Archive by Author
Incrementalism and Solving Meaningful Problems
Posted on 05. May, 2008 by kareem.
Very early on with eduFire we set the intention to only grapple with extremely meaningful problems. We set out to do something very challenging and yet very meaningful: Revolutionize education. There are a million other things we could have done and to be honest a lot of roads that would be have been “easier” depending on how you define success (be it raising money, getting acquired, etc.). However, that didn’t have much appeal to us. Instead we want to take a really big swing and try to shake an industry to its core in the hopes that something much better would emerge on the other end. That’s exactly what we’re trying to do with eduFire.
Umair has a great post up on the HBS blog which I think everyone who’s an entrepreneur or a VC needs to read. In it he takes issue with the incrementalism that he sees coming out of the Valley.
But today’s revolutionaries are sheep in wolves’ clothing. They’re lost in the economically meaningless, in the utterly trivial, in the strategically banal: mostly, they’re cutting deals with one another to…try and sell more ads. That is, when they’re not too busy partying.
I gotta say it…Umair’s dead on. Instead of looking for the New New Thing that could revolutionize the *fill in the blank* industry it seems that a lot of people are instead looking for the New New Alert Thingy. You now, that service that aggregates all of my friend aggregators which in turn aggregates all of my friend feeds that aggregate all of the things that my friends do on all of the social networks that aggregate all of my friends…
I agree with Umair that there’s something more out there that we’re missing. Our time has an opportunity cost which is that the time spent on the trivial and banal is not time spent on meaningful innovation and creative disruption. In a world with so many (real) problems to solve my concern is that so many young, creative, ambitious people are chasing after stuff that while cute and cuddly perhaps doesn’t solve these real problems.
Maybe we have the luxury to not worry about food and education and energy and health. Maybe those problems will take care of themselves.
But maybe not. Maybe we’ll all look back one day and see that we spent way too much of our time focused on the stuff that didn’t matter and not nearly enough time focused on the stuff that did. As Tony Robbins puts it, maybe we’ll realize that we “majored in minor things.”
And that I fear is indeed the real Serious Business at hand.
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One Laptop for You, One Laptop for a Child in the Third World
Posted on 17. Nov, 2007 by kareem.
The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project has a special deal over the next two weeks. It’s simple:
Buy an OLPC laptop for a child in the developing world, and you get to buy one for yourself. It costs $400 total, but $200 of that is a charitable donation for the laptop you donate.
You can buy them at LaptopGiving.org, but only for the next 10 days. After that, no laptop for you!
Bill Clementson has a great description of the OLPC laptop. For me, I’m excited about it because it runs Linux, weighs less than four pounds, has a battery life greater than 10 hours, and I’m sure will be hackable to high heaven. I’m excited about the possibility of developing on such a portable, rugged machine.
So if you’re a geek, or want to buy a cheap laptop for your child while buying one for a kid in the third world, head on over to LaptopGiving.orgin the next 10 days and do some good.
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iPods in the Classroom
Posted on 09. Oct, 2007 by kareem.
From the NYTimes: In Some Schools, iPods Are Required Listening:
Grace Poli, a media specialist at José Martí, said that she approached district officials about buying 23 iPods for an after-school bilingual program in 2004 after being struck by students’ passion for them. Spanish-speaking students seemed bored by their English-language textbooks, she said, which they found outdated and irrelevant.
Ms. Poli said her Spanish-speaking students — known around the school as Pod People — have been able to move out of bilingual classes after just a year of using the digital devices, compared with an average of four to six years for most bilingual students.
It’s phenomenal to see educators teaching using technology and methods other than osmosis. It’s a small but important step that marks the change that formalized learning is going to see in the next 5-10 years.
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Some EduLinks for you…
Posted on 07. Oct, 2007 by kareem.
Some stories that we’ve been reading lately…
Parents must do homework, too — or kids’ grade may suffer:
So far, Mr. Frye, an English teacher at Montclair High School, has asked the parents to read and comment on a Franz Kafka story, Section 1 of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” and a speech given by Robert F. Kennedy in 1968… If the parents do not comply, Mr. Frye tells them, their child’s grade may suffer — a threat on which he has made good only once in the three years he has been making such assignments.
UC Berkeley puts lectures on YouTube (YouTube link):
Berkeley officials claimed in a statement that the university is the first to make full course lectures available on YouTube. The school said that over 300 hours of videotaped courses will be available at youtube.com/ucberkeley.
Why I’m homeschooling my kid in science next year:
in Colorado, all students are required to take the Colorado Student Aptitude Test (CSAP), as part of the Leave Every Child Behind Act. This means that all school year until March, but especially from January to March, my kids are getting immersed in that test. The teachers do NOTHING ELSE but teach that test.
Then, after March, when the pressure is off, the teachers pretty much coast through April, May and the first part of June. This is the only time when my kids have a real chance at getting a useful education, and it’s wasted because “Whew, we’re done with that test.”
The CSAP is the only thing that is actually measured, so everything else, like the actual education itself, is ignored.
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Democracy in Work and Schools
Posted on 07. Aug, 2007 by kareem.
In our Manifesto, we wrote that we’re designing EduRev so that it’s run democratically, instead of as a command-and-control organization. Part of the challenge in doing so is that there are few pre-existing models of democratic workplaces. The great-granddaddy of them all is Semco, based in Brazil, which is run by Ricardo Semler. Semler has written two phenomenal books, Maverick, and The Seven Day Weekend (which every new hire gets at EduRev).
So I was stoked today to finally have time to watch three videos on Semco that my friend Traci sent me some time ago.
And I was even more tickled that there was some good information on Semco’s new school, which sounds similar to Sudbury Valley.
Here are the three videos (the school bits are in the first and third videos, but they’re all interesting).
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Why Learning isn’t a Means to an End
Posted on 06. Aug, 2007 by kareem.
It’s actually an end in itself, which is something this testing-focused culture of ours seems to miss.
This short animated video was commissioned by the guys who did South Park, and illustrates this beautifully. (thanks Eric)
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Let’s Build a New System
Posted on 11. Jun, 2007 by kareem.
Educational consultant Barbara Brier writes about how the current educational system can’t be saved, and references a phenomenal post by Tom Haskins.
After reading smart people like Dan Pink and Sir Ken Robinson, understanding how technology is changing our lives, and speaking to several teachers recently who all echoed similar sentiments, I think she’s right.
Most attempts to fix the system are incremental. Things like “stronger, more consistent curriculum standards nationwide; lengthening the school day and year; and improving teacher quality through merit pay and other measures.”
How about re-imagining what learning could be like, and then going to build that?
We have the luxury of not being the incumbent, but we have the challenge of trying to institute change from the outside.
Either way, something needs to be done.
So, off to write some more code…
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26 Ways to Get Attention
Posted on 06. May, 2007 by kareem.
The one question we get from everyone who knows the consumer internet space well right now is “how do you get distribution?” i.e. how do you get product adoption?
The consumer web space is saturated right now, which means that attention is at a premium. In order to get that attention, it’s not enough to have a great product.
Jon and I had some ideas, but until Friday had never put them down on paper. Over lunch at Real Food Daily we put our brains together to brainstorm on how to get good traffic.
In an hour, we came up with 26 ideas, some so-crazy-they-just-might-work. It was really beneficial to be out of the office and focus on a core piece of the business… minimizing distractions is good, and being in the flow state when solving a problem is one of the best feelings you can have during the work day. ;)
Next step: prioritize based on the 80/20 rule (where do we get most output for the least input) and execute.
(And no, we can’t share the list with you yet… :) )
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Turning Teachers Into Rockstars
Posted on 30. Apr, 2007 by kareem.
From the NYTimes last week on hedge fund manager salaries:
To make Alpha’s list, a manager needed to earn at least $240 million last year, nearly double the amount in 2005. That is up from a minimum of $30 million in 2001 and 2002. Combined, the top 25 hedge fund managers last year earned $14 billion — enough to pay New York City’s 80,000 public school teachers for nearly three years.
Doing the math means that each NYC public school teacher makes, on average, $58k per year.
Now, last year a report on education in the US found that this country is on the brink of an educational crisis:
The Teaching Commission notes that “our schools are only as good as their teachers,” yet this “occupation that makes all others possible is eroding at its foundations.” Top students are far less likely to go into teaching today; salaries are stagnant; nearly 50 percent of new teachers leave within five years. To remedy this, the commission calls for raising teachers’ base pay, finding ways to reward the best teachers, raising standards for acquiring a teaching degree and testing would-be teachers, on the basis of national standards, to be certain they have mastered the subjects they will teach.
People don’t work for money, they work for meaning. But when the disparity between the upside of working at a teacher (avg 58k to maybe 80-90k after a lifetime of service) versus working in another white-collar job (6 figures after a few years, up to $1.7B if you’re the hotshot hedge fund manager) is too large to ignore for many of the most talented folks.
The question then becomes, how to close the upside gap between being a teacher, and working in another, more lucrative job?
There are incremental solutions, like the findings in this report released by the Center for Teaching Quality in North Carolina. It calls for pay based on performance, and not seniority… rewards should go to teachers with better-performing students, and to teachers that do more work outside of the classroom. We fully endorse that idea, but there are more dramatic ways to close the upside gap.
The way we’re approaching it here it to help teachers scale their expertise by enabling teachers to reach more students. The best teachers in the world shouldn’t be constrained by physical walls that enable them to reach a few thousand students a year at most. Those best of the best should be rock stars, and should make more money than crappy teachers whose lectures you have to struggle to stay awake in.
Helping education scale effectively is a problem we’re working to solve at Education Revolution. It excites me that by achieving this, we’ll not only be incentivizing super smart people who might otherwise go into I-banking to help the world become a smarter place, but also help drive change in an industry that badly needs it.
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Customer Observation Began Today
Posted on 10. Apr, 2007 by kareem.
I’ve done some work with an amazing customer experience consulting firm in NY called Creative Good. Traditional usability testing measures things like “time to complete task”, and requires people to do things they would never do themselves. Creative Good’s method, on the other hand, involves setting a natural context for a customer by figuring out what kinds of tasks they perform on a given website, and then observing them performing those tasks. The results are more natural, because ideally you get a customer behaving as close to how they behave “in the wild” (a.k.a. sitting at home in their underwear.) From those observations, the one or two strategic issues, along with several tactical ones, become clear.
So I used a slight variation of this method today while observing our first set of customers “in the wild” (they were wearing pants.) We’d talked to quite a few customers in our ideal market already, but since people are notoriously bad at telliig you what they want, there’s nothing quite like watching your customers do their thing. It never ceases to amaze me how much I learn from sitting back and observing customers, and how few people do it. Perhaps it is pride (”I know what my customers want”), or shame (”I should know what my customers want”), or even fear (”Holy shit, I have to hang out with my customers?!”)… whatever it is, it is worth getting over so you can sit some customers down and watch them use your product.
Today’s session gave us some really good clarity, and we’ve got more coming up to further refine what we’re doing right and what we need to change before launch.
