My New Gig: BetterLesson

7 years ago, I started my essay to graduate school with this sentence: “My career goal is to pursue entrepreneurial opportunities in educational technology.” Last month, I finally made good on that statement – leaving Microsoft after 4+ years to become the VP of Product with BetterLesson.

I’ve known Alex, the BetterLesson founder, for several years, and have watched BetterLesson grow from a small closed beta to the knowledge management platform for many of the most innovative educational organizations, including KIPP, Achievement First, Uncommon Schools and more.  And this summer, in recognition of this growth and the continued opportunity, BetterLesson received a substantial financial investment from a diverse and experienced group of investors (more specific news coming soon).

There are many reasons that I’m excited about BetterLesson, but here are the two big ones:

1) Amazing teachers deliver inspiring lessons daily, all over the world.  And yet these lessons often only see a single class.  Having been a teacher myself for 4 years, both at Gateway High School and Germantown Friends, I know teaching is rewarding, but hard work, often isolating, and the effort that goes into building creative & inspiring lessons often goes unrecognized.  And unshared.  There’s a tremendous well of teacher-created content that doesn’t get as distributed as widely and effectively as it could and should.  The Internet can help.

2) The curriculum market has yet to be substantially disrupted by the Internet in the same way the other markets (music, books, television) have. A handful of billion dollar plus publishing companies continue to dominate the market, maintaining market share due to the lingering “moat” of physical distribution. Schools (including Gateway, where I was on the Board) spend a large percentage of their budget paying for paper-based materials that haven’t changed much in decades (aside from maybe the questions at the back of the chapter being reshuffled – another $120 please!).  Sometime soon (within a decade is my guess), students will be receiving dynamic, interactive, relevant, educational content delivered to an iPad/Kindle-like device, curated by a teacher from a diverse set of materials tied to learning objectives.  And that playing field will look a lot different than the curriculum market does today.

With the great work done thus far by the team, BetterLesson is now well positioned to tackle both of these opportunities, with an offering that spans the software and publishing markets.  The next year we will be focusing on delivering the promise of Alex’s original vision, refining the toolset for creating, organizing and sharing curriculum, and leveraging the already deep trove of teacher-created content to surface innovative lessons and materials.

In recent months, the education market has started receiving a lot of attention from the technology startup world.  ”K12 Imagine”, an education focused incubator, had 200 applications, and just announced the launch of the 10 finalists.  Wired ran a cover story about how Kahn Academy is changing the rules of education. Marc Andresson, of Netscape fame, wrote in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed about the disruptive qualities of the Internet, says that “education is next up for fundamental software-based transformation.”  I wholeheartedly agree, and look forward to helping materialize that transformation.

On digital permanence

Might there be an inverse relationship between the ease of with which we create digital content…and the permanence of the cultural artifacts that we are creating?

More than 10 years ago, when I was in college, a friend and I created a web art project that we (pretentiously) called art(i)facts.  Mostly, it was our excuse to hack around with Photoshop, perl and html and explore this crazy Internet thing that was suddenly all the rage.

So we made a small site based on the premise that some apocalyptic rapture event had occurred, and you (the viewer) had discovered an archeological site (a bunch of photoshoped pictures like the above), and were in charge of interpreting the objects you’d discovered, with a simple web form to add your ideas. For example, one viewer said the that”item 361” (a CD) was a projectile toy, most likely used by children for simple amusement. (The site kinda still works, but this was 1997, so be nice)

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Would you pay $1/year for spam-free email?

A few months back, my colleague, Matthew Hurst posted a link to a interesting infographic from the New Scientist that visualizes data from a spam-bot called “Storm.”:

(click the image the see the full-size graphic)

The visualization is interesting, but doesn’t explore what I think is the most interesting question with regards to spam: “what’s the marginal revenue per spam email sent?” Based on some of the numbers presented, here’s my math to back that number out:

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why i ride my bike to work: a manifesto. of sorts.

drive? or bike? hmm...

this is part of my route home.

I’m not a hard core bicyclist type. No tats of chain rings. I think fixed gear bikes are fun but kinda dumb, really. But I’ve been commuting by bike for about six years now…and it’s just so freakin’ sensible on so many levels, that I don’t understand why it’s not more adopted by the mainstream, and not more supported by various levels of government.  What follows is my case for why I ride.

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burritos ’round the world: a @bingtmaps joint

One of the projects I’ve been working on at Microsoft FUSE Labs over the past few months is Bing Twitter Maps – showing geolocated tweets as they happen. (It’s one of the applications inside the beta versoin of a new Bing Maps, which you should check out, if you haven’t already). We’ve just released a new version of Twitter Maps that includes the ability to embed a custom Twitter map into your site.

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