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.