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The Children’s Crusade: Entrepreneurship in the 21st Century

Posted by Tom Segal on May 2, 2013 in Rethink Education Portfolio | 0 comments

When Marissa Mayer took over the controls of Yahoo!, the internet giant whose market position has been squeezed and boxed out with the rise of the Facebooks, Googles, and Twitters of the world, it became clear that the company was ready to make a mark for itself in an effort to return to its glory days. With a new leader on board already making headlines for the breaking of corporate conventions (plus a hefty sum of cash in the bank - over $7.5 BILLION at the end of Q3 2012, or roughly a third of total assets, an impossibly high percentage...

The Impact of Investing in Education

Posted by Tom Segal on Mar 27, 2013 in News | 0 comments

Something has always bugged me about State of the Union addresses, and I don’t just mean the ripe clementinean glow that has been emanating from the top right corner of my TV screen for the past 4+ years. It’s the priorities of the speech with which I take issue–they seem so, out of whack. No, I am not making some grandiose claim about the wayward American soul; a “woe, is me”, shame-on-us attack on fast food, Hollywood, and teenage sexting. Instead, I quite literally mean the construct of the speech...

The rise of smartglasses in education: or, A shameless plea to Jaime Casap

Posted by Tom Segal on Mar 6, 2013 in News | 0 comments

Dear Jaime, Between you and me, how can I get access to some of these Google glasses (or simply “Glass”, as it seems)? I’m currently in Austin at Day One of the South by Southwest Education conference (or simply SXSWedu) – according to my brochure, you will be a featured speaker coming up this week. I know you have access to the secret vault: can I just get a taste? For those of you lost souls apparently rummaging through Mr. Casap’s mail and reading this letter that are unaware of said Glass, it...

Can Classroom Games Improve Learning?

Posted by Tom Segal on Mar 1, 2013 in News | 0 comments

Guest post written by Nancy Cao. Nancy is an Associate at Mission Measurement, where she works with corporations and nonprofits to measure and create social impact. Teachers have always sought new ways to make learning in the classroom more fun and more relevant to their students. However, once students move beyond elementary school, a lot of the “fun” tends to go away: no more Gold Rush simulations during history class, multiplication games during math, and certainly no more time set aside to play games in the computer...

Turning Theory into Action: The Role of the Foundation in Education

Posted by Tom Segal on Feb 27, 2013 in News | 0 comments

I am a child of the Wikipedia Age: this is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, my brain is now saturated with all sorts of exciting factoids ranging from the evolution of the west-coast rap scene to the complete first rounds of the NFL Drafts from 2005-present; on the other hand, I tend to sit down for a bit of research on a new blog or investment report only to resurface five hours later from a link-induced haze. Wikipedia in particular makes it incredibly easy to pop from one idea to another, something my wandering mind takes to...

2020: What’s the expiration date on YOUR textbook?

Posted by Tom Segal on Feb 25, 2013 in News | 0 comments

Guest blog written by Art Bardige, Sustainablearning Would you buy a K-12 textbook this spring to be used in the year 2020? Would you buy a science or social studies text, subjects that dramatically change every year in a rapidly changing world? Would you buy a math or English paper textbook when the Common Core implementation just now starting will likely keep changing? Twenty years ago a principal or superintendent adopting a new textbook series would have two choices, paper or paper. Today we have an alternative to the...

Living on Amazon’s Planet

Posted by Matt Greenfield on Feb 20, 2013 in News | 0 comments

Is there any business in any sector that is not threatened by Amazon? Walmart cannot seem to build a functional e-commerce business. Best Buy is worried about “showrooming”– about customers examining electronic products at Best Buy and then going home and ordering them from Amazon. In the Seattle area, Amazon is now experimenting with the delivery of fresh produce. And Amazon is also threatening to tech businesses. For example, Amazon Web Services is now competing with Rackspace and Microsoft for ownership of the...

Quality Access to Learning: Teachers and Technology

Posted by Tom Segal on Feb 19, 2013 in News | 0 comments

Guest post written by Wendy Heckert. Wendy is a former English teacher and department chair. She is currently working on an Ed.D in Curriculum and Teaching from Boston University. Originally posted on EdWeek: 12/29/12 Preparing students to participate in a global society is the underpinning of education reform these days. To address this national initiative, schools are changing their teacher evaluation systems, adopting the Common Core standards, continuing with high-stakes testing, and increasing the push for technology as a key tool...

Symbiotic Brands: Borrowing the Prestige of Stanford

Posted by Matt Greenfield on Feb 13, 2013 in News | 0 comments

In The Usual Suspects, Kevin Spacey’s devious character, Verbal Kint, tells detectives, “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” In a surreal symbolist poet/neo-noir film mash-up, Kint is paraphrasing Charles Baudelaire. The brand identities of the for-profit MOOCs (massive open online courses) are similarly surreal mash-ups. The brands of both Udacity and Coursera, like many academic brands, are composed out of affiliations with many other academic brands. What else...

Get to Know a C.E.O., with Tiffany Cooper Gueye

Posted by Tom Segal on Feb 11, 2013 in News | 0 comments

In this, the second installation of the series that has set the ed-tech blogosphere ablaze and captivated the hearts and minds of millions – “Get to Know a C.E.O” – we will meet Dr. Tiffany Cooper Gueye, C.E.O of Building Educated Leaders for Life (or simply BELL). BELL was incorporated in 1992 and named in honor of Professor Derrick A. Bell, Jr., Harvard Law’s first Black tenured professor. The BELL after-school program reached 20 students in its first year of operation and has since developed an...