Steli Efti

High IQs For Rich Kids, Low IQs For Poor Kids

Apparently, that's still how it is. On average, rich kids score way better than poor kids on IQ tests.

And apparently, the big majority of people still think that this is because of genetics. That's of course a very convenient explanation, because then you really can't do much about it. If it's genetics, then it's fate, right?

In comes professor Richard Nisbett. He recently published a book on the subject and has lots of evidence that shows: the correlation between IQ and income has very little to do with genetics, and very much with early childhood influences and belief systems.

For one thing - professor Nisbett showed that if you do nothing else but teach high-school kids that they can improve their IQ and intelligence, that will motivate them to study more, which will in turn really improve their IQ. This works specially well for girls, who seem to believe that they are at a genetic disadvantage when it comes to mathematics.

Now, that shouldn't be too difficult to implement, if you think about it. Telling kids: Hey, you might not have scored the way you wanted to at an IQ test, but the good thing is, you can do something about it.

But apparently, it's too much to ask from public schools.

That's why at Supercool School, our goal is not just to provide access to education, but to make learning fun. Supercool School is about a very different mindset when it comes to learning. It's about adventures of the mind. It's about exploring possibilities. That is very different from what public schools do right now: determining limitations.

Shalom,

Ramin

Good Schools For The Rich, The Rest For The Rest

Pretty much everyone that I met in Thailand that has money (the kind of money that can provide you with a very comfortable lifestyle any place in the world) is sending their kids either
    a) to ultra-expensive international schools in Thailand or
    b) (more likely) to study overseas (usually in England or the USA).

And to me, it's pretty obvious why. I can't tell you how many people I met that have a master's degree in English, whose command of the English language can be summarized like that:

"Hello, how are you?"
"I'm fine, thank you, and you?"
"Sorry."
"What is your name?"
"Excuse me please."
"Yes."
"No."
"Handsome."
"Beautiful."
"Happy."
"Smile!"
"Do you like Thai food?"
"Very good."
"Speak Thai."
"Sing a song."
"Drink whisky."
"Enjoy!"
"Welcome."
"Bye, bye."

Considering the fact, that they achieved this amazing amount of fluency in just six years of high-school and four years of university education, I think that is pretty impressive. It's a pretty impressive evidence of incapacity - what do these universities do to slow down the learning process so much? No wonder that "hi-so" (high society) children are sent to either overseas or to international private schools with five-star amenities behind high walls.

I mean, keep the high-school aside - who remembers anything they learned in high-school, right? But four years where you do nothing but study English, and this is the result? What do they do with these students? Freeze them for four years, wake them up, play them a 15 minute English introduction CD and hand them their diploma?

Well, one thing I know is that they are taught to avoid mistakes like hell. If that means not trying to get it right, so you risk not making a mistake, then so be it.

You think we can do better than that? You bet we can! The kids growing up are all tech-savvy, the internet is their new playground. Once Supercool School reaches it's tipping point, I hope that nobody will have to waste four years and many years of savings to learning something that can be learned in one Supercool Class for free.

Dibidabadoo,
Ramin

PS: An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a narrow field. - Niels Bohr

Students Protesting In Italy - 1.5 Billion Euro Budget Cuts

Now we wouldn't be able to call us "education revolutionaries" if we'd not spread the word about this:
Students in Italy are protesting against huge education budget cuts - 1.5 billion Euro (that's about 1.9 billion US-Dollars).

Silvio Berlusconi's reaction to the students protests? He announced that any further protests will be broken up with police force.

You can see pictures and read more about the protests in Jared Katz's article, which has been featured by the Wall Street Journal & Newsweek online.

And I'm just gonna quote this one from freestate.tv:

"Former Italian President Francesco Cossiga has offered a solution to the Italian government in dealing with widespread demonstrations by students and teachers over a cut in state funding of education - use agent provocateurs to start riots and then have the police “beat the shit out of the protesters”."

Do you think students protesting because of budget cuts should be treated like that? That's more like something I'd expect from a conspiracy movie, quiet frankly...

It just shows that we need to find new ways to educate, teach, learn and share knowledge. Because if we leave it up to the government, this is what we'll get.

Be well,

Ramin

Supercool School will set minds on fire

Eminent knowledge entrepreneur John Seely Brown (a.k.a. Chief of Confusion) published a great paper entitled "Minds on Fire", which not only outlines "the perfect storm of opportunity" supercool school is playing in, he also nails down our ventures leitmotiv - social learning / learning to be [free].

Here are some of the key points of his paper:

"As we move from career to career, much of what we will need to know will not be what we learned in school decades earlier. We are entering a world in which we all will have to acquire new knowledge and skills on an almost continuous basis."

He continues to state that society is facing a real challenge to develop the institutions and the methodology to meet this growing global demand for education. Of course this is exactly the challenge we @ Supercool School believe we are developing a solution for.

Next he elaborates on his understanding of social learning. His argument here is that, as we have to learn new stuff all the time, "the focus is not so much on what we are learning but on how we are learning". He refers to research which showed that "students who studied in groups, even only once a week, were more engaged in their studies, were better prepared for class, and learned significantly more than students who worked on their own". In his view study groups are so effective, because "students in these groups can ask questions to clarify areas of uncertainty or confusion, can improve their grasp of the material by hearing the answers to questions from fellow students, and perhaps most powerfully, can take on the role of teacher to help other group members benefit from their understanding" and here it comes "one of the best ways to learn something is, after all, to teach it to others".

While he commends social learning as a superior method for learning, there is - and we couldn't agree more - another effect of learning in groups: One is not only "'learning about' the subject matter, but also 'learning to be' a full participant in the field". This reminds me of Sartre's existentialist thinking along the lines of "if you want to be a writer you need to write, if you want to be a politician you need to debate, lobby and engage in politics"; and what better way is there to start to become an expert in X than to take that role within a group of peers?

In the next two sections of the paper he supports his assessments with a number of real world examples and introduces some interesting toughts about the long tail in learning (something that Supercool School should/will strategically exploit as well).

      

He then turns to describe his analysis of the learning ecosystem as a circle of knowledge building and sharing (see pic), an approach that we also foresee to support within the supercool learning environment. It is however his last point "from the web 2.0 to learning 2.0" where he (implicitly of course)  describes supercool school: "We now need a new approach to learning - one characterized by a demand-pull rather than the traditional supply-push mode of building up in an inventory of knowledge in students heads. Demand-pull learning shifts the focus to enabling participation in flows of action, where the focus is both on 'learning to be' through enculturation into practice as well as on collateral learning"

A Ebook For Kids Who Love Hip Hop

Ok, I haven't posted in a long time on this blog but you know what that means...we're getting ALOT of things done at Supercool School ;)

In the meanwhile...I decided to publish an ebook online that I had written a long time ago called "Hip Hop Millionaires Success Secrets".

My motivation to write this book came from seeing all the kids who love Hip Hop music and worship their rap stars. I though...hmm...there must be a way to use that motivation and admiration from kids to teach them some valuable things in life.

So I did some research on the TOP personas in the hip hop biz and tried to extract some valuable and common sense business and success strategies from them. Things that you could find in an Donald Trump book but that are based around celebrities that the kids really care about.

So if you have or know children (or anyone else for that matter) who loves hip hop...you might want to give them this ebook to read. I promise they're going to learn some really valuable things for their lives.

Enjoy!

Top Ten List: Largest Schools World-Wide

  Source: National Center for Education Statistics

Holy Smokes! Fred Wilson Won The Lunch With Jerry Yang And Gave It To Me!!!!

Read the story here: A VC

I will write more about it later. Right now I'm speechless and very happy!

A Vision of Students Today

DonorsChoose.org And The Chance To Give A Kid Lunch With Jerry Yang

Sometimes I find it very difficult to write a post. I find myself struggling trying to express myself in the best possible manner. Alot of times this is the cause for not posting anything at all.

Blogging is a great metaphor for life. Think about it - how many times you don't do anything to NOT do something less then 100% right. It's silly - but very human. It's not the evil that people do that causes alot of problems, it's the good that people fail to do that does.

Now overcoming hesitation is almost always causing something good in life. Here my little story:

A while ago I read an post by Fred Wilson about DonorsChoose.org and their Blogger Challenge. I was inspired and excited about this great project and the impact it has for kids in classrooms. I was thinking to myself: "Hmm...could I do more than "just" donate some money for this?"

But then all these thoughts came into my mind about how much energy and time I need to build Supercool School and that I'm working very hard to help improve learning and education world-wide in my own way. That was convincing enough for me (at least for a while) to stop thinking about it and getting back to work.

But in the back of my mind there had been (I'm sure this is not grammatically correct) a picture formed that I couldn't ignore. I had this idea.

Fred Wilson was motivating his readers to donate and help him win the Blogger Challenge by offering to give away his seat at lunch with Jerry Yang, the CEO of Yahoo!

He was asking his readers to send him an email after donating some money to a good cause at DonorsChoose.org and tell him why he/she deserves to get the seat.

First I thought wow - I could really use this seat. I mean I'm building a learning platform to improve education world-wide! But then I thought about the gesture of GIVING and had a different idea.

I wrote Fred Wilson an email saying:

"The reason I want to get the seat at lunch is to give it to someone else. If you choose me, I will find the right kid in an underprivileged school who would really benefit from an inspiring and life-changing experience like meeting with Jerry Yang.
I think that's the best use of this seat - and I would be more then honored to serve that cause.
Now I'm not fully unselfish:
I was a kid like that and I can only imagine what would have happened if I had a chance like this as a kid"

Fred Wilson's responded:

"What an amazing gesture. How will you decide who to give it to?"

I was wowed! It looked like this could really happen!!! But then his question was a great way to say: Did you really think this through? Will you really make this happen if I choose you?

And I hadn't thought it through. So I decided that the best thing would be to give a seminar at a local school about technology and entrepreneurship and ask the kids to write a one-page essay about how their life would change if they would get a chance to have lunch with Jerry Yang.

Right after sending Fred the second email I had to make a decision: will I wait to see if he wins the challenge and chooses me to take some action or do I go ahead and do it anyway?

Well, in this case the answer was easy but not the execution. I decided to  hesitate a bit and put "Contacting Schools For Workshop" on my To-Do list.

I didn't contact any school for two weeks.

And then...one nite...I was sitting in an entrepreneur meetup in San Francisco thinking about my To-Do list and that I should get my shit together and start contacting some schools when a guy introduced himself as a Program Director for PathwaysForKids.org

You see - sometimes things fall into place.

I had a great conversation with him and we decided to work together and give a seminar to kids about technology and entrepreneurship since his organization is already working with schools to bring entrepreneurs and kids together.

Life is a great adventure. Sometimes I still feel like I underestimate the power of taking action now. That is the reason why I don't post more often. But fortunately, taking action is a habit. And every time you do so, you are programing yourself to bigger and better things in life. Now this post might not be as perfect as I would like it to be - but it's damn sure better than not posting it at all.

ATTENTION: the DonorsChoose.org Blogger Challenge is still on - there are 5 more days to help!!!

You can choose one of the teacher requests and help classrooms become better places by getting the right resources. But not only that: in this special case you can help Fred Wilson win the challenge, and if he chooses so, we will get the opportunity to find a kid and give him a once-in-a-lifetime chance to meet Jerry Yang.

 

CLICK HERE TO HELP

This is a win-win-win-win situation. C'mon! What are you waiting for? This is a 4-win ratio for kids!!! It can't get better then that ;) Take some action now and help!

NOTE: I can't guarantee that Fred Wilson will win the challenge, neither do I know if he would choose this idea. The only thing I can say is that in the worst case you helped kids by donating money for a good cause and in the best case you also helped giving a kid a seat next to Jerry Yang. There are only winners here.

Philos Of Philosophy

Although I'm Greek, I don't consider myself a philosopher - I'm much more of a "Doer" then a "Thinker".

But, knowing the meaning of the word "Philosophy" ( friend of truth, wisdom, knowledge) I would say I'm definitely a "philos of philosophy" ( a friend of the "friends of truth" ).

Reading some of Aristotles work today inspired me to share some of the wisdom of my friends with you in this post.

Warning: there is a catch: One of those quotes is actually MY quote. I thought it would be interesting to see if anyone will find out which one is from me ( and if it makes any difference ). Enjoy the wisdom...

"Wise men speak because they have something to say; Fools because they have to say something."
Plato

"The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet."
Aristotle

"Those that know, do. Those that understand, teach."
Aristotle

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit."
Aristotle

"What it lies in our power to do, it lies in our power not to do."
Aristotle

"Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world."
Archimedes

"We know all there is to know, but we don't do all there is to do."
Socrates

"Let him that would move the world first move himself."
Socrates

P.S.

Here are some interesting links I found searching for philosophy blogs:

Experimental Philosophy Blog

Facebook Experimental Philosophy Group

MySpace Site of Experimental Philosophy

Seems like "Experimental Philosophy" is big on the net. Though am not exactly sure what it is. Hmm...I'll get back to you on this one.