A few of my favorite people to talk to are Shane Lofgen, DJ Strouse, and Max Marmer. Shane I’ve known since eighth grade geometry, DJ was Shane’s roomate freshman year, and Max is a bright, just-graduated from high school Californian from the Twitter-sphere. All four of us are quite interested in reforming the university system from the technologically-backwards state it’s in to something that’s useful in an era of ubiquitous information. Today’s topic was reinventing the textbook.
DJ has an idea for augmenting the traditional textbook or, as Max puts it, adding an “onion skin” on top of the text. Meta data and meta conversations to make studying a collaborative exercise. If you think of the textbook as a platform from which learning can take place, then there are digital tools that can be built to make information flow happen more organically (think commenting, videos of professor explanations, quizzes, etc.).
