Learner Wallets for Identity, Discovery and Pathways | Jacksón Smith

Mason Pashia sits down with Jacksón Smith, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of the Learning Economy Foundation, to explore what it really means to build credential infrastructure as a public good. Drawing on a decade of improv comedy, a childhood shaped by Montana wilderness, and a globe-spanning research journey that began with a single provocative question, Jacksón traces how he and his collaborators arrived at LearnCard, a free, open-standards-based wallet designed to make learner records portable, trustworthy, and genuinely useful for the people who hold them.

The conversation moves through three organizing verbs that animate everything the Learning Economy Foundation builds: collect, understand, and navigate. Jacksón and Mason unpack why credentials are inert without the stories that give them meaning, how concentric rings of self-recognition, peer endorsement, and external authority each play a distinct role in identity formation, and why a true learner GPS, one that reroutes in real time when life makes a wrong turn, may finally be within reach. For education leaders wrestling with siloed student data, eroding institutional trust, and the urgent need to connect learning to opportunity, this episode offers both a grounded technical roadmap and a deeply human vision of what learner-centered infrastructure can become.

Transcript

Mason: You’re listening to the Getting Smart podcast. I’m Mason Pashia. A few months ago, I published a piece called “Why Learner Wallets Will Fail and How to Make Sure They Don’t” with my friend Beth Ardner at Gobekli, where we explored some of the pitfalls of edtech, really building things that people don’t actually use, and specifically building wallets that kinda feel like updating a resume. Contrary to that title, I do believe they are an essential infrastructure technology, a utility that enables individuals to tell their story.

For the last few years, I’ve been fortunate to have a lot of conversations with the folks at the Learning Economy Foundation, and have been finding them to be kindred spirits, both in thinking about this technology as a public good and thinking long and hard about demand rather than just supply. They’re thinking strategically about working with Scouts and veterans, two places where badges and credentials already have real significance, and building from there to better reach the education ecosystem. They’re building colorfully and inclusively and working to get the whole system connected and collaborating. So today I’m excited to have one of those conversations with a mic in front of me, and record it so all of you can hear it.

Today, I’m excited to be joined by Jacksón Smith, co-founder and chief technology officer of the Learning Economy Foundation, where he works as a technology architect and storyteller. A word after my own heart. Jacksón, thanks for joining me.

Jacksón Smith: Hey, thanks for having me. This is great. Excited for the conversation.

Growing Up in Montana and a Decade of Improv

Mason: Likewise. Okay, so I wanna start with a question that I think helps signify maybe why credentials are useful. What is a learning experience or life experience that you’ve had that is very valuable, but you think is really hard to communicate to people who don’t know you?

Jacksón Smith: I think it’s a great question, and I’m gonna answer with two. One being growing up in Montana, growing up near rivers and wilderness. I find that to be a really core part of my identity, and it’s sometimes hard to convey why I think it’s so important, how it affects how I think about things, in terms of ecosystems, in terms of the importance of clean air and clean water, and that effect on your psyche, and that transformative experience of just being able to ramble in the forest, ramble into rivers and float down them. I think that’s a hard experience to communicate.

So the other learning experience, I would say, is improv. I’ve done a lot of improv comedy, over a decade of doing improv comedy. There’s all sorts of “improv is helpful for business” talk, but I mean improv for comedy’s sake, improv as performance, but also in social settings.

I’ve hosted shows, I’ve performed probably thousands of shows at this point. And it’s one of those things that I think is really difficult to convey, the layers of skill and identity formation. I suppose these are both identity formation, right? Both this experience growing up in Montana and all of this improv really just changed how I approach everything in my life. So that’s my two answers.

Mason: I think that’s so important, and I wanna come back to this identity formation piece. But before we leave improv, I have a bunch of friends who are improv folks, and I put this connection together recently, and I’m curious if it resonates for you at all. I heard a podcast where they were talking to somebody who’d meditated their whole life, like they were a monastic presence, and they were in their 70s, and the host was like, “What did that get you? What have you earned by meditating for 55, 60 years?” And the guy basically said, “I have three milliseconds in every decision of my life where I can decide how to respond.”

There’s something about that that feels similar to improv. It’s like this constant something’s coming at you, and I have to choose how to respond in a way that serves the current context. Does that resonate? Do you feel adept at navigating small moments with more spaciousness, more ability to laugh at yourself and more levity?

Jacksón Smith: Yeah, absolutely. It’s kind of awesome that you bring that up, ’cause I often describe that there’s two kinds of improvisers. There’s meditative improvisers, and then there’s non-meditative. One’s not necessarily better than the other. I gravitate towards the meditative improvisation, and you can see it in someone’s eyes when they’re doing it. I don’t know what it is. It’s this glassy almost kind of eye flutter that’s deeply attuned.

It’s unsettling once you notice it, because it is those three milliseconds. It’s someone who is moving in slow motion, but so deeply attuned to what another person is doing, someone that they’ve maybe never met, right? A lot of improv is being thrown onto a stage with five other people in front of an audience of 200 people, and you’ve never met this person, and you have those three milliseconds to attune to as much as you possibly can in every three-millisecond moment. It takes a lifetime of meditation to even achieve that. So I have not achieved that, but I aspire to it. And notably, it’s attuning. I always struggle with the control of how you’re responding.

I think that’s true, and also a surrendering, right? Control is a funny word, ’cause it is the right word, but it’s also a hard word, ’cause it’s surrendering to things completely outside of your control. And it’s that paradox, doing both in the same quick breath, which I think is really exciting.

Mason: Right. And I feel like we see that a lot with something like mastery, right? There’s this really interesting place where something like mastery becomes flow state, or it becomes second nature. The best jazz musicians have the best ear. They’re not necessarily the best player, and they’re able to just follow this thing, and they know how to do it, but really, are they playing or not? I don’t know. I read this great John Cage quote this morning, the musician and painter, who was talking about how when you walk into a studio and pick up an art brush, you have your friends, your family, and every painting you’ve done before with you, and slowly they start to leave, and if you’re lucky, you leave too. I loved that. I was like, this is such a cool image.

So, amazing. Well, I didn’t think we were gonna start there, but we did, and that’s great. I’m curious, how did you find your way to this specific problem, specifically the Learning Economy Foundation infrastructure of credentials and stories and signaling? How’d you get here?

The Origin Story: Could You Pay People to Learn?

Jacksón Smith: That’s a wild and wondrous path. I don’t know if we need to get into all of it, but I’d say about 10 years ago, myself and several others, like Chris Purifoy, who I founded this with, Ana Rold, Carissa Carter, who’s on our board, as well as Amy Purifoy, who’s our creative director, we were really struck by this idea of learning being one of the most accessible things we can all do.

We all found in our own lives, we’re all kind of entrepreneurial spirits. We’ve all kind of moved in formal systems, but also in informal systems, and as we open this conversation, we are both technical people, but also deeply, at least find ourselves to be creative. And so we were interested in this: if learning is one of the most successful things that any human on this planet can do, could you actually pay people to learn? So this is our weird and interesting kind of origin story. We really went all in on this question: could you pay people to learn?

And it took us down a rabbit hole. We traveled all over the world, met with teachers and superintendents and principals and economists all over Europe. We went to Qatar, we went all over Africa, all over the world, pursuing this question very earnestly.

We did research and models of, can students build equity in a learning environment? We actually did research in California as well, at the Claremont Colleges, around whether a student could actually earn equity in their university as they’re taking classes. And then even beyond, as alumni, can they actually earn equity in that? And by equity I mean they can actually then borrow against that equity and use that to purchase textbooks, and feel invested in a different kind of way in these communities. It took us down a wild rabbit hole. We studied dairy co-ops, all sorts of different cooperative models, all this kind of stuff.

And as part of that: could you actually measure an individual’s contribution to someone else’s learning? And if you could, could you actually reward that economically? Could you help kick back, instead of thinking about us atomistically, like, “I succeed because I succeed,” what about the village that helped you get there? And could you track that village in a way that’s actually helpful?

We looked at models in Europe around paying coaches in soccer, football, who contributed to an athlete rising to professional fame where they make a lot of money, and they actually get a financial kickback early on, in third grade, fourth grade, very young, in the development of their athletic skills. And then they could actually earn a kickback that then enables better early education and coaching.

I don’t know if that answered your question, but that’s how we got into it. In studying this, working alongside so many different communities, we saw that there was a need and a prerequisite to do any of that, which is essentially what we’ve arrived at around better portability of student records. Basically, we found the data is siloed. The data is in a hundred different systems. It doesn’t work for anybody. It barely works for administrators, it’s in too many places for them. It doesn’t work for the student, they have to pay constantly to move it around and get it reverified.

And so we found the need for that public good infrastructure, and that’s what we’ve been working on for the last eight years.

Mason: That’s awesome. I did not know that origin story, so that’s super cool. Is that research public somewhere?

Jacksón Smith: Yeah, I can share some links to that. There’s a bunch of different pathways that takes, and there’s a couple different layers of that research.

Mason: Yeah, I’m sure. I’ll put some in the show notes, but that sounds really interesting. Okay, so there are a lot of people who are taking a look at wallets right now, and they are privatizing them, whether that be through an edtech tool, or every once in a while it’s like a government project in some way. But I’m curious, you all define this as a public good, which I think you just described that ethos a little bit. But how do you create a public good in the world?

Open Standards as a Public Good

Jacksón Smith: It’s a great question, ’cause we’re living that answer. We’re day in, day out chatting with people to advocate for public good, ’cause it’s not always an assumption, I think, to your point. There are lots of private actors in this space, and in all spaces.

So I would say, first of all, standards are one of the major public goods, before we even get to wallets, before we even get to a lot of the more tangible public goods. Standards are a public good, in terms of defining open ways for anyone to participate in this ecosystem, to make it so that lots of different schools can get involved and can issue transcripts, can issue credentials in a way that’s actually useful, and makes it easy for others to then accept those credentials and accept those transcripts down the road.

There has been an immense amount of work for many, many decades. There’s been many false starts, many failures, but there are converging standards that make data itself more portable, even though that’s a really hard problem. So I would say that’s number one, that open standards, which is really just shared agreement, right? And that is a public good, as opposed to secret or proprietary standards.

Mason: I just wanna build on that for a second. This is a standard in its purest sense, not like the standards that you have necessarily in your English class, but just because our listenership is educators, not “education is the way.” That is not what you’re saying. You’re saying it’s important to have shared agreements, and have those be open and known and transparent.

Jacksón Smith: Absolutely, yeah. No, that’s a really good disambiguation, because the more jargony word I would use is more “schemas.” But that is just pure jargon. What I mean by that is, a public good to me is like the US Post Office. I don’t know why it has to be the US Post Office, but that’s one of my frames of reference. There’s a protocol: this is what an envelope looks like, this is what a package looks like, here’s how you put a stamp on it. There is infrastructure cost, you might have to pay for a stamp here and there, although there are lots of ways to subsidize that, to do media mail, or mail that’s just free, if you’re a government service. And even then, it’s often very low cost. A stamp is not very expensive.

And the protocol doesn’t determine exactly what you do with it. It doesn’t say, “You can only write to your cousins. You can only write to your parents.” It enables you to write to whoever you want, and the protocol just defines, this is what an envelope looks like. When you’re ready, put a stamp on it, write the address on it, and you can put any kind of contents inside of it.

So when I say open standards as a public good for education, it’s very similar. Here’s what an envelope looks like for a student record, or for a transcript, or for a badge that you earn as part of becoming an Eagle Scout. And in that same breath, all you can put in that envelope. And you can give that to a student, and this is the new protocol that we’ve been working on, is you can give that to that student, that student can hold onto it, and they can carry it forward with them and take it to a new school who, because they’re following the protocol, can recognize that envelope, can open it up, can trust that it came from the original school that issued it to them, in a way that doesn’t require phoning home, doesn’t necessarily require calling up for each individual transaction.

It would be like if you had a driver’s license, but every single time you wanted to… I wanted to use a non-alcoholic example, but this is a simple one: if you wanted to buy beer, every single time the bartender had to call the DMV. That is kind of the state of a lot of student records right now. Every single time someone needs to verify it, you basically have to phone home. So that’s what we’re talking about.

Collect, Understand, Navigate: The Three Verbs of LearnCard

Mason: Yeah, I think that’s really helpful. And for the conversation today, I wanna shift a little bit from what LearnCard has been perceived as doing, which is really the storage capacity to hold credentials. There’s an app store in LearnCard, which is really cool, and it allows you to track essentially learning in real time through a variety of partner apps and tools. But the thing that I really think you all do is the identity formation piece. I think you’re starting to be conversant in this thing, which to me is a missing part of the sector. As I mentioned in the blog at the top, I think it’s the only way this works, this app has to help the user understand themselves better, or else they’re just not gonna use it, because there’s no real reason to.

So you do a couple different things that I think are cool. One, you have these peer endorsements, which are a really fun way to make this collaborative, this collective idea about learning and demonstrating and witnessing, which I think is important. You’re also playing with some really new, interesting navigation and self-discovery tools that I think you all call the GPS, personal GPS. Talk to me a little bit about building that into one of these products. How do you think about identity formation, and what are some of the necessary feature stacks you’re thinking about, as you think about how someone can look at this app and understand themselves better and what they can do?

Jacksón Smith: Yeah. With everything we’ve done, we’ve really converged on three main verbs for the open, free app LearnCard that we’ve been working with communities on. And that’s collect. That’s the first verb, which is about helping learners, helping teachers, collect experiences, formal, informal, in those standardized envelopes essentially that make them portable with consent, abiding by FERPA and all the data regulations.

So that’s a foundational pillar. Having the portability of that record is really important. But then there are two other verbs: collect, understand, and navigate, are really the three main verbs. Once you have, or have started to, collect some of those experiences, you can work on understanding, which is related to this identity formation piece, which is helping you understand how the experiences you have have skills underneath them, right? You can understand what your skills are. You can understand that even if you’ve worked in one industry, say as a waitress, those skills might transfer, and you can actually understand those connections between the skills you already have. Or if you’re a caregiver at home, you’re not even in the formal workplace, but if you’ve collected some of those experiences and articulated them, there are other different ways of understanding those experiences.

So there’s a whole lot that goes into that understanding piece. And then, of course, navigation. This is that learner GPS piece, which we can probably talk about in more depth. Once you collect those experiences, once you have an understanding of yourself and what you’re interested in, what your goals are, then you can actually start navigating towards them. This is where I think a lot of “wallets,” in quotes, in this space fall short, which is that they help you collect, some of them help you understand what’s in there, but rarely do they actually help you take that next step. That next step can be so many different things, and that’s why it’s really hard, because learners are complex. Teachers are complex. Adults are complex. We’re all complex, and a goal is not always “get a job,” although many people do have that goal. And even that goal has many intermediate steps on the way. So helping you break down your goals into digestible chunks and actually take action and move towards those goals and achieve them is really satisfying and rewarding, and is, to me, the main driver of a lot of the work that we do.

Mason: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I didn’t even know about those three verbs, but we kind of stumbled into them, so that’s great, a super helpful map of what you all do. Do you wanna talk about the GPS a little bit? Do you wanna share a screen, or just give a voiceover? How do you wanna handle that?

Jacksón Smith: Actually, I realized I didn’t answer your identity formation question, ’cause I kinda glossed over it, which is just something I feel very passionate about, because especially when we talk about credentials, I feel like there’s sometimes a conversation that credentials can only come from external authorities, that they can only come down at you. This relates to identity formation, which is that you are a sum of things other people have told you that you are.

I’ve worked in this space for a while to try to flip this a bit, and I think about it in terms of concentric rings. You start with the inner ring, which is yourself, self-understanding and self-recognition. You know yourself in many ways, you can articulate things about yourself, we’re all striving, and that is a powerful thing, to say, “I am X.” You don’t need someone necessarily to tell you that you are X. You have the power to stand up and say, “I’m a writer.” I am that.

And once you do, and I know it sounds kind of hokey, there’s research on this though, that that is very powerful, believing that you are something. If you recognize it, it’s habit-forming, and it’s confidence-boosting, and that is itself a skill, something that separates someone who writes but doesn’t say they’re a writer.

I don’t know, there’s back and forth on whether or not that… But the second ring outside of that is peer recognition, which I think has largely been a huge aspect of the Open Badges movement, which is your community is who you spend the vast majority of your time with. That community can be big, it can be small, it can be your family, it can be a friend group, it can be your classroom. These are your peers, and your peers usually see and watch you all the time, and they aren’t as deceived by your same self-distortions that may affect that inner one, whether positively or negatively.

And that is usually more rewarding when a peer recognizes what you’ve done than just, say, an ambient standards authority that has said you’re good at math. That can be really rewarding too, but it’s very different from a friend recognizing. This happens all the time in Scouts. It’s fellow Scouts recognizing that you are an incredible teammate to have on a hike, that you’re gonna help them, you’re wilderness certified trained, and they’ve seen you in action. That means something totally different than just being, say, CPR trained.

And being CPR certified is also valuable, which is that outer ring, the external authority. So I think everything that we do tries to move between these and recognize each of those rings for what they are, which is, they’re all valuable, but they all play a different role. They require different levels of validity and verification, but they’re all key to identity formation. You can’t work with a learner and just describe them in terms of their certifications. Anyone who’s listening to this, think about all of your official certifications, and tell me if just listing those would adequately summarize who you are as a human and what your goals are. The answer would be, I doubt it. I hope not.

Peer Endorsements and the Power of Community Recognition

Mason: Yeah, yeah. I think that’s a really great provocation. Just going back to my first question for you, there’s a specific part of it, which is basically the one about valuable learning experiences that are hard to communicate to someone who doesn’t know you. Like, the fundamental role of a credential is really to do the work of relationship building across where they don’t know you at all. It is to make you portable into different relational settings, professional settings, and all these other settings. But it’s really hard.

I was talking to Julia Freeland Fisher at the Christensen Institute last week, who’s done a ton of work on who you know and social capital and networking. We were just like, this is really, not a blind spot necessarily, but over 50% of people get their job because of who they know. And we’re all saying what they need is actually just more credentials, and we’re not saying what they need is a better network or fabric of who you know. Social media tried that maybe, and LinkedIn is maybe an attempt at what it means to credential your people on these concentric rings of first, second, third degree awareness. I’m curious how you’ve seen the uptake on peer endorsements. Do people feel seen and celebrated in that way? Do they enjoy the collective effort? And what are some other ways you’re thinking about how you might, not necessarily credential social connection, but really make that a part of the wallet infrastructure?

Jacksón Smith: Yeah, it’s a good question, and I will answer it by saying they’re not mutually exclusive, and often they are related, in that a lot of credentialing efforts, so, Scouts is really, I love using Scouts, ’cause we do a lot of work with the World Scouts organization. We have a wallet with them, Scout Pass, that’s used globally, for exactly this, which is more official merit badges that go from troop leaders to Scouts, not mutually exclusive then to badges that individual Scouts can give to each other to recognize the kinds of things they see in each other, day to day, in problem solving or in wilderness exploration challenges.

Why do I say that? Recognition has to come from internal, and recognition is more valuable if there’s a small, or small-ish, community that has bought in to recognizing each other. You can’t impose it. And within that recognition, it’s not always true that that peer recognition immediately, you know, just because Joey from Wilderness Exploration One said I was good at knot tying, that’s not, I’m not gonna go use that credential just to go get a job. In fact, it doesn’t really take seriously what we’re talking about. However, that creates the fabric of recognition within that community that then, over a year, over multiple years, an accumulation of those peer recognitions actually lends to data, lends to situations where that’s evidence for then a troop leader who can say, “Hey, this person has hundreds of peer recognitions saying that so-and-so is really, really good at knot tying, and I’ve seen it, so I’m gonna add my endorsement as well to it.”

And then that can actually almost be aggregated into a larger badge that can then be used externally. It’s not always how it works, but I think it’s something useful to think about, which is, internal communities are often really good at seeing what’s actually happening, and by not being visible to external verifiers, and not immediately being sucked into using this to apply for a job, it actually adds value to the evidence that’s accumulating. But then it reaches a certain level where it is valuable and useful to know.

Mason: Well, and it might even be a breadcrumb trail for stories of demonstration, right? So often it’s hard to know when you demonstrated something well. If you’re not doing constant self-reflective work, it’s like, “What is something that I can do that demonstrates I can tie a knot?” Unless it’s an actual assessment. But if Jacksón’s like, “Oh no, they can tie a knot super well, I’ve seen it.” And maybe that’s like, “Oh, we were climbing and I had to tie a one-handed bowline knot, and I pulled it off.” I can tell this story, there was pressure, and whoever is witnessing that story might be like, “Okay, I can infer from that that this skill would be transferable into these relevant contexts for me.” So I think a story carries so much of this contextual evidence layer that is really missing in our current badging system, and I think the peer endorsements can really start to gesture at that.

Jacksón Smith: Yep, 100%. And this kind of goes to your initial question there. Do we think badges immediately translate into getting jobs? The answer is, yes, in some scenarios, but it’s in some ways proof of what I’m talking about, which is verticals that have agreed on, “These are the certifications that matter.” And because they’ve come into common agreement, a public good, that these credentials matter, those can stand in for the thing that, yes, tends to drive many job decisions, which is who do you know, how do you know them. But I think what you’re saying right now is really important.

Credentials are inert. Credentials are evidence. They are not a story, nor are they very persuasive on their own. I think even in those verticals, there’s a cultural story that says these credentials are valuable, and that’s what gives them cachet, and I think that’s really valuable to pay attention to. I think there are a lot of people in the space that continue to believe that credentials in their inertness will just get people jobs. I don’t have that false belief. I think that’s false. This is why our verbs are collect, understand, because understanding is that tumbler, if you will, into different stories. That is where those inert things, that evidence, can get rearranged, reformed to understand the picture a hundred different ways.

Why Stories Matter More Than Credentials

Jacksón Smith: Why is that extra helpful right now? I’m surprised we haven’t even said the word “AI” in this whole conversation, which is, obviously I think there’s a layer of underlying evidence that’s verifiable, I think that helps cut through some of the AI-generated noise, in terms of AI-generated resumes. I think that’s helpful. I don’t think it’s the entirety of the story. It seems like we’re headed more in a kind of recruiter-style way of advocating for the ways that, I mean, ultimately this is what we really do, which is someone vouches for you, which is also a story. But advocating for the ways that your collection of experiences is fit for the job ultimately. And if someone vouches for you, they’ve just told the story on your behalf, and someone’s like, “Great.” Whether or not they think about it hard, I don’t know, that’s hard to cut through. But assuming their experiences need to map onto being able to do a job, that understanding piece is where everything happens. Evidence comes in many different forms, and being able to articulate why that evidence speaks to your ability to do a job is where you can crack open a lot of this nut.

And I have a feeling it’s gonna be a little bit of, for the screening processes, where you’re filtering out lots, it’s gonna be my agent talking to your agent. It’s like Hollywood, which is kind of weird, kind of interesting, I don’t know if it’s good or not yet, and that’s what I think we’re doing a lot of research on, how can we mitigate all of the horrible things that could cause. Also kind of interesting, because a lot of those hard-to-translate experiences are the ones that, if you can rapidly translate your informal work experience in the moment, that means you actually have more opportunities available to you, versus a kind of lack of confidence or belief that your skills are only in your narrow vertical. Most skills are not in your narrow vertical, and that is also a margin that helps people get the opportunities they’re going for, understanding how translation of these skills and credentials works.

Mason: Right. Yeah, I think that’s important. And ultimately, I’ve seen a lot of these things where you feed in a resume, and it gives you a confidence rating based on how likely you are to be able to perform this job as well. So the more data you have in that resume, the more accurate the inference can be. I think there’s, at some level, that’s kind of what we’re trying to do at a much larger scale with a lot of different factors. And I think AI is one big disruptor in this space, but I think the other one is just general distrust in systems that have been taken for granted for a long time. For a long time we assumed that every institution authoring a credential was like your best employee giving this person a “yes, I can vouch for them.” And now I think people are like, “This might be more of a mid-tier employee giving the recommendation, and I don’t know if I can trust them all the time, so why should we trust their word that this person is great?”

And I wonder if there’s gonna be this really interesting inversion where stories become the thing people actually have to rely on, if higher ed signals continue to drop, and other signals continue to drop through grade inflation and all these other things. There’s just so many things going on right now where it’s hard to trust anything, and really we always come back to being storytelling creatures, and who you know. I think you all are thinking about that in an interesting way. So, that’s all just to say, nice, keep it up. And I’m curious, I do wanna talk a little bit about this GPS tool before we wrap up today, ’cause I think this is a nice indication of your third pillar, that navigation, and also what you all are up to next. So talk to me, show me, whatever you wanna do, but let’s go there.

The Learner GPS: Navigating Pathways in Real Time

Jacksón Smith: Great. Yeah, I’ll maybe show something here in a second. So the third pillar is navigate. We’ve collected experiences, we’ve worked to help articulate and understand those experiences, and now the last one is take action on them, navigate. Something that I… We’ve been in this space for a while, and the learner GPS, this idea of a Google Maps for learning, is not new.

It has actually happened 10 times and died 20. The math doesn’t even make sense, how many times it’s died relative to how many times it’s happened. However, I do think it is the holy grail in terms of unlocking more opportunity for more people around the world, and I think I’m gonna be the person to say, I think now is actually the moment it can happen. To me, a learner GPS has to be learner-centered. That’s relevant because there is an enormous amount of pathways work out there. It’s excellent work, mapping what the pathways are, especially in kind of what we were just talking about.

Here are certifications, if you get this certification, it unlocks these kinds of jobs, and so forth. That is awesome work, and a lot of that work, in my mind, has been more mapping the terrain, right? These are roads that we’re mapping. We don’t have, there has not to date been the, just like you open Google Maps and you wanna get a coffee and you type in “coffee,” and you see 10 different coffee shops in your city, and you can see five different routes to the one you pick, and you can pick if you wanna bike there, you can pick if you wanna walk there. Everyone’s used this GPS, but it’s like that thing does not even come close to existing when it comes to understanding how you can move through learning experiences, in terms of first, the goal articulation of that.

You can start with a specific place in mind, but you can also start with a general idea. You can start with, “I’m hungry.” But you can also start with, “I wanna go to, you know, Le Petit Outre, that’s here in Missoula.” That’s a coffee shop. And once you pick this, and that barely exists, but once you pick that, the route, choosing it. That being said, the infrastructure is rapidly growing, and that has been a lot of the work that we’ve been doing in these open standards, in these schemas, saying, “Here are the various educational entities out here. Here are the various formal, here are the various informal learning opportunities. Here are the jobs out there.” Currently, those are all over the place, and there’s been a lot of work to put together the pieces of a map. I think the opportunity right now is what we’ve been working on, which is to bring those all together, to actually allow pathfinding through all of those roads that so many people have put work into, and to navigate in real time.

‘Cause there’s one aspect of looking at a GPS, which is exploring the map, looking at things, understanding what’s out there. But then once you’ve chosen what your goal is, actually getting turn-by-turn, step-by-step navigation towards that goal, and it doesn’t assume that you’re gonna make a right turn at every correct road. So if you’re heading towards the coffee shop and you make a left turn, and you’re supposed to make a right, it reroutes you. It doesn’t say, “That’s it, game over.” Maybe there are some turns you can make that do, maybe if you crash your car, but generally, if you make a wrong turn, it’s gonna work as hard as it can to reroute you.

And the thing is, the landscape out there, these pathways can be days, they can be months, they can be years, the roads themselves are changing. There’s construction in areas. So this idea that you can be rerouted based on “failure inputs,” or adversarial inputs, maybe is a better way of putting it, that you didn’t get the ACT score you thought you were going to get, or that you wanted. You didn’t get the job offer that you applied for that you thought was for certain. There is no certainty, so having a GPS that can actually walk you through those steps. And then often a lot of these roads are at a very high level: get this certificate, then get this certificate. But that might be days, weeks, months between those certificates, and what does it take for you personally to move from where you currently are, which is where a lot of pathways assume that you’re starting at a starting point that is not the starting point you’re actually starting at. You’re at your home, you’re at your house, you’re on the city park bench. You’re not already at coffee shop one, getting to coffee shop two.

So how can, and that’s where collecting and understanding is important, ’cause that is about understanding where is your home base, where is your starting place. Then working with you to understand what are your goals, plural, sometimes again fuzzy and vague, and then helping you refine those down to something tangible. And then helping you look at all the road systems out there, at a level more granular than just, “Here’s this boulder of a certificate.” It’s like, “Hey, for you personally, you study best with repetition-based learning. Here’s a repetition-based learning plan for this specific sub-module of this specific certification that you can work through. And you know what, three days in, you’re not following it. All right, let’s reroute, let’s figure it out.” And that can be assisted with AI systems, but it can also be a support network, a teacher, parent, guardian, a peer, and all of those things can work in tandem. A lot of it’s about making it easier for all of those different forces in your support network to help you along the way, to help you reroute, help propose, but ultimately, you’re always in control. You are always the driver. You choose the path that you’re on, you choose your goals. No one’s choosing those things for you.

Mason: Right. And the interesting thing, super cool, super fascinating, I may request that you send me a demo that you record separately, and I can just put it in the show notes if you want. But I just, this collecting and understanding is so important for the user, and it’s also so important for the businesses, because we don’t do that very well on the other side. A lot of businesses don’t actually know what their secret sauce is, or what makes them them. But if I’m on a drive, I’m gonna probably pick the coffee shop that’s next to the bookshop that I don’t mind spending time in afterwards. I still want a coffee, but the contextual variable is, it’s in this neighborhood I like, or it’s near-ish, and maybe I might bump into a friend or whatever.

And if you go out for a job, and that job has pretty good work-life balance, you can travel quite a bit, and you can have slower mornings, and those two things matter to me as a person, I’ll pick those much faster than I’ll pick this other thing that maybe pays better and is more aligned to my skill set. So there’s this context, this story layer on both sides, that I think the GPS does to bridge them. Super excited about that work. Would love to show a little bit of the stuff in the show notes. I got a little sneak peek a couple months ago and was super excited about it.

So I think it really complicates the pathways story in a useful, necessary way. Okay, so I think we’re kind of coming to the end of our time, so I just wanna make sure, we’ve covered a lot of ground. I think, generally, we followed the principles of LEF pretty well. But I’m curious, what are some things you would like our listeners to do next? They can download LearnCard on their phones, they can play with it there and see how to use it. What are some other good next steps for our listeners, for you?

Jacksón Smith: Yeah, great question. You can definitely download LearnCard. It’s free, always will be. If you’re interested in working with us to study some of what we’re talking about, if you’re excited about what I’m talking about, if you’re scared of some of the things we’re talking about, we’d love to talk with you and would love to hear and have your input. To me, the “public” of public good is that this is not steered by me alone. We’re working with hundreds of organizations every day, and that, to me, is building that community of public good. So your inputs, Learner GPS in particular, and we have other projects, is one that we cannot build alone. If you think you have an opportunity to pilot something, or do something larger scale, to make that reality of a true Learner GPS come true, we’d love to talk with you. And if you have input for the kind of world that you want this to be, reach out and chat with us.

Mason: Love it. Well, Jacksón, keep up the great work, and thank you for joining me today.

Guest Links

• Jacksón’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacksonsmithcurtis

• Learning Economy Foundation: https://www.learningeconomy.io/

• LearnCard: https://www.learncard.com/

• “Why Learner Wallets Will Fail (And How to Make Sure They Don’t)” by Mason Pashia and Beth Ardner: https://www.gettingsmart.com/2026/01/06/why-learner-wallets-will-fail-and-how-to-make-sure-they-dont/