EdStartup 101 Intro

I've been looking for something like Ed Startup 101 for a long time -- especially since last year, when my own attempt at an ed-tech startup, Sympadia, went down in flames, and I found myself with no money, a lot of problems, and a desire to transform my situation into some kind of a production project that could finally lead me (and others) to a sustainable source of income.  I believe that a range of problems -- including economic problems like unemployment, and a range of quality of life problems, can be addressed by giving people better tools to understand themselves and the world.

Audrey Watters wrote in her Ed Startup Intro post,
"I’m pleased to see this class happen as the gulf between educators (theorists, researchers, and practitioners) and entrepreneurs (founders and developers at companies big and small) can be pretty vast. Add politicians, lobbyists, investors, parents, publishers, and students to the mix and you’ll find plenty more gulfs, along with lots of currents flowing in different directions. And unfortunately, a lot of those currents flow away from education theory, away from education history, and away from education research."

For over a decade, I've been interested in bridging these gulfs -- as well as another one, with the field of psychiatry.   I'm especially interested in the needs of learners whose minds are not understood by others, and how people make sense of each other, and life in general.  

After protesting the pointlessness of school at 14, then dropping out of high school at 16, then dropping out of college at 18, I was fortunate to find a job at a web customer service startup in 1999.  I soon became a software developer, and though I found coding difficult, the startup atmosphere was incredible.  My experience there prompted me to reflect back on my life and figure out how to pursue a career at the intersection of psychology, education, and media production.

That led to a long and difficult attempt at self-education, including figuring out how to use my mind, and struggling to meet people to collaborate with on some kind of entrepreneurial and production endeavor.  However, I didn't have a map or guide to either of those things.  I knew there had to be some way forward other than "get any job" or going through academia, but I didn't know quite what it was.  I wanted to create a media property, but my ideas were vague, and I struggled with mental energy depletion and had to deal with the question of whether my mind would never be able to work effectively.  (It turned out that I mostly needed the right kind of interaction and motivational context.)

In 2005, I returned to college to major in psychology, but I ended up spending most of my time surfing journal articles on psychology, education, and individual differences, and participating on the forums of a site for students who can't stand school, http://www.school-survival.net  The founder of School Survival, SoulRiser, referred me to some people in New York with an ambitious project for a network of self-educators, which they called "Misled Youth Network" -- http://www.school-survival.net/allies/myn.php  The founders, Nick and Sarah, had a lot of ambitious ideas, and we discussed making an interactive web site including a personal learning portal, but that never really came together, and I spent the years leading up to 2009 doing a mix of jobs -- office work, web work, construction, and some tv commercial production.  I kept my eyes open for progress in educational technology, and had varied ideas for creating a show highlighting the challenges of those who struggle within traditional academic environments, but I didn't know how to proceed.

I reconnected with Nick in the summer of 2009, and we fleshed out ideas for a web startup, including the name Sympadia.  Then, near the end of 2009, an opportunity came up.  Nick was working on the web site for a charter school, The Renaissance Charter High School for Innovation.  They also had a far more complex project in mind: an all-encompassing student information system, based on the notion of data-driven decision making.

And so, Nick and I formed Sympadia with that project as our core mission for the first 6-8 months of 2010: a Drupal-based "Student Information System with Analytics."  However, there were delays in getting started, partly due to delays in the school getting their funding, and partly due to uncertainty over whether we would even do the project.  By May, the school was pushing for even more complex features -- specifically, a lesson-planning system with differentiated instruction for individual students, and subgroups of students.  This turned out to be extremely technically complicated to pull off, and by the end of August, when school was about to start, it became clear how far behind we were, leading to a perpetual crisis that lasted through the spring of 2011, a falling out with Nick, and for me, the question of how to move forward with no money to hire people, and being unable to deliver the features Innovation wanted, trying to do work for other clients, and even dealing with my mom's development of early-onset dementia as she struggled to complete her third Master's degree in an effort to increase her employability.

I saw the potential for a documentary based on the whole thing, that could broach discussion of a number of issues I saw as major problems, including the question of how student data is interpreted and used, when I think students are often not understood very well.

I also saw a problem with pipelining all students into college, when I myself had long wondered why real learning had to be delayed until college, only to find I learned very little in college.  I began finding more and more examples of others backing up what I'd long seen, such as the book Academically Adrift discusses.  Josh Jarrett gives a striking example in this talk, Josh Jarrett - Wednesday Morning Keynote of a charter school system attaining 98% college attendance, but only 25% college graduation rate.

That raises a set of complex problems, that require not only information technology, but a discussion of some fundamental questions about how people can be prepared for life in a complex world that's saturated with increasingly free (or cheap) information and content, but too often, people still face boredom, disengagement, and disconnection.  And too often, the stories that people are told about how life plays out just don't turn out to be true.

And so, I was faced with a situation last year where I couldn't deliver the information technology that Innovation wanted, and it was difficult to broach a discussion of how school itself could be better understood by stepping back from the code and interfaces, and thinking about how people's lives play out.  This led me to a lot of reflection, research, and attempts to deal with not having money, and not having any straightforward place to go to get money to work on this problem, let alone pay for food or rent, and I struggled to figure out how to write, process my past, and figure out how to explain myself to someone who might want to collaborate on transforming a vague idea that "knowledge is needed" into something tangible, real, and interesting to an audience.

This comment from Bill Gates gets at the problem -- Was the $5 Billion Worth It?

"I bring a bias to this," says Mr. Gates. "I believe in innovation and that the way you get innovation is you fund research and you learn the basic facts." Compared with R&D spending in the pharmaceutical or information-technology sectors, he says, next to nothing is spent on education research. "That's partly because of the problem of who would do it. Who thinks of it as their business? The 50 states don't think of it that way, and schools of education are not about research. So we come into this thinking that we should fund the research."

I think it's important to think about education research as inextricably linked to psychiatry, substance abuse treatment, and the twin problems of unemployment and people miserable at their jobs.  Many people are, in various ways, responsible for their own problems, but at the same time, people tend to be sold a story that doesn't involve a need for self-reflection or pondering the complex aspects of life.  Without doing so, when life doesn't go according to plan, things can get hard, and there's often nowhere to turn, but negative beliefs about life.  Why are so many people sitting on Manhattan streets every day with hand-drawn cardboard signs, in today's age of technology?  I found myself nearly being in that position, but knowing there must be some way to earn a living tackling the problem, so I began making layouts that referenced the many points of reference I was finding, to at least give me a chance of having something more interesting to show for myself than a cardboard sign, such as this one from last August, featuring the above Gates quote, and Michael Wesch's blog post asking the question, "what do *I* need to learn, and indeed, what do *any of us* need to learn in order to lead happier, healthier, richer, more ethical, and more meaningful lives." 1991: Who we were wnad Who we need to be.  The bored student image is from Ken Robinson's RSA Animate video, Changing Education Paradigms.

Another key article I found last spring was How Brain Science Can Save You From The Wrong Job by psychiatrist Edward Hallowell, which addressed the problem of people being stuck in horrible school or work situations and blamed for their failures rather than encouraged to develop their abilities.  I could relate to this on a lot of levels, as I struggled to code web sites and juggle multiple clients and how to organize my use of time and daily decision-making, as I was saddled with debt and had nowhere to turn for help.

More recently, I found a key talk on the neuroscience of individual differences through the Myers-Briggs framework -- a topic I'd long been interested in, but which I hadn't seen any actual research on.  Here, Jane Kise talks about a study that involved videotaping students and looking at how they approached problems very differently according to differences in temperament.

I also looked into the work and research of Dan Siegel, who studies interpersonal neurobiology and speaks about a key problem in mental health and education contexts -- people who are paid to work with people's minds often know very little about how it works.  Compound that with the challenge of understanding people whose minds work differently from one's own, and trying to envision how specific learning experiences influence how people perceive and act in later scenes that play out, and things get even more complex.

In the past year, I've found a lot of people and resources that validate the concept that there are many ways to earn a living beyond "getting any job" or academia, and I'm interested in adapting what I've found into a format that doesn't take others years to figure out.

Two key examples I've found are Jonathan Fields, who has an interview project where he talks to people who have taken risks and succeeded, Good Life Project.  Another, Mark Horvath, interviews homeless people for his site Invisible People.  I found myself squarely in between these two possible life outcomes -- actually brushing up against total homelessness, and still risking it as I try to figure out how to translate my experience and research into useful outputs for people in various situations.  It's a challenge that has provided one of the best learning opportunities in my life, and yet not one that is sustainable.

I'm look forward to a further discussion of these topics, and getting better at my ability to structure writing and conversation about such complex topics -- hopefully into a format that can help me earn a living developing a brand that can have a positive impact on people's lives.

Dialogue, Narrative Identity, and Student Struggles

This is a draft I wrote up yesterday, attempting to link backstory to the online courses I'm taking, and some TED and other videos. One of my challenges is that at times I'm inspired to write, or speak, or create associative layouts, but they tend to be nonlinear, and I'm still trying to figure out an effective format for others to read and watch.

It's a process of learning how to learn, and learning how to show my work to others in a way that optimizes their use of time. I may go back and edit this later, or pull sections out to expand upon them. I also recorded a long video yesterday where I talked through the ideas I hit on in this email. Ultimately, I'm looking to develop a better life workflow process, and adapt this approach into an immersive experience for others -- Screenstorming.

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I'm currently taking three MOOCs -- massively open online courses: https://www.coursera.org/#course/gamification https://www.coursera.org/#course/modelthinking http://101.edstartup.net/

And, I just found this fascinating article on the topic: The Rise Of The Star Professor http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesmarshallcrotty/2012/08/07/the-coming-age-of-the-teaching-megastar/ which hits on some thoughts I've had myself, going back over a decade.

I have a tendency not to complete courses, and one of my core interests is in developing an approach to learning -- and living -- that frames life as an actively unfolding story with an ongoing motivational context. Often, the term "story" has connotations of either fantasy, or lies, but there's much to be said for the concept, as Robert McKee makes a great case for in this video:



Story is also applicable to education. People attend school, or take classes, based on an implied story, as Ken Robinson discusses in his Changing Educational Paradigms video. As he explains, many people growing up today don't believe the traditional story of "go to college, have a good career." My own experience, as a disengaged student whose college professor father and stepfather both complained about their own disengaged students, I've long known there was something wrong with how teaching and learning tend to work -- certainly in my case.





My mind works in a very non-linear manner -- for example, in watching the first videos for the Model Thinking course, I have a lot of associations with concepts like "mental models" and the general way in which people conceptualize the world, whether formal or informal. One approach to mental models is that of tropes, as catalogued on http://tvtropes.org And with that, I'm going to flash back to a few years ago, and explain some of what has unfolded since then. In early 2009, I found tvtropes, as part of a burst of inspiration about creating a web series or tv show that hit on making sense of life, a goal I've had at various points in my life. Yet, I've often been torn over whether to take a documentary or fictional approach, and I've never really known where to begin. I've had some character ideas -- based on my own experience as a student who was disengaged in school and life, but I didn't know how to proceed with the story. And, I wanted to create something more interactive, and even "useful," than a traditional show or game. In summer of 2009, I met up with a friend of mine, Nick B, and we brainstormed ideas for a web tech startup, oriented around personal learning profiles and some kind of online courses. Later in 2009, Nick approached me with a project from a charter school, to create a school information system that would bring all kinds of data into one place. We met with the school, and the idea evolved into a statement of work for a "student information system with analytics" in early 2010. Nick coded an attendance module, while I researched business questions, web hosting, and the competitive space of learning management systems and student information systems. It wasn't until late May of 2010 that we really got the go-ahead on the project, and by then there were only 3 months until the school was set to open. We were asked to prioritize the development of a lesson plan feature that included differentiated lesson plans -- so that each student, or subgroups of students, within each class could be given different assignments and activities. This request turned out to be monumentally complicated to code, and by the end of the summer, I had to put together a much simpler version of the lesson planning feature, and other parts of the system were delayed, as the complex lesson plans took up most of Nick's time. In late August, the school handed off the project to an established consultancy, but more work needed to be done that could be afforded at their rates, given our project budget. In September, I spent quite a while attempting to write emails that explained our standpoint -- that as two people, we were overwhelmed with all we were expected to do. I put an ad out for help, and heard from Keith, a college professor with project management expertise, who offered to review the project. Suffice it to say, the project had major problems, including being enormously complex and having a very small budget. Yet, we struggled to deliver the functionality that the school needed, as weeks and months continued to go by. At the end of 2010, I took some time to reflect back on my life, and picked up my interest in neuroscience of cognition, and tvtropes. Meanwhile, I had two simultaneous projects I had taken on -- another web site, and work with a third client -- and my mom, living alone in Florida, was struggling with extreme memory problems and her own financial problems. By February of 2011, I hit a point where my commitments and liabilities went from overwhelming to impossible. While struggling one evening to complete coding tasks for one client, took a break and wrote up a series of pages in an unusual "flow state" -- in which I referenced a number of concepts, as well as the concept of patterns and http://tvtropes.org As spring proceeded, I continued to struggle with how to deal with the situation, and exchanged a series of emails with my dad, trying to explain things, while also seeking help from him. Two key elements of his response were papers he wrote, on "Radical Hope and Heroic Chaos," and on Participant-Observation as a tourist in Tibet. I felt like I was a participant-observer of a strange place myself. Not even a culture -- but a situation. I didn't know how to find a way forward. I brainstormed, and came up with a concept for a youtube presence, and sought a way to transition out of doing coding and web tasks, and into creating an online presence, acting as a consultant, and finally creating some kind of show. I just had to figure out how to brand myself... which is a task I've made much progress on, but it's still a work in progress. I began digging through my books and papers, and past writings, as well as web content, and began to think about how to transform all this information into a format others could find useful. I tried linking to and explaining some of what I had in mind in emails -- including referencing Dan Siegel's discussion of interpersonal neurobiology, and my own experiences as a disengaged student at various points in school. Nobody in my life seemed to see that as relevant to this student information system project, but I saw the need to step back and reconceptualize the whole thing, and certainly my whole life. I begin photographing layouts of items, and then making screencap-based digital layouts. I also began recording some video, and doing a lot of freewriting of words and phrases onto paper, and sending off emails to people in my life that referenced some of what I was finding and creating, in an effort to spur discussion of my situation. That strategy didn't work out so well, but in the process, I found a wide range of content that I'm trying to figure out how to bring together into a sort of participatory course. I've found many things that would have been useful to me earlier on. So, what is the best format to present what I've found, and my ongoing attempts to put things in a manner others can find useful? I have an idea for a combination between a transmedia show and a MOOC, that pulls participants in sort of like how people sign up to games like World of Warcraft or Second Life, but which is based on the reality of participants' lives, mixed with a big picture and story-driven take on life.