BetterLesson Hacks Education
“A hack solves a problem in a way that breaks some established and widely accepted rule or conventional wisdom.” --Union Square Ventures wiki, March 2009
This past Friday I had the pleasure of attending Union Square Venture’s “Hacking Education” event where a distinguished panel of attendees met to discuss how to use the web to reinvent teaching and learning in the United States and abroad.
The discussion began with opening remarks from author Sir Ken Robinson, who summarized the central tenets of his provocative TED lecture, “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” The panel then opened up into a series of engaging discussions on how to harness the transformative power of the internet to hack at education from inside and out. Some highlights:
- Jeff Jarvis, author of What Would Google Do?, proposed that students should have their own “Google 20% Time” during which they could explore any intellectual topic of their choosing (a potentially nice way to rebrand ‘elective’ periods).
- Activist and scholar Danah Boyd made the case for employing social networking tools to scale high-quality instructional content and best practices; I responded by presenting BetterLesson’s unique plan to achieve this vision.
- The New School president Bob Kerrey provided everyone with a history of 20th-Century education policy.
- Fred Wilson, partner at Union Square Ventures, emphasized the importance of giving students more control over their education: “That's what the web does. It transfers control from institutions to individuals and it’s going to do that to education too.”
Throughout the conversation, participants also contributed thoughts and ideas on a large Twitter projection at the back of the room. This offered a fitting backdrop for rigorous debate and a great way for people outside the room to participate in the conversation.
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