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You may be right. But if I'm right, I'll help more kids faster. And that's what I care about. And I think I am right, because I see what I'm talking about every

You may be right. But if I'm right, I'll help more kids faster. And that's what I care about. And I think I am right, because I see what I'm talking about every day. With the exception of a few incredible teachers and mentors out there (I myself had several), education today isn't genuinely exciting for most students. Many teachers are truly great people and are valuable to students. But are they a necessity, or a luxury? Either way, in order for educational content to stay current in today's system, teachers need to be taught new information first before they can then teach their students. Physical teacher-to-student teaching is an O(n^k+1) solution that will never be in every city let alone the developing world. If -- and that's a big "if" -- learning could come from a single software-based source of information in a way that was just as good or better than physical teaching today, a world-class education and credit for it could be accessible everywhere. All a student would need is a smartphone, which is relatively nothing compared to the current cost of education. Look at Duolingo as a great example of this for language learning and language-fluency credentialing. And on top of that, is the role of the teacher to in fact teach, or to guide and mentor? Great mentorship is invaluble, but that can also come from anybody great even if they're not in a formal teaching role. Most learning today, whether technology, science or art, happens through books and YouTube videos and students teaching each other anyways. This peer-to-peer model works. And because through this model, young, radiant students are the primary source of content delivery, this model is also addictively social and exciting. All you have to do is remove the system and let kids do their thing. There's a reason products like Reddit are so popular -- it's an Internet ecosystem for youth all over the world. Almost everyone who's been largely successful in any field has been self-taught. This isn't a coincidence. Those who truly love what they do enough to commit themselves to becoming world class by definition transcend the limits imposed by conventional educational standards. The problem, then, is not a teaching problem, but an exposure problem and an excitement problem to help kids find their passions and solve problems with friends in person who they love. Could an edtech platform be as viral as a Snapchat, Twitter, Netflix, Twitch Reddit, Buzzfeed? That's what I'm set to find out. Edit: For context: Harkness table https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harkness_table https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harkness_table Sugata Mitra: Kids can teach themselves https://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_shows_how_kids_teach_themselves https://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_shows_how_kids_teach_... The best prep school in the world Phillips Exeter Academy, where I went, ironically is designed around kids teaching themselves. And parents pay $40,000+ per year for it.

nickpsecurity 10y ago
You make some good points and I appreciate the links. The one thing you're leaving off that public and private schools teach are the lessons learned from face-to-face social interactions with peers, bullies, and authority figures. Public schools largely held be back as a savant where I had to learn most shit on my own. Some teachers were great enough to try to help me on the side. Nonetheless, the basic principles on human behavior I've encountered in various workplaces were the same as I dealt with in public schooling. Other people good at balancing various tradeoffs in the schools did well in the workplaces I've been in. Among the worst were the homeschoolers with one or two exceptions. Especially when they were trying to change things with resisting authority figures before getting slapped in the face with constant expectation to do what you're told. If anything, those of us from public school experience more freedom going into average workplace than we had then. So, if kids left the normal educational system for your app, how would you replicate that experience gained in soft skills when most of their learning is just watching videos or messaging/talking to people through a phone? Or are you going to push it off to parents hoping they just all change in terms of how they facilitate training in social interaction? Remember that many students being held back by poor education are in the hood, rural areas, homes with apathetic parents, etc. The schools might be the closest thing they get to learning from some decent or just diverse people. Plus, there's the side benefit that they're like a day care allowing parents to go to work or have a mental break at least until summer. ;)
- KeatonDunsford 10y ago
  If you look over my application linked in the OC, you'll see our number one design goal is to connect users physically. There's something incredibly powerful about the social experience that school provides like you're describing that no big edtech platform today has made an explicit design goal. In short, we'll have to "design for trust" a lot like Airbnb did (see Joe Gebbia's TED talk). The locations could be anywhere from a local Starbucks to a public library to the nearest college campus. If educational content could be optimized for the smartphone, a lot like Snapchat has optimized the Snapchat story as their primary unit of content on mobile, then any place could become a sort of classroom. So long as you're surrounded by kids like you learning and making things with you that you care about. Meetup.com has accomplished this to some extent for working professionals, but we don't think it's specific enough towards specific projects in the context of youth education. This is going to be a really hard problem to solve overall from a design perspective. And like you hinted, it will be even harder for us to do this for kids in poor or rural areas in contrast to rich kids in urban areas. But we're going to figure it out somehow. If the timing is right, self-driving cars and improved cheap public transportation will help this tremendously. Our app could then in theory automate the entire process of getting a group of kids connected somewhere safe and public. The value and safety of those kinds of experiences could be built upon even further if you add in a kind of crowdsourced mentorship experience on top of that, like Uber for chaperones in a way. If you're a local software engineer or cinematographer or biophysics researcher, you could give back to your local community by helping out local kids who want to contribute in your field. Now all the sudden everybody can become a teacher, which feels really good. Like Quora answers, but in person.

nickpsecurity 10y ago

You make some good points and I appreciate the links. The one thing you're leaving off that public and private schools teach are the lessons learned from face-to-face social interactions with peers, bullies, and authority figures. Public schools largely held be back as a savant where I had to learn most shit on my own. Some teachers were great enough to try to help me on the side. Nonetheless, the basic principles on human behavior I've encountered in various workplaces were the same as I dealt with in public schooling. Other people good at balancing various tradeoffs in the schools did well in the workplaces I've been in. Among the worst were the homeschoolers with one or two exceptions. Especially when they were trying to change things with resisting authority figures before getting slapped in the face with constant expectation to do what you're told. If anything, those of us from public school experience more freedom going into average workplace than we had then. So, if kids left the normal educational system for your app, how would you replicate that experience gained in soft skills when most of their learning is just watching videos or messaging/talking to people through a phone? Or are you going to push it off to parents hoping they just all change in terms of how they facilitate training in social interaction? Remember that many students being held back by poor education are in the hood, rural areas, homes with apathetic parents, etc. The schools might be the closest thing they get to learning from some decent or just diverse people. Plus, there's the side benefit that they're like a day care allowing parents to go to work or have a mental break at least until summer. ;)

KeatonDunsford 10y ago
If you look over my application linked in the OC, you'll see our number one design goal is to connect users physically. There's something incredibly powerful about the social experience that school provides like you're describing that no big edtech platform today has made an explicit design goal. In short, we'll have to "design for trust" a lot like Airbnb did (see Joe Gebbia's TED talk). The locations could be anywhere from a local Starbucks to a public library to the nearest college campus. If educational content could be optimized for the smartphone, a lot like Snapchat has optimized the Snapchat story as their primary unit of content on mobile, then any place could become a sort of classroom. So long as you're surrounded by kids like you learning and making things with you that you care about. Meetup.com has accomplished this to some extent for working professionals, but we don't think it's specific enough towards specific projects in the context of youth education. This is going to be a really hard problem to solve overall from a design perspective. And like you hinted, it will be even harder for us to do this for kids in poor or rural areas in contrast to rich kids in urban areas. But we're going to figure it out somehow. If the timing is right, self-driving cars and improved cheap public transportation will help this tremendously. Our app could then in theory automate the entire process of getting a group of kids connected somewhere safe and public. The value and safety of those kinds of experiences could be built upon even further if you add in a kind of crowdsourced mentorship experience on top of that, like Uber for chaperones in a way. If you're a local software engineer or cinematographer or biophysics researcher, you could give back to your local community by helping out local kids who want to contribute in your field. Now all the sudden everybody can become a teacher, which feels really good. Like Quora answers, but in person.