Robert Scoble #7 on the Future of School - Gutenberg Academy

In my experience, it's one of the first times that younger people are teaching older people about the newest technologies.

Yeah, that's been happening for 30 years here.

Yeah, but I don't know, when books were invented, all people taught young people to write and all this stuff. So it was most of the time in society, it was the other way around. And this time it's the first. Yep. Or with computers, the whole story.

Yeah.

So. Yeah, but school hasn't changed. What do you think is.

There's a lot. The reason there's a lot. I've talked to school teach, my sister in law as a school teacher. There's a lot of. There's a revolution coming and it's going to be due to the low cost tablet and the cell phone, particularly the cell phone. And the revolution is happening for a number of different reasons. One is cheap. Two, it doesn't rely on any IT person in the school. But my son went to a private school in Los Altos. So it's a rich school in the middle of Silicon Valley, in the middle of the most dense, you know, technological world in the, you know, world. And they couldn't even take my donated computers because the, they only had one person for the entire school to deal with all the computers and she just couldn't deal with more. That's not gonna be true when kids are bringing cell phones. Six year olds are bringing cell phones to school right now. And the reason why, by the way, is fascinating because there's, because of divorce. The parents are handing their kids cell phones so that they can call them without talking to the other parents that they don't like anymore. But back to the point. Cell phones are bringing a revolution to education. Over the next 10 years, you're going to see deep effects and you're starting to see some of the early signals. The Khan Academy is a great early signal. The fact that I can watch a YouTube video from this guy who recorded videos in his closet in Los Altos and I can do that whether I'm in China or India or Germany or here, you know, near him is transformative. It's changing education, but there's deeper things. I talked with one of the computer science professors who taught, I think it was Larry Page, and he's working with at risk youth in Detroit, that is poor kids. And he says the problem in those neighborhoods is if you're carrying around a math book, you're going to get beat up and the book is going to get torn up and taken away from you. And so your ability to escape is retarded, is hurt. The chances that you're going to be able to read a book and get out of your situation and improve your life is very hard to do. And this happens.

Right.

The guy who invented cleartype, which is how the fonts are smoothed on the screen, was Bill Hill. He was my first interview at Microsoft. He escaped poverty by going to the library and reading every day and educating himself and pulling himself out of the situation he was, and getting smart enough to get a, you know, to go to a university. And so it's possible. We know it's possible. I have examples in my own life where that has happened, that he was the first person in his community to go to a university. Right. The problem is how he had to put a lot of energy, of his own energy into doing that and maybe even take on his peers who didn't want him to go to the library and wanted him to go play sports or go drinking or do whatever they were doing. A phone now brings the world's information into your hands. So you don't even need to go to the library anymore. You just need to have a phone in your hands where you can watch those Khan Academy videos or chat with people on Facebook who are smart. You know, I have people. I have people who are in the White House right now on my Facebook. They're in my hands. That's transformative. Something is going on here that's different. I mean, when I was in school, we thought we were in a cold war with Russia. And now I have friends who are Russian generals. And last Sunday I was hanging out with an astronaut who's been on a Russian Soyuz spaceship. The world has shifted and our access to information is shifting very, very quickly. I mean, you're holding a GoPro camera, which is a $300 camera. When I was a kid, a TV camera was $200,000 and it wasn't even 640x40. That's a 1080p camera and has the ability to distribute its video now worldwide. That's a revolution. There is no doubt there's going to be a deep revolution in education. I think this is why also the venture capital community starting to invest in new startups for education, because they're sensing now there's a market that they can build because of these transformative technologies. But take it deeper. Now the kid has access to information. Every kid who has an Android phone or an iPhone in their hands has access to the world's information, has access to the Wikipedia, the YouTube. Now they could use it to Goof off, you know, and watch stupid cat videos on YouTube. That's gonna be a choice that a lot of people make. Or you could watch TED videos, right? And each TED video you watch puts something in your brain and teach. It rewires your brain to maybe go and learn a little bit more about that topic and become more proficient and learn a little bit more math, a little bit more science, or learn photography, right? Learn something that has some value to the world. So the kids are gonna. The smart teachers. When you talk to the teacher of the year, like over here in Palo Alto, which is one of the best districts, the smart teachers talk about being a curator, a connector, a facilitator. They say the classroom is being flipped, where you learn the lesson at home by watching Khan Academy videos on your tablet PC at home. That's. Your homework is to learn, and then you come to the classroom to practice. Because there you need a teacher who can help you see the world a little bit differently or get past a block. I remember being in junior high here and we had a metal shop. And, you know, it's one thing to teach how melted metal works and how to make a cast and, and make something. It's. It's one thing to teach you that on a TED video, for instance. It's another thing to actually try to do it. And it took me 20 times to make the stupid horse work. And the, the teacher was there not to teach me how to do it. I already knew how to do it. And we, I did it 20 times before it finally worked. He was there to say, okay, why didn't the metal get into the foot on this, on this iteration? How did you vent it? Let's look at your cast. Oh, you didn't do it quite right. And he was a facilitator for learning. And that's, that's going to be the, the place where a lot where I think this revolution is going to come and it's. You're going to see new apps. Calcanis already has a conference on new apps that are coming to help teachers facilitate this kind of new learning. You know, we're seeing Khan Academy and Creative Live. There's a new company, they just got seven and a half million dollars to do new kinds of video and new kinds of learning, lifelong learning for people. We're seeing, you know, some of the colleges are starting to react to this. I talked to Tina Selig at Stanford, and she's teaching a class right now on creativity. 30,000 people are watching her teach this class. So Stanford And Harvard and the better colleges are already learning. Oh, if we share this information with the world, stuff happens. It causes the learning to get better because the audience. As the audience gets bigger, the learning gets better, because there's going to be somebody in that audience who's smarter than the teacher. Right. And who is probably more creative than Tina Selig. Right. And is seeing something happen in the world. I interviewed a surgeon, a lung surgeon at Stanford, and he said, everything I learned in Medical School 30 years ago, this is an older guy who's quite accomplished, is obsolete. He said, we don't do anything the way we learned it 30 years ago. And. And he carries around an iPhone now to know the latest science, because some kid who's studying in Helsinki or London or China might have discovered a new thing about the disease he's trying to cure and might have come up with a new drug, a new procedure, a new way to get to it. And the science changes, right? And he has the latest learning in his hand. He said, that's how I do surgery now. Before I go in surgery, I stop and look to make sure I know the latest science. Because the world changes its understanding of these things. Revolution is coming. We have access to the world's information for the first time. It's quite exciting.