Articles Tagged with fred wilson

384574407_2b4b7295ea_oHow can technology and innovation reshape education? Union Square Ventures put on Hacking Education – a conference that brought educators and entrepreneurs together to hash this out. Unfortunately they didn’t have any practitioners from the education technology and publishing industries there. After reviewing the well written summary of the discussion I put together the following extended comment to add the perspective of someone who was there, did that, and got the t-shirts.

As someone who has spent the last 18 years in the Education Technology and Instructional Materials businesses I feel the commentary misses the mark from a business perspective. This isn’t a critique of what was was covered – many of the participants are people I admire and cite frequently – Danah Boyd, Fred Wilson, Katie Salen, Steven Johnson , NT Etuk etc. It is meant to talk specifically about the business challenges of translating these great ideas into practice.

It might be tempting to dismiss folks who have been in the trenches as old school – people who “don’t get it” – but some of us are not clinging to old paradigms but working hard to create new ones. Experience may blind us to new possibilities – but it may also guide you around some of the land mines many of us have already stepped on.

Wondering how to spend that iTunes gift card you got from Aunt Millie? Here are few suggestions from my latest favorites that you might want to consider.

Here are my suggestions on how to spend an iTunes Gift Card:

1. Look at your own iTunes library for artists that you like but whom you only have one or two songs from.iTunes will show you their whole catalog and which are their most popular tunes. It helps if you rate all the songs in your library – you can do this on your iPod while listening by hitting the center button a couple of times. Then it is easy to search for all top rated songs and scan the list for singletons by an artist.