One of the most important things we can teach our children as they’re coming of age is to cultivate a comfort with contradiction. Sometimes good things come at the expense of other good things. You can’t always get your way. There’s no such thing as a free lunch.
As we grow up, we discover the contradictions of everyday life: one benefit requires giving up another.
In fact, we do teach these things as parents trying to raise well-adjusted kids: Share and help others. Tell the truth, even when...
Jason Fried has an idea for improving education that I couldn’t agree with more — teaching kids how to iterate:
Making anything better is iteration. When you put something out there, it’ll often land right back in your lap. Sometimes that feedback boomerangs back directly, other times you have to infer the problems by deciphering other people’s behavior when they interact with the thing you gave them. This customer struggled with this, this manufacturing tolerance didn’t line up with that, this printing process looked better on the screen than it did on paper. Or after a certain amount of time...
Antonio Garcia-Martinez interviews Austen Allred, founder of Lambda School. Lambda charges no tuition and builds its program on the ISA (income sharing agreement), in which you only pay when you get a salaried position in your field of study.
The cool thing about the incentive alignment is that we’re not going to train you to be a sociologist, because it just doesn’t work. A common critique of the ISA model is: oh, now people aren’t going to study poetry anymore. And my response to that is: yeah, we’re not a university, we’re...
Last week I linked to Mike Munger’s interview on EconTalk where he and Russ Roberts discussed the roles universities play (above and beyond the educational) and the likelihood that these components could be unbundled or disrupted in the post-COVID landscape.
This piece from earlier in the year goes deeper into Munger’s lexicon for separating these roles (using some clever metonyms):
The Clock Tower — Even with online courses making asynchronous learning possible, students still...
Tom MacWright with some ideas for cleaning up ever-creeping morass of web technology:
I think this combination would bring speed back, in a huge way. You could get a page on the screen in a fraction of the time of the web. The memory consumption could be tiny. It would be incredibly accessible, by default. You could make great-looking default stylesheets and share alternative user stylesheets. With dramatically limited scope, you could port it to all kinds of devices.
Today Nat Eliason launched version 2 of his Effortless Output course for learning Roam.
This time around he’s doing an interesting thing with live courses and students selecting a capstone project. Adding something that goes beyond the typical online video self-paced learning style of most tutorials is fascinating.
This is a course about creating something new, not just how to use Roam. Together we’ll pick an area you’re interested in to explore as you develop your skills with Roam, and a final product you want to create with your newfound abilities.
A new piece from Andy Matuschak and Michael Nielsen (beautifully illustrated by Maggie Appleton). Can we make reading a more engaging and interactive learning experience? This builds on previous ideas from the authors on spaced repetition.
Interesting take from one of Byrne Hobart’s recent newsletters. Contrasting a typical “full-stack” model of company-building and VC funding to a “sumo” model:
The amount of VC funding has been rising steadily, and returns are skewed by a few positive...
Jason Crawford on Roots of Progress’s new program for high school students:
Progress Studies for Young Scholars launches in June as a summer program, with daily online learning activities for 6 weeks. We’ll be covering the history of technology and invention: the challenges of life and work and how we solved them, leading to the amazing increase in living standards over the last few centuries. Topics will include the advances in materials; automation of manufacturing and agriculture; the progression of energy from steam to oil to electricity; how railroads, cars and airplanes shrank the world;...
A 2017 commencement address from Mihir Desai, critiquing the phenomenon of infinite optionality and lack of commitment pushed by modern universities:
I’ve lost count of the number of students who, when describing their career goals, talk about their desire to “maximize optionality.” They’re referring to financial instruments known as options that confer the right to do something rather than an obligation to do something. For this reason, options have a “Heads I win, tails I don’t lose” character—what those in finance lovingly describe as a “nonlinear payoff structure.”...
The COVID-19 pandemic is the biggest global event that’s happened in my lifetime. It hasn’t impacted me personally that much (yet), but the financial and public health implications are clearly already disastrous, and bound to get worse.
Most concerning, though, is how little we know today about what’s in store for the rest of 2020 and beyond.
I don’t use this outlet to make predictions, and I’m generally not a fan of trying to call shots on uncertainties. But as an experiment, let’s set down some open-ended questions to revisit in 6 months to see...
Anki is an open source framework for creating your own flash cards. A neat system for helping your kids with classwork, or even just testing yourself on topics.
Anyone who needs to remember things in their daily life can benefit from Anki. Since it is content-agnostic and supports images, audio, videos and...
Zoom is one of those admirable SaaS companies built on solid product and amazing execution. I love this — not relying on anything sexy or super inventive, just solving a known problem better than everyone else. My favorite bit is their retention; it proves what can be done even in SMB with lock-tight product market fit:
Zoom has 140% net revenue retention. This is similar to RingCentral from our last analysis and other leaders. Zoom also shows that yes, this can be done with smaller customers too, not...
Automation is penetrating every industry, but still heavily reliant on human behavior and feedback to make it effective. In this piece, Benedict Evans talks about identifying the point in a workflow where the optimum point of leverage sits for human interaction:
This means that a lot of the system design is around finding the right points of leverage to apply people to an automated system. Do you capture activity that’s already happening? Google began by using the links that already existed. Do you have...
It’s not a shocker that American schools don’t produce the level of output we expect. I’ve written here before about this topic, and one of the largest failings I see (even dating back to when I myself was in high school, though not to the same extreme) is the rigorous constraint and hyper-measurement culture that’s pervaded education. It seems intuitive that measuring an outcome would help you to identify shortcomings to fix1, but measuring without a deep understanding of the means and ends can lead to blindness...
This is part 2 of a series on learning, education, and what we might do to improve. Read part 1.
In my introduction to this series a couple weeks ago, I posited a few ways we could rethink education. The first idea was about increasing the flexibility of the system to create one more prepared to adapt to changing demand:
Create a system flexible enough to keep up with what markets demand (and I use “market” to mean “any post-education environment”) — our system is too rigid to bend and...
This is part 1 of a series on learning, education, and what we can do to improve our systems. Read part 2 here.
The most effective learning relies on curiosity, a required characteristic to grow emotionally and intellectually over time. Teaching, on the other hand, is the act of steering this process. The best teaching provides fundamental “first principle” building blocks, lays down a breadcrumb trail, and lets the student discover their own path through trial and error. But we don’t teach children the value of curiosity; we often feel compelled to jump straight to direct information...
Khan Academy’s Andy Matuschak on tasks that require “depth of knowledge” versus those that have higher “transfer demand.” Both can be considered “difficult” in a sense, but teaching techniques to build knowledge need different approaches:
One big implication of mastery learning is that students should have as much opportunity to practice a skill as they’d like. Unlike a class that moves at a fixed pace, a struggling student should always be able to revisit prerequisites, read an alternative explanation, and try some new challenges. These systems...
A great interview with Bret Victor on the Track Changes podcast. His work has always been an inspiration for how to think about both creating things and teaching people.
This post from Caitlin Hudon is a great reminder for anyone that works with data. Combining git versioning with your SQL is super helpful for archiving and searching previous analysis queries.
You will always need that query again
Queries are living artifacts that change over time
I’ve hosted many OSM mapathons in the past, and today’s event with AGS and the Geo2050 conference was a huge success. It’s hard to create an engaging, productive environment that’s conducive to new mappers learning about OpenStreetMap. Today’s objective was to highlight how teachers can involve students in active work + contribution in a valuable context.
Steve, Richard, and Nuala did all the work, I just showed up to lend advice to folks that had any questions while mapping. The TeachOSM group did an excellent job showing the tasking manager, with...
As premier sponsors of the American Geographical Society, we try to do our part in promoting geographic literacy, education, and the future of geo sciences.
Part of our efforts this week is participating in the GIS Career Fair at Hunter College in Manhattan. Bill and I were there to showcase how geography fits into our business and talking with students about what it means to build a career centered around GIS and mapping. We talked to dozens of people about all aspects of the industry, with a...
We’re heading up next month to the American Geographical Society’s Geography2050 again this year, which will be my 4th one, and the 5th annual overall. It’s always a great event — a diverse crowd in attendance and a chance to catch up with a lot of old friends.
The last two years the AGS has hosted and led an OpenStreetMap mapathon in conjunction with the event to promote OSM as a tool in education. It’s organized and led by TeachOSM, and they invite 50+ AP Geography teachers from around the country to learn how to...
The Khan Academy’s Long-term Research group studies new strategies for teaching and learning. This paper presents a method for freeform response and feedback on open-ended The dynamism and interactivity of these tools for teaching are fantastic. I haven’t seen some of these modern e-learning platforms in a long time, things like Blackboard or Canvas. I have used Khan Academy extensively and am always impressed. My childhood self would’ve really taken to the engaging presentation style of the content.
Students shouldn’t have to wait until their adulthood to pursue open-ended problems and improve their...
Learn the foundations of how an economy works, in only 30 minutes.
This piece from Ray Dalio (hedge fund manager and author of Principles and hedge fund manager) breaks down an entire Econ 101 class in a concise, graphical form. He’s actually an excellent narrator. And knows a thing or two about how markets work.
Great tools keep up with their users. They operate at the speed of thought, ever shrinking the feedback loop between conceiving of an idea and exploring its consequences.
Tools for thought must support communication not just from the expert to the novice: they should enhance conversation between collaborative peers. They should enact thought at the speed of speech. With tools this fluid, we can reinforce natural dialogue through novel representations without awkward pauses. We can support students in co-constructing meaning as they discuss and resolve their multiple...
This entire post comes with a caveat: I am not a software engineer. I do build a software product, and work with a bunch of people way smarter than me, though. I’m experienced enough to have an opinion on the topic.
I talk to lots of young people looking to get into the software world. Sometimes they want to build mobile apps or create simple tools, and sometimes looking to create entire products. There are a lot of possible places to start. The world is full of blog posts, podcasts, books, and videos that purport to “teach you...
I wrote a blog post last week about the first few months of usage of Pushpin, the mobile app we built for editing OpenStreetMap data.
As I mentioned in the post, I’m fascinated and excited by how many brand new OpenStreetMap users we’re creating, and how many who never edited before are taking an interest in making contributions. This has been an historic problem for the OpenStreetMap project for years now: How do you convince a casually-interested person to invest the time to learn how to contribute themselves?
