YakShaving

I’d love your support in voting for BetterAt’s SXSW2012 panel. Please vote early and often. A Cure for Reflection Deficit Disorder Here’s a short description: The formal structures supporting education haven’t changed appreciably in the past several decades. The world continues to move at a dizzying pace and knowledge & information are created faster than [...]

Normative thinking around entrepreneurship is around solving a “problem” that people have. Many great online experiences aren’t borne from a solution to a problem. What “problem” did facebook solve? Here’s a useful startup lesson I learned about ideation: A little while back, I drove down to Portland with Vinita and my buddy Rich and to [...]

Here’s an awesome example of content curation via a short form mechanism. It’s called 24in60, and all it is is text based summaries of stuff that has happened in the last day in small chunks (the idea is it takes less than 60 seconds to read). Here’s a description from the site: This site is [...]

I feel like I quote Kottke a lot lately, but there’s been a lot lately that’s relevant to BetterAt. This latest one is a short video by Ira Glass on Storytelling. Kottke even pulled out the most salient quote: Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us [...]

flickr: chrismetcalf Woz, of Apple cofounder fame talks about schools and education in this interview. I feel like we can learn a lot from a guy who creates world changing companies AND was a public school educator for over 8 years. The learning cycle between what is taught and when a student is tested on [...]

This post on “getting to genius” made it to hackernews and I found a few of the ideas fascinating. At Xerox PARC Alan Kay was known for saying, “A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points.” I’ve heard this similar idea about “perspective” from successful angel investors and VCs: Genius is the extreme form [...]

A designer makes things. … Typically his making process is complex. There are more variables—kinds of possible moves, norms, and interrelationships of these—than can be represented in a finite model. Donald A Schön, The Reflective Practitioner Understanding how people learn (and improve skill level) is complex. Designing elegant stuff is also complex. Put them together, [...]

I haven’t read Ariely’s latest book yet, The Upside of Rationality, but the Boing Boing folks seem to have summed up the best part. Ariely was on All Things Considered earlier this month. Here’s where our intuitive response is really wrong: we have a tendency to indulge our pleasures without respite, and to take frequent [...]

If the world were easily explained by some meta production possibilities curve that included every single possible output, I wonder which “output” most people are spending their time, energy, and money. It might seem odd to boil the entire world of production into this simple curve (but economics by its nature is a simplification). I [...]

Yesterday, I (this is Ash writing) gave a presentation to all of the senior faculty at the IIT Stuart Business School about BettrAt and the future of informal learning. I think the presentation went pretty well (apart from me making a silly mistake with the domain and thinking that the site was down in a [...]

This article is also available for comment in the BettrAt blog. I had a conversation with Hugh (the associate dean of the Institute of Design) today about his son Morley’s high school which sounds completely amazing and reminded me of this article in Wired I read recently, called “Making Geeks Cool Could Reform Education” I’ve [...]

As Mr. Burns from the Simpson’s would say, “Exxxxxccccccellent”. Check out this great New York times article. I’ll keep quiet and curate the best stuff for you. In a Digital Future, Textbooks Are History Textbooks have not gone the way of the scroll yet, but many educators say that it will not be long before [...]