Creating a New Dialogue in Education
sharing ideas, building on others’, looking ahead
There will always be a place for academic publishing in education. We need rigorous research to drive insights and innovation; this is a fundamental fact. We also have Blogger/Wordpress, Twitter, Facebook, and community sites like Edutopia acting as communication vehicles for teachers, thought-leaders, and more. There are quality news outlets like EdWeek, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and EdSurge as well.
Why would we need anything else?
The internet was originally built as a broadcast tool, with all forms of interaction — mostly reverse-chronology comment boards — created as a bolt-on to that architecture.
Medium is creating a system for the exchange of ideas and stories, through better publishing tools and mechanisms for responding, reacting, and building on one another’s ideas.
It’s an ambitious task, but we have some of the best engineers and designers in the world making it happen: before Medium, our founder Ev created Blogger and Twitter. He lays out our vision here:
Everything is Connected
Education as a sector is more interconnected and interdependent with other industries than at any other time in history. A sole focus on peer-reviewed journals, trade publications, insider conferences and one-off op-eds will diminish the sectors’ influence and leave us behind the conversation instead of driving it.
Alternatively, a connection to rapidly evolving, adjacent networks — edtech, consumer tech, venture capital, neuroscience, data science, behavioral economics, design thinking, civil liberties, gender politics, and the school-to-prison pipeline as examples — will enable and accelerate the design, development and deployment of the innovation we wish to see.
Take teachers as an example.
Never before have teachers needed a more diverse skill set than today. To be effective in the classroom teachers are taking on multiple roles: data scientist, social worker, technologist, and entrepreneur. Some say they’re already acting like CEO’s. In today’s world it is necessary for teachers to be inspired by, connected to, and inviting of these adjacent fields.
We’re designing a system that will enable big players in the sector to share a broader view and build on others’ ideas within their field, while inviting adjacent communities to participate in the dialogue.
What Does This Even Look Like?
A few recent examples of responses/builds/reactions, some within education and others from beyond:
- Build on This / Innovation in Education: A series of letters between IDEO’s Sandy Speicher and the Department of Education’s Richard Culatta on the origins of innovation in education. America’s Promise Alliance CEO John Gomperts and Jim Knight, former Minister of Education in the UK also join in.
- Slack as an LMS: An interesting thread between teachers on the merits of Slack as an LMS.
- The Data on Personalized Learning: Original Peg Tyre piece here, and two responses from 4.0 School’s Matt Candler and danah boyd at the bottom.
- Technology in the Higher Ed Classroom: A UGC-post followed by a Columbia professor’s response here.
- The Future of the Classroom + Student Debt: Finance reporter Alexis Goldstein’s response to Arne Duncan’s vision of the classroom of the future.
A Head Start
The education sector more broadly is rapidly growing on Medium, with a sampling of organizations and/or leaders from them below. We also have a number of publications running, like The Synapse (community-run) and Bright (Medium-run), that are driving a diversity of user-generated and editorial content. [There are many more publications, as well as tags, doing the same.]
What’s just as relevant are the other areas thriving on Medium: politics and policy, activism and authors, startups and venture capital, design and social impact.
Medium has made a conscious decision to focus on the education community because we believe in the impact it will have in the world.
We know you share this belief.
Let’s act on it together.
