The Deception of Difficulty
I remember when I was growing up, roughly around the fifth grade, I would occasionally hear older people mention the field of TRIGONOMETRY.
“TRIGONOMETRY”
What an awe-inspiring word that is to a fifth grader. It makes them shudder in their seat trying to imagine what such an impassable realm of thought might contain. There was an aura about it that suggested it would be some sort of mental and spiritual transcendence. Then - a few years later - in the glorious awakening - it turned out to be triangles - fucking…. triangles….. three-lines connected at three points. (slow clap)
Throughout my life, I’ve always marveled at what the next level of life and of knowledge would hold. And, upon climbing to that next level, I have almost always been met with disappointment. The next level of knowledge to be attained, the next experience to be had, always turned out to be somewhat less magical than I expected. The times when I did feel a sense of magic while attaining new knowledge came not from the difficulty of its content, but instead from its surprising simplicity. Far too often society has a tendency to take simple things, and veil them in difficulty - to make things seem harder than they actually are.
Let me be clear and say that this post is not me trying to be arrogant. On the contrary, what I am trying to get across is that sometimes people are deceived into being impressed by certain realms of knowledge, which, when explained with clarity, actually turn out to be far less complicated than they’re portrayed to be. Most of the sciences fall into this category - and this is unfortunate.
I believe that one of the greatest ails of society is making things seem more difficult than they actually are. There is an immense disservice that we do to ourselves, collectively, by instilling in our shared consciousness the belief that certain realms of thought are inaccessible to the majority of the population. Exaggerating and mythologizing the achievements of our great thinkers and their works does nothing but to provide us with a sense of awe, that in turn demoralizes the ambition of too many capable individuals.
Most magic is not as magical as it may seem.
So, why does this happen? Why do realms of though like math and computer science get veiled in mystery? I’m not sure, but here are what I think some of the causes are:
A tradeoff between accuracy and interestingness.
Often times it is more ‘interesting’ to portray something as excessively complex, to portray someone as a genius, rather than to be accurate about the true contents of the subject, or the individual.
Laziness or Bad Teachers - Leading to More Bad Teachers
Deceptions occur when people cast something as difficult because they did not take the time to understand it, or because they had a teacher who did not have clarity themselves. When people don’t understand something, they try to make it seem more complicated than it actually is. This leads to a vicious cycle where people who don’t understand, end up teaching others, making it seem even more difficult to their successors.
Starting at the wrong place
Sometimes, basics of a given topic, and its assumptions, are not adequately covered, and people are recommended to start too deep. This is manifested in the lack of history that is used to teach many topics - for example, we learn calculus without learning how it came about, without grasping what problems it was intended to solve. Seeing how problems and their solutions unfold is probably the best way to learn, but this happens rarely.
Wanting to Sound Distinguished
When something is simple, but people want to seem important and indispensable, they wrap simple concepts in words and language that make those concepts difficult to distill. This achieves their desire to sound distinguished, but harms the ability for others to get to the root of things.
The consequence of all this is that people approach new fields of knowledge with two things: fear, and an expectation for magic.
The fear is unfortunate, because it scares many people off before they even begin. It makes people discount their own abilities, and leads them to strive for less than they are actually capable of achieving. How many people have shied away from math all together because they were made to feel like they could not understand it? Perhaps, it was those who were teaching them that did not understand.
The expectation of magic is unfortunate, because it leads people to constantly question themselves, and their comprehension of the subject they are studying. It is a disillusionment and questioning after the fact of comprehension. When something turns out to not be as complicated, or as magical, as it was portrayed to be, they are not sure if they actually understand it. This type of disillusioned self-doubt leads to listlessness, and a lack of certainty in one’s own uncertainty. People are quicker to question their own deficiencies if something doesn’t make sense, rather than question the thing which does not make sense. We should constantly question the assumptions and contents of what we learn - if something doesn’t make sense, we should examine its basis with honesty. It could well be that you are right, and the material is wrong - so take a moment to consider this possibility. Be bold.
I do believe that there is substantial value gained by making things seem less magical, and in turn more attainable. It would be empowering for people to know that things are not as far out of reach as they may think. This applies to experiences as much as it does to knowledge. Although the next realm of knowledge you dive into, or the next life experience, turns out to be less magical than you thought it would be, it just means that there is more possibility for you to now make real magic, to try to locate that subtle process through which true magic is made.
Building Apps On Top of Your Genome: OAuth For Your Health Data
There’s an interesting TED talk up right now about the ‘Genomic Revolution’ (link to talk). The idea of the talk is that soon our genome will soon be so cheap to sequence, that it will become a key part of our ‘identity’ data. It will be used in providing personalized health care, but it will also be a core piece of data for other applications as well. Resnick encourages us to reflect on exactly what this means, and how we can participate/influence the oncoming ‘Genomic Revolution’.
In fact, there’s lots of interesting ideas even mentioned in the talk (reminiscent of Gattica):
- Dating apps based on genomes.
- Job applications including your genome (e.g. if you want to go to space, you need to pass certain genome requirements).
- Self-improvement/productivity apps based on your genomic pre-disposition?
What else would you build if you had access to this data? (would love to actually hear ideas)
One of the key things for this to happen is to have something that can store this health data, and can then give other app’s access to that data (in a system similar to what oAuth is for Facebook and Twitter Apps right now). This could be an interesting project to work on, and it asks an important question of how ‘data management’, and granting access to data will work in the future. What data do you want to have access to, that you don’t have access to right now - and what would developers build if they could have access to that data? Will online genome data storage and sharing be something the existing Genome companies like Resnick’s company, and 23andMe do first, or is there room for purely software companies to win in this space?
The Locker Project is a cool idea on this front - that helps you to preserve your data in a local store, and grant access to the data from there. This may be the right approach in spirit, however, I think they’re still missing out on a ‘consumer’ focused application of their technology. It could be that they’re sin the process of building the interface/app that will be a big consumer hit based on this idea right now. I’m excited about this space, and I think there’s some interesting approaches to data management and access that I’ll write about in an upcoming blog post.
So… if you had access to this data - what would you build?
10 Amazing SkillShare Classes I Will Teach
For those of you who don’t know me that well, or sadly haven’t had the chance to meet me, I’m really talented and amazing at everything I do. Thankfully, now there’s a new startup here in New York called SkillShare that lets you share your skills with the world, and more people will get to be some small fraction as amazing as I am. Hopefully you’ll get a chance to attend at least one of these fantastic classes - let me know if there’s any classes you’d be particularly interested in having me teach.
Tastebreaking: How to Make Popular Things Unpopular
Remember things like Devil Sticks? Troll Dolls? The Macarena? and Friendster? Those are just some of the popular fads of the past that I had an integral role in crushing.
The 405 Essential Principles of Mime
I’ll be running through only the most basic of the mime principles that you need before you can perform at the competitive mime level.
Eating on a Budget: Preparing Your Own imaginary Food Like in the Movie Hook.
Save money, and burn calories by using your imagination! I’ll be showing you everything from how to prepare your own breakfast, to how to convince an entire dinner party that the food is delicious.
Sword-eating Your First Sword
There’s a first time for everything - and I’ve actually never persay eaten a sword, but I have thought about the technique substantially. We’ll be getting right into the sword eating so please bring your own sword, and don’t eat anything real 3 days before coming to this class (advise you take the imaginary food class mentioned above a week in advance).
Communicate complex thoughts to strangers within 100 meters - just by using your eyes.
If you were within a 100 meters of me you’d know a lot more about this class already.
Defenestration
Partake in the joys of the age old art of throwing someone out of a window
Being arrogant without being arrogant
This class is intended specifically for people who know they’re the best.
Have you been watering a fake plant?
Five tell-tale signs your plant is fake.
Farm Faster: Taking Your Farmville skills to the next level.
The latest in keyboard shortcut technology, hand postures, multi-monitor setups, and crop distribution strategies
#10: Any Other ideas?
I ran out of web appropriate ideas :|
8500 Startups vs Skype
The recent Microsoft purchase of Skype for 8.5 billion dollars left a lot of people unhappy, and calling for Ballmer’s resignation as CEO. So, what could Microsoft have done instead of buying Skype? Well, what would happen if Microsoft invested 1 million dollars in 8500 startups, and gave them access to the distribution channels, expertise and technical resources that Microsoft has? It’s an interesting thought experiment!
Not too long ago a close friend and mentor of our company suggested this potential strategy for Microsoft over breakfast. That comment he made in passing really did make us all think - why the hell isn’t Microsoft investing small sums of money in a large number of startups as their way to establish a pipeline of innovation? They would be playing some pretty good odds of developing multiple hundred million, and billion dollar companies! Especially when considering the network effects that would be gained! So - why isn’t Microsoft Yuri Mcluring it?
Sure Microsoft has their BizSpark program for startups, which tries to connect them with Mircosoft technology, but the offering isn’t overwhelmingly compelling for startups, and they don’t invest in the companies! As a result Microsoft is not doing a great job garnering the mindshare of startups, and this is dangerous for the company’s long term well being. In order to retain that mindshare one thing they could try is to make a TechStars, 500 startups or Y Combinator style startup incubation program where they invest small seed/Series A stage investments in an incredibly large number of startups that fit within Microsoft Research’s vision of the future. Even if the immediate monetary returns were not phenomenal - they’d have mindshare, access to talented developers, and ideas!
It’s true that M$ currently has limited expertise in the realm of startup incubation - being in a large company is VERY different from being in a startup. But, with a couple of pilot programs they could quickly develop the expertise and framework needed, and they would essentially be pumping out 8500 miniature Microsoft Research groups! They could set broad themes in terms of the types of startups they’re looking to fund (e.g. social enterprise, teleconferencing, database technology), and make it ridiculously compelling for entrepreneurs to participate. Some of the benefits they could offer include:
- Easier distribution and partnerships with Microsoft’s existing user base… which…. is a ridiculously large user base.
- Free access to Microsoft technology (There’s a reason so few startups use M$ technology. It’s definitely more heavy duty than what most startups need. But, if more of them did use it, it would put pressure on M$ to improve their underlying technology, and there would be a lot more people who know how to develop products using M$ technology.
- inside knowledge of what Microsoft is doing next, and how they can build on top of unreleased technology (this is similar to what Apple does with their app developer ecosystem)
- Ready connection with Microsoft for M&A purposes - i.e. they have a high likelihood of being bought by Microsoft, but they could also pursue other buyers.
- Access to experts who can help the startups with areas that are not their core competencies: e.g. technology experts, marketing experts, sales experts. Who can do regular reviews of the startups and offer advice (essentially Microsoft advisory boards).
- Free office space? Imagine 8500 startups working in close proximity, all near Microsoft’s headquarters to keep their core staff constantly energized, and connected to the cutting edge of technology (Redmond can feel like a bubble at times). The importance of being in close physical proximity, and how that impacts innovation, and execution, should not be underestimated!
- Free legal services up to some amount.
- Help finding additional financing from other sources - I’m sure M$ could put together a strong network of investors, and become a prominent player in the deal flow.
- A free zune.
The list of possible benefits could go on (would love to hear what you think they could offer). I’d certainly seriously consider participating in that program if it was available. Now, all this thinking is at a very high level, and misses out questions like what would happen in terms of follow on investment, etc. But, that stuff could be figured out - and when I imagine what the potential benefits to Microsoft of doing something like this could be - the question resurfaces: why isn’t Microsoft doing this?
10 Ways Tech is Changing Education (Part 2)
This post starts where I left off last week: covering the 10 most important ways I think tech can impact education. I’ve been trying to identify these opportunities, and also brainstorm what types of startups can emerge in each of the areas.
Last week, I covered the first 4:
1. Online courses, video lessons, and lesson plans.
2. Curation
3. Connections
4. Digital Textbooks and Visualization
Given how long each of these are, I’ve decided to split it up into 3 parts to make them more digestible. Now, it’s time for numbers 5 and 6:
5. Online Problem Solving
In my time at McGill University, a large number of the problems we had to solve in math classes were online. This was limited primarily to math classes, and the tools for online homework were at a primitive stage three years ago. I enjoyed the idea of doing my homework online, but not the reality of it. Now, it may be that these tools have improved since I left school, but I think in general online problem solving is an area that is ripe for innovation.
I remember solving countless problems in the backs of my textbooks in preparation for my exams, only to not know at the end whether I had done them right or not. My solutions were scattered across hundreds of scrap pages, that I had a tough time organizing. Many of the textbooks did not even include answers to the problems - and if they did they were usually one line answers.
The solutions in the book were never walkthroughs of the analytic process that goes into solving that type of problem - they were just a numerical solution. Perhaps I was getting the right answer at the end, but I was missing out on more elegant, and effective ways to solve the problem. I was missing out on how to solve the problem. Beyond that, I always found that the problems we had in our textbooks, were far simpler than the problems we were given in our exams: I always wanted access to harder problems to better prepare for exams.
For these reasons, I think there is a need for a larger repository of problems to be available, with nice walkthrough solutions (maybe I can ask for help if I get stuck along the way, and then get a hint?), and ways to input the solutions. I would also like to be able to track how I am doing as I solve these problems. I want to be able to see where I am weak, and where I stand in terms of the problems I can solve. This concept is related to the next areas I will cover: progress tracking, gameficiation, and personalization.
A good approach to innovating in the online problem solving space could just be a giant database of problems, accessible in the cloud, that have nice solutions, and nice ways to work through them online. I am guessing many students would pay for this (or perhaps the educational institutions would pay for licenses). I would like to know which problems are similar to each other, have multiple different solutions to the same problem if they’re available so I can follow different thought processes. Now, this doesn’t apply only to the sciences - in the arts there can be longer written answers (think Quora style answers), that illustrate what makes up a good answer to a particular question. But the entire question of how to handle the different subjects, and their particular ‘types’ of problems, is open to a lot of exploration and experimentation.
Both the types of problems available online, and the ways that people input and work through their solutions, are ripe for innovation.
6. Progress Tracking
Education is all about progress. It’s all about taking what you know to the next level. Sustained exercise at the same level of intensity does not translate into growth - we need to push ourselves. In that respect, there’s many elements of gamefication that are pertinent to education, and I’ll touch on some of them in the next post. But, even beyond gamefication - just being able to know what you’ve learned, and what you have yet to learn, is a very valuable tool.
The university and highschool systems allow us a very cursory level of progress tracking: you’ve passed these classes, and you still have to take these other classes. But, the lack of granularity in progress tracking is a missed opportunity.
Students should be able to track how all their homework is progressing, how difficult they found lessons/materials, what they plan on learning next, and more. All this information combined can give insight for students and the teachers to easily identify which areas they are weaker in. Now, this progress tracking can be largely automated, through the online problem solving and online lesson systems that will likely come into place - if students watch lessons and do the homework, the system can update the student’s progress with that information. This lets students all go at their own pace - which is powerful, and it also gives them a nice history of accomplishment they can refer to later on.
I believe that this type of granular progress tracking is far more encouraging to students than one-off, checkpoint exams. It can let them see how all the things they are learning are connected to each other - giving them a sense of purpose. It can also let them feel like they are doing ‘sustained’ learning, rather than short bursts of preparations for exams, followed by brain dumps of all they learned immediately after.
— Stay tuned for next week’s post :).
10 Ways Technology is Changing Education (Part 1)
Watching TED Talks, it seems like the most common theme is the paradigm shift that education is due for. The revolution in teaching and learning is two fold. On the one side it comes from new psychological studies about educational techniques, examining what works and what doesn’t. On the other side it comes from new possibilities on the technological frontier, that change the tools we have at our disposal for educating ourselves, and one another. This is a brainstorm and survey of the different ways that technology is changing education. Many of the evolutionary threads listed below are related to one another, but I tried to separate them where I thought each was worth highlighting for its own sake. I think each of these threads provides excellent opportunities for startups looking to innovate in the education space. If you’re interested check back next week for the rest:
1. Online courses, video lessons, and lesson plans
Top universities are increasingly making their courses, videos and lesson plans available online. Things like MITOpenCourseware, iTunes U, LectureFox, and AcademicEarth, are democratizing access to the educational curricula of the top universities in the world. About five years ago, while I was studying philosophy in Denmark, I started teaching myself how to program through MIT’s OpenCourseware’s introductory course on algorithms. This was powerful for me for two reasons - I could explore programming on my own time, on my own terms, and decide if I liked it. But, more valuable than this, was the ability to learn in isolation. Because I had no one to measure myself against, I didn’t get caught up in what ‘should’ be hard, and what ‘should’ be easy. The learning felt more earnest than the regular type of group learning that happens in universities. There was no bell curve. This was a refreshing, and honest experience of what education could be like. I ended up learning lots of things that I later found out should have been hard - but no one told me, and so they weren’t.
Now, as more and more of the materials universities provide are available online, it becomes increasingly apparent that the university experience is not for the materials alone, but much more for the in-person interactions, the relationships, and the character building that emerge during one’s university years (this is something I don’t think will quite be replaced online yet).
But, while the university experience can’t be fully simulated online, the world of readily available online courses does herald a new opportunity for us: sustained, earnest, life-long learning. I think one of the promising things - is that people may continue to learn beyond the halls of academia. There is something very fundamentally wrong, and scary within the idea of university. People go there for 4 years, study as hard as they can (some not so much), and then pretty much stop learning anything else after that. On-the-job learning is fundamentally different from academic learning, and in my personal experience doesn’t push the mind the way that ‘book’ learning does. But, the cultural norms are geared towards dropping book learning as quickly as a degree is handed to us. It’s almost like we should check in our textbooks inexchange for our degree. It’s true that reading physics textbooks on your own for fun is something that is less likely to happen for most, however, having guided online courses can make continued education more engaging. Now that the technology is increasingly available, shifting towards sustained independent learning is something that depends more on a cultural shift rather than a technological one.
In this space there’s both rooms for startups that get more of these materials online (e.g. Economics materials were scantily available when I was in school - maybe this has changed), and also for helping individuals track their own education, across a broad variety of sources throughout their life. Another possibility is finding ways to certify and equivalate online learning with real world learning.
2. Curation
Related to the increased availability of online course materials is the curation of what one should read and learn. Really, if you think about it, a large part of education is just curation. The instructors serve to curate what textbooks I should read, and in what order. If I want to start learning Chemistry, it’s hard for me to know what I should learn first, what math I need to know, what a good introductory textbook is, etc. . But, with lesson plans, and courses moving online, and with the growing exchange of lesson plans between educators, there is the opportunity for the best curation to shine through. There is the prospect of people discovering materials, and educational paths that are more effective ways to learn. Khan Academy’s educational work flows, where they highlight which lessons you should take and in which order so that you reach the knowledge you want to obtain, are an early paragon of what curation can look like.They make education into a journey, with a clearly defined path to the end goal - essentially gamifying the process of education.
Curation startups that let people collect, and order educational materials have substantial prospect. My startup The Shared Web may eventually go in this direction - even though it’s not what we’re focused on right now. There is also excellent opportunities for collaborative curation and curriculum setting, for teachers to collectively discover the best resources to teach their students.
3. Connections
With the growing availability of materials online, and the heightened level of curation, we also get an increased linkage of knowledge. The online world is perfectly suited for linking the mesh of information. Now, as I’m watching a Khan academy lesson about Options in finance, I can quickly jump to a linked Wikipedia page about that article, explore early papers explaining the concept, or perhaps browse to a tool for simulating a stock market and how options play out in that model. Anyone can enrich the trunk of knowledge with their own branches of insight, and explanation. Spotting patterns, and connections is really an essential part of curation, and the web is empowering us to exponentially increase the number of connections that are explicitly codified. In the near future algorithmic approaches can also help identify information that should be linked. People learn better by association, and a large part of creativity is just spotting connections and patterns - so all these new connections will create fertile opportunities for learning and creativity. The question will become how to balance the endless amount of connected content, with curation.
Interdisciplinary approaches have the prospect of thriving like they’ve never thrived before, and the true value of this hyper-connected knowledge has yet to be fully comprehended. Data mining all this connected data, across disciplines, even creates possibilities for entirely new fields to emerge. Ironically, even though the web is perfectly suited for fostering these connections, the tools and technologies that have appeared for allowing people to link knowledge are still in their infancy. This is a space that is perfect for startups to explore, and there are lots of low hanging fruits ripe for the picking.
4. Digital Textbooks and Visualization
The texts we use to learn have continued to increasingly move online. The iPad is an obvious candidate for replacing the bulk of textbooks that university students have historically been used to lugging around - and Inkling is a company that seems to already have made great headway in this direction. Beyond relieving back problems from heavy textbooks, these digital replacements are also powerful because they are better suited at incorporating the curation and connections I mentioned above. Now, in a textbook section that covers mathematics, I can watch a visualization that illustrates the concept being explained. Perhaps, there are even many different visualizations available, and the textbook has the ability to identify which visualization will work best for me based on my learning history. In general, these types of visual aids, and digital models we can play with should make a great deal of knowledge more accessible. I know having more concrete digital and visual models of the concepts I learned for economics in university would have been fantastic. But, with the augmentation of these visual aids, we need to also ask ourselves, whether replacing out mental visualizations with tangible, digital visualizations, we are substituting something for our imagination that may actually be detrimental to learning.
Here there are two clear opportunities for startups:
- startups focused on digitizing educational texts, and creating new interface paradigms for interacting with educational content.
- startups focused on providing better visualizations, and models, that can serve as aids for education. (so far only http://visual.ly/ comes to mind in this domain - though I’m sure there are others)
Part 2: 5 - 10 Coming Next Week
