Kare Anderson's blog, Say It Better, featured us in a post about attracting employees.

Massively, a news site that covers the MMO market, gave us a short write up.

SeedWatcher, a blog about early stage start-ups by one of our angel investors, interviewed  me in connection with our latest financing.

Grockit, a San Francisco Learning 2.0 Start-Up has raised its Series B financing. Integral Capital Partners lead the $8M round with Benchmark Capital, who lead their Series A, participating as well. Grockit is creating a MMOLG (Massively Multi Player Online Learning Game) where people can connect to learn from each other. The company was founded by Farbood Nivi, a long time teacher, and Michael Buffington, a well known Rails developer. Grockit will use the latest financing to expand their development team and they plan to launch their first product this fall.

You can also check out our post on TechCrunch. 

1. Notice the basket
2. Look down to bottom of screen
3. Watch the score change

Lately, probably because of advances in technology, the score often updates before you look down. You can be left staring and waiting and sometimes not really knowing whether the current score is the updated score or the pre-basket score. You can end up staring longer than you would had the score been delayed a second, allowing you to look down.

So, from a UI perspective, should there be a 1 second delay in the update of the score on the screen? Would one test this? How?

1. Our developers code in pairs that rotate almost daily.
2. We write code to pass tests, not tests after writing code.
3. We iterate, iterate, iterate.

I would like to take a moment to discuss the first point. Our developers code in pairs.

Grockit's MMOLG is about students teaching students (yes, it's ok if you're a teacher, you can play too). And recently, I've had some discussions with folks around my comments about the problems in education and the re-design it badly needs.

I realized, in these discussions, that paired coding is what I'm talking about. Because we code in pairs, all our devs get in on the action. This means that every dev is constantly teaching and learning from the other devs. We don't do peer reviews, we don't need to.

Does every dev come to the table with the same skills and skill level? NO.
Does paired coding work despite individual differences? YES. In fact, it works because of it.

People think that students teaching students is impossible because, 'Where do you start?'. It seems to imply that half the students need to already know the material if they are going to teach the other students. Not at all. Let's look at what our devs do.

When the team is faced with a challenge that nobody has the immediate know how to address, someone starts doing some research. This is what happens in real student to student learning. The first thing you need to do if you're going to teach someone is to learn it yourself.

When Russell Ackoff was asked by a group of students to teach them systems, he said 'No, but you can teach me.' Well, teaching Russell Ackoff about systems is a serious challenge. Nevertheless, after many months of studying and working together the team put on a seminar for Ackoff that he described as the best course in systems he's ever seen. In fact, one of the students is now a major planner for Brazil.

In paired coding, or paired learning, the group continually builds on top of its strengths. In this modality of learning it would be impossible for students to graduate illiterate. As it stands, an alarming number of 8th graders can't read and write. We've been trying this education design for about 100 years now and quite frankly the bar has not risen much. I think it's time for a change. I think it's time that students take the responsibility to teach each other.  Can our students handle it?

Well, before the modern industrial revolution, people began having families as early as 13 or 14 years old, and certainly carried far graver responsibilities than children do now. We are sadly mistaken in thinking that young people are not motivated or capable. We take on this view because we place them in an environment that they finding very demotivating and that strips them of their responsibility to contribute. Strangely enough, when it's a matter of their own well being, people can make the personal choice of caring or not. When our responsibilities are to other as well as ourselves, we often care quite a bit more. In fact, some parents might argue that their kids care only about the thoughts and wants of their peers. What a wonderful leverage point to help students teach each other.

Without metrics measuring the delta of a student's learning before and after said 'learning', we are left with a system that shuffles students down a line and out the door. Some work, some don't. Nobody knows where they went awry.

Here is some food for thought.

1. Let's go to our standby, Russell Ackoff. Thoughts?

Ackoff's take on learning from computers is that it's sort of insulting to the student. The idea that you don't deserve to learn from another person and instead should learn from a semi-animate object seems unlikely to be a solution to education's problems. But then again, maybe students have given up on class and are more available to their gaming consoles than their teachers.

2. A large number of the millions that take the SAT can't afford a Nintendo DS. This only serves to further solidify the one consistent correlation in the SAT market. The more money your family makes, the better you do on the SAT.

We'll see how many students buy the game and what they get out of it. My guess is that it has more to do with getting in on the Brain Age money than applying relevant solutions to the massive problems in education and the social inequity existing in the test prep space. But, what would you expect from an educational company?

- Army not welcomed by occupied population
- Teachers not welcomed by student population

- Army's soldiers are out numbered
- Teachers are out numbered

Both the Army and Education suffer from the problems of scaling quality. Both have only one solution. Help the population you're managing help themselves.

Soldiers are not the ideal tool for nation building.
Education, in the model of teachers disseminating knowledge and being bottle necks for quality, is not the ideal tool for empowering individual learners to realize their own potential.

This gets to another issue which is that schools are not about "empowering individual learners to realize their own potential". Schools are about grading and getting the population up to the bar of being able to read, write and do some basic arithmetic.

The military is moving towards an Army of One. Maybe we should do the same for our teachers. Maybe we should empower each teacher to be an agile, capable, leader of learners. First, they need the tool and resources.   

Student Grade Calculator

Learning, in the psych community, is not so easily defined. One relatively consistent thread, however, throughout the different views on learning, is 'change'.  To 'learn', something must change in your head. Something that wasn't there, is there, or vice versa. Therefore, learning is about the 'delta' or change in a person's knowledge or thought process. So....

1. To claim that your school is about learning, you MUST measure before and after the 'learning experience'. The measurement of the change between the before and after lets you know if any learning went on.

2. No schools do this. They simply assign you a grade after they have done their teaching.

3. Therefore, schools are about grading, not learning.  This applies to public, private and higher education, as well as most other forms of education.

Even the language of the education system betrays it. Your position in the school is a matter of the state of grade you have achieved. Grade One. Grade Two...etc. It's interesting to note, also, that the measurement of the change in the learner is not really a grade of the learner, it's a grade of the school. How did your school do on its last test??

Thanks, Russell Ackoff, for helping me see this.

"Over thousands of years, we have developed the knowledge, wisdom, and practices that make up human civilization. In the course of those ages, our species has achieved beyond all others who inhabit the planet—as far as we know, even beyond all others who inhabit the universe. But despite the success of humankind, the fabric of our civilization is thin, and not integral to our animal being. The base spirits within us remain and are exposed when the fabric is removed."
....

"President Lamar set the tone for educational achievement in Texas when he urged the fledgling nation to develop not one, but two universities, and he sponsored the commitment of public land to support them. This was in 1838. Texas was on the frontier. The daily goal of individuals was survival, not high culture. The Texas population—everyone included, part of the civil society or not—was only 50,000. The whole nation was no bigger than present-day UT Austin. Five square miles to every person. There were few schools and no cities. A university must have been practically the furthest thing from the minds of most people as an element essential to the future. Even Lamar had never attended a university and could only have had second-hand understanding of social benefits that could be derived from them. Yet he sought two. And not colleges, but universities."

Is the institutionalization of learning, aka education, helpful for society? necessary?

Thinking of it, Education has probably been around, if not in the 'mass production' style that's in the mode today, at least in a mentoring/apprenticing fashion as long as there has been civilization. What does this mean, I wonder.

You probably didn't think this was possible or even made sense, but you'd be wrong on both counts.

Fax technology has done for decades what the Internet has done for barely 10 years. Connect people. In fact, most of the Internet protocols that we love and talk about every day came directly from Fax technology.

Here's how it works.

1. Fax Grockit your fax number.
2. Wait to receive your first Grockit GMAT question.
3. Answer the question (include your work) and fax it to the next student. You will find the next student's number at the bottom of your GMAT question that we fax you.
4. When you receive a Fax question from another GMAT player, answer the question and keep faxing.
5. If you're the fourth person to answer a question, fax all four answers back to Grockit, and we'll fax you all your scores for this round.
6. Rinse and repeat.

It's really that simple, and before you know it, you'll be learning and teaching GMAT in a live MMOG.  Don't be fooled by the Internet's fancy promises to connect you with other learners when the tried and true is just a dial tone away.

If you don't have a land line and can only connect to the world through the Interweb, Internets, or Tubes, don't worry. Our web-based Learning MMOG will be coming soon. Drop us your email if you'd like to know when. 

Oh, by the way, Grockit is in no way affiliated with the GMAT Test or the GMAC.