The official Tumblr of Fast Company.
Khan Academy, the wildly popular Youtube lecture series, is slated to launch its iPad app any minute now in Apple’s store. The enhanced version of Khan Academy will include time-syncing between devices—no Internet connection required—an interactive transcript of the lectures for easy searching, and a handy scrubber for moving between parts of the lectures.
The mayors of three very important cities took part in the Education Reform Summit today, I hope they take a moment to read this: What Jay-Z Can Teach Us About The Future Of Education
NYC Mayor Bloomberg, Chicago Mayor Emanuel and LA Mayor Villaraigosa Catch Up at Today’s Education Reform Summit
“There’s an education bubble, which is, like the others, psychosocial. There’s a wide public buy-in that leads to a product being overvalued because it’s linked to future expectations that are unrealistic. Education is similar to the tech bubble of the late 1990s, which assumed crazy growth in businesses that didn’t pan out. The education bubble is predicated on the idea that the education provided is incredibly valuable. In many cases that’s just not true. Here and elsewhere people have avoided facing the fact of stagnation by telling themselves stories about familiar things leading to progress. One fake vector of progress is credentialing—first the undergraduate degree, then more advanced degrees. Like the others, it’s an avoidance mechanism.”
i don’t always agree with Peter but he’s spot on about education
A Conversation with Peter Thiel - The American Interest Magazine (via pegobry)
Here’s some background on Thiel’s program: Peter Thiel Gives Whiz Kids $100K To Quit College, Start Businesses
(via fred-wilson)
“It’s like a writers retreat for computer programmers.”
There’s a world of opportunity to re-think and re-design the way we make stuff. (Bonus: Everything sounds nicer in an English accent.)
A new study lays out a vision of the future where we get most of our resources from things we’ve already used. The one trick: It requires making things so they’re easy to reuse in the first place. But if we do, we could save billions. Continued—>
Could A Rebranding Help Give Teachers The Prestige They Deserve? The Brooklyn-based design studio Hyperakt schools teachers on honing their image through branding.
“If you tell kids that they can get a book with sex in it for free, that might be enough to spark some desire for reading.”
That’s the thesis behind Uprise Books, a nonprofit that is sending low-income students all the good books that have been banned or challenged to promote teen literacy, fight censorship, and halt the cycle of poverty.
Some Mobbing Behavior Of Birds With Your Popcorn?
Want to hear a Harvard professor hold forth on the neuropsychology of zombies? Then attend an event at the newly expanded “Science on Screen” series, where films are followed by scientific discourse.
Can These Simple Animations Help Redesign Education?
Born to Learn is a collection of animated short films aimed at changing attitudes about how we mold young minds.
“What if a computer could accurately grade student essays? It could change the way we test students (and the way they’re taught). And a new $100,000 competition is trying to spark auto-grading innovation.”
LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman and former Facebook executive Matt Cohler drop $15 million into education startup Edmodo. Can creating an education graph transform how schools do their job?
General Assembly, founded in January 2011 in a 20,000-square-foot loft in New York’s Flatiron District by four friends in their late twenties and early thirties, is a campus for technology, design, and entrepreneurship. It’s not a degree-granting college; it’s not a high school; it’s not a traditional trade school. It’s something new—augmented education, a stopgap for the startup economy.
In the future of education, some General Assembly may be required.
“Universe Sandbox” knows that even the most beautiful space simulator isn’t going to keep a kid’s attention very long unless she can break the rules with it. So it goes for broke right from the get-go, urging players to “smash moons in orbit around a fictional planet,” “watch moons collapse into one another,” and “collide galaxies for fun.” Talk about good user-experience design.
But of course, all that diabolically destructive fun is grounded in a rock-solid scientific fact. Yes, you can break the rules of how the universe actually looks in real life, but not how it fundamentally functions. Which means that when you bash the Milky Way into the Andromeda Galaxy, the resulting spray of star-stuff is a faithful representation of what such a cosmic apocalypse would actually look like.
Click through to see a video of what it lets you do. You’re going to wanna watch this EPIC teaser in full screen!
