“The return on higher education would be much better if college were cheaper,” states The Economist in a rare tautologism. The magazine goes on to note that the cost of post-secondary schooling has risen at almost five times the rate of inflation since 1983 and at not-for-profit and for-profit colleges, the default rate among graduates three years out is 15% and 22% respectively. All of which begs the question, what are students paying for? While the editorial then goes further to explore nuances in the ROI on a college degree based on different disciplines studied, the magazine is content to accept the data in line with conventional wisdom. “Unsurprisingly, engineering is a good bet wherever you study it…[but] arts and humanities courses are much more varied,” it concludes before ceasing to perform any real analysis.
Protected: Dave Eggers’ The Circle: Technology and the Moral Landscape
Protected: Exhortations and the Fratty in Poetry
Deep Dive: ClassDojo
As iconic an image of the classroom as the perfectly polished red apple on a teacher’s desk, as evocative a symbol as the moss green, lined chalkboards, is the slightly askew gold star collected by eager kindergarteners for (out)performance in the eyes of their teachers. Why not update that for the Web 2.0 era? ClassDojo is premised on tech-ifying classroom behavior management. Rather than handing out gold stars or even manually tracking positive comments on a clipboard or poster, teachers can now manage all of this not just electronically but through a mobile app. And by gamifying classroom behavior, students should become more incentivized to maximize their engagement.
For an enterprise as elementary as Gold Star Management (GSM…just kidding, we don’t actually need that acronym), the app is appropriately simple and intuitive. It may toe the line dangerously between “feature” vs. “platform,” but there’s no denying that it does what it wants to do better than any other company out there.
Enter the Hedge Fund, Part II
I can only hope for additional demonstrations of my own prescience.
peHUB wrote recently about the hedge fund Tiger Global’s move toward investing in technology startups. My loyal readership will recognize in this statement a clear continuation of an earlier post on Snapchat which discussed Coatue’s movement into the space. That post looked at how hedge funds, with their large capital pools and lower cost of capital, may be able to “disrupt” the traditional VC model which bundles capital with expertise to then demand a higher return.
A Call for an Educational Gini Coefficient
It’s not often you get to discuss the negatives of having too much data, but Viktor Mayer-Schönberger (Oxford) and Kenneth Cukier (The Economist) do just that. In their recently published book, Learning with Big Data, they explore the dystopian extrapolation of the current movement towards data gathering in education. In some ways, theirs is a warning as old as Nineteen Eighty Four (or even Brave New World); when authorities have at their fingertips every type of data they could desire, how can we trust them to act in our best interest? (Maybe this goes all the way back to Juvenal?)
Deep Dive: Edmodo
“It’s Facebook for the classroom.” That’s a common description for one of the most impressive EdTech platforms out there, but it’s likely quite unfair. The visual resemblance between Edmodo and Facebook may be uncanny, but the use case for Edmodo is terrifically different. Between content management, social, and analytics, Edmodo shows promise beyond just being your classroom profile and newsfeed. The potential for the company is sky high, but at the same time, my biggest reservation about Edmodo is around its ability to – truly – transform education.
Features
Edmodo’s main feature is “social,” in other words, imagine having a separate Facebook just for your classmates and your teacher. Everything that popped up your newsfeed was related to your class and the only people you could communicate with were your peers and teacher. I’d like to think that would improve student engagement. Facebook is the world’s greatest procrastination tool because it appeals to our very human desire for social connection as well as the darker, voyeuristic side of us. Edmodo works by co-opting that promise of social connection and even voyeurism for an educational context. You can send messages to anyone in your class, send out a blast, share homework assignments and pictures, not to mention watch your peers’ profiles and interactions the same way you “Facebook stalk” your friends. You’d expect that would increase engagement with the classroom context then, even if only marginally.
Education’s Awakening: Adaptive Learning
In an earlier post, I talked about how education at Oxford has remained remarkably unchanged over the course of centuries. As an example of an “evolved” learning style, I provided the “American” higher education system, with its investment in lecture-based pedagogy and social learning. Really, though, all that represents is a sideways move in learning evolution. American colleges didn’t advance learning, they just borrowed elements from less advanced learning environments, namely the K-12 classroom.
This is sad because the traditional classroom developed not out of any particularly brilliant insights on how best to teach students. Instead, it developed from a need to educate as many students in the shortest amount of time and with the fewest consumption of resources. Kids have required education since the dawn of civilization and parents figured out that it was more efficient for them to throw all the kids together in a classroom and use only one adult to teach all the kids at once. Efficient in terms of time commitment for parents? Yes. But no one can possibly defend this as the optimal path toward academic efficacy.
Adaptive learning, then, marks the dawn of the next stage of education’s evolution. Guided by the foundational premise that every student learns differently, adaptive learning uses technology to understand something about how a student learns and then provide content differently based on how it qualifies a student’s knowledge level. A basic example is the GMAT; as you answer questions on the GMAT, it adjusts the difficulty of each successive question it serves up to you. It helps the GMAT create gradations of knowledge by constantly subdividing test takers into more refined groups of “knowledge isobars,” if you will.
Idea-driven vs. Knowledge-driven
There have been too many articles exploring the shift of the cultural center of gravity from New York to San Francisco. (Appropriately, a lot of the hand-wringing comes from sources like the New Yorker and New York magazine.) But these articles tend to be culturally focused, even the ones purporting to compare the finance and tech worlds. They answer questions like, “is tech douchebaggery the new finance douchebaggery?” or “do writers need to live in San Francisco?”
These articles will occasionally wonder what the implications are for society when its best and brightest are choosing to go build sexting apps. A website called FirstWorldProblems.biz exposes just how nonsensical many of these “problems” are that startups are trying to address. (Examples include “I can never come up with enough cool music for my parties” or “I just have too many social networks for me to keep track of.”) None of them really contemplate the question at any length.
I finally came across an article that actually dwells on the problem of the brain drain, looking not just for why people join startups, but spending real time looking at cultural, sociological, and business implications of this new world order. Writing for the New York Times Magazine, Yiren Lu doesn’t actually take a position on whether this is good or bad; in fact, the article’s lack of agenda gives it the pleasantly “purpose-less” feel of a meandering late-night conversation with friends. But in this one piece, Lu exposes a number of different motivations and characteristics of the techie ecosystem and I can’t help but draw out my own implications.
Education and the Streetlight Effect
I want to highlight an essay in the Washington Post that discusses one of the less popular subjects in education policy – the responsibility of the student. While policy makers and talking heads would never say that students bear no responsibility in their own education, their focus often is on improving teacher quality and more intelligent resource allocation within districts. Students are treated as the lifeless lump of iron, requiring adequate environmental support and the firm forging hand of the teacher to be shaped into their true potential. The danger with this narrative is it encourages students, and maybe more importantly, parents to shrug off their responsibility in the education process.
Some Work of Noble Note 