I was just flipping through the just-released FBI file on Steve Jobs. Among the numerous references to his drug use, out-of-wedlock daughter, and lawsuits, shows his high school record:

Fremont Union High School District provided a copy of the transcript for STEVEN P. JOBS … JOBS attended Homestead High School until June 15, 1972, at which time he graduated. He earned an overall grade point average of 2.65 on a 4.0 scale.

Recall that Jobs went on to Reed College (before dropping out), which is now a highly-selective national college. If he were to apply again today, he would never have been admitted — only 1% of current Reed students had a high school GPA below 3.0. Of course, there’s grade inflation — but still, I appreciate remembering that smart and ambitious people can do well without the obsessive focus on that one magic number. 

I’ll continue the thought when I write up some reflections from my second year of interviewing high-achieving New York City high schoolers for Harvard, next time.

Steve Jobs FBI

So I’m watching a video of Stanford professor Steve Blank sum up his class on entrepreneurship, through Stanford’s Entrepreneurship Corner (AWESOME resource). It’s the end of the semester, and he’s talking about all the guests who have come to speak. There are some startup entrepreneurs, the CTO from Sun Microsystems, VCs, etc. The big Silicon Valley players. 

And then — Chamillionaire, the Houston rapper known for “Ridin’ Dirty”! He apparently participated in Stanford’s Globation Innovation Tournament. 

I’ve personally always liked Chamillionaire’s tunes, ever since someone gave me a discarded copy of The Sound of Revenge CD in the summer of ‘06. I even taught one of his songs in my English class in Brazil. So even though it was such a random appearance, props to Stanford for bringing in some new characters. 

Steve Blank video: http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=2327

Video of Chamillionaire at Stanford (with a pretty funny moment at 2:35 where he reveals his modestly hidden chain under his shirt): 

I am using Khan Academy to brush up on my calculus and physics in preparation for some challenging math and electronics courses next semester. First of all, in case anyone out there didn’t realize this, Khan Academy absolutely a treasure to the world. If it weren’t for these videos, I’d either be hunting around online for bits and pieces of this material, with no guide whatsoever as to the quality and accessibility, or I’d be studying from textbooks, which even for a nerd like me, wear me out. The Khan videos, on the other hand, are split into convenient 10-minute chunks and they are amazingly easy to follow and well-explained. I just finished an electricity video and noticed this comment at the bottom:

I have been using Khan Academy for a few months. I have been using it to learn advanced calculus, differential equations and linear algebra. I am also watching the physics playlist and the cosmology playlist which are equally as interesting. 
I really like the videos since you make such seemingly complicated concepts so easy to understand, even to a 12 year old like me. Thank you so much for the videos and how much time you devote to education. 

I have a request. Could you please do videos on advanced topics like Differential Geometry, Clifford Algebra, Lie Algebra, Exterior calculus, Tensor Algebra, Fourier Transforms, Quantum mechanics, Special and General relativity and Quantum field theory? 

This kid is 12 years old.

From a BusinessWeek article this week: 

The Green Bay Packers are a historical, cultural, and geographical anomaly, a publicly traded corporation in a league that doesn’t allow them, an immensely profitable company whose shareholders are forbidden by the corporate bylaws to receive a penny of that profit…

When you talk to Packer management, you start to realize that success is a tribute to the careful, constant maintenance of two things: the product on the field and the community’s warm feelings about that product. “It starts with football,” says Murphy. “We structure the organization in a way that we can be successful on the field. But a big part of it is also remembering that this team has a special place in this community. We’re owned by this community. We can’t be perceived as gouging the fans.”

I’m in the middle of thinking through a lot of the non-profit/for-profit issues in the education space, and I wish I understood the football industry, because Green Bay seems like a fascinating case study. 

My first thought is that the Packers have “done well by doing good.” By prioritizing fans and the community, they created a brand and a customer relationship that has become extremely lucrative. It doesn’t seem like there’s anything stopping heads of for-profit teams from doing the same.

But then you get a chicken-and-egg issue: if the team doesn’t already have great fans and a great brand, where to start? By winning games? But you really have to take a long view to cultivate a whole talent system over time, which is tough, especially when ownership changes and neither fans nor shareholders are necessarily willing to give new owners a long time to get results. 

I see this as two interconnected cycles: long-term performance and branding/loyalty. When you can get both cycles going together positively, they are mutually reinforcing. When fans are engaged with their teams and expect results, there is additional pressure for teams to deliver; when teams deliver, fans become more engaged. 

Loyalty and performance don’t always go together — in baseball, the Cubs have high loyalty/poor performance, the Florida Marlins have high performance/low loyalty. But those are exceptional cases — Cubs have a beloved stadium, Marlins don’t really have a hometown (just a home state). But it seems like in most cases, you have to work on both at the same time. 

So to get back to Green Bay — given fan ownership, they have a tremendous, ingrained traditions of loyalty and long-term focus, so they really don’t need the profit motive to incent management to cultivate them. 

New Radiohead remixes, excellent music to work at home to.

I’m reading Dan Pallotta’s book, Uncharitable, for a writing project. He advocates for charities to use the tools of capitalism, especially market-based compensation and advertising. It’s provocative on a number of levels, which I can get into later — but here’s a really (at least for me) surprising quote from FDR that he references: 

If I were starting life over again, I am inclined to think I would go into the advertising business in preference to almost any other… . The general raising of the standards of modern civilization among all groups of people during the past half century would have been impossible without the spreading of the knowledge of higher standards by means of advertising. Advertising nourishes the consuming power of men. It sets up before a man the goal of a better home, better clothing, better food for himself and his family. It spurs individual exertion and greater production. 

I grew up thinking that proper liberals had to understand that corporate advertising was deceptive and some kind of necessary evil. Maybe it’s because so many of Nixon’s buddies — H.R. Haldeman and crew — came from that industry. I don’t know. 

In any event, I don’t agree with it in whole — advertising certainly makes people want to consume, but depending on what’s being advertised, it’s not always beneficial to them or to the country — but it just came across as more “free-enterprise-y” than I imagined FDR to be.

Today’s Harvard Gazette came in with the headline, “Hausers give $40 million for education and innovation.” The promo piece and promo video were chock full of very pleasant-sounding buzz words —

• “The gift will launch an initiative for learning and teaching and serve as a catalyst for transforming students’ educational experiences University-wide.”
• “Dramatic developments in technology and research aimed at understanding how people learn are radically changing the practice of teaching, offering instructors new and exciting ways to engage with students,” said Harvard President Drew Faust.
• …”experimental teaching methods and the flexible use of a variety of technologies”
• incorporate and study groundbreaking techniques that aim to transform students’ learning experiences.

The video lists its planned first-year activities as “Grants to capture and study innovations that will have a lasting impact on learning,” “Enhanced classrooms for experimental teaching,” and “Conference on innovating learning and teaching.” 

And on, and on, and on …. 

Some thoughts from an alum: 

First, that it takes a relatively modest charitable gift for the world’s wealthiest university to all of a sudden care about ways in which technology may be used in more interesting ways to promote teaching and learning is telling. You’d think this would be a pretty top priority regardless. But it sure hasn’t been. Harvard has obviously lagged way behind Stanford and MIT in participating in the open education resources movement. I remember, at one of the faculty hearings in Spring ‘07 on the new Core Curriculum, suggesting that more classes use video to implement what’s now being called the “flipped classroom” — lectures online at home, active discussion in live class time. It’s simple, easy, and low-tech, and eminently doable. The response from faculty was something like, “But sometimes students ask questions in lectures.” Wouldn’t they ask more questions if you didn’t have a 50-page deck to get through? Wouldn’t that be better?

Second, there’s obviously incredibly vague language about the kinds of “groundbreaking techniques” that Harvard wants to “incorporate and study,” with no specifics whatsoever. I’d be more forgiving if Harvard hadn’t already been ostensibly thinking about this stuff for a while. But the fact is that there’s a whole “Technology in Education” program at its Ed-School. I was a “President’s Instructional Technology Fellow” in the summer of ‘06.  For all this talk of the “science of learning,” talk to the folks at the Ed-School’s Mind, Brain, and Education program and they’ll say that it’s deceptively hard to actually use basic educational psychology research to drive pedagogical decisions. The fact that this new program is going to start with a big conference in February without any specific goals whatsoever (at least according to the promo materials) leads me to believe that this whole process, like the underwhelming Core Curriculum reforms, is going to proceed very slowly, by committee, while overlooking the easy changes that could be implemented right away and make a big difference. 

Sunday’s front-page story on the sometimes-shady research offered up by education software companies as proof of effectiveness is very worth reading. It examines Carnegie Learning, which has a pretty sterling reputation for adaptive tutoring, makes a big point of being a product of Carnegie Mellon researchers, and which was recently bought by the Apollo Group (owners of University of Phoenix) for $70 million. Turns out that its record on delivering results is much less impressive. Even so, an exec at Apollo likes the fact that his daughter “got to move on to the next tree” when she understood a lesson. 

Two thoughts: 

1. The mere existence of the story is a great testament to the value of the What Works Clearinghouse. The WWC is a service of the Department of Education that provides very rigorous evaluations of research studies done on the effectiveness of curriculum and education software. The NYT used its evaluations of research on Carnegie as the basis for the article. 

2. Clayton Christensen, the Harvard B-School professor and sage of the digital learning movement, wrote a very congratulatory piece in the Atlantic on Carnegie and Apollo when their deal was announced last month. It’s not just the hapless school district officials who’ve been misled by Carnegie’s marketing. 

I hadn’t noticed these yet — but at the Khan Academy blog they have some promising results from the first school year of the in-school pilot in Los Altos, CA. There wasn’t an independent evaluator, but state-mandated test scores (the California Standards Tests) showed an increase from 23% to 41% of 7th-graders at “proficient” or above. Obviously, there are still a lot of kids under proficient, but that’s an impressive first-year gain, given that many of the kids spent a lot of time either remediating basic skills or working on advanced skills, none of which would necessarily be reflected on the CSTs.