where I think  informal learning is currently failing in the educational technology field: we are not giving enough importance to the meaning of physical spaces and piazzas for meeting. When we see mobile technologies, social technologies and physical spaces intersecting very well, I think that’s when we see what true learning is all about.

• We are going back to the ancient times of  platonic-style conversations, which means having conversations with people who help you come out with ideas by asking the right questions.

   

  That’s what you are doing Robin: you are asking the right questions. When mobile learning and  informal learning intersect it’s like typical life and I think it’s the direction we should go to.

   

  The  industrial revolution generated the need for structures that were useful: but in the future I think we have gone too far, seeing people – as  Max Weber would say – as cogs in machines. People like little cogs trying to get into larger cogs.

• Teemu Arina: I think there are certain things you need to do. One is to increase  serendipity, which is accidental interaction between people, perhaps by creating very effective “third places”. I mean places between the home – which is the first place – and work or school – which are second places. The third place is where you can escape school, the demands of your family and the demands of your manager to share meaningful conversations.

   

  A place which is not connected by technology, in which people meet each other and are able to interact on topics over different fields. If you invest in such environments where you can have such conversations with your employees, that’s when you start to come up with ideas from different mindsets than your own.

   

  It’s very easy to have a tunnel-shaped vision of thinking when you are looking for rational argumentations inside your organization. You have to look for new environments existing outside your organization and let people go there and share different conversations.
• Fundamentally, it’s about emphasizing the connection more than the content that goes through the connection. George Siemens would say it’s the pipe that is more important than the content within the pipe.

• The role of teacher is to show different points of view of the same thing that is important to understand.

   

  You don’t look at the sky from the same point of view all the times in order to understand what’s going on with the planet. The teacher shows different angles to these interconnected constructs around us.

• Managers manage things; leaders lead people. You don’t lead people by saying what to do and what things to look at.

   

  You actually light the fire inside them to go towards a direction that is collectively useful. This is what the role of teachers should be in the future: they should be leaders, rather than managers. They should help people come up with ideas rather than being the source of ideas.

• I think it’s like the  global warming: we see the problem (e.g. we see the problem of learning and teaching) but sort of, you know, you wake up in the morning and there is no problem with it – not yet – so you don’t do anything about it. One day you wake up and it’s a disaster.

   

  Maybe we should be more proactive than reactive about learning and knowledge.

9 more annotations...

• Digest This Thought: The Answer to Information Overload Is to Produce More Information.

• Even with such a limited set of features, the page was weighing in at 250KB. I dug into the code and realized that our optimization tools (i.e. Closure compilation) were unable to exclude code that was never actually used in the page itself (which would be an unfair expectation of any tool under the circumstances). The only way to reduce the code further was to optimize by hand the CSS, Javascript, and image sprites myself. After three painstaking days, I had arrived at a much leaner solution. It still was not under 100KB though. Having just finished writing the HTML5 video player, I decided to plug it in instead of the far heavier Flash player. Bam! 98KB and only 14 requests. I threaded the code with some basic monitoring and launched an opt-in to a fraction of our traffic.

• An exit break-even for investors (money-losing if the funds' cost of capital are considered) and no real return for founders/team.

  The hardware-media play is tough.

• 　　其为学生提供了手机题目查询APP，为老师提供了web端的智能出题系统。。这看上去和猿题库不太一样，事实上目前在线教育领域做题库的有很多，但是如何做出特色则是关键。

    

  　　对于快乐学来说，最大的优势是技术，林桢总结为大数据处理、搜索技术、自然语言处理、光学识别技术。
• 　　但是社区并没有那么好做，运营15个月的教育社区粉笔网上个月宣布关闭。林桢认为，通过行政手段将学校、老师、同学集体注册圈进来的做法，并不太符合用户心里。“社区的关键是看强制性还是自发性，比如网民喜欢的百度贴吧，就是根据兴趣出现的自然社区。”