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Hello and welcome to Lewis and Kyle show an interview podcasts where Lewis and I bring on people that we think we can learn from, whether they have achieved some of the goals that we have for ourselves, or they are an expert in a specific area, or they just have a cool story to share. We bring them on to learn a little bit more about them how they think and how they've done what they've done. Louis, who do we have on this one?

Kyle, and this episode we bring on esteana hack love. Seon is someone I met on Twitter because we follow the same people and ended up having conversations on the same threads reached out to them because I really liked what he had to say about a lot of interesting topics and learns that he's a very interesting guy. He is the senior engineer and learning architect at the Minerva project, which if you haven't heard of it, we'll get more into in the interview. Basically, it's a very innovative new online platform alternative to college where you travel and are with the same small cohort of students and have a very good New and upgraded approach to higher education. Seon is fluent in eight languages. And he also has had a PhD in open collaborative online education, which is ultimately how he ended up in the role he's in now. And this interview, we go through his process, traveling, learning those languages working his way through school, and the goals of the Minerva project. So with that, we are going to cut to the interview. Stay on Thank you for coming on with us. Yeah, it's fine. It'll be fun. Now, this is pretty cool milestone for us because you're the first guest that's not from either of our personal networks. So it's really exciting for us.

This is actually my first podcast interview, which is kind of funny because I have been on radio before and I've listened to a huge amount of podcasts. But this is the first time I think, a guest so I'm excited.

That's awesome. Cool. Well, like I said, since we didn't really have any much of an existing relationship before this We're hoping just to get some more general background on know where you're from, because you're not from the United States, you speak all sorts of different languages, just a little bit of general background on yourself.

So I'm Norwegian. And I grew up there, I was there till I was about 17, in small town. And then I got the chance to go to this amazing school called the United world college. Basically, I was in this small town, and you know, kind of bored in high school. And I saw a poster outside my guidance counselor's office, about this college that had students from all around the world, and who were kind of really interested in politics and you know, just under, you know, global understanding and learning together. And to me, that was really appealing because I saw other people going on exchange years, but they would mostly just can't party for a year. And then you'd also be like the one in the region who was in the US or is in France or something. I didn't really want to be that. But this idea of being somewhere where everyone is new, everyone comes from everywhere. Around the world, and it was a really challenging curriculum. So I thought that was super exciting. And I ended up going to Italy for two years. I had an amazing time there that really opened my eyes, and probably set the stage in many ways for the rest of my life. And one of the things that gave me an appreciation for was language, which I'd already been interested in, but, and I spoke a few European languages, but this idea of trying to learn a really exotic language, and not because it was exotic, but actually Well, actually, to certain extent, because I was interested in studying linguistics. And so I thought if I go in, and I studied linguistics, and all I know is you know, classical, like French and German. I know, you know, the region, English of course. And then you start trying to make some kinds of generalizations based on that it's very problematic. And so what are like the languages are the most different from from English, but at the same time, I'm not going to go relearn some kind of Native American tongue that nobody speaks. And so I'm also interesting kind of the language that unlocked just, you know, huge swathes of the world and civilizations and stuff. And so to me, at that time, I said, I want to learn Chinese, Arabic and Russian before I'm 30. I didn't succeed in that. But I did go for Chinese. So I ended up studying Chinese for a year and then taking the train to China, and teaching English there for a year with the goal of really learning Chinese and that happened to be in Wuhan, which has been for a long time the city that nobody's ever heard of. and now suddenly, it's it's quite infamous. Yeah, I guess that's on

the front page of the World News. Yeah, one thing that me and Lewis have discussed a lot in our conversations is just about how, you know we only know English, but we know that knowing different languages changes the way that you think, how have knowing you know nine languages, change the way that you're Your brain works or can you even remember back that far?

That's really tricky. I mean, there's, there's, you know, I know, you've probably come across our work hypothesis that people you know, like, where they're talking about language changing the way you think in a very direct manner. And of course, you see all these kind of Eskimos have 300 ways of saying snow. And these kind of or, you know, the pig is a word that only exists in Norwegian or Danish, so it must say something profound about that civilization and stuff. I think that's quite superficial. And many of those examples I just cited are kind of disprovable.

So

I'm not sure about the linguistic features, I think to me much more. And I mean, my son would be a great case study of that because he is growing up now with a Chinese mother in Switzerland, so he's now Speaking of region, French, Chinese and some English, and so you know, and it's really fun to see him kind of switching back and forth and stuff. But to me, I think it's much more to travel. And even though I love reading, I love listening to podcasts, audiobooks, watching movies. And you know, like, just for China, which I've spent a lot of time in, which I really love, like, I mean, there's all kinds of problematic issues there of course, but in terms of just being there and talking to people and enjoying the life there, it's really amazing and, and, and because I'm fairly, I'm still not like I've read a bunch of books in Chinese, but it takes me a huge amount of time, and I'm never really able to just get into it. Unfortunately, it's one of my big regrets, but talking I'm pretty fluent. And like the amount of amazing conversations I've had with people even like not necessarily philosophical ones, just you know, sitting there in some little village and some guys just chatting away and sharing his way of life with you and Chinese people are actually surprisingly open, which you might not believe if you, you know, just see them from Western media and stuff. But when you're there in person, and if you speak their language, like they're very happy to share a lot of stuff, they're very, very generous with their time. They're very curious. They don't meet a lot of foreigners and they, the people they meet they can't talk to. So you know, those kinds of conversations, but that's the same for Indonesia for even, you know, going to Germany and I often it's, the one thing is just a pure being able to communicate with someone, right, like I'm able to ask for the directions of translation or something. But another thing is the humor, the personality. And I remember I spent the summer in Beijing doing research with this Chinese Catholic guy, who was one of my best friends and we would go out for kind of dinner drinks almost every night and talk away and had a really good, you know, relationship. And then one of my friends came to Beijing and I was really excited for them to meet was my friend. This is Big Chinese, so they're talking English. And they were able to communicate. But there was that my friend, my Chinese friends suddenly seemed like, some boring guy would like, just very stilted and like, I like the worse. So for so for my, my visiting friends like, Oh yeah, this Chinese guy like, whatever, you know, didn't leave an impression at all. And it was so completely different from the person I've met. And so that's, you know, even even with I think automatic translation apps which are getting better and and even with like the whole world learning slowly English to some level, I think if you assume that that's going to be enough you are you're missing out on a huge amount of kind of texture and color.

You're missing out on the depth.

I think that's that's a really inspiring kind of story about the ways you've been able to experience different societies because I mean, I've lived in two other countries and not really gotten proficient in the language beyond asking for directions and maybe not even up to that. Very much. And I kind of noticed that I mean, like I said, all these people, I never was able to connect with the locals in a more meaningful context, it was kind of always an acquaintance thing, never really a full befriending. And that's kind of because I traveled with like an American group in the American bubble. So what are some tips you'd have for learning the language? I'm sure, this is another theory, you might say you have total truth or no truth, once you've gotten your third, fourth, fifth 678 come pretty easily, relatively, that also depends if they're from the same family. Because if it's your seventh European versus, you know, learning something totally different, but your advice for language learning to make a long question short.

So there's a few things and I follow a lot about this. When it comes to multiple languages, you know, there's two things one is definitely just kind of spillover. And there I think, yeah, so you know, if you speak Italian, then for Spanish is going to be a lot easier, although you're going to keep messing them up. But at least you'll be able to kind of read and understand them much, much faster. And on the other hand, you know, learning Chinese, there's not gonna be a lot of spillover. But I think breaking the barrier in terms of learning your first foreign language to a high level of proficiency. I think that gives you both a better understanding of language from a structural perspective. Because if you only speak your native language like you, like all these grammar terms, they're kind of not you maybe learnt them for a test, but they never had any meaning for you because, you know, kind of how to speak the language just intuitively. And suddenly you start learning German, and what's the subject and the object and the indirect like, suddenly those things are crucial and you know, decoding that and then I think the the self confidence that comes from knowing and I think that's maybe one important thing for Norway, for example, where every single person speaks good English. Most people don't learn anything else beyond like most people study a bit of French and German they don't really get proficient but at least they know Know that yes, of course I can learn another language Well, okay. And I was actually blown away I had when I was in China, a really good friend from the US who had didn't know really any Chinese before he arrived and didn't know any other languages other than maybe a little bit of Spanish, and was still able to learn a massive amount while he was there. And to me, that was kind of mind blowing, because I came there, you know, having worked English as a young age, and then having studied some other languages. And here's someone who's 20. And Chinese is his first foreign language. And still, he's able to kind of not be overwhelmed and make progress. And it's been his measure of progress, because that's one thing that's really tricky when you're learning language, right? At first, it's like, you know, I'm learning one word today, two words, tomorrow, four words, you're doubling every single day, but pretty quickly, you get to the level where you're it's really hard to kind of see that progress. So his measure was he would go to the local noodle bar. And again, Chinese being very curious about foreigners They would ask him lots of questions. And you know, and but they would be very impatient because they're not really used to people who don't speak a language well, right. They're not gonna slow down repeat themselves. It's like, he speaks Chinese or not kind of binary question. So they would say like, ah, where are you from? You know, and he's like, make Wah, China America. Okay. Okay. And how old are you? And they like, you know, arcia say 20 years. Okay. Okay. And so then he has to speak Chinese to speak Chinese. Great, great. And then they say, you know, like, what job Does your mother do? or something? He's like, ah, could you repeat that? And then oh, my God, he doesn't speak any Chinese. Okay, whatever. I'm not even gonna bother my time like that this is over. Right? Like, Come on, give me a chance. But the point is for him, the measure was like, how far can I go?

How many questions can

I answer questions? Right. And then he like studies for a month it comes out okay, maybe 210 questions. is also great. Like, so. I mean, that's, I guess part of the answer to is just communicating with people and not being shy. Yeah, is a really key key thing. Have I mean when I came to China I spoke worse. And I was teaching English there in the university and I spoke much worse Chinese than most of my students English, but I would just have to use it all the time outside of class to get fed to get my clothes washed to get anything done was

also in like 2000 2001 this wait way before of instantaneous digital translation? Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah. For I mean, this was before digital dictionaries like you want to like try looking up a word in a Chinese dictionary. Have you ever thought about how you would do that in a manual dictionary

in real time?

Yeah, well, even in real time, but like, literally like, here's a character. Here's a book. You don't know this character. Look it up. Where do you even start? Right? Like there is a way obviously, but it's not. It's not like oh ABCD No, way more convoluted. So yeah, that was it. Yeah. So anyway, within a few months, I spoke better Chinese than they spoke English or at least I was more comfortable because I kept using it and and my The best example of this was, I was in Russia at this Russian course. And we had this this girl from Manchester, who was just really exuberant like just really, you know, fun. And we were all super super crappy had Russian but she would like pick up a few words and she would just use them so she would Russian you know that they personally bomb off work that can be super nice, but like on work, they can be very off putting. And she would go up to the like the the security guard in a shopping mall was standing there all's strict. And she would be like, hey, how many brothers do you

like the only sentence you knew how to ask?

Yeah, but they would, you know, she would use it. And then she got much better. So using it, but then I mean, for the other part, to me, I think. And I have a lot of polyglot friends who agreed and agree with me. And it's possible that you know that we're not representative of the general population. I don't know. But most of the court the traditional public books that you find, right? They'll be like, here's a text in Hindi. And it introduces a ton of new vocabulary, a ton of new grammar. And so you're kind of working your way through it. Like maybe it's a one page, but you're spending so much time trying to keep like, what was that word? What's that? Even that letter? Because you're just at the beginning. And if you put them together, what's the grammar? And what this is? And what's the story even about? And then like, you might spend a day or two working on that, and at the end, and then there's like, you know, work book questions and stuff. At the end, you're like, I made it through the story. And you go to the next chapter, and there's more words in there more grammar. And if I designed the textbook, you would would make your way through that one page. And then there would be a 10 page story with no new vocabulary. Right, just like just because both because it would let you really reinforce what you've learnt. It would also just let you get that feeling of reading fluently, even though it's a super limited vocabulary, but pretty quickly, you could write like simple things like that. And I haven't really found anyone who tried that out. But

that's a really interesting idea. You should test that out with Minerva.

We're not doing a lot. Interestingly, we're not doing a love language learning app in Aruba, really, um, students do a lot of individually, I think, both

kind of outside of class live in their lives in those wherever they are for a couple semester, whatever. Let's

go ahead. I was gonna say, let's get let's take a step back before we get them nervous, because that's gonna be a long conversation. But can you tell us a little bit about your education? We know you got your PhD and you've done some research. Did you focus on linguistics? Or did you you have a different focus? And

no, I never really so I went, so I studied in Sweden for a year and I went to China and then I came back. I did the air. In Norway, we are an altar service. But if you say you're a pacifist, you get to do civilian service. I did that I was a receptionist and a peace researcher. Institute which was a pretty appropriate for a year. And then I went to Canada and I started on this undergrad and International Development Studies. Because I was I've been traveling I've been in China, I'd been going all around the world taking the train to China seeing a lot of stuff. I was like, Why are some countries poor countries rich? And like what's

seen gross differences between different countries and people's quality of life and those kind of things?

Yeah, but even but also like stuff that's not the challenges your kinds of traditional, very naive conceptions of rich and poor in third world and stuff because you see amazing stuff going on in China. Of course, and, and you see, yeah, just like so a like, why is the world like how it is and be what can we do about it? Whether that's as individuals, as NGOs as governments, I was also really interested politics. I'm like, what what is, you know, What is a good political stance to have? That's actually that would lead to some improvement. And, of course, it's a very complex thing to study. So you ended up in our program, studying everything from soil science, because agriculture is really important to Sociology, history. You know, I took some courses on public health, which are now fairly Yeah. It, you know, broadened my horizons in a huge amount of ways. It was also because it was kind of a very small program that took advantage of a lot of big programs. In terms of putting together the course catalog. It felt also quite disjointed. Because I would take a course on soil science, most of the people there were people who are like, you know, geology majors or something. And then you're going into a course on sociology, where a lot of people are going to just do a master or master in sociology, and you don't have to sew it all together yourself. But then we went to Part of the attraction for me was that we get to go for a year to a developing country to work for an NGO there. And I thought, at this time, I was a bit older than, well, I was the same age as my, my friends, but they had many of them had finished university, whereas I've been doing other stuff. And I saw him kind of finishing University with a degree in sociology or something, it was super interesting, and then not being quite sure what the next step was. And I thought this thing will give me still a really good academic degree, but it'll give me like a full year work experience in an NGO. And so I really liked that combination. And so where did you go? I ended up going to Indonesia, which was actually, I really want to go to Africa, because I felt like I'd been to Asia, I liked it. But I could easily go back by myself. Whereas Africa, I hadn't spent a lot of time and I wouldn't really know where to start. And so, but the problem was actually and this was something we studied a lot was this concept of time. aid, where countries oftentimes when they get money, they'll be very specific about what you can use that money on. And so here we get money. Sorry.

It's earmarked. It's earmarked.

Exactly. And so, you know, like you, and that's part of the reason why they give the money. Of course, I'm in the US us aid is, though the farming organizations are big lobbyists for them to increase the giving, because then they buy up farm products and stuff like that. But the problem was, I was in the region in Canada, and Muslim organizations getting support from the Canadian aid organization, they wouldn't be allowed to have an original turn. And so I was able to go to Indonesia because it was with care International, which gets money from all around the world, and they were able to host me, but it turned out to be a super interesting year. Very challenging, but very interesting.

Cool. So is that what you did your PhD in? Or is this before the PhD? This was bachelor

still, I'm sorry. Okay. Slow,

even in school on time, lots of There's a lot of interesting stuff along the way, clearly. So,

yeah, so I was there for a year. And I ended up we were supposed to do on our thesis on all the topics that we found there. And I didn't really so I worked for this huge NGO. Right. And this was a few years after the Big tsunami. And so they had, they had really like a massive operation. But what I actually ended up writing on was, so that was really interesting was this concept of community libraries that had kind of sprung up like, some before. There was a huge amount of these initiatives, but it was all in good. Like it was not driven by any foreign NGOs. And there had been almost no reporting on it, like people hadn't even heard about it. And yet, when you asked, like people in Indonesia, like so, if two young guys are unemployed and an Indonesian bullet, they'll start a village library, and be like, yeah, and like, that doesn't happen anywhere else when they just kind of assume that's what

that's what people do, but

right Yeah, that's not what people

do. Anywhere I've ever heard

heard of that. And so it's just super interesting to kind of dig deep into it. Because by then I spoke the language pretty well,

literacy, like a really big deal there or like people just really enjoy reading books, or that's just how does that come to be? So

I'll give you the short version.

You know, Indonesia was, it was under the Dutch for 400 years. It's really funny to think that the home is a very small country, in the US as a very, very large country. That wasn't really a country before. It was just like 16,000 Islands or something like that with different languages and different cultures. And really, the Dutch people made it into one state and then also like Malaysia and Singapore, there's no reason why they should be and it was all kind of just one area of islands with different cultures. But so Holland had two colonies, I think Suriname was just a tiny place and South America or middle America, and, and Indonesia. And at that time, you know, the schools were in touch, then eventually you had some like basic schooling in the nation, but that was like shut down upon the libraries, you're not allowed to go to library if you weren't, if you didn't have a high school degree, which was really rare. And of course, all the books were in Dutch. And so we were seeing that something very foreign and exclusionary. And then after then you had a brief period of Japanese rule. And then you had about 50 years of dictatorship until I think 1998 fairly recently that they became a democracy. And until then, like all of the culture all of the artists everything had been really suppressed. And so there was this kind of huge wave to yeah to both literacy but but also religious culture our you know, discussion creation, sharing those all this is kind of bottled up. But the cool thing is they didn't call them libraries, because library As I said, that had this kind of connotation of something that's very tough for people like me. And even like, well, I don't know, today, this was 10 years ago, but in Jakarta had like 15 million people, and they had seven official libraries, but they were like, on the seventh floor of a government compound, you know, like, in the back of like, so normal people would never want to go there. So instead, they called them reading gardens. And they just, they totally rebranded them. And you know, instead they would be like in a village or someone just like having a garden, lots of like, colorful books and kids would come and there would be like artists, teaching them theatre and stuff. And so it's like, and it just somehow spreads crazily. And I felt it was really interesting, especially the fact that it was just for them. It was so obvious, and nobody outside of it really heard about it. But so on the one hand, that was kind of telling the world this really cool example. On the other hand, I was trying to give Indonesians themselves a little bit of a chance to reflect on what they were doing. Not And so as part of that, and acknowledge that it's actually extremely interesting and unique, what's going on? Exactly. That's really beautiful. And just one more thing about language because I've always been interested in kind of language equity, right? This this idea that we take for granted that everything valuable is in English, and it's kind of up to others if they want to access it. So for me, obviously, I got, especially when you're studying International Development Studies, and you're going to be an intern abroad. I mean, there's all kinds of questions about ethics and equity and like privilege and stuff that but you know, one basic things like obviously, so many people there helped me out massively with asking my answering my questions with guiding me with, you know, all that stuff. And so the least I could do, I felt was to make my research available to them in the nation. And so after I've written my thesis I had I paid someone to translate the whole thing to the nation. And luckily, I read in the nation well enough, like go through and kind of feel comfortable, like I wouldn't want to do the translation, but I was able to look through it and fix some things, and the cool thing is that and of course, it's open access and stuff. And so you know, like, almost nobody. I mean, it's out there in English, like, you know, I actually got two journal articles out of it too, which is cool for an undergrad. But I don't think it's caused a stir in the international library movements like that. On the other hand, it's been cited like 2030 times in Indonesian journals, and on Blotto

made an impact in that organizations.

So on the one hand, it's, I think I provided something of value by giving them this kind of outside view. And on the other hand, is also a way of keeping myself honest, because my supervisor at the University of Toronto, you know, they know the methodology, they know how to write well, but they, they didn't have any I could make up all kinds of stuff. Or I could just be completely wrong myself. And so writing in that and I that's something similar I did for my masters and I wrote about a tie and I also made shirts. It was what I wrote was available in Chinese

videos. really doesn't say so it's really good. You go first go.

That's really good validation for you like that's the ultimate validation is the people that you wanted to provide value for them citing it in their own journals and their own their own works and stuff. That's really, really cool.

I think that should almost that almost makes me want to think that should be some sort of standard for like an academic to do is put it in a whether maybe that burden shouldn't be on the student or not to just make it available in the language of the people most directly affected by it or most directly studied because other than like that, so it can really be verified, if that's what it takes.

I have a blog post still on my site from, I don't know 2005 or six or something back when I'm still on but I was really interested in open access and this idea of journal articles being hidden behind paywalls and not accessible to public. And then the other hand, there's this issue of research ethics and you have to go through a lot of loops when you want to do research on people, which is the way it should be. But there's almost nothing in those ethics, requirements about what you do once the research is done. And so in my blog post, I said, you know, should there be a fair trade stamp for research? It's kind of just more a joke, but to think about like, Well, yeah, if you do research on people in other countries, then a it should be open access. That's kind of the base requirement, be it should be translated to a language that they understand and see, if they are not people who read academic materials, then it should probably also be in a version that you know, so if you're researching children, like you're not going to let them read your PhD thesis, but maybe you can make like to make a children's book, maybe you make a little video or you know, explain it to them. I feel like that. Yeah, I still think today that that should be a requirement and I think a university should have a fun just like they haven't been broken access public. dictation, which many of them do, and that's great. They should have the fun for translation if, whenever that's appropriate,

reworking the academic materials into kind of a more useful resource for everyone. Yeah, and have a PhD to read it.

Not at all. And I mean that that's something I've been thinking I'm doing a lot of, but also, through my life is thinking about access to scholarly communications and how we publish. And so, you know, for my, for my bachelor thesis, I did this translation projects got my first thing for my Masters, which was about open courses in Chinese universities. And this was when I was doing a master's in education, comparative education. And this was a topic that was, you know, open educational resources at this time was really like I was in the there was a lot of people blogging about it. There was a lot of people interested. And I knew that those people, you know, these were academics and stuff, so they spoke English. At least the ones outside of China. But they wouldn't necessarily sit down read 150 page thesis, I know how many PDFs I download, but then they unfortunately stay in my Downloads directory. And so I tried a few different things. So the one thing I did is I made a like a Kindle ebook, just converted it, but then you can put on your E reader, because academic PDFs, they kind of suck in terms of usability. But also I serialized it on my blog. And so I would just kind of take, you know, staple of this stuff that you need in your PhD in master thesis, but it's not so interesting. And then pick up other chunks and then just post one a day for like, final two months. And I tweet them up. And I got I got like a, you know, the nice thing there is a, you know, that's back when people were using Google Reader and they were actually kind of like newsletters today, they would actually get it regularly. So a lot. I would meet people in conferences who were like, Oh, I read your, you know, that part of your thesis is really interesting, which felt very cool. But also, now you're making each little chunk into its own kind of sizable thing that has its own unique URL. And so if someone's on Twitter, and they're talking, you know, in my literature review, I talked about open courses in Japan. And, you know, if I'm sending you 150 page PDF, that's kind of silly. But if you're saying something about open course in Japan, I can send you the link to that blog post, you know, that that's something that then can be retweeted it can be common to the poem. And so, I mean, I still think we need a much better infrastructure for that, and maybe Rome and these kind of things could point the way but that was like an early experimented and trying to make stuff more margin,

each component of the 100 page thing, its own usable piece. Yeah, kind of changing with the unit size, almost breaking it down,

making it more searchable.

Yeah, definitely more searchable, more accessible.

So I guess now, that's a good jump to the PhD, which is kind of on the same line of thought, right? Open Education, or is it a little different?

Yeah, yeah.

So and it's still democratizing knowledge and these kind of things.

Yeah, absolutely. So so the ideas are similar but the approaches are kind of different. And the thing is, when I saw I was doing my bachelor, and I was really confused about where I was going to go. And two things like I had never thought about before. One was public health, and the other one was education. And both of those really, when I was young and naive, I thought, you know, education is only for teachers. And health is only for doctors. And I don't want to cut people open. I don't want to see bloods, I'm not gonna go into health, I'll get no attraction to me, and I don't want to become a teacher. And so I'm open studied education. And then I guess that's what a good bachelor's degree does is going to open your your vision a bit. And so I understood that health and we see this today, of course, public health, you know, and all kinds of other aspects of health. They're extremely complex and require all kinds of disciplines. And so I almost went into that direction because I'm amazing teacher, but also education we have at the University of Toronto, there's a 12 story building. That's just a Faculty of Education. And it's one of the biggest in the world, actually. But they have everything from, you know, early childhood psychology to the standard K through 12 pedagogy to higher education to workplace learning to labor unions. I mean, just everything. And it turned out to be, because I'm interested in, as you said, democratic democratizing access to knowledge, but also just learning development. I mean, these are really huge themes that let you look at almost anything. And so I went, but my challenge was, I was really interested in how adults learn. And this is a bit scratching my own itch, because I, I felt like I don't understand the development process and the seven year old, like, I just, there's so much going on there that it's really confusing. Whereas I know that myself, and I think part of this was coming to university a bit older, because I've been traveling around and doing the civilian service and stuff. I was able to both learn, but also have a little bit of a meta relationship or is looking at well why are we sitting here? A lecture hall with 300 people and why are we doing multiple choice tests? And who? Who thought that was a good idea? And did they actually test the letters works or not? So I have all these questions. And the problem with was that even though this Medical School of Education was one of the biggest in the world, you had to choose between studying higher education. And then you're in the theory and Policy Studies, or you studied pedagogy, the science of teaching and learning, then you're focusing on primary school to high school. I'm like, Well, I want to study teaching in the university or for people beyond University. And so the way I ended up doing it was I did my Master's in the fear and Policy Studies field. And so I got to look into

this open educational resources in China. That was, by the way, another example of this massive project in a country, China at that point had created. This was before mass Massive Open Online Courses. In 2003. MIT began with tsunami courseware. Yeah, from money from Hewlett Foundation and others to basically release Most of it was actually PDFs and PowerPoints and stuff. But what people remember is like the 5% of courses actually had full videos, and they would be literally a lecture recordings, two hours, you know, but that was still kind of revolutionary at the time, because especially because it was kind of Harvard and MIT and Yale and stuff. And people around the world were like, what is you know, what's actually going on inside there. And because it was a Creative Commons license, people were able to subtitle these things, they were able to kind of chunk them up and deep link to them in a way that you can't with all the books today. And in China, they had this movement where they had created something like 800 open courses, across, you know, hundreds of universities, massive government funding. And there were actually more than 1000 academic articles written about this program in Chinese and not a single one in English. So in this case, they did and also again, Like they were kind of aware that this was something unique. But if you ask them, why is China doing this? Why did they start this program at this time with it, you know, is bigger than any other country in the world, like in the US government never supported? supporting these programs thought, right? And they would say, Well, you know, and it's funny because I talked to a lot of people they would all point me to like, this is what the Minister of Education says, like they say, these three sentences, and I'm like, why did they decide to say those three sentences at that time? And that question hadn't really crossed people, but that's what they said. That's why we're doing it like, it's really interesting. So again, I kind of ended up doing almost more investigative journalism than than research. Just talking to people reading a lot of articles and of course, also bringing in the theory and it's quite an interesting story. I don't need to go into depth now. But, but as I was doing that, on the side, I met this group of kind of international interesting things. People actually started at a creative commons summit. So Creative Commons, you know, this is this open license. And they, I don't think they do anymore. But they used to have these conferences and they were really cool because they would actually bring together like artists who are releasing music under open license, but also like programmers do an open source educators doing open educational resource and like businesses who were interested in, like, What's an open source business model? And, and so there was like, people who wouldn't necessarily meet otherwise. And, and it was, that's also where I learned the value of like conferences, because so I was in my undergrad. And I was reading a lot of blogs and following people on Twitter that were kind of my intellectual heroes, but nobody knew who I was outside of my friend group. Like I wasn't, I didn't have any presence. I wasn't part of a global community. And I really wanted to somehow get into that community. And so I went to this conference with my own money in Europe, and I'm Walking around, there's thousands of people and they're all like super smart and super well connected. And I didn't quite know where to start, right. And they had different tracks in this conference. So there's the main track. And here you have like people like Cory Doctorow, Lawrence Lessig, Joey Ito, like these just giants that I've been, you know, really looking up to on stage. And I'm like, man, I want to see them live. And on the other hand, you have the education track, which was much smaller and was kind of run like an unconference. And so I went to the, to the main conference, because everyone see these people. But what I realized is that after I sat there for an hour, you know, in this big lecture hall, and then we all went for lunch, and I'm like, okay, I could have just watched that video. It's a great talk. Like, I really enjoy watching these people, but I can just watch it on video. I still don't know anyone. I'm still going to eat my lunch by myself. Instead, I went to the education track with 30 people sitting in a circle. And the moderator goes around and says, Why are you here? And I said, I'm here because I want to figure out what the university The future looks like because I don't think that we need big campuses and we don't need libraries necessarily. We have everything online, and we don't need a lot of the stuff that we have. But there might be some crucial things that we do need, and what are those? And how can we reproduce those and actually give access to a lot more people. And she said, that's great. And she keeps going around. And there's two other people who say, I'm really interested in what he said. And so at the end, the moderator says, Hey, the three of you here some other room, come back here, some markers and some paper come back in two hours. And that, you know, to me, that really changed my life in a way because what we ended up doing was sketching out what would become the peer to peer University.

Which to go a little bit longer to to gel, but like, I got so much more out of that. being physically I mean, in these days, more than ever you realize how, how kind of valuable thing kind of physical presence is right and How often that is completely wasted by people checking their email and listening to a lecture. And instead of giving people the space and time to create something together.

So what was peer to peer university?

So what we came up with at that time was saying, okay, we have the materials, like we have all these videos from MIT. But we also have all these open open source textbooks. We have Wikipedia, we have like documentaries on YouTube, we have open access journal articles, like the stuff is out there. I mean, this was already 10 years ago. Now of course, there's even more stuff but still. But so what's lacking? Well, one thing is curation. Right? Like if I say, hey, I want to learn about blockchain, or I want to learn about quantum theory, like what if I just put quantum theory in Google and I click on the first link, like I'll learn something, but it's not necessarily the most effective? No, and I don't know what's good or bad. What are the prerequisites? I might, you know? And the second thing is, is kind of a social community

for, you know, for two main reasons one is

I, if I read something, I won't discuss it with someone. And so it's hard if I go to my friend and say, Hey, can you quickly read this 20 page paper x, I want to discuss it with you, as having a cohort of people that work done that is actually hugely valuable. And then you can also have this kind of peer pressure, social pressure, motivation, accountability, deadlines, right. Like we've talked so much about these kinds of things. And so that was and then later, we had ideas about kind of alternatives to accreditation, digital badges and stuff that kind of kind of came later. Those were the main components. And we were really inspired by the Wikipedia model, like can we build something that's free that scales that's really built on volunteerism and networks and not? At Now, one of the tensions that we had Which I think you see the same thing with the massive open online courses is this idea of wanting to serve the unserved right to say, oh, there's all these people who don't have access to good education, whether they're in the wrong country, or they can't afford it, or whatever. And the problem is that these kinds of approaches aren't necessarily what's needed. Right? Like there might be, there might be this one genius in Ghana, who's like living in a little village. And he's like building robots out of scrap metal. And if he could only get access to, you know, like Coursera, or PDF or whatever, like, he would actually just like, take off and like those people exist, I've seen them right, but they're not the rule. And the average person who drops out of high school or you know, is just struggling in general with access. You know, a they have other issues like, you know, time and money because even if education is free, doesn't mean that you have the kind of space to sit there the whole day and to focus on it and be like, If you have issues around self efficacy and study skills, and all of those things like giving you a bunch of online self study resources is not going to be the best way. And so actually peer to peer University now, which I'm not working with anymore, but they're kind of trying to experiment with working with libraries to provide an on site plays with a physical community that's connected with all these curated resources on this national network. So I think that's really interesting. But, but for the people who, in a way are privileged, right, like the people who are taking p2p courses, the people are taking MOOCs they're overwhelmed overwhelmingly, they already have a have at least one degree. They're fully employed. They love them have masters and PhDs. So they're not underserved. But on the other hand, like, still, like there's this massive potential for professional development that's not being met. And and for that population, like we were doing really interesting stuff and we're doing for The most interesting thing was really, on the one hand, you have this global community of people who are super diverse, most of them are not researching education or anything. And we have all kinds of interesting ideas about pedagogy and how we learn together. And on the other hand, because we have these boundary object, if you want to use a fancy term, which was the actual school, like we're building a school together, and we're designing courses, and some of them we've designed, we've seen how that went, and you've taken something and we're building a platform, if it's like a software platform, we're talking about policies. And I think that made the discussions that we have much more real, because if you just take 50 people and say, hey, let's do an unconference about the future of education, like you'll probably generate a bunch of ideas that will be really scattered. And here because we have this thing that kept us together, and yet we were able to really dream and go pretty deep in different kinds of theories and stuff. It was one of the most kind of productive intellectual communities I've ever Part of I think I was really lucky as a, as a senior undergrads to, to and then later as master students can stumble into into this.

And so that kind of led me to the PhD. I was doing this on the side during my master's as a life masters, I asked questions about

this open educational resource program in China from a policy perspective, like, why did the Minister of Education start this? What was the motivation of the professor's all of this stuff? But I never asked asked whether these resources were useful, because I wasn't looking at it from a Pentagon. And I didn't have the background of the tools to be able to ask those questions. But those were highly interesting questions. And at the same time, we're building up peer to peer University and I'm like, I want to understand how people can learn together at scale in online environments. And so I went into PhD on computer supported collaborative learning, basically exactly what I just said. And it was an incredibly interesting and stimulating time. There's also frustrating because it turns out that community is really focused on primary school to K through 12. Again, and professional

development for people that already have a degree or even high, even universities are not.

It's coming more now. But it was really hard to to connect the things I really wanted to do with the things that would let you publish in the best journals and conferences and stuff like that, which is of course with your PhD supervisor will guide you towards and, and there's lots of things that I feel like I could have done differently or better more effectively, during my PhD. But on the other hand, like the PhD, sometimes can be a place where you really explore a lot of different things. And so, one of the things I spent a lot of time exploring was a note taking system

Does evergreen notes or something else?

No, I mean.

So basically, I was really overwhelmed by the amount of literature I was expected to read. And also the timeframe because you're reading hundreds and hundreds of papers that you might need to cite in three years when you're actually writing your thesis. And you need to be able to cite it extremely precisely because, you know, you need to know which page you got that idea from. And it's, and there's so many different theories and models, and they're all related and extremely complex. And there were no good tools, not even close to any good tools for this. And add to that, the whole just logistics of dealing with PDFs and reference management, which is, you know, nowadays, at least you can put stuff on instapaper and you have a single URL, and that's all you need to find the source. And for academia somehow it's way more complex. It's quite an I could go on for quite a long time about how silly it is. But what I ended up doing was creating this kind of very hacked together duct tape be MacGyver system using. So there was a big geographical Reference Manager that was open source, but it was scriptable through Apple script. And there was a PDF reader those open source and let you annotate and highlights and stuff like that. And there was a document wiki, which was kind of the early wiki that had one nice property, which is that all the pages were actually stored as text files on your drive. So it was really easy to like have a script that just generate new text files, maybe just be pages or manipulate those things. And so I made this crazy workflow with AppleScript and Ruby and keyboard Maestro and you know, it was really a Rube Goldberg machine. But what it lets me do was to read a PDF, take highlights, export it to the wiki with every parent Graphs linking back to the page in the PDF and the metadata. And then I could kind of take higher level notes and stuff. And of course, it was much, much more complex than anything that, for example, Roman ABC to do. But at that time, there was nothing else like it. And still today, actually, in terms of the actual logistics of academic note taking, there isn't anything like it was just kind of insane. So I spent a lot of time exploring that field. And that's a little bit reason why I think immediately kind of clicked when I saw Rome.

ago. Yeah.

But my final project, so I also, so during my PhD, the massive open online courses and came on the stage, this is why like, 2020 Yeah, I think the first MOOCs were 2012 13. Of course, there was, you know, that there. Have you heard about x MOOCs and see MOOCs now. So this is kind of like the geeky, geeky distinction because initially so the the initial genealogy was there was a guy called David Wiley was still is still around but actually and he was at Utah State University I think at that time researching Open Educational Resources really really cool guy. And so he says I'm teaching these courses on open educational resources like maybe what would it look like to make my course open? Because up until then people have been like posting PDFs posting videos, but like that's not a course. So he's like, Well, I have this graduate course on open education, like how can I make that open? And instead of doing something super fancy, he said, Well, you know, you guys all set up your own blog. And this was back when RSS feeds were still a thing. So, you know, just give me the link to your feed, and I'll add it to my page. And here's a bunch of things. And there were like hardcore readings there like the first week was 150 page United Nations report and two questions. Shouldn't education be a global issue? Right? And should it also be an obligation? Or is it nothing? So right? Those are two questions. And anyone could sign up. There are no prerequisites didn't cost anything. And this is my last year of my undergrad. So I signed up. And at first I didn't know. So I started reading other people's blog posts. And I said, No, I wrote an install on my blog today that the thing I wrote back then is a ton. And then people would comment and stuff. And it was, for me, this was the last year of my undergrad. And I spent the whole Sunday every day for a semester on this course without any credit, because it was just such an incredibly interesting group of people discussing these topics. And so I was super impressed by this course. But it was kind of a one off like it did this one time. A lot of people close with a cool and then said, Okay, well, what's next, what's next? And these guys in Canada, George Siemens, and Stephen Downes, they had been developing a theory of connectivism just kind of like a learning theory for the digital age.

And there was bunch of people excited about that. So they said, Hey, you know, let's do a course about connectivism. Let's kind of be inspired by David via this method. And, but we're going to make it bigger or I don't think I thought they were gonna make, it became much bigger. So they have a byline, maybe 3040 people, and they had about 2000 people to sign up. And you know, now we have hundred and 50,000 people on Coursera. But this was a really massive back then. Right? And so they were like, well, we can't, nobody can read 2000 blog posts every week. That's not that's doesn't scale. So we need to have kind of tribes and and it was really self organizing. So the cool thing was like there's a bunch of teachers in Spain, who would all go in Second Life back when that was the thing. And they were like, you know, there's people in Toronto who go for coffee and then you have this kind of wet method of having the best ideas bubble up to the top and George Stevens might, you know, do a weekly newsletter and say, here's some really cool stuff that happened, but don't expect that you can, you're not gonna be able to follow everything. That's fine ecosystem. It's so much work. And this just created a massive amount of energy. And I think it was a guy from Prince Edward Island called Cormier who coined Massive Open Online Courses. This is a massive open online course. He was the first guy who used the word MOOC. And then I think just a year after you had a, you know, the the AI and machine learning courses from Stanford, and of course, they and New York Times article 150,000 people signed up. And that became a MOOC. But there are incredibly different models. And so, in the literature, you distinguish between, see MOOCs which are connectivist MOOCs, which are these kind of like really bottom up networks. And and there have been a good number of them after that, and a bunch of research on them. And then x MOOCs, which are the edX the Coursera, Udacity, the kind of corporate massive model. But anyway, so this created a lot of excitement, and a lot of pushback as well, but it, it created a bit of an opening and the scholarly community to look more at collaborative learning in universities, interestingly. And so for my PhD thesis, what we ended up doing was designing a MOOC for teachers on how to use technology. And we want to we put it on edX. But we wanted it to be really participatory. Because the topic that we wouldn't know, the thing we want to convey was how technology enables you to use new pedagogical approaches are more collaborative. So you can use blogging, you can use wikis, you can have students take pictures at home and share them. And so you can well, we felt that you can't really teach that by just showing people videos, you need to let them experience it. And that was a real challenge, because edX is doesn't have a lot of functionality for collaboration. And the functionality does have is very limited. So even it does have peer reviewed, but it only works on one specific model of peer review. And we have, so we spent a lot of time actually building custom technology as plugins that x and the thing we wanted to kind of do was twofold. On the one hand, what can we do with and we had about 2000 active learners, we had about 1000 people signed up, like 2000, who really participated, right? So and these were mostly the teachers. And some people worked in light and universities or museums. So these are not people who come in as blank slates, right? They have massive amounts of experiences, ideas. And so on the one hand, what can you do with 2000 teachers that you can't do? Or can't do as well with 20? What is the what is enabled by scale? And on the other hand, how can you still do with 2000 teachers, that kind of really intense, really rich learning that can happen in small groups and small classrooms. And it was really interesting to kind of explore those two in parallel, and then think about both what kind of pedagogical scripts and and also what kind of, you know, computer interfaces, algorithms that that you could use, and then we kind of built that and ran the course. And to me, that was Both, you know, it was a big step forward in my PhD thesis, but it was also kind of a, it was when I lost some of my inferiority complex about being a software developer, because I've been playing around with technology for all of my life. But I always thought, you know, I'm not a real developer and those people those Ninjas in San Francisco, they're far far above me and stuff. And I still thought so to some extent, but like having built something that wasn't used by 2000 people, and where you see them you know, like there's a there's a physics teacher and cambogia physics teacher in Australia who's like, creating a lesson plan together, and they're like, Hey, what's your skype let's keep in touch after this I'm going to teach this lesson plan in my class let me know how it goes. You know, that kind of feeling that I enabled that to some extent

with the software you build

with the software with the with the with the pedagogical design with the community, right these are these all go together, but exactly and so I said, Well, you know, I yes, I love I like research. I'd like new ideas, but I will To build stuff that gets used, right like that seeing that human connection being made to me was more meaningful than like getting a paper published in a journal. Even though like I built like I, I built on so much of the research that was out there. I'm not I'm not downplaying that, but I'm saying for my myself that was both like, Oh, I can actually build stuff that has a real use in the world. And that's like something that I really want to do.

So what did that lead into?

So

basically, I talked about these pedagogical designs and we in, in computer supported collaborative learning, we talk a lot about scripts. And because the idea is basic ideas, people can learn certain things better collaboratively. And there's a ton of research about why that is, what kind of things in what situations we're learning collaboratively better and so on. However, in most cases, just asking two people to sit down and work together on this Something like happens a lot in schools is not very productive. Right? And again, there's lots of research by why that might be because you're satisficing. So someone says, I think might be a and you're like, Okay, fine, let's let's do a, someone might be dominating, someone might be freeloading someone, you know, all kinds of different reasons. So basically, the whole field of CSL is how can we kind of nudge people? How can we create the environment where they can be really productive collaboration towards learning. And that can happen through the physical design or the design of the interface. There's a ton of really interesting research, which is very relevant also to Rome, for example, on how do people interact using different interfaces have we right now we're taking those in the Google Doc, how would that be different from if we were taking those in the concept map, or in an Excel spreadsheet where we listed the hypotheses on the left and the and the evidence for you know, on the top or all kinds of different things? It could be saying okay, you talk for three minutes. And I listen and then I respond to you. Right? It could be saying, well, you're going to be the critical one, you're going to be the supportive one, it could be giving out roles. It could be, you're going to first read this article, I'm going to read this other article. And then we come in, and we have to combine our knowledge. There's all kinds of methods. And what we're trying to do is see what that how does that work scaled up, and also more asynchronously, because in the MOOC people aren't, aren't there at the same time. And the problem, you know, if you're in the class with 20 people, a physical classroom, you can do almost anything with some sticky notes and some some pens and paper, right? You can ask people to good teacher or workshop facilitator can have people go in groups and you're going to talk to that person. Then you go over there, and here's a gallery walk and you're sharing this thing. They walking around it kind of the moment you move that online, now you have a 20 person zoom meeting. Right here. It's useless, but also the moment you move it up in scale. Now you have even 60 people just like a big college class. Now you have success. hundred people. I mean, you can't do anything at all. And the things that you want, you're really limited by software. Right? Like you cannot do it without software. And the problem is that most of the software that exists even today, this is like quite a few years after my PhD thesis already, you know, we think, well, we have zoom, right? It's better than not having zoom, but it's still pretty limited. We have that x, we have, I mean, some some different like quiz app like Kahoot. And so you know, it's just really compared to this kind of stuff that we want to be able to do. Like, we have Google Docs, that's great. But now you have 100 students, you want to put them in groups of four, and then give each of them a Google Doc. And at the end, you want to, you know, send them out for peer review.

That's really, really a simple use case. But if I asked you to set that up for class tomorrow, take a couple hours, probably. Right. And if you had 1000 students, you couldn't even do it. So we did it because we hand coded everything. And we haven't coded it like to the level of like, this is next week function next week. You know, it was not a generic framework, it was really just like, and that doesn't scale. And so people would read my thesis with all these like design diagrams and stuff. And they might say, well, this is a really cool approach. We want to do that we have, you know, at the TfL, were in Switzerland, where I was working later, they were doing MOOCs for sanitation workers in Africa. And the Francophone Africa, extending the French speaking country. And this is the same thing. We have these people, their sanitation workers, they have so much experience, and we want them to share their experience. We want them to crowdsource solutions we want, you know, but well, you can, because there's no software that supports it, and you'll have to hire an engineer for two or three months. So then I came across this guy in Switzerland called pure Dylan Berg, well known in the CSL community and he'd written a book about a concept called orchestration graphs, which was a way of kind of bringing a formal notation to collaborative learning. So a way of describing the thing I just said about Google Docs, Mandarin Students and peer reviewed stuff in a kind of almost like mathematical formal way, like a flow diagram of dependencies and stuff like that. And he was thinking of using it mainly for kind of learning analytics to be able to connect back data about how you learn during different steps of the process to actual learning design. But I have an idea of what if we use this as the authoring interface for a tool where teacher could come in, and it's almost like a no code that's like, the fancy word these days, I guess, like a no code tool, or, you know, kind of like yackin pipes if you ever saw that those

drag and drop builder.

Yeah, exactly. But that had enough flexibility in it that you could do really rich things. And then you can instantiate a virtual learning environment for students where they could then do all these things. And so that seemed like a really, really exciting challenge. And here, I went from an education lab to computer science lab, focused on education, but where you know, people have maybe the right ideas to be able to build something I think about like, what, what's the what's the abstractions? What's the kind of grammar that that can let you fit these pieces together and in a way that I'll actually run, right, because one thing is drawing lines on a piece of paper. And the thing is like having something that is executable by the, by the computer. And so we spent about four years working on that a few years, and a bit working on that in Switzerland.

I mean, if you think about it, where we were 20 years, plus until like the Internet, and people making websites and there's still people that are aren't satisfied with what exists for drag and drop website builders, which is just like the fundamental base unit of the internet. So trying to create a drag and drop builder for something as complicated as learning, which like you said, you can do a million and a half different ways and all have their own merits, whether it's facilitating a virtual debate, or like the gallery walk or small groups that bubble up into big groups. And you add in the challenge of being asynchronous and global and not requiring a substantial amount of information to be able to build plus the curriculum. And so creating that I mean, that's it, that's a challenge. That's, there's a lot to consider in making a tool that satisfies people from a drag and drop approach. So that's

there are a lot of moving pieces.

That's a big undertaking.

Yeah. And in fact, what we were building was, was focused on synchronous meetings, okay. Because we felt that there is, in the wild in terms of workflow, there isn't necessarily something perfect for asynchronous, but there has been a massive amount of cool tools developed for asynchronous stuff. And there's also a little bit more scope for, you know, Wizard of Oz approaches, where you have someone who's sitting behind the scenes and copying URLs and stuff like that for asynchronous, right, but synchronous, you're in the class for an hour, everyone has their laptop, and you just don't have any scope at all to do things manually, like it has to it has to work. And, and so, so this, but anything synchronous, you know, adds this complexity, there's very little tools out there are a few tools that let you do collaborative writing outside of Google Docs. So either bad, right? Those are the But they work in a very specific way. And so, thanks. And you know, none of this could have been possible even a few years ago, but because of the amazing libraries that we have available now open source libraries, like react, but also like shared to be just the main library we were using for for kind of real time collaboration, we were able to build these kind of abstractions on top of that, where anyone could develop a kind of real time, collaborative widget or activity. And we said we had, you know, generic things like collaborative writing collaborative spreadsheets, collaborative, you know, concept mapping, but even like, we have a master course where students would build these and you know, some of them built like a game theory activity, where you would be like, Okay, I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna fold I'm gonna tell on my partner and the recycler says something and then it shows you the result. So people are able to build these really quickly. And, and we had this nice API where they were feeding data into into into a dashboard. To the student, so the teacher could monitor in real time, what the different groups were doing. And they could reuse the data. So you could take the data from that game session and put it into a chat where you could discuss about the different, different approaches. And we even started putting in some more kind of machine learning stuff where you could have, let's say, you have a bunch of students, and you say, what's the biggest challenge in terms of sustainability right now. And some people talk about energy, you know, the power is too cheap. And someone talks about, we need more solar cells. And then you have two students one talks about, we need to bike more and another one talks about car sharing. And so using things like Word to veck, you can actually classify these at, you know, in a kind of n dimensional space and say that these two are much more similar than these two, even though none of the words overlap. Like one of the literal words overlap. And now you can ask the teacher then this was our dream, say, hey, I want to group two people, the two people have the really similar approaches first, or I'm gonna now I'm going to Mix them with the people who have two really different approaches right and so for the teacher just like how we use voice recognition on our iPhones without most people really don't understand how that works but they're able to use it like can we take some of this kind of cutting edge stuff and and package it in a way that teachers could just use it without necessarily knowing anything about where to back? I mean this this kind of ideas that we had

and that's how you get the bottom up system that you're talking about is combining these people in ways that you know, you don't see if you just put it all into one huge PDF and have something searching for words. It's it's like a deeper level of connection that you're looking for. I think that throughout this like we can obviously see that your passions, your passions for DOD, pedagogy, pedagogy,

pedagogy,

pedagogy, and education and teaching people and I think that it all plays really well into what you're doing now with nerva can you tell us a little bit about Minerva and What it is because I don't think that our audience is going to be very familiar with it.

Yeah, so I had heard about Minerva, back in 2013. Maybe. Because one of the things that frustrated me when I was studying comparative higher education we were studying, I was studying the education systems in Europe and Asia. And it felt to me that even these the world experts on higher education, they were so kind of set in their ways of thinking about possible models, right? it tended to be like, Well, you know, we could add one credit hour of this, maybe we should have some clickers in our large lectures, or maybe we could tweak this thing or, you know, there's, I'm like, well, there might be completely completely different ways of doing this. And in fact, there are some countries are doing it completely differently. Also, like there must be just such an incredible opportunity space that isn't really being explored. And peer to peer University was one attempt of exploring that, of course, we have no money and we'd like our limitation was like we want something that can scale to everyone in the world for free. That's that's one approach. Minerva had a very different approach. They said, we're going to build an elite University, right? Like, we want to compete with Harvard and Stanford for the quality of our undergraduate education. We're going to be very selective. We're going to take the best students, but we really want to try to figure out how we choose really the best students, not just people have money and get coaching and stuff. We're gonna we're gonna have tuition, we want to lower the tuition as much as possible, but you know, so now suddenly, you have money. So you can actually hire people and all that stuff. You have really highly motivated students, you want to get accreditation. So those things are different from peer to peer University, and they give you a very different opportunity space, but then everything else is up for grabs. They don't have a legacy. They don't have a campus, they don't have. You know, they want to really rethink everything and they want to base it on how we know people learn. Of course, that's a very contentious and there's a lot of different points of view there. But there are a few things that people tend to agree upon. One of them is that lectures are not very effective. Right? Like I challenge you to find the education researcher says no, it turns out that lectures is one of the best ways of learning for students. Right? And so we keep doing it. So what would it look like if we designed the university around? what we think is the most effective way for students to learn? And what they ended up so I've been following. So you know, what they ended up doing was saying, we're gonna have this universe, it's gonna be four years accredited undergrad. All of the classes will be online. And right away when people hear that they're like, Okay, well, it's like Phoenix University, or it's like the Open University or whatever. Like, no, no, the class are going to be seminars of maximum 18 students at one professor in a live video conferencing, and that we're going to, we think none of the existing solutions are really good for that. So we're going to build our own, and we're going to just spend all of our time and energy to design it around the kind of learning The kind of interactions that we want to promote. And we think that we can get to a point where people would actually prefer having a class online to being in the classroom. Because, you know, imagine, like I had tutorials, I never I don't think I have almost any class in undergrad with 18 students, one professor that had tutorials where they've been students at one VA and everyone's looking, everyone's see that in a small room, they're looking on to the TA, right? And then and then does anyone say something, you look around stuff like that, in another class, every single student's face is on the screen the whole time. So we're all looking each other in the eyes the whole times already that is changing something right? And we we have you know, our approach to education is fully active learning. So there's a lot of universities are experimenting with active learning, right? So they might do flipped classroom like you do. You watch a video at home and then you kind of do the homework in class you do you collaborate with your peers or you have clickers you breakouts. And for us, we want to do fully active learners won't take it one step further, where you come to class very well well prepared. There's love pre class work. And we do tests, usually at the beginning of each class quizzes that are graded, to make sure that students come prepared. And then the teacher is never allowed to talk for four minutes at a time. Because they're not lecturing. They're not teaching you they're facilitating learning, right? And that actually goes to the kind of learning that we want to see because it's easy to focus on just the classroom. And I'll come back to that, right. But you know, you have a lecture, if you have a small seminar, you can you can tweak it a lot them and most of the work I've been doing actually in research was really focusing on that one and a half hour that people are reading, because that's where you can go and do an experiment. You can talk to Professor and say, Hey, you know, Can I try this out in your class as a researcher trying to redesign a four year university curriculum,

is impossible. So you might not even try even designing, redesigning a 12 week course is really difficult. So you go for the smallest granularity. But Minerva didn't have that limitation. So what so they said, you know, what do we want the leaders of the future to know? Or to be able to do? Because we're, as we see, right now we're in, but even before the current crisis, right, we're in very dire straits, like the world is facing incredible amounts of complexity and challenges. And we need people who can meet those, whether they're in business and politics and science and culture, whatever. So okay, what do we want them to know? Well, you know, just one example, critical thinking. We want our students to be good at critical thinking every university is going to say that every university is gonna say that they train people in critical thinking, but go to the university president of your university, and say, how do you train people in critical thinking? And how do you know whether it works or not?

I'll ask him.

Yes, I would.

Answer I've heard, for example, the president of New York University be asked that in a public setting and not giving a very convincing answer. Because it's, I mean, partially also, because the way universities are organized where professors largely, you know, are responsible for their own teaching, there's very little coordination going on and stuff like that. So the first thing you have to do is that well, what is critical thinking? It's a very diffuse topic. And maybe it's not even one thing, maybe it's a bunch of things. So at Minerva, we broke it down. And you know, people might break it down differently. That's totally fine, but at least like tried to make effort. So we did a bunch of research in the literature. And we said, you know, if you were deciding between going to Stanford and going to Minerva, and that that's a situation that calls for critical thinking, right? But one of the things you might want to do is to look at all the information on the middle of a web page and say, like, is this credible, if they're claiming, you know, that it's all this Things like, Can I really believe that? Like, you might say, well, going to Stanford costs more, but over a period of 20 years, am I really going to get a higher return on investment than going to Stanford? Right? Like there's a lot of different questions that you can ask yourself. And they're, they require very different kind of thinking. They're all kind of part of critical thinking. And so we broke it down like that. And you can get down to the level where you can actually have a rubric where you can say, can you assess the claim of the logical structure of a claim? Right, so if I say because the Coronavirus came from China, we should block immigration from all Chinese, right? There's two ways you can you can you can while there's lots of ways but two ways you could say it's like well, first of all, do we know that Coronavirus came from China? In this case? Probably yes. But you know, that's one way of protecting that another way saying like, wait a minute, is that logical inference you made actually valid? And if it's not valid, then I don't even need to look into that claim that you made right. So again, you can measure whether people Can this is a symbol of logical claim, you can measure whether they can look up a source validity. And there's a lot of other things. So what we said is start going into love detail just to paint the picture. But the ideas we have, we came up with a list of 88 foundational concepts. And they're all kind of hierarchical. So there's four categories, women's critical thinking, there's effective communication, there's a few others things that we think every single person in the world needs. And then we say, okay, we want to make sure that every single student not only learns these, but is able to use them in real life. And the way we do that is we the first year of Minerva is the same for everyone. So if you go into study philosophy, or computer science or biology the first year you have no choice. It's for courses. They're very multidisciplinary. So I mean, I get to take some of these classes when we're testing testing out new pedagogy and new functionality is really fun. So for example, one class, we talk about logical statements. So we start by Look at the reading some English literature and identifying logical statements. Then we look at the way we do logical notation in math. And we we look at some and then we look at philosophy and how they've been talking about it and then we go into Jupiter notebook and inviting us and or statements. And so we're sitting like so foremost computer science perspective, it's actually really interesting how you kind of actually being able to connect all those levels that

are all the different perspectives of formally studied logic. Yeah, discrete math. It's Python kind

of useful. And, and because so for example, for us, you know, every single student in university learns Jupiter, and Python. And of course, the people who go into computer science are going to go way, way, way deeper. But the point is that that's basic literacy. And because we have those four courses are obligatory for everyone, and they're going parallel. We can know that everyone has the same so we can go and have Yeah, you're doing a literature class on Shakespeare. You know, let's, let's try some quite quick scripts that do some word correlation. And let's use that for our digital digital humanities. But anyway, so so they learn these skills in the first year. And we have a hashtag for each of them. Because we want the students to really, that it's a part of a shared intellectual language among the students in the faculty. So you know, they see the definition, they have some examples, then we give them a bunch of opportunities to practice it to apply it. And then over the second, third and fourth year, they go into more and more depth first, they go into, you know, computer science or physics, then they go into concentration courses. Then we have reading courses where students come up with the topics, they want to learn about three to five students find the faculty member, and they basically write their own curriculum. And I'm going to actually supervise such a course in the fall. I'm really looking forward to that. And then you do a capstone project for the last year where you find an external adviser. And it's, you know, it could be an honors thesis kind of thing where you're doing like some some kind of research thing that could also be like starting a business or writing a play or something significant. New and relevant to your debris, right? Are you writing a computer program that does machine recognition? I mean, you know, so it's it's kind of going from everyone does the same two people doing two different things. And you having no agency to be honest the first year, I mean, of course, the things you do, but still, like have the gold program to you choosing exactly what you want to do, because you have now seen what's what's available. And but throughout this process, you're expected to apply these foundational concepts and you'll be graded on them. Because I, you know, all of the classes are in this video platform that we built ourselves. And they're all recorded. And once the class is over, and they're, as I said, very highly active. So one of the things that we've built in is talk time. So let's imagine the teacher has a bar of all the students on top and then we have multiple layouts. And this is part of a timeline that's predefined. So the teacher could say I want four students on the screen that's going to debate with each other I want to students in the Google Doc, I want the Jupiter notebook. I know they switch it around all the time. And they call on students. And if they press control, all the students faces light up in a different color, depending on who has not spoken aloud. And so we make sure that every single student gets a chance to talk all the time. We we cold call all the time. Right? So we'll say, so Kyle, what would play those say about what Peter just introduced from Augustine's perspective, right, like you have if you're not paying attention, it's very awkward. And you learn very quickly, because we know it's hard to pay attention and like, well in a digital environment, right? Well, we've made we make people pay attention. And so it's recorded after the class, the teacher will go in and they will look through the recording. And they will say, Well, here's what the 30 seconds of Kyle was speaking. I'm not just going to say it's good or not good. I'm going to assign a specific foundational concept and then say you, you applied the concept of multiple agents analysis. Here's the rubric for multiple agents if I've got it, so I'm going to choose a free I'm going to write your comment. And that then goes into your dashboards. When you log in to our, you know, it's kind of like our Blackboard or canvas or whatever. You see, here's all of my foundational concepts. I'm going to click on this one. And here I see every time I've been evaluated multiple agents analysis or identifying audience for writing, right? Or for across all the four years across all courses, whether it is in a video lecture, or whether it's when you upload a PDF, they'll actually go in and highlight and kind of annotate and said this paragraph. And again, they'll they'll choose the specific foundational concept and they will write a comment. And so we're tracking because what we're aiming for is transfer. We're aiming for you to be able to learn a concept and and being able to apply to widely different contexts. And prompt first prompted right so we're scaffolding this first we're prompting you said, Well, you know, if you're going to use funding, multiple agent mouse's How would you look at homelessness and Cisco and you And hopefully you're able to do that, right? But then in the third year, we're in the sociology class, we're talking about, you know, the separation between India and Pakistan, we expect you to come up with certain things. Or maybe you surprise us. And you're like, whoo, I'm going to use a complex dynamic system analysis of this. And we're like, whoo, I was not expecting that. But I'm going to give you a five for that, because that was a really clever use of that concept.

And it's something that I've never seen anyone else even attempt to do. And it is so so powerful. And it's also something that as a researcher, as I said, I could I could never have tried to do this, this kind of approach, right. And for the transfer, by the way for Minerva schools, right, which is our university. It's not just in class because actually what this video platform allows us to do as well. You know, the students they all live in San Francisco the first year 80% from outside the US, most selective University in the US. 20 30,000 applicants 400, maybe around 180 seats per year. So the old live in San Francisco first year and the classes are online, but you know, the class or three, four hours a day or even less, sometimes more. And so they go out into the city and they're doing internships they're doing. They're doing civic partnerships with NGOs there, they go to events, they organize events. And then after a year, they all fly to South Korea as a cohort, and they're not exchange students in South Korea, right? They're the same teachers the same curriculum online. But now, after the four hours of class, you're in South Korea. And so you're going out, you're eating different foods, you're working with different civic department and we have staff on the ground. We don't the teachers are not on the ground. But we have staff on the ground that set up those relationships so that we're kind of bootstrapping you because if you just went to South Korea as part of a group of English speakers, as you mentioned, then you're just hanging out like that. It would take you a long time to break in. And so we're kind of bootstrapping that by setting up with all these relationships. And again, like giving you the chance to apply these concepts in real life situations across a range of cultures. And we're hoping that that kind of unique combination is really enabling. And we have, you know, the first cohort of Minerva students graduated last May, which is was a huge milestone for Allium. Absolutely. Were there from the beginning, who started the university from scratch, like the kind of hubris to believe that you can do that. And then actually seeing those people and I was there to graduation soups, I mean, super emotional. And these students are now out in the world doing really, really cool stuff, and are going to be followed by a new cohort. So we're kind of so that's like the Minerva schools. But then we realize that we want many more people to have access to this kind of pedagogy in this this sounds amazing technology. And so we're starting to work with a bunch of partners around the world. And we have universities especially interested I think, in the first year experience, because most universities will not be super proud of their first year experience if they're honest with themselves.

Yeah, I mean, it's At our school, the first year experience is basically taking classes you could have taken in high school. I mean, I didn't really have that first year experience because I had no whatever AP credit, but from ever and I've talked to it's just taking the most generic courses that are all online for free have been taught a million times. And they're taught and not unique and interesting way at all.

Right, so you're taking all the students that are super excited, were coming to university and are like, just ready to learn and ready to party as well, I'm sure But still, like they're definitely, hopefully ready to learn. And you put them in huge lecture halls. And like in Toronto, I had a lot of multiple choice tests and this kind of stuff. And with our curriculum, you're able to really teach them skills that will kind of set them up for success no matter where they go. On the other hand, we're also working with corporate partners who want to do in house training of their middle management. And the interesting thing turns out, a lot of the stuff that we teach our first years is exactly what do you want to teach? middle management. Of course, the examples are going to be different. The classroom discussion is going to be In a different because people are drawing on a whole different range of experience. But the core skills and competencies are pretty much exactly what you need in this world. We're working with some, like Berkeley law has a really great partnership where they're training senior lawyers, you know, so of course, Berkeley was great at training lawyers, you know, the law and all of that stuff. And so you graduated to go into law firm. And now like, you're 1015 years into your career, maybe your partner or so maybe your partner, you're managing, you know, up helping manage this huge company, or maybe your general counsel at a big tech company. And so your job is just much more complex than than just knowing the law. And, and they're now offering some, some courses with us, our pedagogy, our platform, their teachers, and it's really amazing to see these people coming together and exchanging experiences and digging in. So we're working with a high school Laurel Springs High School in California. So, you know, for me, it's also a super festival. waiting to see how we're taking this thing that was like custom built for our own university. And now like applying it to all these different partner communities

is useful for more than just a college student, for sure. And I really think that from the way you outline the skills, I don't feel like the courses I've taken just taking math science, computer science courses have done much to bring about development and communication or you know, those different types of mental models. I guess you could call it the way you've broken down the different ways of constructing arguments and assessing information. I don't think I've won definitely zero, like explicit evaluation and those things, but very few projects or assignments or circumstances that would even bring about one and awareness of them or to any chance to develop them even even implicitly.

I feel the exact same way we go to the same school. So similar experiences. Exactly. I

mean, I think lectures, homework tests, I mean, coding projects, that's more or less than the extent of the things I've been asked to do.

But what you're creating for these nervous students is not only, you know, the educational piece, like, I think that being in different communities where you're, you're going out with a group of people that you know, that are, you know, 20,000 down to 180. Like, all these people are having really cool conversations, I'm sure. And they're going out into these seven different, completely different worlds basically, and in making change, like, and at the same time figuring out what they're passionate about. So by the end of it, they've, they've built for four years and they're ready to take on the world. I think, you know, I hadn't I hadn't had it in my head like that beforehand. And it's sounds amazing.

Yeah, it's, yeah, there's, I mean, so there's a if anyone's interested. There's a great book that we published a few years ago. That actually lays out in great detail. I mean, it's a little bit out of date, because we keep innovating. But it's, you know, it's kind of it's like a handbook for how to build a university. And it goes into not just the pedagogy, which I was interested in, but it's like, how do we recruit? How do we provide Psychological Services, which are, you know, super important thing, putting people through this incredibly intense process? How do we support our alumni to be the most effective that they can be? So the people who graduated in May, we basically said, we will support you, you know, a lot because we're trying to do everything different from traditional universities. So traditional universities, you know, they have some career guidance services, and then they send you a newsletter and they ask you for money regularly, and maybe they have some like meetups or something. We're saying, you know, you think you're going to go out and do great things. And we commit ourselves to supporting you for your lifetime. That when you need support when you're doing something that needs amplification, right if you need to be connected to the right People were there. And we're following you along, like, because we were kind of bringing up this group of people that we hope that are going to do pretty great stuff. And so we're trying to rethink like everything about the relationship between the students and the university and how we're kind of able to, to, to kind of support them. So anyways, that book is called Building the intentional University, which I really love, because I feel like, I mean, universities are like, I've always loved universities, I'm not, you know, there's so much wonderful things about them. But so much of it is really historical, right? And it's kind of this kind of path dependency. Like why do we do certain things in the way we do them? Well, it's almost as a T test. There's like, you know, for for military in the First World War something when they needed to sort a lot of people very quickly and like there's all of these things to dig into. But like, again, if we started from scratch, how would we do it and if we did it intentionally if we put everything together for Reason, then what we look like. And I think, you know, Minerva is one possible answer, but it's not a bad one.

That's incredible. I mean, it's such a rare opportunity to be able to start from scratch, have a budget, be informed by the latest knowledge, be equipped with a team of engineers who can actually realize it, and then have designed a system that selects the best students to go to participate in it. So it's a really powerful thing. And I'm really eager to see next year to what some of the alumni stories are, because from everything you're saying about it, there's no reason those students shouldn't be going on to do great things. Plus, you have the added advantage of having a cohort of students that were likely to be successful either like, on their own so it's by taking them and amplifying them in that way and exposing them to each other. Ah, there's a huge

I mean, if they're weighing going to Stanford or doing Minerva, like they're obviously pretty high level thinkers beforehand. That's what I touched on with like them all being together, you know, the cohort piece of it. So, so strong

Absolutely. And it's it's interesting because we really try hard. We, you know, and even even that, you know, so let's say you have 20,000 applicants. So first of all, you have to figure out how to get your word out there. A lot of people haven't heard about Minerva. And and so we have don't have a big marketing budget yet to be extremely thoughtful about how we reach the people that we want to reach in a global fashion. And then once you are lucky enough to get 20,000 applications, you have to figure out how do you not spend all of your money, you know, evaluating those, but at the same time getting to the people that you really want. And then once you get to those, you actually have to convince them because, you know, sometimes those sort of people also got offers from MIT and Stanford. But there are other times where those are the people who wouldn't have had the chance at Stanford and MIT because maybe they weren't qualified for a there may be their profile didn't fit and so we're we are looking for slightly different things. We don't look at sh t 's at all. We built a lot of kind of custom computer systems and workflows, both to be kind of economical, but also to really hone in on on the skills that we think or the characteristics of students that are likely to be very successful at Minerva, and trying to correct as much as possible for socio economic advantage, which is, you know, it's impossible to do it completely. But But I think we're doing a much better job than all of the traditional universities. And so like one thing that we're proud of, but there's also kind of one thing that's limiting our growth in terms of size. You know, some of the big universities, you know, they talk about being income blind, and then anyone who's admitted they can they can attend. And you look at the month, the percentage of students you know, who don't need scholarships, even though the tuition might be 65 $70,000 a year and it's, you know, extremely high. And so, it seems kind of strange that only the rich people are are smart, as well in theory of the world. And Minerva, you know, our tuition is 15,000 a year and We don't get any government funding at all. And that's because we don't have a campus, we don't have, you know, we our administration is down to the bone and kind of starting a startup style effective. And almost all of our money goes to paying really high quality faculty, which is how it should be. And on the other hand, 85% of our students can't afford $15,000 a year. So we we have work study programs for them. And then if that's not enough, we give them some grants, right. And so that's expensive. And that means that it's hard to kind of if we want to keep the profile, growing the enrollment manifolds, which we know will be great to just like, take many more students, but that's going to be challenging. And that's also another one of the reasons why we're working with all these different partners. And from a pedagogical perspective, that's incredibly interesting, because it's, you know, I still think we do a completely different job than some of the top universities but it's certainly easy to say like Look, those students would have been successful no matter what. And, you know, when we're working with students across a much broader range of institutions, and seeing how our system works there, I think that's, that's incredibly interesting. That's awesome.

I know there's a million other things we could get into like in the pre outline we sent you in perhaps we could discuss after this maybe doing some sort of part two on the completely different range of topics that productivity, knowledge management, those kind of things, but I think that would just be a bit too much for for one interview. So I think we'll kind of shift towards our popery just open bag questions now. Not nervous stuff. That's so so cool. It's one of the things I kind of wish I knew more about it because it sounds like extremely advantageous for anyone who do it. And any high school seniors out there, I know I bet almost. I'd want to encourage them to consider that as an option because having experienced three years of college firsthand, in a stem discipline, you know, it's all the things that The modern media wants to say that's the way to do it, if you are going to still go to traditional University, is get the STEM education. And even there I can say, I don't really know the ways in which I've benefited from not just taking a MOOC for all the different technical topics and learning everything in here and sort of for what real development have gotten out of it. From the classroom perspective. I mean, the social environment, there's definitely the benefits to that. But that's a whole that's a whole other conversation. You know, I'm really kid there

myself for not applying.

We had a much better chance of getting in three years ago than we would now that's Oh, that's true.

It's getting really hard. But we'll just one thing I want to mention is, you know, because of the whole grammar crisis, we've been thinking, you know, thinking a lot about how we can support universities, we're now suddenly facing new challenges and we've done some some outreach and been able to help a bunch of people in a very ad hoc fashion this semester. We're, you know, caught completely unaware. But we're now You know, a lot of universities are thinking about the fall semester. And it seems like a lot of them might be going completely online, partially online. I mean, nobody quite knows what's going on. And so we're already working with a number of partners who are interested in like actually moving parts of their curriculum or to the Minerva platform. And, you know, and because there's lead time, they can actually do much, you know, properly training faculty and stuff like that. But you know, if we also have a really interesting offer, thinking that, you know, a lot of US universities are very dependent on international students for their budgets. And there's, it's very uncertain times for international students. I mean, Chinese students, as you know, the most extreme example, which are very important for a lot of us campuses, but even even other they don't know if they should accept their, their offers of admission, or, and so on. And what we're offering them is that if you are accepted at the top us University, we will accept you as a visiting Minerva scholar for one year. So you will be actually taking the same courses that are first year. So we'll be taking wood Tran taught by our professors who are you know, top notch so this is not be taking some kind of zoom class by someone who's number top align before this would be exactly the Senate Education that our students are getting for one year. And we're working with different university in the US to be able to gain full transfer credits. And so in a way it's helping the students because they would be able to like not waste a year but instead like get top quality education and then move straight into the second year. And it's helping to us institutions because they would be able to kind of offer something very concrete to people who are actually keep those enrollment numbers.

Give them a buffer so they can

see exactly.

I can't imagine though, the how the students are gonna adapt to they're gonna have the the best instruction in the world for here and then just be dropped in calc two taught on zoom. And so what the heck is this I want to go back. This doesn't count as the same thing. But that's an incredible offer for those students. And that's great that yeller using the fact that you've kind of designed yourself around the challenges the world is facing. I mean, not even with them in mind, necessarily, but your online are always education's very, you're well equipped for it. I mean, the University of Alabama, we're counting goes to fantastic school, but they had, I mean, they did not anticipate this until like the last possible minute and took an extra week of spring break. And the classes have really just been, like you said, zoom, zoom, and Blackboard, and haven't even been to a single zoom lecture. So it's kind of been, it's been interesting to say the least. So y'all are in a good position. And it's great that y'all are helping out. So let's get into kind of our general grab bag questions. The first one I have here is a little back to some of the topics from the beginning of this conversation about your travel and your different experiences. And maybe he talks about that cosmic friends. Did you do your let's talk about that bike ride? You did? For a second because that's awesome. You did a cross continent. I don't know what to call it bike ride from China to Iran, or Iran. You tell us about that journey and one Spartan kind of Yeah.

So this was the first time I went to China.

And I, I've always loved biking, and I've done some some bike trips before, multi day bike trips. And I was in, I was nine months in Guam, teaching English learning Chinese, and I traveled a bit around China, but I felt like I was always taking the train to another big city, and they all kind of look similar. And I really want to see more of the countryside and just different landscapes and stuff, but I didn't even know how to go there. Like, you know, take the bus to some tiny little village, walk around with lots of people and then you take the bus back in it like it was. I mean, I might have been complicating it for too much for myself. Cuz I just like didn't quite know how to do it. And I had this idea of doing like a big overland bike trip, I met this awesome New Zealand guy who was teaching there. He was doing med school and there was like a natural break where they were able to take a year off from med school. So he was there teaching as well. He was much more athletic than he had done this kind of adventure races and stuff. And so initially, we said, Hey, you know, let's get some bikes, and let's go for a month bike ride. And we kind of looked at the map and we have like this goal in mind, which was Ruchi, which is in the west of China, where the week we're live. So it's like north of Tibet, basically, the all of China is splitted into like, four quadrants. And in the east is like where 95% of people live. And then you'll have the the South West is Tibet, and the Northwest is cynjohn is just a gigantic desert Muslims. We were very simplified anyway. And we had no idea what to expect at all. We had been on the bike for like a year before. We didn't have a bike in China, even finding a good bike was not trivial. This was way before. I mean, they didn't have yellow pages, right? They just had like one street in the whole city where all the bike stores were. And so we had to ask around where like where it was that street. Anyway, we managed to get this stuff together. We couldn't get saddlebags for the bikes, but they have these cobblers on the street that like fixes your shoes and stuff. So we bought some elementary school backpacks and we had a cobbler can just sew them together in the back so we could put them over. Very amateurish. But we kind of said that the thing we had was time and a little bit of money. I mean, I had money for my summer job in Norway before I left and so it's not a lot but it's something that later in life when you have a family in a job and you're like, wow, back then like just take off for a year that was pretty valuable. I'm so glad I did it back then. But we started off we biked for and the first week of biking enough interesting stuff happened that if I had stopped after a week, I would still be telling the story today. Like, we just met so many interesting people and of course, me being able to speak Chinese fluently. People just generally being super interested, super friendly and curious. You know, we would just can we tend to camp in fields and sometimes in the morning farmers would like, you know, send their kid out with an apple for us, or, you know, like, we would be eating noodles in a cafe and with that, 40 people watching us and they're like, take us to the one English teacher in town to check if she could really speak English because I've never seen her speak English. Anyone else? Right, like, it's just, it's just amazing. And And so after that first week, we were. So we had no digital connection. Other than every week we'd go to the internet cafe would stay for a night and hotel, an internet cafe. And we were like, what if we kept going? What would that look like? Because I don't have any plans. I mean, I had some plans, but it wasn't crucial. So we go to the end My friend had this pocket album back and there was a world map out there that could fit in the palm of my hand. And so we're kind of looking like because we were the thing. The idea was that we were going along the old Silk Route, which started in Cheyenne, which was ancient capital. And there was a few different ones, but

but we're like, what if we went to Rome in Italy?

Why not? Right? How far is that, and we're kind of using our thumb, and we're like, Okay, so that's so going to shinjang. That's about 3000 kilometers. That's one thumb. So let's get to three more thumbs, you know, like, let's see, what's the variable Park, and we go to an internet cafe and back then it was the Lonely Planet Thorn tree. That was like the one place where you could meet crazy travelers who had gone to all kinds of weird countries and they would leave. And so we're like, well, what countries are even between here in Italy? And it turns out, we have to go to Kazakhstan. Kurdistan is Pakistan. And so you're googling like hiking in Turkmenistan. And you know, you find people have actually done it and they'll be like, Okay, this is how you get the visa. Turns out that was really hard. And all these things. And so we just, you know, we just kind of kept going. It took us a week to get the visa to Kazakhstan from from China. Then we crossed the border in Kazakhstan, we didn't have a map. So we asked the guy the border, what's the direction to the Capitol and just pointed, and we just kind of went in that direction for a while that we found the Capitol. And, I mean, you know, I could, I could tell stories for hours, but, and then, like, we spent about four months until we reach the other side of Iran, closer to Turkey. I've been kind of sick for about a month with something weird in my stomach. And I thought it would get better, but they never did. And so I said, I was kind of pretty exhausted by that time. So I decided to break off the trip. And my friend, he continued all the way to Rome. And so I went back to I went down to Italy to meet him there. When he when he kind of reached a goal. So he managed to complete his goal. I mean, he was always the information This was just more of a adventure. Like I want to see all of these amazing things and like, be able to say look on the map like I biked here. I know what it looks like. It's not just like this abstract thing for my friend, you know, he was always more athletically driven. And he's the kind of guy who would walk to the North Pole just to be able to say you did it. So for him really big, big thing to complete it.

Well, I think that we could probably do a whole part three on the bike ride, but we'll get to a couple more questions. Who are some of your favorite thought leaders right now?

a thought leader is a loaded word.

Exactly.

At Minerva, we're thinking about how we can become thought leaders in education. Maybe getting on more podcasts is one strategy. But

I would say I'm I'm continuously kind of amazed at how much

value is on Twitter. And it's difficult because Twitter is also this horrible, you know, distraction. And then it's like you really need to learn how to use it effectively. And I don't think I'm very good at it. So you can't just turn it off. I mean, you couldn't, but it would be a shame because I've learned incredible amount. And so I think that's something I'm struggling with a bit. But there's like, people I can name like, I'm, you know, Michael Nielsen and Andy Matuschak. Like the stuff they're doing around education in terms of spaced repetition, which sounds like one word is actually like this whole field that I feel is kind of burgeoning right now. And note taking and stuff. But there's like even people I follow that don't even have their real name on Twitter, and yet they're, like, more insightful than a lot of people I could cite in academia. I also wish I love the traditional academia, especially my field. learning science would be much more open to these kinds of medium, because they're a lot less, especially as senior people, they're basically still frightening journal articles and books. And you know, there's a lot of deep thought and insight there. But it's so slow, like the feedback cycles are so slow. And oftentimes, because what goes into a journal article is so limited. And I love the work, the most exciting work that's getting done is design based research, where you're saying, Well, you know, it's not about testing hypotheses of A versus B. It's like, what I did my PhD thesis, like, what would it look like to scale collaborative pedagogy to a massive context? Right, that's that's not a hypothesis question. That's a design question. And the answer to that question, is very rich in many facets, and might consist of like software, and sketches, and all kinds of qualitative stuff. And sadly, most of that stuff gets left by the wayside. I saw that my myself, my PhD lab where we would do this incredibly rich designs for, for high school science classes. You know, we have hundreds of pages of sketches and stuff like that if you're an architect, and you're famous, you could publish that as a book, like people buy in his book, you know. And for us, we would write up like a 15 page thesis that would get published and give you credit, but really wouldn't have any of that richness.

That's that's kind of a weird way of answering. But yeah,

I feel I feel like it's not so much to people as like the communities. And to me, Rome has been really amazing. In the way it's functioned as this kind of gravitational pull on a lot of people, many of whom aren't even using ROM themselves. But just feel like this is a group of people interested in this and are kind of really building on each other in a really productive way, which mirrors a little bit what I felt with the open educational resources in the open education blogosphere, you know, 12 years ago was just an it back then interesting thing was a lot of people hack. They were not actually professors of education, they tended to work in, like University Centers for teaching and learning or IT departments where they didn't have the same requirements to publish. And so they needed to come up with all kinds of solutions for the local community. But those solutions don't have to be unique, they had to be appropriate for your community. And so you don't need to get credit for that being you know, you'd be the only one in the world doing it. In fact, if you share that with someone, they improve it, and now you can use their improvement, like you're serving your local population better. And so those people were much more likely to put out open source code or just reflections, ideas, sketches that people are building on, like, on a daily basis. Whereas the professors of education who really are supposed to be paid by taxpayer money to do this kind of stuff, would be so worried, maybe worried about people, you know, not getting enough credit and stuff. And this is not them being selfish. This is I mean, I've been an academic and It's an incredibly stressful environment where you're just calmed constantly being told that you're not good enough, and you're not publishing enough and stuff like that. So it's not their fault, but And so anyway, I'm seeing a little bit of the same energy in the kind of extended notetaking community where people are just, you know, on slack on Twitter, putting out open source hacks and building on each other's ideas and you know, iterating on what this evergreen knows mean, what the subtle custom mean, how do you implement it? And I find that that kind of environment is really, really exciting to be part of,

I mean, I've really enjoyed following along and try my hand at contributing just in the little is. So the last question we have for you, is now with the Coronavirus and quarantine and different things getting canceled and people having plans kind of falling through. It's kind of presented a golden opportunity for self education. With more people being stuck at home, having free time having sitting at home with a computer kind of so with someone who is kind of an expert Very, very educators spent a lot of time in that space. Where do you recommend people go as the best resource online for self education? I know the answer to that might be dramatically different. If it's just you want to learn our history versus you want to become a software developer in three months. So you can kind of maybe take a couple of angles there, but with your expertise in that area, what do you think the best places online for either cheap free or affordable self education during these next couple of months would be?

So

first of all, with the more time or less right now depends on whether you have kids or not. There's a lot parents out there who are not in the position you just listed, but certainly for younger people. It's a great opportunity could be so I have a bunch of notes in Rome that I'm kind of building on like an open questions. And one of them is this idea that which I hear A lot of people talking, you know, that people who, who I have a high confidence level towards saying that learning should be directed towards doing. Because, a, that's a good way of learning B, that's a good way of kind of making sure that the choices you make in what you learn or what resources you use, are kind of effective, and all that kind of stuff. And I think certainly for I mean, learning computer science or something like that, it's fairly obvious that, you know, building projects and stuff like that, and also making sure that you build projects that challenge yourself, because, you know, you could build a lot of crud apps in react, and if you've never used react before, that's probably really useful. But if you have, like, maybe, you know, try building a completely different thing, or like, learning a different programming language, I think can be tremendously useful. I spent a lot of time. I mean, I don't have any formal computer science background. I spent a lot like I and I basically for 20 years of my life, I was just like, Python and Ruby. That was you know, that's So I needed I wrote a bunch of scripts for myself and data analysis and personal productivity and just messing around. And that was cool. But I didn't wasn't making any progress. I wasn't learning anything. And then I partially through like Hacker News, posting a lot of cool articles. And I started getting into lists. And like the whole history of Lisp, and then closure, which has like a really rich ecosystem, as

well as Connor actually recommended Island when I talked to them once was

closure. Yeah, he's a big closure fan. I'm not sure like I didn't I don't like Java so much to solve the problem with closure. But anyway, but then closure was like a gateway drug to Haskell

is Oh, yeah, it's a good thing. Haskell is really

mind blowing. It is like mind altering. Also, Haskell has the most intellectual, for good for better or worse. Community you'll ever find like, you'll be on the Haskell Reddit and they're posting PhD thesis just as much as the posting blog post and all the blog posts could have been PhD thesis. You know, But they're they have this. And so like I spent a ton of time on Haskell, I never wrote anything close to useful. But I learned more about computer science and pipe theory and program like just all these deep concepts than ever before. Then I went and I did my PhD thesis in elixir, which is built on Erlang. And Erlang is in so I really like these functional languages. But, you know, they have very different approaches. Haskell is really big on the type theory, which closure doesn't have it all. closure is like the Lisp and the macros and all that stuff. And elixir is this agent based JavaScript, they migrate. No, no, it's

early. So that's different from like elixir js. That's Yes. Like what the tech center Adams built on and some other little mini apps, but this is something else is okay.

Yeah, elixir is a St. The guy, one of the main contributors to Ruby and Rails was so frustrated because Ruby on Rails, because Ruby is kind of single threaded, and it doesn't scale very well and it does particularly badly with WebSockets because because You need to maintain all these open connections. And that's becoming more and more common with these real time apps. And so he went into Erlang, which is this really old thing that was developed by Ericsson to run like phone switches, I think still 95% of all the phone switches in the world run on Erlang. So it's, you know, if you build a programming language for phones, which is you want something that is never down, and you need to be able to even upgrade it in place, and you need to just have like, incredible scale that's interested in upgrading it in place. Yes, yeah. And so but the problem was that the syntax was kind of weird. And so they kind of just built a new syntax on top of it a bit like closure on Java I guess. And it's a really really fun again community so much you can learn from it and then you can go into like, the guy who wrote react is not working on reason, which is a new syntax for Oh, camel. So like there's just this this language is out there that have such a deep history and

explain taking programming languages in the fall. If Be Cool. Yeah, like, build your own

show, Justin. Yeah, that's really cool. I like that I haven't done much in that, like parsers. and stuff, I think that'd be really useful too, because then even if you go back to JavaScript or back to whatever, you know, you'll be able to cheat. I mean, I use these concepts of daily using in JavaScript. So. So anyway, so my point was like for programming languages, and a lot of other stuff like that, I think building things. And being very thoughtful about the kind of stuff you build is, is really good. And I'm like, Well, I also am really interested in philosophy. I'm actually listening to this amazing Podcast Series now on like, ancient philosophy. And that's like, I think I feel like that's valuable, right? Like, I feel like to maybe to be a better student, maybe to understand things like, I don't know. But what does it mean to do, right, like is doing? Do I need to blog about it? Like, I can blog about it, but not like, you know, does it mean just taking really deep notes and like thinking about how this affects my life, like simulcasting,

on whatever philosophy podcast or

Yeah, so I haven't quite so I feel like there's like,

different produce your own works of philosophy if you have to become an Azure.

Right, exactly. I feel like that's, that's my smoking question. I'm kind of like, you know, keep it there, and I'll keep reflecting on it. But I think like, I mean, so. So going back to my, my PhD system, it because it's really interesting, I still have those notes today. In fact, I put most of them on my on my public realm than anyone else wants to look at them. And so going back and think about how much time I spent reading those articles and writing those notes, and how useful those notes are to me today. And what I realized is that back then I spent way too much on each article in isolation. And maybe this was a little bit of like a PhD, inferiority complex like I need Harrison's amazing thing and I need to understand it in depth like that is my goal as a disciple and I spend way too little time connecting across and being asking questions and saying like, okay, so I read these 10 articles like, how are they different? How are they similar? What does this mean? How would I disprove this theory? What are their claims? Even? Specifically, not just like a summary what they say, but what are their specific claims? How do they prove them? And so I think, that kind of reading, whether it's like the book, how to read books, which was written like 50 years ago, or, you know, it's how to take smart notes reading like Andy Matuschak, like, and really thinking about challenging when you listen to something, challenge it and connect it and make it your own. I think that's what I think that's a blog post. And I think that that's really important.

I think that's where a lot of the appeal and that kind of vacuum around realm and these other systems has come from, is people recognizing that maybe it's just a tendency, right? I mean, humans tend to take very often the path of least resistance and it's the tendency to just read and not do the work of synthesis, which is where like, the higher level value comes out of reading and writing, on people realizing, and that's kind of also the same, maybe underlying cause of this like current drive towards productivity is that our natural impulses lead us to do very unproductive things and take on very unproductive habits. But what we've learned from literature and just watching other people be very prolific, makes us want to force ourselves to do those things. And then these tools that come along with the promise of making you closer to that ideal of being a more active consumer of information and more of a producer based on the information you consume and working with it yourself. That's where I think the interest for a lot of these tools comes around from, but I think, that whole conversation, which was half of what we had planned for this conversation, initially, we barely even got into so maybe we could talk about part two, but I think this was a fantastic interview going through. I mean, the first 10 minutes just first, however long it was on language learning was super interesting. And the travel and the journey through academia and how that led to kind of a an underground with a first hand perspective on the history of open education. Because I mean, Carl and I, in our generation, it's something we take for granted by the time we are reaching that age of Taking some autonomy and authority over learning. edX was big edX was established MIT OpenCourseWare it wasn't just videos like YouTube but YouTube University Wikipedia all these things were there and realized. So it was cool to have that firsthand. Now people are actually in universities building this and inventing it sounds awesome.

And and watching you actualize you know from your PhD and your undergrad, everything kind of built toward Minerva. So it was interesting to hear you, you know, draw that line and keep that thread through through all those years. But yeah, thank you so much for coming on. That's great. Appreciate it. Yeah, it's pretty fun.

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks a lot.

Well, that wraps up our interview with Steve on hack club. I thought it was a great conversation list. What do you

think? I really enjoyed it. I'm very glad we brought him on. We only got to about half the things we meant to get to, which is probably a good sign that You're having an interesting conversation in the first place. hope you all enjoyed it. Thank you so much for listening. If you want to support the show, which we hope you want to do, if you've made it two hours into this episode, please subscribe on Apple podcasts and leave us a rating or review. Follow us on social media for updates there. And please share the show with the friends. Help us get more listeners. Thank you so much, and we'll see you in the next episode in a few days. Thanks, y'all.