“Do you know where we are?” asked Milo.

“Certainly,” he replied, “we’re right here on this very spot. Besides, being lost is never a matter of not knowing where you are; it's a matter of not knowing where you aren't – and I don’t care at all about where I’m not."

At Oxford, Avoiding Generalism

For the past nine months I’ve spent most of my time in Oxford, researching social policy and the Internet’s impact on access to higher education. While I’ve technically been working at Penny Black and BOLDstart full time as well, I’ve spent most of my time disconnected; reading, thinking, and wandering through the countryside.  Here are a few of the more important takeaways:

  1. There’s no such thing as a generalist. At least not a useful one. Many people who go into consulting or similar fields believe they can study a bunch of different businesses and solve any problem once they have the right set of tools.  While I’m sure they can help bring clarity to many problems, there’s nothing like immersing oneself in a space – enough to intimately understand all of the players, issues, and interests. In the startup world this kind of experience gives entrepreneurs a big leg up against others with a similar idea, and it’s for this reason that venture firms put so much weight on a team’s domain knowledge.
  2. Detach completely for quality thought. I took for granted the importance of having time/space to think clearly, and didn’t realize how hard this is to do in New York. You get used to being bombarded every few minutes with emails, texts, phone calls, meetings, and other distractions.  Living in a big city affects your clarity of thought. Being antisocial every once in a while – perferably in a beautiful place –, and taking the time to think, digest, and reflect, leads to amazing results. Simply reacting all the time to the social stimulus around us makes for dull (and stressed) people.
  3. Diversity of people = diversity of thought. 99% of the people I hung out with in Oxford did not know what an API was, had not integrated Rapportive into Gmail (yet), and were slightly offended when I told them that Klout could predict how influential they are online. Generally we think of diversity as people of the opposite view, but the best diversity is people who are not even on the same plane of thought. Innovation happens between, not within disciplines, and it’s important to expose yourself to that every so often.

I frequently take up issue with the costs of higher education and the general worthlessness of many degrees. But if for whatever reason you are fortunate enough to have the opportunity to do a one year independent study program, it can be an incredible and valuable experience. If you do have the opportunity, don’t go straight out of undergrad, find a program that lets you explore before diving in, in a beautiful place, and in an environment where you’ll be forced to surround yourself with people much smarter and very different from yourself.

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Farewell Oxford…

Farewell Oxford…

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Investing in Internet-Enabled Education

There’s no reason why 30 students should sit in a classroom and be lectured on the same thing at the same time at the same pace when everyone learns differently. There’s no reason why the tens of thousands of algebra classes are each being reinvented right now across the country by teachers of variable skill levels. There’s no reason why college students should go into hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt for courses and a diploma that may not take them where they want to go. And there’s no reason why teachers should waste time conveying materials that can easily be found online, when instead they could be inspiring students to be curious, discover themselves, and apply what they learn.

Despite how huge the education market is (estimated at $750b in the US alone), many VCs are afraid to invest in ed-tech because there was a lot of ‘road kill’ in the space after the dot-com bust. But much has changed in the past decade: the addressable market has expanded dramatically (10x more people are online, have 10x as fast connections, and are connected at least 10x as much), and we’ve recently seen a proliferation of internet-enabled mobile devices, data storage and processing innovations, and the spread of open source content that have brought about great efficiencies in content distribution, consumption, and production.

The importance of the Internet in changing education is more relevant than ever: we continue to move from a manufacturing-based economy to a knowledge-based economy at a rapid pace, yet our school system is still stuck in the Industrial Revolution. 

There are a great diversity of opportunities to innovate in the education realm. On the learning side, we need to create new ways to make it:

  1. Fun. All physics lessons should be as fun as Angry Birds.
  2. Ubiquitous. I should be able learn anywhere and everywhere, taking full courses on my iPhone or any other device.
  3. Adaptive / Customized. Machines should learn how I learn and teach in a way that works best for me.  

And on the accreditation side we need to find ways to get people credit (/certified) for practical skills they enjoy in a much faster, cheaper, and more accessible way than is provided by the accreditation bodies who hold a monopoly on the education system today.

I’m not arguing that we should try to overhaul the current system and force schools to adopt new technology and ideas, but rather that if we create compelling learning and teaching products outside of the school system we can push change from the outside, in.

Some Inspiration:

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Networked Knowledge & the Ridiculousness of Exams

I hope this is obvious: forcing students to answer a series of questions under the clock is probably the stupidest way to test proficiency in a subject area. The ultimate goal of teaching is not fact memorization, it’s application. Exams under intense time pressure are useless: they are not at all a representation of the depth/breadth of a person’s knowledge in a subject area, nor how capable they are in applying it.  And worse, they encourage short-term memorization of information that becomes useless a month after the test. How much information do you remember from the last exam you took?

I admit that there are some professions where memorization-based, timed exams are more relevant – such as emergency medicine –, where the need to recall random facts under time pressure is actually a skill in and of itself. Though I would argue that even this skill will soon change as on-demand medical data is more easily accessible.

Thanks to the Internet and the relatively powerful mobile devices we now carry around, we have moved from having a ‘local’ to a ‘networked’ brain, where data is now able to be stored and accessed not just from our own head, but from society’s collective mind. These devices have literally become an extension of our brains: they help us navigate complex terrain, recall detailed information from years ago, and give us access to billions of pages of data covering almost every subject thinkable.

This model is obviously not without costs in terms of human independence, but we have always been social creatures, and this is simply the evolution of that capability to communicate and work together. Given this incredible new model then, how we use that information becomes so much more important. Exams should be structured to reflect this, and focus on data-rich application and creativity.

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Why Reading Deserves its Own Device

A month ago I bought a Kindle, and after a week of use I brought it back with me to Oxford, leaving my iPad in New York. It was a great decision.  For the longest time I had dismissed the Kindle as silly, calling it a ’segue technology’ – a device that would just be around until the iPad or some other multi-function tablet squashed it.  Who needs another media consumption device? I was totally wrong. 

What I had forgotten – living in the tech world and spending every free moment on email, Twitter, and blogs – was that reading a book is a very special and unique experience. It’s immersive, demanding complete attention, and involves opening your mind and letting yourself be transported to a different place, or a different way of thinking. This requires a device that disappears entirely as you start to use it: it has to be light enough that you forget you’re holding it, be large enough that you can immerse yourself in a page without it being unwieldy, and be easily readable in your favorite spaces – under a tree, on a beach, or in front of a fireplace.  

It also has to be free of distractions. The iPhone is great for short-form communication, skimming tweets, checking Facebook, listening to music, and watching online video on the go, among other things. These functions all happen to co-exist very nicely in one device: you’ll read a tweet with a link takes you to a web page with an interesting video that you then want to email to a friend or broadcast.

But reading a good book – and really absorbing the knowledge or story – is a totally different experience. If you find the right book and environment, it’s truly magical. It deserves a device focused solely on making that experience incredible.

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Juventas Fugit  is designed and written by Justin Wohlstadter, who, when not writing in the third person, can be found in a coffee shop talking about startups, thinking about the future of education, and generally procrastinating something important.

  • Passions: startups that positively affect the world, education innovation, good design, learning, and meeting those with an equally insatiable curiosity.
  • Play: director of product design at Enterproid and partner at BOLDstart Ventures.
  • Previously: built the early-stage venture arm of Penny Black. And many other crazy, less successful ventures involving fire extinguishers, measuring philanthropic impact, and creative spaces.
  • Pedantry: most of the important stuff I taught myself or learned from friends, but I’m fortunate to have (barely received) degrees from Harvard and Oxford. At Oxford I wrote my dissertation on how internet innovation will disrupt access to higher education.
  • Procrastination: can be found on Twitter, Linkedin, AngelList and other web spaces, and be reached via email at my first name at this domain.
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