Introducing: Catching Up! | Abundance, Learning Experiences and What's in Your Learner wallet?

Shownotes

In this episode of “Catching Up,” Mason Pashia and Nate McClennen dive into the endless potential of AI across various sectors, with a focus on education and music. They explore the implications of AI-generated music, the concept of unbundling education to expand learning ecosystems, and the emerging importance of digital credentials and learner records. The discussion also highlights a new framework for school redesign, emphasizing real-world experiences and adaptability in a changing labor market. They further delve into the concept of abundance, inspired by recent literature, and its application to educational innovation. The episode concludes with a reflection on the enduring value of human connections and creativity in an increasingly digital world. Tune in to explore how these themes are reshaping the landscape of learning and work.

Outline

(00:00) Introduction and Podcast Overview
(01:30) AI-Generated Music and Its Implications
(05:10) Unbundling Education and Expanded Learning Ecosystems
(08:04) Digital Credentials and Learner Records
(13:14) New Framework for School Redesign
(24:28) Valuing Real-World Experiences
(25:42) Higher Education and Credentialing
(28:42) Exploring the Concept of Abundance
(35:50) Innovations in EdTech
(39:28) The Human Connection in Education

Introduction and Podcast Overview

Mason Pashia: Hey, happy Friday. We’re trying something a little different this week. What you’re about to hear is an episode of a podcast called Catching Up, where I sit down with another Getting Smart team member to talk about what we’re learning, what we’re thinking about, and what we’re writing this week as we try to make sense of many things that are going on in the world.

Alright, we hope you enjoy it and let me know what you think. [email protected].

Hey, Nate. It’s been a bit. It’s time to catch up.

Nate McClennen: Yeah, it’s time to catch up, Mason. Super excited. This is our first pod and that we’re releasing to the world. What are you going to talk about this week?

Mason Pashia: I’ve got a few things. I want to chat about abundance, which is building on the recent release of a book from Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, fellow podcasters. And then I really want to think about how pathways work in a changing labor market, building on some of the work we’ve been doing for the last few years. How about you?

Nate McClennen: Yeah. Interesting. So there’s a couple of things we’ve been writing about at Getting Smart, so I want to talk about this new framework that we’ve just released that we’ve been working on for a couple of years and just really think it’s an exciting time for us and can be super helpful for the sector. And then drilling down into how do you design great learning experiences? And how do we talk about learning experiences as the grain size instead of courses and, or degrees as the grain size? And then just a little snippet on our favorite H3 tech tools right now that are driven by some AI and some not by AI, but are really helping accelerate this next horizon type work. So, so a lot of good stuff to talk about today. We’re going to fill up the show for sure.

Mason Pashia: Alright. What’s our music for the week?

AI-Generated Music and Its Implications

Nate McClennen: I sent you a quick snippet of a song and it is an AI-generated song from Suno. I fed it a little bit of lyrics. I fed it a little bit of my own voice singing and my little bit of my guitar. And your job is to guess the influence, either the artist, genre, or anything you can tell me about what I potentially fed into our Suno app, which we’ve been using to make music.

Mason Pashia: Alright. Let’s try it.

Music: Looking for the door to connect me off the floor to a path only my eyes can see. Stepping through the haze.

Mason Pashia: Learning as I go through the highs and the low, each step’s a mystery, but shape me. That’s beautiful. Is that you, Nate? Is that AI you on the voice?

Nate McClennen: That is me. I fed in a few chords and a few singing notes and then gave it some mysterious style and it took it from there.

Mason Pashia: Okay. What is the mysterious style of this? Did you base it off of an artist or a…

Nate McClennen: I based it off an artist and it’ll be, it’ll, it might be hard to pick out, but you can…

Mason Pashia: I mean, we’re gonna, we’re gonna get better at this over time. So, I think we’re gonna, we’re gonna always start with an original, in quotes, song from one of us that we’ve been working on and prompting, and the other one’s going to have to guess what the influence is. This feels like, it could be something along like the Amos Lee kind of world, Amos Lee, Ray LaMontagne kind of like a little soulful pop songwriter.

Nate McClennen: It, Ray LaMontagne was what I fed it, so well done. Our first one, outstanding applause all around. I gave it a, I gave it a first few lyrics that I made up on the spot. This was a one-hit wonder. So I didn’t practice at all. And then I said, extend the lyrics. Gave me a set of good cheesy lyrics. I said, make it about personalized learning, add a little education, and then, and then put it in the style of our friend Ray. So, there you go. Nice work.

Mason Pashia: That might be the only one we ever get. That’s really impressive. I think AI, you can tell that AI has never smoked cigarettes by how unraspy its Ray LaMontagne impression is.

Nate McClennen: I tried, I tried to, I tried to make it raspy, but it didn’t even pick up on the raspiness. It cleared it up for me. I was like, I really need to make it more raspy, but I didn’t have time.

Mason Pashia: That is funny. Awesome. Well, thanks for contributing to our first intro music.

Nate McClennen: Well, it makes me think, I mean, you and I have been, you especially have been embedded in music for so long in your life and me just sort of dabbling in more of the last couple of years. But this idea that we’re always striving to get better and create songs that people like or that we like, and then I can feed it in literally, I think it was 32 seconds of something and it can clean it up, create lyrics, create a whole song that I could quickly publish to Spotify. And people could listen to it. So there’s something really interesting about creating art that way. There’s something really challenging about dampening human creativity in the process and removing that piece from us. And so that’s what I’m wrestling with right now.

Mason Pashia: Me too. Yeah. Maybe we’ll, we’ll probably talk a little more about that later today as I’m sure. Cause, it’s a wild frontier out there, but I’m curious, what, Nate, what did you see this week? What’d you learn?

Nate McClennen: Yeah.

Unbundling Education and Expanded Learning Ecosystems

Nate McClennen: A couple of just, I think one of the things that caught my eye as I was browsing email and listening to pods or reading blogs is, I was listening to the Future of Education podcast which Michael Horn from Clayton Christensen. And he was interviewing Ron Matus, who is part of Step Up for Students, which is the ESA slash scholarship slash voucher program down in Florida. And it was a really interesting interview, not that the fact that a lot of people were participating in these voucher-type programs, which they are in Florida, and there’s a variety of types. But that some school districts, not just in Florida, but in other places, Arizona and Utah, who have big ESA programs running, is some districts are offering a la carte service back.

So, if you go to, say, Vail, Arizona School District or Canyon School District in Utah, they have a published list of here’s what you can participate in if you are not enrolled in our district, but you want to say, play sports, or you want to do drama, or you want to take one course in person. So, this idea of unbundling, is really intriguing.

We’ve written a lot. Expanded Learning Ecosystems matter to us. Bundling things back together matters to us. We have some nervousness around what if everybody pulls out of the public sector because we deeply believe that public education is important, but the idea that a public system, a district could then offer services to homeschoolers who either never enrolled or may have unenrolled may create more of an open-walled system that we’ve been thinking about. So that was sort of interesting to me. What about you?

Mason Pashia: That reminds me of the unbundled conversation that you had with the folks from Colorado and Amy Anderson kind of took a moment to be like, we actually think of this as bundling rather than unbundling. And so that example of like the public school offering it within that same world kind of alludes to that, that we’re actually going to be bundling, unbundling, rebundling over and over and over until people have options. And who knows what the final version will look like.

Nate McClennen: Right. And, how do you make it so it’s sustainable? I mean, I guess I’m trying to think of, we’re going to talk a little bit about abundance later on in this pod, but this idea of how can we make sure that public schools stay well-financed and well-supported for all students because 95 percent of students are always going to be in the public system.

Mason Pashia: Right.

Nate McClennen: Also perhaps appease some of this, hey, people want to do things, education in a different way and have some two-way street, a market going both directions. And I think currently right now on the negative side, people are like, Oh, we’re losing students because of the ESA world. And these are, these are just a few examples of home. Maybe this is a little glimmer of what could be a bit more of an open marketplace for education, which may serve students in the long run. There’s all sorts of issues of accountability and things that we’ve been talking about at Getting Smart that we’re not sure how to deal with when someone backpacks money directly to their child’s. But, but we are starting to see a little bit more of an open marketplace, which is interesting.

Mason Pashia: No, it totally is.

Digital Credentials and Learner Records

Mason Pashia: And, something that I saw this week, I was at the digital credentials summit, in Arizona. And the main reason I wanted to go to this event was to get workforce and higher ed and K-12 all in the same room on credentialing, because you and I have been doing a bunch of research into that and writing and thinking about it. But it’s just been a little trickier to access, particularly what HR and workforce is thinking about with regards to credentials. So, at this event, I learned a lot, I wrote a recap that I’ll link in the show notes as well, just about what I was hearing, but there was one piece that really I guess stood out to me, which was, I know, and you’re always like a real, a leading advocate of this on calls, but this idea that, A learner is self-sovereign over their wallet and can control the information that’s in it.

And at the same time, we are hearing from workforce, like, yes, it is about the employee, but also employers are going to be gathering information and sort of passing it on about you as well. And so there’s just this, there’s a piece of me. It just raised this little flag in the back of my brain as we’re thinking about. Creating these records of like what how to keep it both transparent, but also something that is not taking all this baggage with you. Like thinking of the worst possible example is like a criminal record where you just can’t escape certain things that have happened. And there’s so many tools right now that are gathering passive information about how you are as a communicator, how you are as a worker.

And if those start to get incorporated into this ecosystem. That makes me a little wary, but I’m still very optimistic about the idea of a learner record. It’s just very important to keep the learner or the user at the center of it rather than the company.

Nate McClennen: Right. Right. No, that’s super interesting so imagine we all have our LERs and there we can store these learning and employment records on our digital wallets and we have control over them. But. We’ve also been talking about rating quality of the experience. We’ve been talking about whether someone is proficient in a competency or not. And those are actually real measurements of proficiency. And so if someone performed poorly at a particular job or, or, or an experience. For all sorts of reasons. It could be that they weren’t skilled enough. It could be that they were a learner, whatever the case may be. Is there a decay rate on that? Is there some way that they can overcome that? So that disappears? Like, how do you wipe the slate clean? Kind of like a speeding ticket, right? Like there has to be some time period where you can, can control that. Yeah, at the same time. If there’s someone who’s really a poor performer and someone who really is not skilled and, and they’re trying to apply for a job where they need those skills, that, that also is really important for the employer side. So, so really interesting. And I think as privacy and self-sovereignty, and those things come up with LERs and digital wallets, we’re going to have to reconcile and figure those things out.

Mason Pashia: The last thing I’ll say on this is, as you were just talking, it made me think like, this really makes the case for a more competency-based progression-based approach. Like if those little things about your communication style show up on a progression of like, not very capable in communication or whatever, then over time you could actually prove that and advance up the progression, which is sort of a way of wiping the slate clean, right? Like you are actually advancing through these skills and competencies. So as we’re thinking about extending these portraits of outcome frameworks to other people in the community, other people in the school that just seems like a really useful way to show progress without obfuscating of details of the past.

Nate McClennen: Right. That’s a good point. And I think the progression work that we’ve seen in K-12, especially when people implement a portrait of a graduate and they have a progression that is advancing across eight levels or five levels or 10 levels, whatever they want to do. There is no it’s not a rubric in that someone is doing poorly on something. It’s just that someone is a novice at something. And so, that may actually ameliorate a little bit of this issue, where you start with novice and you’re moving forward towards expert and advanced. And when you look at portraits of graduates, every single portrait of graduate that I’ve ever seen would apply to adults in the world as well. Right. And even the language and the progression potentially would apply to adults. And so, unlike a standard for say algebra, which says you understand how to solve for a single variable or something like that, it’s very, very discreet and someone might master that and wouldn’t have to keep working on it. But collaboration, communication, creativity all those things are progression friendly. So I think that’s a really good point you make and one that we need to continue to dig into on this show. Okay.

Mason Pashia: I agree. Well, let’s get into the news section of the show here. Because this is probably the first episode of this, we’re going to be running. Basically, we’re always going to jump into a section where we talk about, recent news that we’ve seen or things that Getting Smart has published. This week in particular is a bit heavy on the Getting Smart stuff, just because Nate and I have been writing a lot and thinking a lot. So these are going to have some broader views in there, but just so you know, we’re going to cast this net wide and not all of them are going to be focused on things that we published this week.

Nate McClennen: Yeah, and I think also those who are listening to the pod and we’re excited that you’re here. And if you think there’s something that’s newsworthy, especially that doesn’t get a lot of media attention, send it our way. We like uncovering stories and things that people are talking about and doing in education, whether it’s at schools or districts. Yeah. If they’re amusing, great. We like to laugh on the show and if they’re, if they’re good for young people, that’s even better because we want to do things that are good for young people and learners across the world. So, Mason, maybe I’ll start.

New Framework for School Redesign

Nate McClennen: So, you and I, like you said, we’ve been writing a lot and we, we are super excited. Rebecca Meadows and I have been working on this framework of how do we take all of the time we spent in schools and districts. And, and put together a framework that we think captures a way to think about school redesign and, and especially in the age of AI, how do we do this and well, do this well. And so, so we have built the, the, the blog is already available on our website, and we’re going to write a bunch more about it, and we’ve started to implement it with some of our school partners and district partners. But, but I think what I want to talk about quickly here is that this layering system and we pulled this from technology where you have a UX layer and you might have a code layer and you might have a operating system layer, whatever the case may be. But we’re thinking about that and we think about redesign and we, we have these, these elements are these four layers. Like one is the learner layer. We always think you need to start with the learner, who they are, their identity, where they want to go, what’s the pathway they get there to get there. And then what’s the. What are the connections they need to make, the partnerships they need to make along the way? And Julia Freeland Fisher writes about, a lot about this in Human Capital. But, so we start at the center with this, with this learner layer. And then we add on the outside this learning layer. And the learning layer has, how do you build a community vision? We think all this stuff should come up from the ground and from the community. How do you build a set of learner outcomes, what we were just talking about. And then build a nice learning model around it that says, how are we going to actually make this happen? How are we going to signal to the outside what a student has accomplished? And then what does the learner, the, the ecosystem look like? We talked about breaking down barriers and expanded ecosystems. So you have learner layer, learning layer, strategy. How do we make this all happen? Because you can create anything you want, but if, if you don’t have a plan, it’s not going to happen. And then the system layer. What happens when you’re in a big district like LA Unified or New York City or Atlanta, and you have hundreds and hundreds of schools. It’s a portfolio approach and they’re all going to be in different places in their, their, their school redesign. And so we’re thinking a lot about how do you help those particular leaders in those systems use a model like this and that system layer addresses that. So we’re, we’re super excited about it. Take a look, listeners, please read the blog, push back. I’m wondering your reaction, Mason you’re sort of, you did a lot of proofing on this and, and you’ve heard about it. What do you think? Okay.

Mason Pashia: No, I think it’s great. It makes a lot of it makes a lot of sense for our work. It pulls a bunch of things that we’ve been talking about for a while together into an easy to kind of digest place. One thing I’ve really been appreciating is just as we’ve been having calls or I’ve been on calls with you, you’ve been sort of messaging like. Just like it says in our framework, like you’ve been really connecting a bunch of things that we’ve been doing back to this, which makes it feel much more alive. And I think sometimes when people make a framework, it just kind of dies in a PDF somewhere. And this is a really great way to just keep it alive and keep using the terms so people are both familiar and know how to relate the experiences or the things they see in the world back to it.

I love the way that this built on some of the stuff that we did about 18 months ago with the portrait model stuff where we were talking about the system and the leader and the self-portrait. And I think the way that you framed it as inspired by technology is pretty thought-provoking in some ways. I think that like at its core and maybe at a more. Philosophical level, like all of these things are complex systems and we’re trying to just map them. And so it does make sense that kind of a core nugget, they all, they hold sort of the same ripples, even if you’re. Pretty fundamentally re like redirecting where those are applied. So I think that was really smart as well.

Nate McClennen: Yeah, I mean, I think the, and the, and the, the, the journey we’re trying to figure out how do you, how do you, some of this stuff is so complex, right? If you’re operating school in a district and you have the ebbs and flows of leadership changes and student changes and community changes is how do we simplify this process so everybody can find a spot on the map? Within the framework. And so that’s the goal for us. We want people to be able to see themselves and see their communities in this process, know where they want to go next and know why they would be doing that. So we, you know, we frame it as a why, what are the outcomes, how are you going to do it? Who’s, who’s going to see the signals and then, and where on earth is this whole thing can happen. And then you layer the strategy and the systems work on top of it. So more to come folks who are listening and pay attention to that blog and, and push back. If you see things that were missing we’re working on a blog right now about the AI layer that drips over this to say how do we make these things more efficient? Do we really need to spend an entire year doing a portrait of a graduate? Does that actually help learners or can we do a portrait of a graduate in a couple of months and then quickly get to the learning model, and the progressions that the learning model drives to so that we’re quickly more quickly getting to students. So, that’s one thing I was thinking about. What’s some other news in your world that you’ve been writing about or thinking about?

Mason Pashia: Our new pathways campaign. Cause this, this was a campaign we started about three years ago. And so I’ve been looking at it with sort of present day eyes and being like, does this still hold basically the things we’ve been saying, do they endure change? And anecdotally I’m up in Seattle and I’ve had a bunch of friends and people I know get laid off recently for a number of reasons, but a lot of them are in the tech sector. And so I was just, I was grappling with this idea that like. Everybody I know is not everybody. I know a lot of people I know are,

Nate McClennen: Everybody makes it,

Mason Pashia: Everybody is unemployed. It is crazy. No, there’s a lot of people who are unemployed and the job market is really tough for them. And at the same time, we’re saying that employers can’t find workers with our pathways campaign. And those two things were just not squaring in my mind.

Nate McClennen: And the numbers are the same, right? The number of unemployed and the number of employers looking for jobs or looking for employees is actually the same. We just haven’t found that match yet, right?

Mason Pashia: Totally. And so I just I’ve been revisiting that this week and I’ve got some data just about like the number of information technology sector workers who are unemployed has gone up in the past few months at just a couple of percentage points, but it puts it above the average unemployment rate. We have these folks that are 65 and older are increasingly working later into their life. So that’s going to make up about 21.5 percent of the workforce in 2031, which is a pretty big

Nate McClennen: Of 65 and older.

Mason Pashia: Yeah. I’m 65 and older. So then we have a lot of these, this sort of speculative AI agent rollout, right? Which is like people, there haven’t been a ton of reports of like, I’ve saved X amount of money by incorporating an AI agent into my company. But like, because the number, the unemployment rate is going up in tech, it’s possible that AI is really starting to show some of the ways that it’s able to make some work more efficient there. And then,

Nate McClennen: Do you think that, that is it possible that AI agents just go the way of say email, where it was this great fancy technology, but then it just gave up. Yeah. So the work in the long run? Or is our AI agents going to be more independent? What’s your thought? What’s your hypothesis?

Mason Pashia: That is a really good question.

Nate McClennen: Work or less work? What’s going to happen here?

Mason Pashia: My guess is it involves more management work. I think it just, I think it changes the work probably more than

Nate McClennen: Right, right. That’s good.

Mason Pashia: We all become managers of basically big teams of AI agents, but I think I could see AI agents more so than email. I do think we’ll actually replace tasks that a lot of people do on a daily basis.

Nate McClennen: Whereas email, all it did was the reverse. It added tasks, right? So maybe that’s, that’s the opposite there. So, okay, good. We’ll, we’ll keep that hypothesis in our mind and, and, and see when we future catch-up episodes that we can actually verify that. So, okay. And you were going to say last one you were thinking

Mason Pashia: No, no, I just the last thing with this is I think that my, my takeaways from this is just really reinforcing some of the stuff that we have been saying in our new pathways campaign. So if I had to say, like, does new pathways hold up in a new labor market? So far the things we’ve been saying, yes, it’s this idea that agency is more important than ever connecting people to problems that need solving is more important than ever and really having those community communication apparatuses. So you actually know what workforce needs so you can then provide and vice versa more important than ever. So I think kind of a napkin math version of my post, but I’ll, I’ll throw a, I’ll throw a link in the show notes to that as well. And you can dig a little more into the data on what’s going on in the market.

Nate McClennen: Yeah, I’m super interested to see what happens. I think AI is going to be. You know, the rise of AI agents is taking away work, which will shift the work, like you said, more to management question is, well, we need more or less managers. And the question, the second question is, is how well do people manage, which I actually think is probably not very good across the board. And so, so I think that there, especially in the professional worlds of people that do work in front of a computer or, or, or those kinds of, I think there’s going to be some real disruption and people need to reinvent themselves. I think it’s gonna be less disruptive in the trades. I think plumbing and electrician plumbers and electricians are in good shape right now and they make good money. They can run their own businesses and, and and they do really good, valuable work. And I, I, I think that there’s some sense that that will be a delay impact. Whereas sort of, sort of the, the technology type work is going to have the early impact and maybe we’re starting to see that. So.

Mason Pashia: Strongly agree. What else you got, Nate?

Nate McClennen: Okay, so, Victoria and I were working on a project and we were really thinking about the limitations of courses as the grain size that we look at in schools, and so high schools and colleges, middle schools as well. And, and by that, just to be really crystal clear is, we most students take English 12. Four years of English in high school, they might go to college if they decided on higher ed, and they’ll, they’ll take an English course, they’ll take a music course, and they’ll be more specific, etc. But everything’s related to time in the Carnegie unit, and you, you know that we’ve been writing a ton about how do we bust up that Carnegie unit because, and even Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching is also thinking of that. They, they, they are, they are really, really preaching we need to change this. And so Victoria and I were, were really thinking about what should that grain size be? And we really started to settle on this idea that the grain size should be the learning experience. And so right now by, it’s a proxy, the course is a learning experience and you’re supposed to learn a bunch of things in that course and you get a letter grade at the end, and that checks off that you have potentially mastered or shown proficiency in those outcomes. The reality is we don’t really know what an A, B, and C are, is, and it’s also a large length of time, typically a semester and, or a year. So, what would happen, and what we’re preaching and working with, with some of our partners is, what happens if you actually unbundle courses into learning experiences? And so your grain size is learning experience, still connected to outcomes, you’re getting some sort of result after each learning experience. It increases flexibility so that if a student takes a learning experience and they don’t do well on it, they don’t satisfy or become proficient. They just have to redo that experience in some format rather than an entire course. We have way too many students repeating entire courses even though they only missed a certain part of that course in terms of proficiency. It allows you to stack different experiences so you could have a learning experience inside a school, outside a school, and you could put those together and potentially stack to some sort of course credit. Maybe a microcredit.

Valuing Real-World Experiences

Nate McClennen: I think this idea of valuing experiences matter. And when we diffuse or we hide the curriculum within a course, say English nine, but yet the student did a really interesting project where they went out and interviewed community members and were writing an analysis essay on the health of the community or something like that. That’s a real experience that should show up somewhere. And it doesn’t show up if you’re at the course level. It only shows up if you’re at the LX level. So, we’re, we’re thinking about this is how do we get schools to actually change and think about LX as a learning experience as the grain size and not the course. You can still stack all those learning experiences up into a course. No problem if you want to do that. But it opens up way more doors. Push back. What do you think? True? False? Maybe? Maybe?

Mason Pashia: There’s a piece of this that feels like it’s already, it’s happening in some way, but the student is not able to communicate it right. Like there’s, if you get an A on an essay in an English class, that’s sort of a learning experience. You know how you’ve performed on it, but it’s really hard to then ever use that. To your advantage again in the future and be like, Oh, I actually wrote this essay on this thing. And I have a little more maybe content expertise in the case of an essay because of that.

Higher Education and Credentialing

Mason Pashia: One thing I heard it made me think of was again, at the summit that I was at recently, they were, they were really talking about the ways in which a very similar line of thinking applies to stop outs from college. So like, if you even take this at a level up and you say that like a diploma or is a. Is a sequence of like a stack of courses, then if you just actually re grain size, everything down to learning experience, like you can be through college and suddenly it’s not four years until what you’re doing has value. It’s like every week, what you’re doing has value, which is so important. And I think a fundamental reframe that could both help with engagement, it could help with providing people with experiences that actually show them what they want to do in the world. And it’s just a really great way to build and articulate skills for young people.

Nate McClennen: Yeah, and, and the other big piece that should be added to your list there, because I think that’s really important. Is it addresses a little bit of this debt issue because too many students have debt with no degree, right? Hundreds of thousands of students have no degree but debt left. And so when there is value attributed to even a single project that can go into your portfolio or your as an LER in your digital wallet and that is actually stamped as something that is validated from that university or higher ed system That’s meaningful. The challenge is, is that higher ed is going to push back a little bit on this, because they want a captive audience, right? The, the learner would really benefit, but the, the higher ed would say, well, shoot, I don’t want someone just to come for a quarter or semester, and I give them seven validated experiences, and then off on their merry way. But the reality is, is I think this is the rise of credentialing has done this anyway. More and more students are not wanting a full two year, four year system. They want something that will be valuable right away. And so stackability matters, and it’s exactly right. I didn’t, we were writing from the sort of high school perspective and middle school’s perspective, but I think it’s totally valid at higher ed as well. So. I’m excited. The blog’s out. And, and again, listeners take a listen and push back. And we’re seeing more and more schools start to think about this way, but it does require some reframing for sure.

Mason Pashia: For sure. And I think we could actually learn a lot here from art schools where you have something more like a portfolio that accompanies learning, where they’re not so dependent on completing a full sequence of courses, but you have these kind of tangible communicable project deliverables. So I wonder if there’s any, if there’s cool schools out there that you know of that are doing something like this where it’s sort of like these incremental project-based report cards where you can kind of show what you’re doing. We’d love to hear about it.

Nate McClennen: Yeah, yeah, very, I mean, I think it’s very, very few because most of them are translating out into a typical system. Typically it might be in the private sector, it might be a micro school and they’re just saying, here’s your portfolio, you’re building it and your portfolio is a set of projects and they stack to whatever thing, whatever you want, they could stack to credit, stack to degree, whatever the case may be. So. Let’s keep investigating. And if we find some good examples or listeners here or something and want to send it our way, we’ll definitely do a profile. So, all right, tag back to you. What do you got? What do you got for me, Mason? Okay.

Exploring the Concept of Abundance

Mason Pashia: I’ve been working on this piece on abundance. And this is, this is kind of a, it’s a little bit of a meta comment, but then I also want to spend a couple seconds thinking about this framing of abundance. So, I’ve been following a number of thinkers for a few years here Ezra Klein, Tyler Cowen, Noah Smith Derek Thompson, to name a few of them. And all of them had this similar idea at the same time, they all called it something different. And over the last four years, it’s sort of coalesced into this idea. They just published a book on it called Abundance. They being Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. So I love this idea of an evolution of. An idea where like, and I think it was 2021 as recline put out a blog post on supply side progressivism, which is what he called this. Like if people need more housing, the problem there is we don’t have enough houses and we need to make it easier to build. Right? So that was sort of the impetus. And then there was this idea a year later where Derek Thompson came in and said something super similar, but he was approaching it through the development of technology and was basically like ideas are cheap. And implementation is really expensive and hard and like that is wrong. That’s like a mismatch of effort. And I guess skill. And then you have Noah Smith, who’s this economist and he says a lot of kind of quippy things all the time, but he came up with this idea of checkism. Which is basically that the problem with progressives, not to make it political, but he was kind of zeroing in on them in this post is that the size of the check is the only thing that gets reported on and the outcomes never get reported on. So it’s like you, if you have a bigger check, you could see this with like the chips act or something that passed where it was like this huge act for incentivizing building in America. And then it took. So long to roll out the money that we kind of just like push the outputs down the road. And so this is like a, all three of these things where they were talking about it for four years and it came together in this idea of abundance. And I’ve been listening to all of them and have a bunch of different. Lenses in now. And I was like, what would it be like to apply this to education? Cause we have a, we have a set of similar challenges, slow moving bureaucracy that prevents innovation. We have a bunch of different restrictions and just processes we’ve put in place that are really good in some ways, and they mean well, but they also slow things down.

And then outcomes, of course, as you know, in education are just so difficult to communicate and report on. So recently wrote a post that’s sort of looking at emerging education innovations through the lens of abundance. And you, you had the chance to read and offer some feedback, but what do you think about?

Nate McClennen: Yeah. I mean, first of all, I do love the book that just came out and I, I wish they had written a chapter on education. They didn’t, they wrote it on energy. I mean, like they missed that sector and that’s fine. Maybe they’ll do an addendum. Maybe we’ll, maybe we should I don’t know. Send them an

Mason Pashia: Get, get on their podcasts and talk about it.

Nate McClennen: Exactly. Yeah, that would be good. Well, we volunteer to be on both of those podcasts. So we are publicly saying we’ll go there. So a couple of things I’m thinking about is I agree and I read your blog and then I actually dove into a couple of pods from both of them as they’re being going on the interview circuit around the book. And if we had to write the chapter on education, there’s two places where I would think it would be really good example. So one, one is this idea of IEPs, right? So you have these individual education plans. they’re really important because they give students services, extra services for students who need them, right? Really, really important. But almost anybody who works in the IEP business in schools, it is a very arduous, long, very legal type process. And it takes a long time for a meeting to happen, for the IEP to be built, before actually services are given to those students. We need to figure out how to do that at a hundred times the rate, right? And so that’s an example of really good ideas. We need to serve all students, especially students that have high needs. And we need to do it. We need to reduce the process time and increase the outcome side. So the outcome being this student is getting great services and actually it’s helping them grow and become. Great citizens of the United States or something like that, whatever the case may be. And so that’s one. And then the second one I was thinking about as they were talking about all these other sectors was around standardized accountability testing. And so we do this crazy thing, as you know, where in schools. Teachers are assessing, so they know where their students are at, and that’s pretty flexible and nimble, and there’s, teachers can do real-time adjustments, like, great teachers do this anyway. Then you have more norm-referenced, so this, think about NWAS maps testing, or iReady, or something like that, which are done typically three times a year. So that, that’s formative summative. And then, then, come May, all these schools that are in the public sector have to stop and do these state-mandated tests to serve accountability rules. And so, my question is, is like, let’s reduce this process. I think you get every teacher in America to think about, say, this is a good idea. And at, at minimum use the formative norm reference tests for your state end of the year tests. So everyone can jump on maps and do it. And you have this aggregate, it’s growth. You’re getting real-time results. There are states like Idaho next door to where I am in Wyoming and They don’t get results back until the fall after the students have taken them in May. So there’s nothing that helps student outcomes, nothing. And everybody talks about this yet. We have this big accountability system. So let’s use the, let’s reduce the process. And increase the rate of assessment feedback. And so it goes right to students. Like, Hey, this is how I’m doing on ELA or math. Great teacher I’m going to work with parents know, and then you don’t have to waste all of May prepping for, and doing these quote-unquote high stakes tests, which frankly, I wonder how many students really care about. There you go. There’s my, my chapter on education for the abundance folks

Mason Pashia: That’s a, that’s a fantastic chapter. I can’t wait to read it. We should just write it for them and then just send it to them and say like, Hey, just in case. Yeah, that’d be amazing. I mean, if you’re writing a book about abundance, surely more is good.

Nate McClennen: Well, that’s right. An extra chapter really is actually part of the abundance theme, right? So that’s good.

Mason Pashia: Yes, exactly. Well, cool. I would love to hear anybody’s thoughts on that blog. So feel free to send them to Mason at Getting Smart.com. It was sort of a challenge to myself to reshape some of my own thinking on some of the content as well. So yeah, great.

Nate McClennen: Think you know what with that blog going out, you, I’ve won the award of having the most detailed and deeply thoughtful philosophical type blogs for Getting Smart. I’m going to give, there’s gotta be an award for it somewhere, but I read through that as a review. I was like, wow, this is a, this is a well-written and well thought of, you know, a lot of times all our blogs are great. Don’t get me wrong, but they’re, you know, they’re shorter and they’re really specific. And this is expansive. This you’re talking about big ideas here. So we’re going to give you some sort of Getting Smart award and I’m going to call it the The smart deep thinking award blog for 2025. I’m already, I’ve already awarded it. It’s done.

Mason Pashia: Wow. Well, this is an honor. And that is a really good example of how to give an award fast with outcomes. And so now I can continue to improve down the road as

Nate McClennen: And can you please add it to your digital wallet? Right? And just, you can now add this award and the validation will be from Nate McLennan stamped with this newly created award.

Mason Pashia: Love it. Fantastic. Thank you for the award. It means a lot. Alright.

Innovations in EdTech

Nate McClennen: I mean, one other thing is just a, I, as you know, I love thinking about edtech and what’s going on and watching the AI tools sweep the edtech ecosystem, and so much of it is about helping teachers do things more efficiently, which I don’t argue with. I think teachers have a really, really challenging job. And when I was teaching, it was Saturday and Sunday work and correcting and prepping. And, and when we want to do high-quality work with young people and get them out in the community, do real-world. Type experiences and they take a long time to design it. You got to make phone calls. You got to prep. And if we can make other things more efficient with lesson planning or all the administrative stuff that happens in schools, great. And there’s a lot of AI tools that are doing that. There are a few out there that are pushing on the front end. Right? And so. So, we’ve talked about and some of our friends sort of at Schooljoy, where they just released a new demo, and if you look at that demo, they’re using AI to extract competencies and skills, kind of like LivedX in Colorado is doing the same type of thing. And, you know, it’s not validated, but students can add an experience and they can extract the competencies that are relevant for their schools and districts, right, from the portrait of a graduate. Pretty interesting. Beacon over at Building 21 and, and their network is their Beacon platform. They’ve got a new one. They just released the new version. Everyone’s a learner in that. So the teachers and the students are all creating learning experiences for themselves or they’re being created for them and they’re creating connected to a set of competencies that are relevant and they’re tracking along a progression. It is a system designed for the future, not for the past. And then obviously something like play lab and inquire really helping with how you accelerate real-world project-based learning design. That takes a long time to create these things. And you have to create your eight-week progression and you have to create what’s the engager and the driving question and all the learning activities. And both Inquire, Inquire is very specific to PBA, AI PlayLab, you could custom build, as you know, and, and I think both are great tools. And I think we’re going to see more and more tools that are pushing on that H3, the new Horizon type work to make that work easier than it currently has been.

Mason Pashia: Yeah, no, I checked out that demo from Schooljoy as well. And it was, it was pretty amazing, especially the, it started to get started to gesture at some personalization elements that really help teachers personalize content delivery and experiences for the learners. And it, it kind of,

Nate McClennen: Yeah,

Mason Pashia: and there’s, it really is coming to light more as I see these tools incorporating things that I’m like, Oh, that would have been a, that would’ve been a passing thought in a conversation with Nate, like he said something, I didn’t even clock it. But because it was saved as data in this thing, it’s totally useful in the future, where now I know Nate probably likes Ray LaMontagne because that was his reference point. And so like that is something that I can use in the future as data for sending you songs in Slack or something like that.

Nate McClennen: Right. I mean, we’re even just doing this pod, right? We’re, we are contributing data to the ecosystem that we hope is relevant, right, that we hope has some informed, maybe we show up on the top of someone’s Google search when they search for Ray Montaigne or something like that. Who knows?

Mason Pashia: Yeah, that, that would be wild. And if that’s true you should not Jolene or another Ray LaMontagne song, cause that’s a really, really excellent and worth your time. Cool.

The Human Connection in Education

Mason Pashia: Well, Nate, we’re getting into our final section here, which is sort of on that subject, thinking about really what keeps us or makes us human. I think we’re going to always be circling some, some sort of technology on this podcast, just because of the times that we live in and how it’s impacting education and learning. But we, it’s really important to us to always be thinking about the, the human experience and the things that are giving us sort of energy to participate in this human society that we live in. So what, what moved you this last week or what are, what’s uniquely human that you saw?

Nate McClennen: Yeah, you know, I, I think what I’ve been thinking a lot about is sort of the, the relationships of human to human. And we have in our technology-infused world, we’ve put things in between the direct human-to-human relationship. So as you know, I coach high school soccer, girls soccer. And so every day after school, I’m up on the fields and we’re just, we’re just trying to help young people get better. And we’re having conversations, our coach, as coaches, we learn from them. They learn from us. And there’s something uniquely human about that. There’s something powerful about just being with a group of people that are working towards a common goal and having conversations and sometimes hard conversations, sometimes easy conversations.

But, but I think that there is this power when we think about human evolution, the human species. evolved faster and developed our brains develop because we’re able to communicate and share stories and share information and things together and It is easy to see us getting a bit more disconnected from that You know the more ai generated material out there the more we’re on our devices. We’re one step removed from having A conversation with a human being about something interesting and beautiful, whether that’s a sports team or a photo or a landscape or what, that doesn’t matter what it is. So I think that’s what’s making me, I don’t know, think a little bit about how do we make sure we amplify and keep those things going in a world that’s going to probably drag us away from that.

Mason Pashia: Yeah, I think that’s a really great point. Mine from this last week is similarly about human relationships so my mom is a visual artist, as you know, and

Nate McClennen: She’s a photo. There’s a painting in a gallery in Jackson, apparently, right?

Mason Pashia: Yes, there is, there is. And so she’s, she’s very wonderful and talented, but three months out of the year, she’s at an art fair in Arizona. And I was down there. About a week and a half ago, so this tent is filled with like 38 fine artists. They’re doing things out of physical materials. So a lot of sculpture, painting, etc. And they had a session on AI and art. And so I was talking with them and thinking about it. And, I think walking around that tent and looking at it really made the case for why visual art will persist. I think we’ve for years now, we’ve had. The ability to go online, buy a Claude Monet print, size it to your wall, and print it for like 150 bucks in a high-quality print format. And still people have, are buying visual art, they’re putting it up in their homes. It’s not something that the world has voted on as being like the most beautiful thing and putting it in a museum. But it’s like this really beautiful artifact from a human being. And I just think there’s these pieces of the material world that are going to be really hard to overthrow. And sure, they’re using AI, right? Like a lot of folks have been, will that my mom knows, like, take a photo and then they’ll run it through an AI tool and be like, make this more interesting. And then that’s a digital version. And then they paint that, right? So there, there’s like an AI component in the, the flow, but I really think that there are some things that are going to either take a very long time, assuming we don’t all live in the metaverse in five years. But I’m, I’m optimistic about the human-to-human connection of art. And while I was down there, I also got the chance to see. Concert from Dave Rawlings and Gillian Welsh, who are two of my Favorite artists right now. And there was this song they played. They’re very kind of bluegrass rootsy music. So that you’re not, you don’t get on phones when you’re in there or anything. And they’re in a small theater, but there’s this great scene where Dave Rawlings was playing banjo, Gillian Welsh was doing like a hand percussion on her thigh and like stomping, and it felt like we were in the thirties, just like gathered at someone’s living room. And it was so cool to just see this like removal of so many tools and production and just go back to this human experience and the energy in the room was just palpable of all these people sharing this thing. So just huge, huge kudos to getting people in a room and doing beautiful things together.

Nate McClennen: Yeah, I mean, and things that move us, right? Like move us, meaning move us emotionally or spiritually or whatever it is. It’s just, it’s, it’s really powerful. So I think that it gets back to, I think you and I’ve talked about this, but I, I do believe that we’re going to have a unique value prop for a human-made stamp or a human-created stuff and whether that’s a song or a piece of art or a piece of writing and it may not be as perfect quote unquote as what someone can generate after three or four prompts on a chat GPT. But it’s going to be more beautiful and more inspiring because it is human-made. And I think that’s going to become more and more rare. I think it’s, I think we’re, we are generating more information than ever before and, and more and more of it’s not human-generated. So, so thanks to think about love that experience of art and. Thinking about people in a room playing music, which is what you and I like. And this is bring it full circle. So that’s our capstone for the week. We got Mason.

Mason Pashia: Yep. It’s been great catching up Nate. And thanks again for your musical contribution at the beginning of the episode. And you’ll be hearing from me next time. So,

Nate McClennen: I am already excited and I I’m hoping that I can do as good as you did for mine, but I bet you, I won’t. So, alright. See everybody next time.

Mason Pashia: All right. See ya.

Advocacy

Advisory

Topics

Recent Releases

Key Points

Subscribe to Our Podcast

Find us on: