education

What any person in the world can learn, almost all persons can learn if provided with appropriate prior and current conditions of learning.
— Benjamin Bloom

why work on education §

Beliefs:

• Most problems are downstream of broken education. Education is the problem I’d work on if I couldn’t fail/had zero chance of failure.
• We’re at a pivotal point — we now have the technology to solve Bloom’s Two Sigma problem.

Personal influences:

• Reading Totto Chan: The Little Girl at the Window when I was 9. I was so inspired I wrote an essay about how I want to build my own schools when I grow up.
• Watching the following talks
  • Randy Pausch Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams
  • Bret Victor - Inventing on Principle
• My own upbringing

inspo §

good reads §

• Alfie Kohn
• A Mathematician’s Lament
• Darpa digital tutor
  • four layers:
    1. a framework for the IT ontologies and feature extraction,
    2. an Inference Engine to judge the students understanding/misunderstanding,
    3. an Instruction Engine to decide what topics/problems to serve up next, a Conversation Module which uses natural language to prod the student to think through the problem and create tests for their understanding,
    4. a Recommender to call in a human tutor when necessary.
• Henrik Karlsson
  • Childhoods of exceptional people
  • The Learning System
• Derek Sivers
  • there’s no speed limit
• Andy Matuschak
  • Game designers vs. education researchers on unguided instruction

alternative schools/platforms §

• Alpha School
• Primer
• Synthesis
• GT school
• Khan Lab School
• Minerva
• Lambda School
• Outschool
• Recurse
• Cristo Rey Schools
• Maven
• Mentava (one of the softwares used at Alpha School)