Thought You Should See This

July 24, 2012

"Amazon will pay up to 95% of the tuition, textbook and associated fees up to a maximum of $2,000 per year for four years."

—

“At Amazon, we like to pioneer, we like to invent, and we’re not willing to do things the normal way if we can figure out a better way,” writes Jeff Bezos in a letter to customers that currently inhabits the home page of the online retailer. The Amazon Career Choice Program encourages employees who’ve been with the company for three years to invest in vocational training, regardless of whether these skills are related to Amazon’s own business or not. “It can be difficult in this economy to have the flexibility and financial resources to teach yourself new skills,” Bezos continues, describing the program as focusing entirely on areas that are “well-paying and in high demand.”

I thought it was bold of Bezos to call out innovation within the company’s fulfillment centers at the top of his letter. That is an area that’s been the subject of criticism in the past, notably in a devastating piece published in The Morning Call. The message here is that top brass aren’t worried about that, and continuing to do things its own way. We all know that education in the United States is in a terrible state, and doing something constructive is the only way to emerge from the economic crisis with any hope at all. So while in-house tuition programs are hardly new, this is certainly an interesting model, and one to monitor.

[Story via Alex Kinnebrew]

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(Notes: 8)

July 18, 2012

"Government spending is not a single-step transaction that burns money as an engine burns fuel; it’s part of a continuous feedback loop that circulates money. Government no more spends our money than a garden spends water or a body spends blood. To spend tax dollars on education and health is to circulate nutrients through the garden."

— This smart NYT op ed, The Machine and the Garden, makes the case that the economy is an organic, naturally impaired system, not a perfectly working machine. As the authors write, “An economy isn’t a machine; it’s a garden. It can be fruitful if well tended, but will be overrun by noxious weeds if not.” I also liked this statement, and wonder if we’ll ever be able to move on from tedious argument on the topic: “Empirically, trickle-down economics has failed. Tax cuts for the rich have never once yielded more net revenue for the country. The 2008 crash and the Great Recession prove irrefutably how inefficient and irrational markets truly are.”

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(Notes: 14)

Filed under: economy government regulation taxes education

July 17, 2012

"People who are in the younger generation, millennials, are getting completely screwed. They’re basically being turned into something like indentured servants where they have to pay off their college loans. Bush rewrote the bankruptcy laws in 2005 to make it impossible to get out of college debt even if you go personally bankrupt."

—

Wonderful, sparky conversation between technology investor and entrepreneur, Peter Thiel and Google’s chairman, Eric Schmidt as part of the Fortune Brainstorm Tech event taking place in Aspen. Ranging across topics, from the true impact of technology innovation to the influence of government on innovation and growth, the pair take on some thorny topics of our time. I did like the acknowledgement, forced by Thiel, that while social media played a role in the Arab Spring uprisings, the catalysts were really more fundamental and less prosaic. Thiel: “The fundamental driver for that was the food prices went up 50 percent and people were going to starve and I think it’s smug and complacent to pretend that it was anything other than that.” Well said.

[Live tweeting of this event came c/o Bill Gross]

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(Notes: 21)

Filed under: Peter Thiel Eric Schmidt technology innovation debate Arab Spring education

July 5, 2012

"If you really want to help these workers, start small, focused classes."

— To be completely honest, I’ve only just started Leslie Chang’s book, Factory Girls. But the premise is great: rather than focus on the idea that everything that cames out of Chineses factories must be somehow inherently immoral, Chang takes a more nuanced approach, and, shock horror, went to talk to the workers themselves to get their take on their lives and working conditions. The quote above was part of a Q&A at the end of her TEDGlobal talk, in which TED curator Chris Anderson asked Chang what she might say to Apple executives if she had a minute of their time. Full quote from Ben Lillie’s write-up: “The thing about the workers is how self-motivated and resourceful they are.” What they want most is education. They’ll take classes at night. And so, “If you really want to help these workers, start small, focused classes. When you talk to workers, that’s what they say — they don’t want hot water or shorter hours, but education.” Fascinating.

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(Notes: 20)

Filed under: TEDGlobal Leslie Chang globalization China Asia factories working conditions education

July 5, 2012

"College is a place where a professor’s lecture notes go straight to the students’ lecture notes, without passing through the brains of either."

— So said Mark Twain, quoted by Daphne Koller in her TEDGlobal talk outlining the success-to-date of online learning system, Coursera. The Stanford professor has certainly seen some serious uptake of the courses (to date 640,000 students from 190 countries have viewed 14 million videos and taken 6 million quizzes.) Of course, there’s a lot to be said about the business model of colleges that currently give professors the leeway to share intellectual insights developed on university time—but which might think differently if enrollments drop. That likely won’t be a problem for the top tier of universities such as Stanford, Princeton or the other universities currently experimenting with Coursera. After all, one only has to think about TED itself, with the phenomenally successful TEDx program driving interest in the two main conferences themselves; or the freely distributed TEDTalks doing the same.) But I do wonder how the model might play out with other, less Ivy Leagueish colleges, which put bluntly might not survive this upending of the system. Everyone’s talking about disruption in the higher education space. This is certainly a robust opening salvo.

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(Notes: 19)

Filed under: Daphne Koller Coursera TEDGlobal education disruptive innovation

June 11, 2012

Brooklyn Castle is a documentary made by two friends of mine, Katie* and Nelson Dellamaggiore. It’s the tale of a school in Brooklyn, IS 318, whose students generally hail from below the poverty line. However, this isn’t your usual hand-wringing, doom and gloom-style documentary. IS 318 boasts 26 national chess titles—more than any other junior high school in the country—and the documentary focuses on the hopes and dreams of some of the chess club’s young participants. As such, the film, which will have broader distribution in the fall, is at once a heartwarming tale of the optimism and determination of youth—and a reminder of the tenuous state of so many schools in America’s national system. As the film’s conclusion reveals, stringent cuts to education as a result of the economic crash of 2008 have caused real problems, particularly to after-school programs, which are seen as easiest to cut or dispense with entirely. That’s right, the ramifications of the cavalier swashbuckling of Wall Street and its ilk now threaten the very initiatives designed to provide the United States with a bright future. Talk about vicious trickle-down economics.

Some of the film’s most poignant moments featured the children’s parents. Many of them first generation immigrants, their dignity and willingness to do anything within their power to aid their children’s success is utterly heart-warming—and a potent reminder of the ongoing motivational power of the American Dream. Politicians with an immigration agenda should watch the documentary, as should anyone working in education. This is the real story of America, and its heartbreak lies not in the apathy of the young but in the myopia of those allegedly in charge.

* Just found out that Katie won Best New Director in last week’s Brooklyn Film Festival. Congratulations!

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(Notes: 13)

Filed under: education Brooklyn Castle documentary film immigration innovation

May 9, 2012

The Flipped Classroom: Answering Obama’s Call For Creativity In Education gives impressive examples of how thinking differently about the structure of education can have enormous effect. Turns out, changing the focus of how time is spent in class and how time is spent on homework can have enormous impact on the students.

Dominique improved in all six of his classes, carrying a 2.88 grade point average last fall compared to his previous D/F average. For the first time, he is talking about going to college.

Meanwhile, the pilot of the experiment reported these results:

Failure rates overall decreased by 30% to 10.8%. The breakdown by subject: English went from 52% to 19%; social studies from 28% to 9%; math 44% to 13%; and science from 41% to 19%.

Pretty impressive, huh? So now here’s my question: what influence might design skills (and, for that matter, writing skills?) have on such initiatives? The slide above, grabbed from the Fast Co Exist story, is like a technical manual on how not to design, while the writing is grammatically incorrect and somewhat incomprehensible. Yet they still got the results… the incredible impact happened quite without the influence of so-called “good” design or writing. So this begs the question, if the results are there, why do so many of us get hung up on the importance of things being “correct”? This is a serious question, and one that I think gets to the heart of designer insecurity. Do all teachers need to be designers and writers too? If things can happen quite well without designers, however can they argue that they actually need to be an integral part of the system? Or do we argue that the impact would be *that much greater* if those other skills were deeply integrated? Answers on a virtual postcard, please.

[Story via Beth DiLeone]

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(Notes: 9)

Filed under: design education writing system thinking structural change

April 30, 2012

"A few workshops and an extracurricular competition won’t produce business leaders with real design-thinking skills. Business education must be completely redefined."

— My colleague Melissa Quinn puts the cat among the proverbial pigeons with her Fast Company piece about the Rotman Design Challenge, organized by the Rotman School of Management, part of the University of Toronto. Quinn highlights the continued gap between the rhetoric of those promising to teach “design thinking” (or “business thinking”) and what actually happens, and she has pointed words for both sides of the equation. The key, as she argues, is that the education system as a whole is outmoded, and we need no less than its meaningful reinvention so that both designers and MBAs can realize, appreciate and embrace the true value of the others’ craft, with real results.

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(Notes: 3)

Filed under: education design thinking design education design business

April 10, 2012

"Humanities majors may well learn a great deal about the world. But they don’t really learn career skills through their studies. Engineering majors, conversely, learn in great technical detail. But they might not learn why, how, or where they should apply their skills in the workforce. The best students, workers, and thinkers will integrate these questions into a cohesive narrative."

—

Overlooking the fact that the Peter Thiel teaching at Stanford is the same Peter Thiel who paid 20 kids $100,000 to drop out of college and start a business, this is a great recap of Thiel’s first course at Stanford. Student Blake Masters took detailed notes, and there are some real gems (not, it should be noted, necessarily captured verbatim). The above comment shows the recognition of a workforce that can integrate inputs from diverse source, while this quote should also be borne in mind by all would-be entrepreneurs:

Channeling Tolstoy’s intro to Anna Karenina, all successful companies are different; they figured out the 0 to 1 problem in different ways. But all failed companies are the same; they botched the 0 to 1 problem.

I was also fascinated by Thiel’s interpretation of “the problem with big business,” which comes down to a question of scale and design:

North of 100 people in a company, employees don’t all know each other. Politics become important. Incentives change. Signaling that work is being done may become more important than actually doing work. These costs are almost always underestimated. Yet they are so prevalent that professional investors should and do seriously reconsider before investing in companies that have more than one office. Severe coordination problems may stem from something as seemingly trivial or innocuous as a company having a multi-floor office.

Thiel also gets into why people should ever embark on a startup in the first place, and it’s not, he advises, in order to merely copy what already exists. You can learn a lot if you shot for the moon and miss. But:

If you try to do Groupon for Madagascar and it fails, it’s not clear where exactly you are. But it’s not good.

And then finally, he details some questions all entrepreneurs should pose to themselves. I say we’d all probably benefit from taking a conscious look at where we are:

First, what is valuable? Second, what can I do? And third, what is nobody else doing?

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(Notes: 16)

Filed under: Peter Thiel education design thinking integrated thinking entrepreneurship startup corporations management innovation

March 30, 2012

The State of Design Education: A (Spirited) Discussion

Yesterday, Fast Co Design published an essay by Pentagram partner, Michael Bierut, entitled The Main Failing Of Design Schools: Kids Can’t Think For Themselves. In it, the legendary graphic designer, Pentagram partner and longtime advocate of design divides design education into two camps: process-driven or portfolio-driven, and concludes that neither serves anyone in this day and age particularly well.

Modern design education… is essentially value-free: every problem has a purely visual solution that exists outside any cultural context. Some of the most tragic victims of this attitude hail not from the world of high culture, but from the low. Witness the case of a soft-drink manufacturer that pays a respected design firm a lot of money to “update” a classic logo. The product of American design education responds: “Clean up an old logo? You bet,” and goes right to it. In a vacuum that excludes popular as well as high culture, the meaning of the mark in its culture is disregarded. Why not just say no? The option isn’t considered.

It was Bierut’s conclusion that had me clapping my hands in agreement:

It’s the broader kind of illiteracy that’s more profoundly troubling. Until educators find a way to expose their students to a meaningful range of culture, graduates will continue to speak in languages that only their classmates understand. And designers, more and more, will end up talking to themselves.

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(Notes: 18)

Filed under: design education Michael Bierut Jon Kolko rant

January 30, 2012

"If a professor assigns books that cost more than $50 per student, per semester–take the excess, multiply it by 100 and subtract it from their salaries. If less, add the total as a bonus. Make the professors bear the weight of the external negative effects they have on the economy (and my pocketbook). On average I would say that most of my professors would take hits ranging from $2,000 to $10,000."

— In Spending Other People’s Money: What Professors and Doctors Have in Common, Forbes writer David Whelan outlines a proposal to deal with the problematic disconnect between the one doing the prescribing (doctor/professor) and the one actually supplying (textbook publisher/pharmaceutical manufacturer.)

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(Notes: 12)

Filed under: education healthcare innovation ideas disconnect pharmaceutical industry publishing money

January 10, 2012

"Educational data-mining also presents ethical questions. How much should students be told about the behind-the-scenes computer analysis that manipulates their educational experiences? And how far should colleges go in shaping those experiences based on data patterns?"

— I found Colleges Mine Data To Tailor Students’ Experience, from The Chronicle of Higher Education, totally fascinating, even as I haven’t totally wrapped my head around how I feel about the piece. Certainly, the concept of applying educational data-mining seems to raise as many questions as it answers. And, as my colleague, David McGaw, who forwarded me this story asks: “What’s the next application of similar preference-matching algorithms now we’ve used them for dating, books, movies, and college? Real estate? Jobs? Food?” Great question, and fascinating topic.

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(Notes: 17)

Filed under: education data mining ethics technology

November 14, 2011

"Need further proof of just how far colleges have distorted our perceptions? Google “the best college in America.” You get thousands of hits by schools identifying themselves as the best. Google “the worst schools in America,” and you find few lists or reporting. Clearly marketers have swamped objective reporting and commenting when it comes to reviewing colleges and universities. In their world, they are all the best."

— In We Are. State Penn, Greg Matusky looks at the state of higher education through the lens of the Penn State scandal and calls for the bubble to burst. Also, for me, a pretty powerful argument for why journalism matters.

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(Notes: 9)

Filed under: education journalism bubble Penn State Google marketing

November 14, 2011

"If design, as a broad field, really does want to start doing some good in the world, it is essential that design develops a clearer voice in public discourse. We need to argue the case for design’s importance throughout education as an integrated practice and be rigorous in understanding the context in which we operate. That means looking outward, not naval gazing. A glance through the abstracts of a great deal of research journals and conferences points to the latter. This is a terrible irony given the fact that many of us practice human-centered design research that expressly aims to avoid the effects of designing from within ivory towers."

—

In Design Research and Education: A Failure of Imagination? British designer, researcher and educator Andy Polaine makes a powerful case for the failure of our academic institutions to produce the creative thinkers our future really needs. It’s a long piece, and well worth the read, particularly his argument that the gap between design theory and design practice is not merely detrimental at an academic level.

We have sold what we do as magic at the cost of hiding our thinking process and when we hide our process we can no longer articulate it, teach it or give it the value it deserves.

Seems to me that the responsibility for imagining and implementing a future that is not bankrupt in terms of economy, politics or culture lies with those who can temper the apparently hyperrational forces that currently dominate business with the ability to see further, imagine more, do better—and explain it all convincingly to those same hyperrationalists. Seems to me, as Polaine puts it, the challenge for educators and designers to stop squabbling about semantics becomes ever more pertinent.

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(Notes: 14)

Filed under: design education innovation Andy Polaine rant design industry design discourse research imagination

October 20, 2011

Some interesting takes on the state of design (and what’s needed from the industry) in this promo for the upcoming Products of Design course at SVA. As you’ll see in the video, I’m part of the faculty, and even though the thesis class I’m teaching doesn’t actually start until 2013 (!) I’m super excited about the whole thing. If you’re interested/around, there’s also an Open Day in New York on November 5th.