Yesterday morning I attended a cool event put on by Feast, a salon on Education at Soho House in the meatpacking district off 14th street in Manhattan. The room was filled with investors and innovators eager to learn more about the new tech market in education. Presentations were made by Diana Rhoten of Startl, Brian Fitzgerald of Newton, and one of the founders of Feast, upstart Michael Karnjanaprak who is launching Skillshare, a technology platform to learn anything from anyone. The event speakers were interviewed by Amanda Fairbanks of Good magazine.
Here are the lessons I took from the day:
1) Education is a hot topic. It's not just Waiting for Superman hype. The business and tech communities are turning to the education industry as one of the last unbreached frontiers of industrial America. Centralized institutions are becoming decentralized, spiders are becoming star fish, as often happens through the disruptive influence of innovations. The publishing, media, entertainment and business worlds have already been transformed. Education, however, the institution of schools, is so byzantine and stratified, so rigid and complex, that the internet has barely made a dent in how children formally learn and how educational resources are allocated. The system is so huge, the rituals so entrenched, and until recently the educational outcomes so ignored, that there has been no real focus on transforming the system... that is until now.
2) Learning anytime, anywhere is what everyone wants. Diana Rhoten spoke about the adaptive capabilities of computers to really personalize learning, and Brian Fitzgerald of Newton expressed his companies interest in creating a tech portal to facilitate differentiated instruction. Rather than having a classroom of 30 kids all working on the same skill at the same time, each learner can use technology to have a personalized, differentiated experience, facilitated by a teacher, who is more of a coach, than the sole knowledge authority learners must acquiesce to. This is where the digital learning space wants to head... There are no examples of truly personalized learning spaces, that are authentic, socially constructed, and easy to use; but that is the challenge for folks to create... something that delivers on user center design principles and works with real learners.
3) Michael K. made a beautiful and funny presentation on deschooling society. He talked about the Wire, season 4, and his own boredom at the University of Virginia as a starting point for getting interested in education reform. His thesis is that spiraling costs of higher education, artificially supported by Federal student loan subsidies are creating a trillion dollar student loan debt, surpassing personal credit card debt, and the bubbles going to burst. You can watch just about any lecture on any topic from the brightest minds in the world online at places like Academic Earth. If you know how to learn and you are not afraid to create your own future, you do not need college. None of us should have to pay for schooling... at least not a giant fee for four years from one institution. Learning should be more autonomous and interest driven. Access to the internet is all we need!
4) Lastly, there is a whole bunch of money ready to be thrown into digital learning. Foundations and venture capitalists are not investing in traditional schooling or youth development programs, but if disruptive technology is attached, and it can transform the way learning looks and feels, there are tremendous financial resources at the ready. The problem is there are not enough good innovations, 'shovel ready' projects. We have demand, but no supply. And as Diana Rhoten warns, if too many mediocre or poorly designed learning products get funded and they flop, the market will dry up and schools will remain unchanged. We cannot have another tech bubble burst in education. The system needs transformation... we finally have a wide cross section of business and technology interested in shifting from entertainment to learning. The products can go belly up, but the demand for innovations that level the playing field and make learning powerful and engaging will not.
Here are my thoughts for the Feast Salon community:
1) The education market is not new, it's always been here. High school dropouts have been around since the institutions developed, not just since the Gates Foundation started addressing the problem. A Nation at Risk, the seminal report in 1983 brought the discussion of educational outcomes to a national audience, but the 1954 Brown V. Board of Education is the more famous demarcation. The case was not just about ending segregation, it was about creating a more just and equal society. We need to remember that education is a civil rights issue and our schools have become increasingly resegregated.
Education is the cornerstone of a democratic society, and inherent to conceptions of social mobility in a meritocracy. Learning is a human right. As entrepreneurs enter the education field they need to understand the context of educational history. The education of vast segments of the U.S. population have never been a concern of the powers that be. That we now recognize the imperative to educate all American's is a wonderful thing. Frederick Douglass would be thrilled. Equity and access to new digital learning technologies is essential to closing the experiential and achievement gap. We need to be careful technology does not further polarize our global society.
2) Deschooling Society is not a new concept. The progressive education movement was born with John Dewey and the rise of public schools following the Ellis Island immigration waves. Ivan Illich wrote his book of this title back in 1971. His idea was to invest the resources wasted on schooling in other benefits for the social good like transportation and meeting people's basic needs. Without a conception of the internet, he envisioned people posting their interests in some crazy bulletin board system, that allowed people to create their own learning communities. The web is making his dream of decentralized education a reality. Illich was influenced by Brazilain political and educational theorist Paolo Friere who is the father of critical pedagogy. He himself was influenced by Liberation theology and Latin America's historical argument with itself, over class and identity. For me Thoreau's essay On Civil Disobedience is the manifesto for self-determination. What makes today exciting, is we actually possess a tool, in the internet, to make these visionary ideals a pragmatic reality.
3) "Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean its going to solve your problem."- M.C. The internet by itself is not going to solve the problem. Everyone is trying to create the killer app, the game changing device, but education is not a software or hardware problem. Education is a habit of mind and the heart. We now have a powerful learning tool that we barely understand how to harness, but it will be transformative. The key is not to get as stuck on the tool as we did on the school. It is not about the institution of schooling, just as it is not about the handheld device. The moderator asked Brian Fitzgerald what the limits of technology are, and I would say it is that a smart phone cannot love you back.
On Maslow's hierarchy of needs the top of the triangle is all about social connection. If technology is just giving us an adaptive, human like software app to learn with, but is not facilitating real human connections, it is not developing our capacity to love and learn in community. Ultimately, we all need to stretch our minds and our hearts. This is the bottom line, which together with the profit margin, social entrepreneurs need to focus on.
4) Lastly, the reason not to just blow up schools or shut down universities is because we need to bridge social capital. Schools do it poorly, because they isolate young people from the rest of society, but the reason why kids show up at all is to see their friends. Schools are a powerful social experience. In a fractured world, segregated by race and class, they have the potential to be hubs of interconnectivity where one can encounter and interact with a wider world.
It is important to create subway cars for learning. The NYC subway is the greatest untapped marketplace for ideas in America, and possibly the world. Its the only place I know of where wall street hedge fund managers, store owners from Nigeria, NYU university students from Iowa, Dominican teenagers from Washington Heights, musicians from Juliard, and any conceivable variation of the human experience rub shoulders on a daily basis. True, most of the time, we're fighting for space or trying to ignore our environment becuase its just too much stimulation, but people are fascinating to one another. If only we could find a way to communicate.
Collaboration, real world problem solving, and cross-cultural competency are the keys to learning in the 21st Century. The internet and software programs cannot do this alone. It is going to take courage, flexibility, and a deep understanding of the interdependent nature of living systems to transform learning. We need to transform schools into porous hubs that are safe places for youth to learn to navigate an immersive information society. It is going to take caring adults, hip to the transformations of digital learning, to pave the way.
