Innovating Education

Let's talk a little bit about innovating education. But to start, let's redefine what innovation is. I mean, it's one of these terms that's thrown out everywhere, in business, in schools, it's in just about every mission statement you can imagine. We want to be more innovative, but what is it? Well, most people think of innovation as invention. They think of things like the iPad and they say, that's an amazing innovation. But the interesting thing is that everything, every component that was in the iPad was already in existence. They were existing ideas, they were existing technologies that were just pieced together. Innovation is when you find adjacent possibilities for these existing ideas and you combine them together or you find new possibilities for them. Now let's talk about what is driving innovation globally. What's creating all of this change both in business and in the classroom? One is critical mass, hyperconnectivity, network energy, and engagement. Critical mass. There is a critical mass or a majority of people that are doing things online. They're engaging online like never before. There's groups of individuals like the baby boomers that are significantly engaged in using the internet to do things. We have hyperconnectivity. 2.1 billion people are connected to the internet. It's amazing stuff. And we have activity, and I think this is the key. People are doing things online. They're not just sitting there reading articles anymore. It's not a consumption economy. People are starting to create. I mean, look at how many YouTube videos are uploaded every 60 seconds with a total duration of 25+ hours. Every minute online, people are creating new things. They're doing things on all of this stuff. What does that mean? Well, in terms of how we traditionally set up websites and teach people, a lot of the conversations, a lot of the real interaction and engagement happens off of the site it originates on. And this is an important thing to keep in mind. The same thing in the classroom— kids are going to other places to try to complement and supplement their education. So from a theoretical perspective, It took 7 million man-hours to build the Empire State Building. If we could truly engage the cognitive surplus of individuals in their free time, we could build 4 of these a minute using brainpower. Now let's talk about technology that's enabling individuals to do that. How do we capture all of this unstructured participation? People are making videos, they're doing all this stuff online, but now how do we capture it? How do we bring that into a structured environment and use that for— maybe it's learning, maybe it's new ways of doing business. There's a lot of different things that go along with that. So crowdsourcing is a technology that we're, you know, another technology we're starting to hear a lot more about. There's 2 forms of crowdsourcing. There's active, which is you imagine a site like Wikipedia where you're an active participant in a community that's crowdsourcing content. And in essence, The entire inception of Wikipedia was crowdsourced. People volunteered time to build the most concise encyclopedia in an online format. It was very disruptive. It took out Microsoft and Encarta, which was looking at the traditional way of doing things by hiring the experts and having the best, most beautiful content. Well, the power is where the crowd lies, and Wikipedia disrupted that. Now, the one thing to keep in mind with active crowdsourcing is, you know, you're participating in it, And you recognize that. There's also something that's called passive crowdsourcing. Many of us have seen these little CAPTCHAs around the web. What we probably don't all realize is that we're actually doing work. In fact, there's 200 million of these CAPTCHAs that are solved each day, which equates to 150,000 man-hours. Now, what are you doing? Well, you're actually translating books and newspapers that have been scanned that computers are unable to read the words. So you're doing work as a security validation. Now, just a little bit about how it works. It gives you one word it knows and it gives you one word it does not know, and it will send it out to a group of individuals so that there's error correction that's built into it. But in essence, you're helping translate books for free as a form of security validation to prove you're not a robot. Passive crowdsourcing is crowdsourcing where you don't realize you're doing work. You don't actively participate in it. You're doing it as a form of some type of validation. Google does this. There's something on Google Labs that allows you to— makes you have to enter an answer to a math equation before you can send an email out, just in case you had too much to drink at night. So these are examples of where you're actually doing work. You may not realize it at the time, but in the process you're— You're crunching numbers, you're doing all kinds of different things. So crowds can do all kinds of things. You know, they can think of things, they can design things, they can build things, they can test things, they can support things. Specifically in education, some of the interesting things is, you know, tapping ideas and identifying bright spots. And this is something that is referred to as open innovation. The ability to create a community that allows us to identify bright spots. Things that are working in education. We, we look at a lot of numbers and we analyze a lot of data in the classroom, but does that really give us what is working and what's not working, right? We can see a percentage of the amount of students that have failed a standardized test. That's fantastic. But let's identify ways and mechanisms that make students pass the test. Now, how do we do that? Well, we could look at numbers, we could do all these things, or we could just ask the teachers. The teachers that are in the context of the entire system that know what works and what doesn't work. And we allow them to vet that together. That's an example of the power of open innovation, the ability to tap these teachers to find out what's working, what's not working. And imagine going as far down as the students. Imagine asking the students what is working, what's not working, and also engaging them in other stuff. What can we do to be, you know, to have a more interactive or engaging school? How do we use your iPhone in the classroom? Let's ask the students. We can pay a, you know, high-dollar consultant Or we can look at numbers, or we could ask the people that know the answers to our questions. Now, from a structural standpoint, a lot of my past work has been in analyzing corporations and how you take, let's say, an idea from an employee, and how do you execute upon that? How do you get senior leadership aware of this idea to actually execute and implement it? And what happens if a customer has an idea that could revolutionize your business, that could make you additional revenue? So, part of using open innovation is, is having a channel or a platform to capture this. The interesting thing is when you look at this command-and-control structure, the same structure is present in education. You have the same top-to-bottom bureaucracy. So if I'm a teacher and I've identified a new way to teach my students that's paying off from a standardized testing perspective, how do I get that out there? Do I send an email to my principal? Do I send an email to my superintendent? What do I do? Are they going to be receptive? How do I let other teachers know about that? Now, these are some of the fundamental challenges right now in the current education system, is how do we innovate? How do we find the answers to our problems? And I would argue that the answers aren't going to come from the top. The answers are going to be implemented by the top, but they're going to come from teachers, students, and I would say parents. People that are in the trenches that are dealing with this on a daily basis that see what works and what doesn't work. Now let's talk about some of the things that are out there that we consider to be changing education. Well, we've all heard of iTunes U, an amazing thing from Apple that allows universities to publish course material open and online for free. It's fantastic. It's, it's Really hasn't changed education though. And the reason why is it's still consumption. And I'll get into more about the problem with the consumption-based learning model. But I have to be motivated to go here, to have access to this courseware, to diligently try to complete it. And that's one mechanism if I, you know, don't have access to higher education or I can't afford it. This is one way that I can do it. However, does this change education? Does this change learning? No, it makes it more accessible. It has not fundamentally changed the model of the classroom. We have Khan Academy, and this has been touted as an amazing— and it is an amazing way for people to have access to tutorials on different components, and they're, you know, building all kinds of gamified aspects into this. Again, it is still consumption-based. Yes, there's some things that I can do. I can take a quiz. There's some things that are coming, but it's traditional learning in a digital form, and I'm going to continue to stress that because we're touting things like iTunes U and Khan Academy and more that I'm going to talk about as revolutionizing education, and they're digitizing education, not revolutionizing it. We have Edmodo. Edmodo is fantastic. It's Facebook for the classroom. It allows your students to interact and engage with classmates and teachers like they do with friends on Facebook. It's also a really interesting consumption tool, but it's traditional learning that now has a digital structure. We have CK-12. This one is a little bit more disruptive. This allows teachers to create flexible textbooks. Basically, I can go in and I can customize a textbook, and I can download that, or I can send it out in a variety of different formats to my students. And customize the way that they're learning. Again, the student is still consuming content, but the content itself has been created or customized by the teacher. This is getting closer to an aspect that can revolutionize education, but it's still too high, meaning it still resides in the teacher level of creation. Teachers Pay Teachers, fantastic site. Kindergarten teacher made $1 million off of selling their lesson plans. Crowdsourcing at its best, basically taking best practices and allowing people to buy it or download it for free. We have iCon, a product that I worked on, the ability to have a digital site that allows you to ask questions and get answers from your classmates, those types of things. It's used in business, it can also be used in the classroom. And then we have Foldit. So Foldit is a very interesting experiment where you can Using animations and using this game, you can show how protein folds. And it's something that we don't fully understand, all the different mechanisms and all the different ways that it folds. However, you can participate in this game, use those video game skills, and actually help solve some significant problems in the way that protein folds and learn in the process, which is really interesting. They solved some age Gene issues that supercomputers have been crunching for a while, and I believe the last count was in 3 weeks they were able to actually create a model of what that protein looks like. So fantastic stuff. Now, these are really interesting new models of accessing traditional forms of learning. Now let's talk about some things that are really disrupting everything. They're flipping everything, society on its head. Well, one is volunteering. When I was in school, we volunteered, we worked at a booth, you know, we sold candy bars. The kids today have vastly different skill sets. The kids today can build websites, they can make videos, they can do things that are very valuable to nonprofits, to government agencies, whatever it may be. But we're not capturing that. We're still asking them to volunteer in traditional formats. Well, Sparked is an interesting startup. Where based on your skill set and the types of nonprofits you're interested in, you can solve challenges for these nonprofits using the skills that you have. And these are technology-based skills in some sense, which is fantastic. It provides a new way for students to plug into real-world learning using technology, and it's basically tailored to their expertise and the types of groups they're interested in serving. Coursera, you know, these are examples of Learning, you know, we talked a little bit about Khan Academy. Coursera is one where I can take a course at a major university, I get a certificate for completion, the instructor is actually engaged in the process, which is pretty cool. So they send out emails and they put the stuff there, and it's got a lot of interesting feedback mechanisms built into it. Mobile works. So we've all heard of Amazon Mechanical Turk, it's the ability to crowdsource a a bunch of tasked individuals. Well, I like MobileWorks. It's a fascinating model that's starting to have some impact in business, which is where I can crowdsource qualitative tasks too. I can say, you know, go to this website, you know, find all the competitors that I have, do market research for me, and there's a qualitative aspect that's evaluated also by me and by a supervisor that's plugged into the system. So it's pretty interesting stuff that's out there. Kickstarter, so crowdfunding. We look at things, you know, the traditional way of doing business is starting to change and what we're teaching is starting to actually evolve. You know, before, if you had an idea, you wanted to get funding for a product, you go to a VC, you make a pitch, you go to a bank, you make a pitch, or you have to base it purely on connections. Well, this Pebble watch was actually turned down by 3 different groups for financing. However, when they went to the crowd, when they went online and said, this is our idea, this is our prototype, this is our watch. People came out en masse and they were pledging to raise $100,000, which is basically $100,000 worth of pre-orders, and they raised $10 million. Second Life. Virtual interactions, new ways to participate in new environments, things to shake things up. Second Life is an example of that. There's a lot of good and bad things with Second Life, but I think as, you know, internet connectivity and bandwidth start to increase and mobile devices are capable of, you know, rich immersive 3D experiences, you'll start to see some of this come into a mobile environment. Right now Second Life is based within a desktop environment. However, I think this is going to start to change and it's shifting the way that things are done. And what they consider to be the next industrial revolution for us, 3D printing. So the ability to take, as you see in that picture on the right-hand side, I have a bike, and that bike is actually the first 3D-printed bike. And the ability for students to print out parts and make different experiments is, is is going to come, and it's now reached a point where it's affordable. The printer on the left, $2,100, and, you know, that's, that's nothing now. It's accessible. You can print parts. You can share CAD files online and print what other people are making. It's really fascinating to see how, how this is changing the way that small businesses can do business as well. So now we'll get to where is— what does all this mean, and where is all of this going? Well, it's all about creation. You know, a lot of the methods of learning that I talked about are about consumption. It's all about what I can read. It's about taking existing things that were in textbooks and making them more accessible, existing courses that have been taught for decades and making them, you know, accessible to anyone online for free, which is good. However, students, people, business people, they all learn differently now. It's all about creation. We learn by doing. It's project-based learning, but it's in a sense where you don't have to consume to learn. People want to test things out. They want to experiment. They want to try. They want to fail. They want to do things. And so As a result, we're working on an app that allows them to do that, allows them to create, and allows them to learn in the process. We call it Stitched, and in essence, we have templates and we have various video effects that allow them to create content, whether it's a book report or whether they're pitching to get hired at a job. People are incredibly creative today. They're using technology to express themselves, but there's not a mechanism for them to do that in the classroom, and not one yet on the phone. That is easy enough for them to use within the timeframe that they have. So what could this look like? I'll show you an example. So by now, I hope that you're encouraged at what you just saw. The evolution of the book report is amazing. Now imagine making that from your phone in 5 minutes. That's our goal. And really, at Collab Lab, our desire is to empower creation and to fundamentally not just change education but change society. And we're excited about what the future holds. We're excited to be a part of the disrupting startup scene, and we are confident that we will change things. And I wanted to give you a sneak peek at why we're doing what we're doing. And what's gonna happen. So, uh, stay tuned with what we're doing at cloudlab.com, and feel free to reach out if you have any questions. Thank you.