Edtech Insiders

Week in Edtech July 2, 2025: Google Unveils 50 AI Tools for Schools, $6B in Federal Funding Frozen, ICE Raids Impact Attendance, 60% of Teachers Use AI, and More! Feat. Matt Dalio of Endless Studios & Anne Trumbore, Author of The Teacher in the Machine

Alex Sarlin and Ben Kornell Season 10

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Join hosts Alex Sarlin and Ben Kornell with guest Jacob Kantor as they explore a transformative Week-in-Edtech, from Google’s AI-powered classroom revolution to major political shifts affecting schools nationwide.

Episode Highlights:

[00:03:17] Google launches 50 AI tools for educators through Classroom and Gemini
[00:05:47] Startup funding threatened as Google expands free AI features
[00:13:41] Google solidifies K-12 dominance, pushing out AI competitors
[00:24:51] OpenAI and Microsoft fund new AI training hub for 400,000 teachers
[00:33:22] Survey finds 60% of teachers using AI, saving nearly 6 hours per week
[00:36:22] Federal government freezes $6B in school funding, including EL programs
[00:38:17] ICE raids linked to 30% rise in school absences among Latino students
[00:43:32] Families turning to private edtech as school trust declines
[00:46:49] ISTE highlights include Amplify, Brisk, Quizziz rebrand, Meta’s school mode
[00:50:34] Edtech Insiders WhatsApp group emerges as top source for breaking news

Plus, special guests:

[00:51:36] Matt Dalio, Founder of Endless Studios on teaching real-world skills through student-designed video games
[00:53:56] Anne Trumbore, author of The Teacher in the Machine, on AI, learning platforms, and the future of teaching

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[00:00:00] Ben Kornell: Second thing is how is this gonna affect the ed tech space? And there's like the new nascent startups, there's the emergent AI native companies, and then there's the legacy players. I think for the new startups, this is going to basically crush funding. Because if you're a new startup and you're trying to get to feature parody with Google, and Google is so broad and they're accelerating and it's essentially free, it is going to be really, really hard to make a claim that you're gonna be a billion dollar company with Google distorting the market.

To your point with 

[00:00:36] Jacob Kantor: superintendents that have a use case that Brisk didn't solve for, or a use case that Magic School didn't solve for Kira, whoever, whoever in the space doesn't solve for. But now Google might have that use case for them and that's the entry point. And I think for us on the call, right, like that gets me excited 'cause the usage is still not high in education on all things ai.

So if this is gonna be the catalyst to really get the next 10 million folks to start to use it and like the collateral damages, some companies potentially go away. But I think that's inevitable in every space, not just in education. 

[00:01:11] Alex Sarlin: But what it might do the, it might have collateral damage and basically you said it before yourself, Ben, being like when an AI education company that might be doing something really interesting knocks on the door of a school or a district, they might say, why do we need you?

We've got Google. It does everything. And that could have a major effect on the space. If you're saying what are the risks to Google, that's a different question. They probably are there, but I think there's a risk in just. Distorting the market, as you always say, and also quelling innovation because there are a lot of people doing interesting things.

And if everything rolls up into Google eventually, if Google's attention turns elsewhere, then the innovation might slow down.

Welcome to EdTech Insiders, the top podcast covering the education technology industry from funding rounds to impact to AI developments across early childhood K 12 higher ed and work. You'll find it all 

[00:02:05] Ben Kornell: here at EdTech Insiders. Remember to subscribe to the pod, check out our newsletter, and also our event calendar, and to go deeper, check out EdTech Insiders Plus where you can get premium content access to our WhatsApp channel, early access to events and back channel insights from Alex and Ben.

Hope you enjoyed today's pod.

Hello, EdTech Insider listeners. I'm so excited to have our amazing friend of the pod and guest, Jacob Cantor, the one and only Chief Dodo, who is one of the great connectors in EdTech. And of course, Alex and I, we've known Jacob for a long, long time, and so Alex and I are just excited to have you here on the pod today.

Welcome, Jacob. Yeah, 

[00:02:55] Jacob Kantor: thanks for having me. Takes me back to like episode four talking about SR dollars and tutoring, so your guys' stock. I'm glad we bought early. Bought early. 

[00:03:05] Alex Sarlin: Well, I mean, we brought stock in you too, man. You are doing some incredible ed tech reporting and amplifying of things over the last couple of weeks, especially during Isti right now.

It's been amazing. 

[00:03:17] Ben Kornell: Purely because of fomo. So for the weekend EdTech this week, we wanted to have Jacob join us. He has a bombshell post that really captures a lot of what was going on at Isti. But truth be told, there is so much news going on in this space right now. Normally we get the July lull. This is the total opposite.

Yeah. Alex, in addition to all that we have going on in the news, what else do we have coming up on the pod? 

[00:03:43] Alex Sarlin: So in today's podcast we have Matt Dalio from Endless Studios. He's doing game design for high school and college all over the world. It's incredibly interesting. We talked to Anne Trumer who just put out a, a really awesome new book called The Teacher In The Machine.

She's from Darden, but she's ex Coursera and Novo Ed and Warden and has just been in the space a while. And this book is amazing. That's in this episode on the main pod. This week we put out an episode about, for Edthena did this amazing Teacher Leader Impact awards. So we have recording. We met with I think five or six teachers using AI in the classroom, doing really interesting things around professional development.

We need to be talking to educators more on this podcast. But this was a great episode and the next few weeks we talk to Tammy Windup from Securely. We talked to Sam Whitaker is at Study Fetch, really amazing AI platform ton vr, which does AR in India. It's a fun times, but. Let's talk Google. Let's talk Google.

We cannot ignore what's happening in Google this week. 50 announcements 

[00:04:41] Ben Kornell: at T. Let's just let that sink in for a second. I think one of the challenges of Google is that instead of doing one announcement, they do 50 announcements, but everybody who's in the know in ed tech is like, whoa. This is basically Google for Education 2.0.

I think Jacob, you were the first one to put that out there. I remember when Google Classroom was announced long ago, it was a little over 10 years ago, and all the LMSs were like, oh crap. This is going to totally distort our market. I was one of the first users of Google Classroom, so I was like, this is great.

It integrates with everything, right? This feels like another one of those moments, and I just was like taking a listen and I heard this tiny cry and it was like. Thousands of startups in San Antonio who are like, we just got our entire businesses crushed. I don't know. Jacob, from the front lines, tell us what's your take and first like orient us a little bit to the Google announcement.

What's meaningful, what's coming out, and what do you think the implications are? 

[00:05:47] Jacob Kantor: So it was interesting to see that. And then last week Google invited a number of us to preview some of this. So they had a, I think it was like a two hour, Hey, this is what's going on, this is what's taking place. And then we were sworn to secrecy until isti.

So it was interesting to see at launch. And then I saw the alert, I'm making breakfast for my two kids and I see this launch, and I'm like, okay, I need to get this in the ecosystem. Right? So it was kind of just what I do, but what's interesting in the space of, to your comment of a lot of cries is I do wonder the disruption for a lot of people that are building on my end, I probably meet with about 10 founders a week.

Building in, you know, and I'm normally actually referring them to your guys' use case, generative use case. And I'm like, where do you fit in here? Because if you don't know, I'm not gonna know. Right. So it's interesting to see how that will kind of shape up with all the players if we wanna name them or not name them, right.

Of how this impacts where they're gonna be going into districts that are now hampered for dollars and knee capped for dollars and say, Hey, it's $10 a student. And districts are gonna turn around and say, Hey, I have 50 offerings from Google that are free. Like, help me understand the dynamics of paying for something versus not.

And you know, and Alex, I think we were all at the November event at Google, right? Where they had like the, I still have my badge behind me where there was 11 different tables. We an LM was one of them and learn about and all these different things. And one of them was this. It just wasn't. What it is now.

So I like foreshadowed it for sure at that time in November at a great event. Thanks for the invite, Google. 

[00:07:30] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, I mean, it's almost impossible to sort of overstate how broad these announcements are. I literally printed out maybe 40 pages of all the blog posts and all of the, they put together a terrific st sort of product guide out there, just trying to sort them and make sense of them.

And I think I have a little bit of a taxonomy mentally of some of the pieces. We don't have to name names, but I think we could talk about some of the use cases that Google is sort of leaning into in this big, big way. And they are supercharging, supercharging, the Google education ecosystem. I mean really in ways that sort of large and small, behind the scenes in front of the scenes, flashy and very nerdy.

It's really interesting. I mean the sort of main. Focus is this 30 new AI tools for teachers. So they're taking Notebook, lm, and gems, some of their main Gemini offerings, and basically trying to turn them into teacher tools. They're offering teachers to create their own gems, to create their own notebook, LMS with their own material.

They can do suggested feedback inside their Google Docs like Glow and Grow. Gemini can make forms now and forms are used for assessments. They could do rubrics, they can do bulk grading. They have a practice quizzing feature, which we covered in the pod about a month ago. That was for 18 plus. Now they're going for under 18.

So high school students can basically create their own really complex practice quizzes, and then all their tools can use visuals. They can use video. They're doing standards. They took all the standards from one ed tech case and pulled them into the platform. They're doing early reading. They're doing integrations with SISs LMSs.

They've made their own camera system to be used with Chromebooks, but it can be used with any system in classrooms. It is such a biggest set of announcements. Where should we even start? I mean, so many startups are doing parts of this, and then Google is coming along and sort of wiping the table clean and saying, we got it all, and it's all inside Google Classroom, which most classrooms already use.

What stood out to you? Ben, let me start with you, Jacob. I know you have tons of thoughts on this, but Ben, what stood out to you about some of these announcements? What was like, what made your eyebrows go up? 

[00:09:35] Ben Kornell: I think with this kind of announcement, there's a tendency to dive into each feature, and my first instinct is actually a step back.

How is Google launching all of these things? One is AI is a unique technology in that it is actually suited for a huge number of use cases rather than narrow use cases. So one of the things we've been talking about is the ed tech kind of thinking in the past was land and expand, get a narrow, like solve a certain problem and then go broadly.

But as we've seen magic school, school, ai, brisk, there's this sense that actually the motion here is do everything with AI and Google is. Uniquely positioned one, because they've got access directly to the AI to Gemini, the LLM. And so they can bring these broad features, but many of what we're seeing are really actually packaged versions of what they're doing with consumers, what they're doing elsewhere.

And so whenever you see a Google announcement at their IO conference, what you need to do is infer this is coming to education in three months, and IO was three months ago. Basically this announcement is everything we said at io. We've packaged for educators. Second thing is, how is this gonna affect the ed tech space?

And there's like the new nascent startups, there's the emergent AI native companies, and then there's the legacy players. I think for the new startups, this is going to basically crush funding because if you're a new startup and you're trying to get to feature parody with Google, and Google is so broad and they're accelerating and it's essentially free, it's going to be really, really hard to make a claim that you're gonna be a billion dollar company with Google distorting the market like this, I think the dinosaurs, the legacy ones are actually sitting pretty good because they were pre.

Ai. And so they just have loads of content and they have distribution channels and sales, and so they have a stickiness that has been hard to displace. I mean, unfortunately they've been around for 50 years and it's hard to see them totally getting disrupted. I'd be watching Amplify, you know, in K 12, just because I think they're the most nimble of them.

And then I would be watching HMH because they're probably the most bellwether organization, but those folks have banked on assessment, and that to me is like the Google has never gone into assessment. Now they're in assessment. So it leads me to the AI natives and I. I would be most worried if I were in the kind of magic school zone.

I'm getting all these cost pressures as a superintendent, and now I'm already using Google Classroom. And let's be clear, the only people that get these features are the people that are paying for the Google Workspace for schools services. So it is not everybody who's on Google Classroom immediately gets this.

This is only their enterprise customers. But I do think that it starts raising real questions around, can these AI upstarts be the new LMS or will the combination of Google accelerating and distorting price down and then canvas, which is totally recapitalized and huge, does that actually corner the market a little bit?

So from an investor standpoint, truthfully, this is what you hate to see if you're an EdTech investor. 'cause you're just like, oh crap, we've got these big behemoth companies for whom this business is a rounding error. Still. Like, let's remember. Yes, still. But now that Google's paying attention and doubling down on education, they are going to.

Really move the market around is my take. I don't know what you think Jacob or Alex on that. 

[00:13:41] Jacob Kantor: Jacob, jump in. You know, Ben, I think your point of this being for paid users, I think the stat I saw was like 150 million users. I'll fact check that before we're done here, just in case that's wrong. But I think one of the most prominent messages, at least to me over the last 24 hours was around, oh, if it's free, what's the safety like?

We've seen this in social media. Facebook is free, but they're using your data. That came up. Probably in 50 of the like 200 some odd comments that came on that post, which is fair, right? Like everybody's looking at something and saying, Hey, how's the data gonna be used? But one of the things that we were told last week, and also in this announcement, right, is like safety, common sense, privacy, admin controls, vault audits, data tagging.

This isn't like a five by night company looking at data and privacy, right? This is a thoughtful rollout. And if as I thought through this announcement, and even last week, right, it was like I saw some of these things in November of last year. So this is going basically seven months later that this actually came to life.

That means they've had a long, long time to make sure that they do this correctly. And as we all know, right? That day I saw 11 different tables doing 11 different things and they do not all talk to each other until there's like a proven. Hey, there's something here because they don't want anyone to get skewed by, which is new in the way you build for me.

But like just seeing how that was and being like, you should probably talk to table two. You guys could totally approach the market together, but that's not how it's set up, right? Everyone has to prove out their own use case and then it is actually a thing. So I think this was thoughtfully done. Everyone can kind of rest assure that this isn't like a, let's just turn this on and disrupt everybody.

[00:15:33] Alex Sarlin: Yes. I agree. I was really surprised at how thoughtful and how clearly sort of user informed many of these features were. And when I talk about sort of the flashy and the nerdy, it's like there's some really juicy stuff in here for the IT nerds for the people who want to understand how to audit the data coming through ai.

In this way, we're getting enterprise level security, or they talk many times in these announcements about how the data is not used for model training. That's like baseline here, but there's admin controls, there's student group APIs, so that grouping can be sent back and forth. There's like all of this sort of infrastructure pieces in this announcement that are.

I think meat, good meat, bread, meat in a good way. For the people who are nervous about exactly that kind of thing, they're saying, well, this is a big company, you know, massive company. If they're doing something in education, what's the ulterior motive? And I think there's some really flashy stuff here. I was really excited to see the Notebook LM Video Overview announcement.

That's awesome. Or this idea of the phonics skills dashboard. They're doing all this interesting work for read alongs and early reading, which is also potentially a threat to a number of different startups that are sort of thinking about that. But they're doing stuff that's really visible and exciting.

They're also doing a lot under the hood to make sure that it's safe and private and that admins have a lot of control and that schools can implement it. And I think those. Features are deeply informed by conversations with the many, many, many Google Classroom users and CTOs and CAOs around the country that already are devoted to Google Classroom.

This was a pretty impressive set of features 'cause they do their fancy stuff. They talk about eight second videos with VO three, so you can make like totally new, very flashy videos inside presentations or offer them alongside your materials for students with sound. But then they're also really, it seems like they're buttoning up the backend and that's what people really need to see to adopt this stuff.

[00:17:30] Ben Kornell: Yeah, I mean one of the things that I'm thinking about is what does the adaptive change look like that pairs with the technical change. And what we know is that part of why education is slow to evolve has to do not with like can the technology do it, but what are the practices and behaviors? And one of the, when we talked with Armand, the founder of Brisk, one of the points that he made is that these are looped systems where to do a different writing assignment, you need a different assessment system.

You need a different set of tooling. And so the amount of change you have to navigate can feel really overwhelming. And that's why it takes years often for people to implement or adopt new systems or tools. What I'm really. Encouraged by is the ability to piecemeal adopt use cases in this AI environment.

And when you've got a player like Google connecting all of those dots, imagine your school is actually a scatterplot of users. On the Rogers adoption curve, you have your innovators and your early adopters and your early majority, late majority, and laggards. And we can talk about the theory there, but regardless, like everybody in the building has a different layer of comfortability with the technology.

Now with Google having this breadth, there's an entry point for everyone. So if I'm a superintendent and I'm thinking, do I wait two years to roll this out, do I not? Google's a great bet because it's comprehensive. It's always going to be on the front edge of the technology because it's right there with Gemini.

And many of these use cases are going to resonate with just a small handful of my teachers, but I could get it all in one. So you're talking about like one of the big things with Google has always been, they've been hesitant to go down under age 13. I mean, that makes it a non-starter for schools to adopt.

Now I can adopt it, I can have leveled reading, and I can have it in other languages, and I can do elementary focus groups and I can use it for high schoolers. So this, while I think the story is certainly about what Google has rolled out, I think it is. The So what about this is that the adoption barrier, the adoption friction is incredibly reduced with this kind of announcement.

[00:20:01] Jacob Kantor: Our mutual friend Patrick, who's now soup at Linwood. Right. Congrats to Patrick. One of the things that he built probably a year ago with PlayLab and Yusef and kind of everything that's going on on that side, right? He built like a district AI toolkit with an LCAP generator and a board document, minute preparation tool and parent engagement.

He just went to his office and said, tell me what is taking three hours of your time that I can help build you and remove 90% of it. So he just literally went to the entire administration and said, what is something where if you cut would make your life dramatically better and more happy, and you just built it in like a Saturday morning?

Right. So just imagine he's also top 10 of techie superintendents out there, right? But imagine now to your point with superintendents that have a use case that Brisk didn't solve for, or a use case that Magic School didn't solve for Kira, whoever, whoever in the space doesn't solve for. But now Google might have that use case for them and that's the entry point.

And I think for us on the call, right, like that gets me excited. 'cause the usage is still not high in education on all things ai. So if this is gonna be the catalyst to really get the next 10 million folks to start to use it and like the collateral damage is, some companies potentially go away. But I think that's inevitable in every space, not just education.

[00:21:28] Alex Sarlin: Yes, I wanna agree with both of you with one particular case, which is that there's lots of entry points here. For the very sophisticated users like Patrick and the early adopters within each school that are really trying to do exciting things with ai. They're gonna start creating these videos using Google Vids, which is now available for everyone, and then putting AI video in there and then making their own podcasts.

They go along with every assignment, and then I mean, some really flashy stuff as possible with very little. Training or work now, but even so, only early adopters are gonna do it for now. But then they have things like, Hey, you brainstorm a field trip plan tool. They have a draft, a student letter of recommendation tool.

They have a create math story, world problems tool. They have drafting syllabi or lesson planning. A lot of the, I won't call it low hanging the common. Pieces of what educators do every day that take a lot of time, which is exactly where the tool suites companies have been going. Google just did them all too, and they're right in there.

So there's so many easy entry points in there. It does bulk grading, so you can create a form. Through Gemini, you can basically take a slideshow that you've made or some document that you've made as a teacher, turn it using AI into a form which makes it an assessment. Make a rubric with it, and then bulk grade with that.

So you could take a form and turn it into an assignment that grades itself and create a gem alongside it. That becomes a brainstorm partner. They have these default gems, a study partner, a brainstorm partner, a real world connector, so that you can always say, how does this connect to my actual life? And it will tell you.

It's like they're trying to make it so easy to grab on and start using these features. And you know, one thing that is worth saying, we haven't said it yet, but you mentioned Ben, how Google IO is this short lag time Now, if it's announced at io, it's probably coming to education. I think part of the thinking there is Google Gemini is still in competition with some pretty aggressive.

AI startups, notably open AI and anthropic, and I think what they're doing here is they're saying, we already have this huge advantage in K 12. We are already there. We are already helping teachers and students all over the country, millions and millions of users. Now we are going to just become the default AI system for K 12, and we're going to really lean into that.

There's a lot of work, even though AI speeds things up, this is a lot of work that is announced right here. A lot of engineering work, a lot of design work. Like this is not a feature. This is an entire ecosystem. They're launching 12 new Chromebooks. I mean, this is a lot of work here. 

[00:23:59] Ben Kornell: So your point of view is this is no longer a rounding error for Google?

I don't. So this is strategic. I think it's a strategic, yeah. You're kind of connecting the dots from where we were in the fall where it was like, whoa, learning. Is a huge use case for ai and Google is the player now who's saying, we are gonna place a bet here. That's what you think? Yes. 

[00:24:19] Alex Sarlin: I think they're doubling down their chips.

They're like, we already had a major first mover advantage here. They also did with Android, they also did with Google Docs and Maps and some of the tools that we use. We've talked about that. But in education, Google Classroom is a huge deal and has been for a decade or more, and Chromebooks are a huge deal.

So they're like, we are already there. We're going to make AI and education possible and happen, and we're gonna box out open AI and anthropic. That's, I think, the strategic part of it is that even if they would never say it that way, but I think that's sort of implicit in here. 

[00:24:50] Ben Kornell: What do you think are the risks of that?

Like My concern is that in the past, private companies, tech companies have been burned by their work with schools in that maybe it's teachers pushing against it or the politics of education, or it could be data privacy. And we've seen kind of these start stops. To me this, even the three of us have gotten to know most of the team there.

They're putting heavy hitters. Behind this within Google, what do you see the risk for education, the risk for Google, the risk for our space writ large. 

[00:25:29] Alex Sarlin: I mean, Jacob, I'd love to hear your answer to that too. I have one quick answer, which is that I think that there is a risk of this sort of collateral damage of there is this rich ecosystem of AI education players popping up trying to do all sorts of interesting things.

And I worry that this, it's an attempt that I think is totally smart and fair to say we are gonna actually make AI in education viable by. Giving enterprise level security by doing common sense privacy by taking tools that you already use and know how to use and making them AI enabled. I get that. But what it might do the, it might have collateral damage and basically you said it before yourself, Ben, being like when an AI education company that might be doing something really interesting knocks on the door of a school or a district, they might say, why do we need you?

We've got Google. It does everything. And that could have a major effect on the space. If you're saying that, what are the risks to Google? That's a different question. They probably are there, but I think there's a risk in just. Distorting the market, as you always say, and also quelling innovation because there are a lot of people doing interesting things.

And if everything rolls up into Google eventually, if Google's attention turns elsewhere, then the innovation might slow down. 

[00:26:36] Ben Kornell: There's pricing concerns too. I think if Google ends up becoming dominant in share, I saw that their pricing increase, they have new pricing changes on the CDW website and in our ed tech insiders.

Plus WhatsApp chat. Please subscribe. Now, there's talk of 30 to 45% price increases coming. So the days maybe of this being free for all or like a free, as Google focuses this on a, as a linchpin of their model, it could distort prices down. It could also capture more budget, and that could have, you know, secondary effects on our system.

[00:27:15] Jacob Kantor: So I kind of look at this in a different risk versus reward. Like the reward is, can we get the numbers of teachers from 40% using AI up to 50 and 60%? The positives, right? The negatives. I wanna say in March, I was presenting with Los Angeles County Office of Ed, and something that Krista over there said that has not left my brain is every time he presents on AI or tools to different districts.

There's 2 million students in la There's 81 districts. So he's in a lot of rooms with a lot of sups. He says to all the principals and superintendents, like whatever tool you choose, if this helps your teachers with grading and it saves them an hour, but then you give them an extra hour of work. This eliminates the use case for what you're trying to solve for.

So if you're eliminating an hour of grading because you have a great new tool, but then you just added on additional work, like that is not helping with burnout, that is not helping with happiness at work, that's not helping with your retention problems. So like this idea of like if these tools help, if there's more users and then these tools then help teachers save time, energy, be more happy at work, like can they then have an hour back to themselves for whatever their interests are?

If they have kids to go do bedtime, read books, play in the pool, whatever. It's summertime, right? So like, can we have more users saving time, but then not adding additional work on their plate? And I think that's a system of thought, right? Like that's a. Thing to think through as a principal where you're like, well, saving them an hour.

Like, you know, we all have folks we work with where we're like, oh, I saved you an hour. Could you do some more for me? So that, that's more of a change in overall kind of thought process towards work. But that gets me super excited because if we can have happy teachers doing less busy work, can they bring their whole selves to work and then work with our students, being a happier individual like that gets me super excited.

Right. Having kids now in, in first grade and going into tk, like I want their teachers to have the best lives outside of the classrooms because when they're having their best lives, they bring their best selves and then our kids experience the best version of them. Right. So that gets me super excited.

Yeah. I 

[00:29:31] Alex Sarlin: think the two things that are not yet. Obviously addressed here, even though I think they're trying to address them are, as you say, they mentioned in these, some of these press releases and blogs, how some of the teacher features are intended to save time, make things easier, make things more pleasant and fun, and give teachers more time back to build relationships and go deeper on individual student support and things like that.

There's a little bit of a mention of that, but I don't think that's really the focus of it and that that is what a lot of the other ed tech companies in AI sort of focus on as their value prop. They also don't talk too much about integrity, which is really interesting. I think Google already has some integrity stuff built in.

I mean, we know it does because it has various version histories. It has, it has stuff that, some things in there. But it's interesting to me and I, I find it positive frankly, that this isn't the core of this. It's not that Google is saying, oh, Google Classroom is now a place where you can use AI without worrying about.

Plagiarism and cheating. It's saying now it's a place where you can use AI to do these amazing things. Turn your assignments into podcasts and videos. Give your students a brainstorming partner to work with while they do their assignments. I personally just really like the focus on the sort of what if, what's possible now, rather than the how do we protect the status quo or you know, things like that.

But I think there is probably room and they will. Adapt this over time to both to incorporate a little bit of those things in there. And then, and then, you know, Ben, I think to your point about the raised pricing, I'm not sure education's as much of a rounding error to Google as it once was. I think that there's a strategic piece of this, and there may be a business piece of this.

They're putting enormous resources into this. I mean, both from an executive standpoint, they have amazing people working on it. Part partially because they love education, but they're also amazing, you know, high level people. But. You don't often see this many announcements. This is a lot, a lot of time and energy and work.

And they're mostly interconnected. I mean, to your point, Jacob, about the tables at the event, right? It's not, I don't see this as six different launches that feel totally disconnected. There is a system here, they announce how the class management piece can now do a system where you can, teachers can broadcast instructions onto every student's Chromebook and those instructions can be read aloud or can be translated into any language.

And that is something that ed tech, we've seen other ed tech startups do. But it also goes along with some of the other pieces of this. They have, they, they camera controls, they have the ability to do that within groups. It's not fully interconnected, but there's like a ecosystem play here. I mean, this really feels like Google is saying this is what education should look like in 2025 and we're gonna make it possible to do that.

It's 

[00:32:00] Ben Kornell: really interesting. Before we move on to other headlines, I think, you know, normally we start the show and we kind of go through the different players. We've been on Google for a while. I guess the question I want to understand, Alex, you mentioned open AI and you mentioned anthropic. I. What does this mean for them and how do you think their strategy evolves?

So we've talked to Drew Bent and we saw that there's the kind of learning or study mode on Anthropic. It does seem like OpenAI is doing more direct partnerships. They've got the California Community College Partnership and the country of Estonia. They have an entire partnership with the country. So it seems to be like more governmental and a little bit more leaning higher ed.

How do you think that, you know, with this news, I actually love your take. This is like Google's saying, we own K 12, we're locking it up. What does that mean for the other. Two or three. And then of course, meta, we don't need to cover this, but meta is basically dropping like a hundred million dollars for every AI researcher they can get.

From my humble perspective, this reeks of desperation, not of strategic moves. And if you're getting a bunch of mercenary AI people, the moment the money runs out, like what are you going to do? But how do you think the others will play and, and parlay? I think 

[00:33:22] Alex Sarlin: if you're open AI and you're working on Chad GBT products or, or, or SOA or any of their stuff, or you're anthropic right now and you've been focusing on higher ed as your entry point to education, which I think makes total sense for both of them.

I think you see this as a, a bright line being like, if we are going to go into K 12 in a serious way, we need a value prop that can get close to this. We need a reason that they would use us either on top of, or instead of I. Classroom with all of these AI features and that raises the bar a lot for the investment you'd have to make to make that actually happen because what open AI and and topic have been doing for higher ed, for the most part, it's, they haven't been doing that much adaptation of their consumer products.

They've been doing little bits of adaptation, but not that much. I mean, even those deals with, with community colleges or with Estonia or, or they, they have a, a couple of other countries I think they've been announcing those are huge deals, but it's not like they're like, okay, and we're gonna make a version of had GBT.

That's totally different and it works only for the community colleges has all these special features. We're gonna really put engineering behind it. That's just not the strategy. They're basically like, how can we give it to you for bulk pricing and give you the basic safety mechanisms you need And to get into K 12 schools means you are not gotta know.

FERPA and copa. You have to know what teachers want and what they're scared of. You need to know what superintendents want and what they're scared of. Jacob, you're an expert at this, like I think Google is basically saying if you're gonna come into K 12, you can't bring it weak. You gotta really invest If you're gonna do that, that doesn't mean that they won't, but I mean, open AI has a lot of money to throw around, but I don't know.

I wouldn't if I were them because I think it's a pretty high hurdle to jump over to compete with this suite of features, especially given how embedded Google already was before this. It's not like this. This is like Google's first entry into K 12. They've been everywhere for a long time, so I think this is gonna be off-putting for them in a big way, but we'll see.

Maybe they'll come with a completely different value prop. 

[00:35:16] Ben Kornell: If I were open ai, I would basically say Microsoft. You know the Microsoft Suite copilot and you know, their kind of ecosystem of tools for schools. You're our best bet for enterprise and K 12, like, we're gonna work through you. And so maybe that is the bright side of this announcement for EdTech startups.

While you have one heavyweight leaning in, you may have the other heavyweights leaning out. To be fair, that would be 

[00:35:45] Alex Sarlin: my guess, but we'll see how they respond. Maybe next week OpenAI has some massive announcement about what they're doing in K 12, 

[00:35:51] Ben Kornell: and if they do, you're gonna hear about it here on Itec Insiders.

So let's talk about some other big news. And Jacob, you know, we've been talking to you over the last three years about funding in the K 12 ecosystem. Big news from the federal government about. Funding being essentially frozen. What are you hearing? Like what is the kind of on the ground take about basically six to $7 billion in funding holdbacks mounts by the White House, uh, last week.

[00:36:22] Jacob Kantor: Yeah. I know Tony Thurman here in California is doing kind of a press conference a bit later today about it, but he posted something I think yesterday, which was like $6 billion being withheld. I don't have it right in front of me, but it was, you know, for some of the things that like have been funded for the longest of times and you know, some of it hurts my heart dearly, right?

Like. EL support. I was the kid that had EL language support four days a week because I came from a different country not knowing any English. So like this is literally my story on display, right? So it's six, I think it was six or $7 billion being withheld. Of course there'll be crazy amounts of litigation and then, you know, we're not there yet.

But this pairs with also some of the other stuff that's going on with like chronic absenteeism on the rise and not just by a little amount. And I know we'll get into that in a bit too. You know, there was, uh, research put out yesterday by Stanford. Don't mind me, I'm just reading from the report. New research recently released from Stanford found 22% jump in absences from five California school districts during January and February compared to the same months and previous years.

The difference analysts say ice raid carried out under former President Biden and Trump for the first two months of the year. The study found absences increased in the majority Latino student populations by 30% for those in pre-K, 27% for students in K through five and 17% for middle school, and 8% for high school.

Pretty alarming as I understand we're, you know, very on announcement on Google, but like kids are afraid to go to school, you know, I'm sure you, social media is hitting your guys' feeds too, of like kids going to graduation and graduating and then being detained by ice. Like, I don't even have the words other than heartbreaking.

[00:38:17] Alex Sarlin: We always try to toe the line here 'cause it is easy to get carried away. At least for me personally, when we talk about what is happening in the federal government level right now, this is the sort of polite way to put it that I'm gonna, I'm gonna try for, which is that this federal government leans very heavily towards the private sector, over the public sector and of any kind of come in good, right?

Which is what education is. And obviously feels like they got voted in on this mandate to be anti-immigrant in however you wanna define that. And I think that combination for schools, especially public schools, which are incredibly diverse populations and have lots of language learners, have lots of Latino students of all stripes, it's creating this really weird set of headlines.

I mean, one, one of the things that I, I saw, I've learned this from you, Jacob this week as well, you know, the. Trump's executive order on AI in education. There's now a movement where like 60 companies are offering all of these materials to K 12 schools for learning. That is pretty exciting. Professional development materials that that list includes Google, Microsoft, Intel, Oracle, OpenAI Magic School, right from the EdTech sector, Nvidia, Adobe.

I named like eight and there are 60. That is good news. It's exciting to see the. Private sector being able to offer things to K 12 schools if they're done in a thoughtful way and you know, but it's offering, right? It's not mandating in any way. I think that's exciting. At the same time that leaning towards the private sector, that sort of like adoration of it has the flip side of pulling money from afterschool programs and language learning programs and all of these things we, you know, learn to expect in in this country.

We also saw this week I was a really interesting finding from the Bellwether newsletter talking about how one of the things, we've mentioned this a couple times in the pod, but one of the things sort of buried in this reconciliation bill that just passed the Senate this week. I think it's still a 10 year basically disallowing states to regulate AI for 10 years.

I think there was one moment they were just trying to get it to five years with some kind of thing, and that really matters because there's over a thousand bills. That have been introduced by various state governments to regulate the AI industry in various ways, including in education. And this would basically wipe them all out if it passes as is.

And we're, we're actually pretty close to that happening. So you have these like different things happening from the federal government that are obviously incredibly negative for students and teachers and schools, and at the same time they're incredibly bullish about AI and technology and education, which is, it's a difficult combination to sort of get your head around.

Ben, what do you make of that? 

[00:40:46] Ben Kornell: Yeah, I mean there's what is happening and then there is the behavioral implications of what's happening. And I think there's a lot of concern about what funding looks like going forward for lots of governmental programs. And so what it leads is schools to be more conservative and they're more conservative on what they're spending and so on for families that are doing pickup and drop off at school.

Is ICE gonna be there? Is ice not going to be there? It will. Even if I am not an illegal immigrant, might I be detained? And so, you know, this idea of, I think there's a particular focus on sanctuary cities or like sanctuary zones for these, the ICE raids. And while I think the sheer number of them are actually.

Relatively small to the like US population, the media effect, the perception effect is very, very large. And so you're having families being more conservative and staying home and not engaging. And I think what we don't have today is a sense of a roadmap of where this is all heading, either from the Trump administration or from state governments, or from, you know, the other political parties.

I think it's telling that in, this is a little adjacent to EdTech, but Newsom just change SE a, which is like a landmark environmental bill in order to enable more housing and he cut funding for illegal immigrants. So there's a way in which there's some follow on effects that even in a state like California are happening.

So what do you do if you're like. You and your family are feeling less safe. Your school district is like experiencing either cuts or just huge uncertainty. It actually goes back to your kind of premise, which is it actually makes private sector options look more appealing. And so there's a way in which there's a self-fulfilling prophecy here around homeschooling around these like pay for afterschool because you can't rely on the government funded one.

And so. You know, what we've had in EdTech and what we've had in our space is this deep partnership in a B2B way with schools and districts and the delivery mechanism. And now I think parents with any means are now looking outside of that system for more stability, more reliability. And I think, you know, it's gonna be.

Over the next three years, it's gonna be harder to be a superintendent than it ever has been. 

[00:43:32] Jacob Kantor: Yeah. And you know, here in LA right, you have the L-A-U-S-D superintendent kind of front and center saying, Hey, I was that student a long time ago. Right? I was the student that education brought me into undergrad, into master's, PhD, whatever credentials he has, but also now leading Miami-Dade multiple large school districts.

And now I'm LA USD, and that's the second largest district in America. Like these are the next leaders. I mean, truly, right? Like I say it and it gives me warm and fuzzies, but like, that's me. These kids are me 30 years ago. Right? 

[00:44:11] Ben Kornell: Yeah. So I think this is where a lot of the politics today is short term, but these are policies that are gonna really have long, long-term implications and you know, the trust and the kind of.

Basically this is all a culmination of like institutional decay, institutional mistrust, and this feeling that the ground is not solid under your foot. And I think so many of the people that are listening to this podcast, I'm sure are doing EdTech because we believe that education is the lever for opportunity.

And that opportunity might be economic, it might be, you know, pursuing your passion and so on. And you know, this kind of land of opportunity mantra we've had in the US seems further and further away when we have these kind of, you know, systemic issues. 

[00:45:04] Alex Sarlin: The narrative of sort of school versus AI or school versus technology.

I don't want to think about it that way. And I feel like that's the framework that a lot of this stuff, I think forces people into. 

[00:45:16] Ben Kornell: Yeah, it feels like the front section around, wow, AI is changing a game. And the back section, which is, which we've just talked about, which is funding from the government, attendance going down, you know, these pressures and stresses on school.

At some point, schools are going to break if they haven't broken already. And so what happens then? And do we need to invest in more resilient schools? Do schools need to slow down their change curve because they just have to cope with all that they're dealing with now? Or is this a reinvention moment for what schooling is and can be?

You know, the optimist in me is like, I see so much entrepreneurial energy out there that, you know, amidst all of these crises, maybe this is the opportunity. So, no good segue from this one. I think we'll continue to monitor this one, but I think back to school is going to be the Bumpiest ride. It's been since we came back from COVID and I think that's gonna be something for us to watch.

Yeah, 

[00:46:19] Alex Sarlin: and the combination of like, hold on, our budgets are getting cut. We don't know what's gonna be happening. The ground under your, under your feet is unstable. You might have, you know, people rating your schools or families not showing up. And also here's all of this new technology to learn and all these new things you could be doing, you could be doing in the classroom.

It's a bizarre combination of messages. I know we're kind of at time, but there's a little bit of around the world we had ISTE this week. There's a number of different announcements to make. Should we do that as little add-on or should we do that? In real time, 

[00:46:49] Ben Kornell: let's do a quick round the world. My topics would be Grammarly purchase superhuman.

I think, you know, Grammarly is maybe EdTech adjacent, but this idea of bringing the AI to where the users are is part of their thesis, and we covered their fundraising round and then we heard great energy around. Freer, which is a low tech like writing tool at Isti, as well as Brisk kind of has won the award for Coolest Booth at Isti.

They have a B brisket location, which it's in San Antonio, so like works out well. But they bought airport ads. I mean, it sounds like. They've really gone all out. We did a happy hour with them at the arcade last year in the Denver isti. What do you have, Alex? 

[00:47:38] Alex Sarlin: There were a bunch of announcements from Isti itself that I found pretty interesting this week.

Their EdTech index that they've put out is, is getting very robust and I finding it exciting. I think it's a, could be a really good partner for us. In our map, they have over 1900 tools. They're sortable by validation, so you can say what tools have the common sense privacy or what EdTech certification.

They're sortable by audience category, discipline, price and pricing model. So I feel like they've upgraded their EdTech. It used to be the EdSurge, you know, product index to this be this EdTech index. And I, I feel like it's about to become a very valid tool. Again, they also announced some AI readiness approaches, some instructional leadership, uh, transformational Leader award and an in an interesting, you know, you mentioned meta before, but they are working with meta to actually make a school mode for Instagram, which expedites the review process for misuse.

So if people are using Instagram to bully each other, or, or you do various negative things in schools, there's now a SW mode, which is actually pretty big news in terms of the, you know, the constant war between social media and school. So those stood out to me. I also think, you know, quizzes renamed itself this week.

Quizzes is a big ed tech company and they're now way ground, and they did that just as they're also integrating into this Google Classroom suite. So I thought that was interesting. Amplify replaced their soapbox labs. They created their own proprietary system to replace what they were relying on soapbox for, for, for, uh, pronunciation.

That was interesting to me too. Jacob, what else stood out to you this week? Are there other headlines that sort of went by you? You obviously have been focusing on these incredibly big posts, these LinkedIn posts that have gone viral, but anything else jump out to you? 

[00:49:11] Jacob Kantor: You know, I just wanted to give a, a plug to kind of what you guys have set up in the WhatsApp group, right?

Like I get a good amount of my breaking news from Ian and Bonnie, boots on the ground at iste and Brett, you know, posting something today about educator stipends sponsored by Google. And like, there's so much stuff that breaks in that channel that, you know, I know we have a lot of listeners, well, more than the number of folks that are in there, but if you guys aren't.

A part of it. Like there's a easy way to really kind of interact with the larger ed tech community in this podcast. And like a lot of the content that I'm seeing actually gets posted there and like, where else are you getting to interact with you guys? Plus boots on the ground at Isti plus venture capitalists that are in ed tech that are chiming in about, you know, companies that are on crazy trajectories to things that break.

So like that is a just, you know, a shout to what you guys built and, you know, an encouragement and uh, invitation for those listening to kind of join us there. Right? Because that's where all of the true conversation happens outside of LinkedIn, outside of the text message threads, outside of the emails.

Like there's a lot of good work that's been done there. So I invite you guys to join. 

[00:50:34] Ben Kornell: Thanks so much. Uh, we appreciate that cross promo. 

[00:50:39] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, and you are a big part of that conversation, Jacob, as you know, that is the real insider chat. There's all sorts of interesting things being discussed in there.

Thank you. That's really, that's really nice to hear. So with that, I think maybe we can go to our guests for this week. We have a awesome set of guests. Keep listening to our guests from this amazing Isti and Google filled week in EdTech. We'll be back next week with some all sorts of additional news coming out of all of the Isti announcements that are happening, including the tiny team era in Silicon Valley, which been you called two years ago.

I think the idea that small teams are gonna be the new norm that is now officially here and there will be all sorts of additional announcements as well, including some announcements from, from, uh, Mr. Sal Kahn about what he thinks AI is going to become. He is always been a leading voice there. Wanna take us out, Ben?

[00:51:28] Ben Kornell: Yeah. Well, thank you all for listening, and if it happens in EdTech, you'll hear about it here on EdTech Insiders. Talk to you all soon. 

[00:51:36] Alex Sarlin: We are here with Matt Dalio. He's the founder of Endless, which is fighting for a world in which every kid is a creator. Endless Studios is a youth game making studio built to introduce young people to 21st century skills like coding and design.

Matt's mantra is that if you can engage them, you can teach them, and his second mission is to make that. Vision available to everyone in the world by addressing the device and internet gap, which is the work of the endless foundation. Matt Dreams of a world in which every kid can shape their technology instead of being shaped by it.

Matt Dalio, welcome to EdTech Insiders. Thank you, Alex, for having me. So first off, you say, if you can engage them, you can teach them, and that's been a mantra for everybody interested in games and education for a long time. How does endless studios use game development to capture students' attention and then build skills that they actually can use in the world?

[00:52:31] Matt Dalio: I actually, if you don't mind, I'd love to, we were just having a wonderful conversation about your own background with games and learning. I'd love to kind of flip it around for a second and just ask you a little bit about that. Why did you get into games and learning, and talk to me about your own inspiration 

[00:52:44] Alex Sarlin: in that.

Yeah, so my background, I was a tutor for many years in my twenties, and what I realized very quickly in tutoring, especially tutoring high school boys, which was my primary audience, was that I'd walk into the room and they'd say. I do not wanna do this math homework. I do not wanna do this essay. Here's what I wanna do.

And it was inevitably a game at the time, it was World of Warcraft, it was just all these different games. Everybody sort of had their favorite. And I would always use that as sort of a way to connect with each student and say, okay, show me how the game works. I wanna see it. Like, I wanna see Red Dead Redemption.

Like, lemme just watch you play it for 15 minutes. And they'd be very surprised that that was what I wanted to do as a tutor. But what I realized is that's what they loved and that was what got them going. It got their brains going. It was often how they connected to other young people. So I just found that so fascinating.

I ended up going to Teacher's College to study instructional technology and design and media all around games and education. I did my thesis about Warcraft and Club Penguin and Second Life and some of the game worlds that were big at the time and how they might be used in education. So I've loved this vision for a long time.

But that's my story. How about you? How did you get interested in games as an educational vehicle? 

[00:53:56] Matt Dalio: So, I was just funny, you know, a story that comes to mind the other day. My dad's an investor and he was teaching kind of the family a little bit about investing. And he had my 12-year-old nephew in the room and you know, he's talking about yield and principle and all that kind of stuff.

And I looked to Christopher and I'm like. Christopher, what if we built a game where you could play the markets basically, and you just by playing a game, you, you learn how to invest. And he looked at, he went from like, you know, stoic face to just like lighting and, you know, exactly. Wide-eyed nodding. So games are the way that, it's the most engaging mechanism aside from social media, which is something I kind of wish I could throw out of the room, right?

But games engage, the average kid spends 20,000 hours playing games by the time they graduate from school. And the reality is most of those hours are actually spent unproductively. But if you could use that engagement and use it productively, like wow, that's, that's 10,000 hours of learning. And as we know what the 10,000 hour virtuoso rule, 10,000 hours is enough to be a virtuoso.

They're all virtuosos of video in video games. And if you use that productively, you can make them virtuosos in something that will ultimately make their lives better. You asked, how did I get into it? Our focus, since about 2010, has been on how you democratize access to technology, especially in emerging markets.

So solving device and internet access computers for everybody, and how do you make it useful even if you don't have internet? And long story short, in doing that, we realized two things. One was I. Every time we would put a computer in front of a kid with a little game logo on the desktop, that was the thing they went straight into.

And I would walk into classrooms of kids shouting numbers at each other, shouting their multiplication tables at each other because they were so excited because it was wrapped in like a 2001 Linux UX math game, which was just a terrible game, but it was a game. And all sudden their multiplication tables, the second insight.

Was, I'll kind of give the slightly longer path there just to describe the problem statement and then how we think about the solution that we stumbled upon. There are under the age of 25 years old, 3 billion kids in the world that need to be educated for the future economy, and we were talking about AI briefly before this.

AI is about to take away so many of those jobs I was just reading last night, but no, coastal says 80% of our jobs are about to be decimated in the next couple of years. Like how do you prepare youth for a world in which like software now can do so much of the stuff that we did? It's a software world.

How do you prepare people to have jobs? The difference between a world in which everyone has jobs and no one has jobs, I believe is the world in, you know, the difference between a world in which you have a lot of angry people in poverty who revolt and have war, or a world in which, you know, everyone is prosperous.

And the utopia dystopia, I really think comes down to do people have jobs in that future world or not? And so the stakes are, I believe, the future of humanity. Like the difference between those stakes is do they have jobs or not? This difference between that or the driver of that is do they have the skills?

There are 3 billion people we have to educate. And the institutions, the schools that have to teach them don't have the skills themselves, therefore they can't teach them. It reminds me of, I spent a lot of time in Guatemala. And Guatemala. I think I've heard different numbers, but it's either 70 or 90% of the math teachers cannot pass the math exam that they're supposed to teach to.

[00:57:05] Alex Sarlin: Wow. 

[00:57:06] Matt Dalio: So how do they even teach the next generation to then teach the, the generation after them? And that's the equivalent for the entire skillset of employability in the future, not even the future today. And so when you look at the challenge statement of how you teach 3 billion kids and the schools can't do it, what do you do?

So the clue that we had, that we stumbled upon was the first clue I just described. You put the games in front of 'em and they're playing them. Exactly. The second was more unexpected. We have this amazing Linux engineering team of some of the best Linux engineers in the world, amazing engineers. I was just curious how they learned to code, and so I started asking them and I got the same answer almost every time.

It was almost, I remember like the first time I asked someone sheepishly being like, well, I actually really liked video games. And then I discovered I could hack my video games. You know, someone else describing, I swapped out the audio files. I'm from Catalonia or Gia, and I swapped out the audio files and next thing you know, doom is speaking in my language and my voice.

And it was just so cool. And then I discovered Elon Musk learned this way. Mark Zuckerberg learned this way. Bill Gates learned this way. It is the single biggest pathway. Microsoft found that four out of five engineers today learned to code when they were kids. What were all those kids doing? They were gaming.

Yes. So why aren't we teaching that way? 

[00:58:23] Alex Sarlin: Yes. I mean, I am very much on board with this games, I think to a lesser extent, video and social media, but we've seen, especially with the rise of the App store and just the, everybody has games constantly in their pockets all the time. The amount of gaming is so vast, and some subset of those gamers decide to hack into it.

As you said, they start to build skills around it. They start to say, how could I inject myself into this environment? How does endless help expand that group of kids so that it's not just lots and lots of players and the tiny fraction of Bill Gates of the world who say, maybe I can hack this. How do you change that mentality from being a player to a creator?

It's the key question 

[00:59:04] Matt Dalio: and it's taken us years to, I, I believe, crack the formula. And what I mean by those years is that for many years we thought that the act of playing a game was going to teach people how to be creators. And so let's go build games that teach. The problem is that those games cost a lot of money to build.

I mean, games cost, you know, I don't know. GTA A is a billion dollars, you know? And to build a halfway decent game, a double a game is eight $10 million. And so to build a collection, a whole ecosystem of these games that teach you all the things, even just one discipline is cost prohibitive. I impossible.

But what we realized was that there was another way of teaching through games, which is teach them to make the games. The moment, like all you need is to throw a kid in a game making engine and all of a sudden with no dollars added, they're making and they're learning how to make and not just code, but what people don't realize, and I didn't fully realize 'cause I was always focused on code.

Code, of course, code is that the act of making a game is the, the game is the most multidisciplinary piece of software you can build. It's left brain, it's right brain, it's creative and narrative and art and storytelling. And by the way, the act of managing that is project management, which is central to any successful project.

And because it requires so many disciplines, it requires you to learn how to collaborate. And you get the people who come in and say, I'm an engineer, but I discovered there was no designer on the team. So I had to learn how to be a designer. You also hear the inverse story. I was an artist. I didn't want to code, but then I discovered that if I did a little bit of code, I could make my art better.

And I like code. And so you end up with these multidisciplinary, highly collaborative, highly creative, highly autonomous individuals operating as teams, making really cool things. 

[01:00:51] Alex Sarlin: And there's that feeling of multidisciplinary but collaborative, this resilience baked into this. 'cause you're trying to create something over time that becomes something big that can be played by other people.

There's an empathy building where you're understanding the viewpoint of the player and others. There's a lot of soft skills as well as hard skills baked into the game making experience. So tell us how endless puts the pieces together to actually put this in front of students. You were working with a SU to do some amazing things you've been working with kipp.

Tell us how you are helping high school and university students sort of get into this mentality of becoming creators, building those skills that are going to help them become productive and happy members of society rather than angry young men. How do you put it into action in the world? 

[01:01:34] Matt Dalio: So actually what you talked about angry young men, 'cause it's such an important point, is people often think.

Games. Men, most of our programs are actually very evenly split. Oftentimes there are more girls. If you show up and you say, let's build a hardcore game, you get all the boys showing up, right? You show up, you know, in the art classroom and you say, do you want to make your art come to life? It's like all the girls' hands go up, right?

And so you see actually a really nice gender balanced experience where someone comes in and says, I'm gonna give order to the chaos. And next thing you know, they're the leader of the team. So I just wanted to comment on that 'cause it's such an important point. Of course. The answer to your question about how do we do it almost requires a little bit of an org chart.

'cause we're a strange beast. We have a nonprofit side and a for-profit side. On the nonprofit side, we have an operating team that actually can go build technology and run programs. We also make grants. We have a grant giving side, and then the same thing is true on the for-profit side. We have a company that goes and builds technology and deploys those into places that can create kind of the economic engine.

For much of this. We're also in a lucky position to be able to invest in other partners. That share a common vision. And so in many senses, our answer to how we do it really is that we have an objective and a vision of if you build games, you learn how to build software. And when you take that game to market, you learn how to take a product to market.

And so really it's teaching the entrepreneurial skills and that you can deploy that globally at scale. But how you do it looks a little bit different, whether you're talking about rural Africa or you're talking about, you know, A SUA University in America. How you do that depends on whether you have a GPU or don't have a GPU.

How you do that depends on whether you're college or high school or middle school. And yet we want all of that to happen and we want a pathway that takes everyone everywhere from a novice all the way up to a professional. And so we have the blessing of being able to kind of look across the whole landscape and say, how would we work with anyone out there, whether they're a nonprofit, a company, whether they have operating capabilities or don't.

And if there are gaps, then we can go build those and solve those ourselves. And so really, you know, we take very much a partnership stance and we take very much a here's the North Star, how do we all do that together? And it's just so cool because it allows us, like, I'm at a SU right now and, and I was spent the whole day basically touring the entirety of the university because we have a great partnership and.

We've launched the Endless Games and Learning Lab here and I was kind of doing a review of what's happened over the past chapter and it's just so cool because everyone we meet with is a partnership opportunity. There's so many opportunities to assemble things together. I used the example a couple times yesterday 'cause I was building a tree for it with my kids and I kind of joke, I'm in two by four land, but it reminds me of like, each one of these is kind of a two by four that you can assemble into something bigger that achieves the objective.

So that was a very concrete way of giving you a vague answer for the question, but 

[01:04:22] Alex Sarlin: tell us about the high school piece of it. You didn't mention it there. How do you work inside high school environments? 

[01:04:27] Matt Dalio: Yeah, so a couple things. We have a, a couple of tools that really scaffold people into professional tools and so I'll talk about the problem before I then talk to the solution.

If you throw a high schooler into Unity, good luck. It's really hard. You know, you're, you're there for a week teaching a course full-time. We've done these courses. It takes, you know, days of full-time work for them to be able to produce something in a professional game engine. Same thing is true for a tool like good.

And so what we've done is built tool that is as simple as Minecraft. In other words, block-based placement. At first blush, it's like, oh, this is just a clone of Minecraft. Why? Because every 6-year-old out there can use it. So literally it's a tool that a 6-year-old can use. But at the same time, we've taken that tool and built levels, you know, kind of scaffolding.

It's almost like the layers of the onion that you can strip back. It's built on top of unity. So you can strip back all the way into unity. So everything from like custom textures and custom blocks, and then you can go do a Lewis scripting layer, and then you go into a Unity SDK, where you could do really easy things that allow you to then have more powerful capabilities in the this engine.

And it's all multiplayer, so you're doing it collaboratively, you know? And then one day we're, we're actually literally right before this, I was reading the document to, to open source it. So as we're making plans to open source it, so literally you can go in and actually see the C sharp code in the Unity project files.

So our whole dream is basically how do you get people off the tool as quickly as possible, because that's where the jobs takes take place. So that's one answer. An example of of how the kind of different vehicles unlock other exciting opportunities is that, and unity require A GPU, but in under-resourced environments, whether that's, you know, a 10 minute walk from a SU as I was talking with the A SU team yesterday, or you know, in Africa as I was also talking about the a SU team yesterday.

Not everyone has a, a laptop, let alone A GPU that can, you know, power, unity. And so Gado is a, an open source game engine. It is for reference, unity is gigabytes, Gado is 58 megabytes the entire thing. And it basically runs on any computer in the world. But you needed code and you needed GitHub in order to collaborate.

And so what we're working on, what we've built is basically scratch in Gadot so that you can use block-based placements. If you can use Scratch, you can now build a game in Gadot. And by the way, we've supported Scratch also on a lot of their kind of future design endeavors and their AI work. So we can kind of, you know, collaborate and make sure those really speak nicely to each other.

It was a wonderful partnership there. And then we've also, we're working on, effectively think of it as like Figma for game design. So in the Gau editor, if I make changes, you see those changes and vice versa so that you now don't have to use Git, but it actually becomes then a really easy way to then introduce people to literally GitHub.

And so these are some examples of how we're easing the on-ramp 

[01:07:14] Alex Sarlin: at the high school level. It's amazing. You mentioned Minecraft, like environments and block building and scratch, and I just wanted to drill down on that and ask you a little bit about it because, you know, we, we have entered an interesting environment with gaming where you have Minecraft, you have Roblox, you have Mario Maker, you know, there are actually some games out there that try to allow students to sort of step into that level designer, you know, type of role or to build their own games that other people can play that in in Roblox.

How do you see your relationship to game environments like that? 

[01:07:45] Matt Dalio: So, you know, one answer is I'm tool agnostic. I mean, we were just running programs two weeks ago on Minecraft, right? So I, I came tool agnostic. I just want people to learn. I also will say I never wanted to build a tool amongst the priorities.

We already have enough going on. We did not set out to build a tool, but we set out to teach people how to use professional tools and what we encountered was a barrier and we had to solve the barrier. Roblox is amazing that the games you can build, it's a real game engine. It's not, you know, as powerful as Unity, but it's a real game engine.

But it's really hard. Unity. So your average kid, they're literally different environments, and if you look at the monthly active player count and the monthly active creator count, the monthly active creator count, I think is about 0.1% of the monthly active player count. In other words, no one's actually making, they're all playing things other people have made, but it's billed as a UGC engine because yeah, technically it is even though a fraction of oh percent that the people are actually making.

Yeah. On the other side, Minecraft, a hundred percent of kids are creators. They're all making, right, but they're not making real games. They're making really think of it almost as a terrain layer. And they're not learning real scripts. Like if you wanna like, you know, mod Minecraft, it's like you go from like, you know, the kiddie pool to the ocean, right?

And then people are using Redstone and things like that to kind of, you know, mock up. There's a lot of learning that takes place to be clear. Makes you hire the guy who ran, he was Microsoft's games and learning lead. I mean, basically the most knowledgeable person, how you use Minecraft to teach in the world.

But he's joined us because he sees that there's a vision here that is deeper than what Minecraft is able to deliver. 'cause it really isn't, it was designed as what it is, which is, you know, kids can build little worlds easily together. So our goal is to take that simplicity of a Minecraft, take the complexity and the power of a unity.

And scaffold people, leverage them into the full capabilities so that at whatever level they're at, whether they're a college student at a SU, which we are working with along with a pile of other universities, or literally a 6-year-old that like at every level. There's stuff they could do, and at every level there's a step to do something that is more sophisticated, that then teaches them like a game.

How to level up into more and more sophisticated capabilities 

[01:09:58] Alex Sarlin: that graduated scaffolding is, is built into many, many games and it's how education works. It makes a lot of sense, and I love the way you're framing it. As you know, Roblox, as a game engine and let alone unity as a game engine are very complex.

You can't just jump into them and make sense of it quickly. You have to really, really dive deep or get a lot of professional training, things like, you know, Minecraft. It's simple, but it doesn't really give you the full skills to make a game, you know, at all. So how do you bridge the gap? So this Gadot engine sounds like a fascinating approach to it.

We have to talk about ai, I know you have lots of thoughts about it. We did an event a couple months ago about game development in the age of AI and brought together a couple of, some of these startups that are starting to say educational game development specifically. You know, starting to try to build game tools to help students, you know, use AI to accelerate their ability to create games as well as studios to accelerate their ability to create games, which is, is a huge part of what AI does.

I don't even have a, a specific question here, other than how do you think AI is gonna accelerate your work? I could probably think of 20 things that you've said that AI could accelerate, including the access in Africa, the GPUs, the ability to, you know, create through lines. How are you thinking about ai.

[01:11:08] Matt Dalio: So the AI question is, it's the central question on a lot of levels, AI's coming, jobs are gonna be replaced. How do you train people to still have jobs? And there's the classic statement, it's not AI that's gonna replace your job, it's someone who's using ai. Ai, right? And typically when people talk about ai, they think of the, and talk about tools that can be used to teach.

So the infinitely scalable mentor, that is amazing stuff happening. And, and that is as we achieve the vision of endlessly, you know, infinitely scalable education, I believe that is so central to it. Everything from how you do the teaching and the mentoring to how you do the grading and so that you can, and, and, and leveling.

So, so many cool things happening there. But that's the thing everyone's talking about. The thing I don't hear as many people talking about is how do you actually teach people to use AI as a tool and be power users of ai? The most common example I use is like, we're gonna teach them prompt engineering.

That's the equivalent of saying like, I'm gonna teach someone to Google and they're gonna know, you know, how to get a job in, in the internet back in the day. And so there are power users of ai and there are entire pipelines specialized by industry. And if you're a marketer and you know how to, you know, do everything from cohort analysis to then create all of the, the ads targeted from a, both the images and the text to them, and then you know how to do, then the data analytics on which ones are most effective and you know how to use an AI pipeline, whoa.

You're the person I wanna hire. And the same is true for coding. And the same is true for every discipline in the world. If you have a bunch of people who don't know how to do that, and then you have a small number of people who do, it's the small number of people who do, who will be employed, and it's the others who will be unemployed.

So we have to teach people how to become power users of ai. Again, be way beyond Chachi pt and how do I, you know, quote unquote prompt something, and it has to be by all the disciplines. And so the beauty of teaching people to make games is that they're engaged. The beauty of the second beauty of teaching people how to make games is that it's so multidisciplinary.

And so when you infuse AI at the center of, and you're like, we're gonna teach you how to become, we're doing design, we're doing mood boards, use AI for mood boards, we're doing the narrative. We're gonna go, you know, use AI for the narrative. We're doing every, yeah, the music, great, let's dive in and use ai.

If we use AI for everything, then at least you have the skill you make. Then step back and say, I, now by the way, it's a great on-ramp into the skill so that you can build the actual skill. 'cause code is scary. You gotta learn a lot of code. But if I can use this to learn the basics of code, then I actually start getting good at code.

And then you could decide not to use the ai. You can use your human creativity, but you at least have the, the ability to choose. It reminds me a little, my grandfather who, who passed away at 104 years old, and he was an illustrator for most of his life, and he went to illustrate book covers. And fortunately it was at the end of his career when this happened, but then along came desktop publishing and his job was, was gone out of business.

And it's a lot like that. Desktop publishing, everyone just assumes, okay, this is, you know, now natural. And why would you ever hand paint a quick cover? I'm, I'm literally working on a book cover right now and, you know, looking at the designs yesterday, you'd never hand paint that right. You know, you use Photoshop or Figma, and yet we are in the equivalent just Hypercharged transition right now.

And there's all of this agita and probably too much excitement and then too much anger. But it's coming. It it is. It's not even coming. It is here. And if we have a generation that are like my grandfather being trained to just do the illustration and are not trained in this new art form, this new skillset, it's like architects.

I was speaking with the head of an architecture department here yesterday, and it was the same thing, hand drawn. Versus 3D models. And she was there for the transition and her husband made the transition, and then she didn't. And eventually, obviously she had to, you know, we are in that transition and 30 years from now, people will look back and be like, they were bonkers.

Why would, why wouldn't they have embraced this? Why wouldn't they have even understood what it looks like to be a power creator in that toolkit? And so our vision of the world is one in which you just, whatever the frontier is, you keep teaching the frontier. 

[01:15:25] Alex Sarlin: Yes, it's a beautiful vision. I also love the emphasis on professional tooling, on sort of getting people as quickly as possible into the professional level tools.

I think that is a very amazing mantra for today's education. You know, don't keep them in the training wheels and in the the wade pool too long. You know, give them the tools to get them to professional tooling and build that stack of professional tools, because as you say, in every industry. Almost every industry is about to be disrupted by a stack of specific professional tools.

And if we don't deny, you know, students at at high school or college level, the ability to use them, it's just gonna set them back. I think it's a really amazing moment. Matt is the founder of Endless Fighting for a World in which every kid is a creator. It's Endless Studios and the endless foundation helping game design become part of education throughout the world.

Thanks so much for being with us, Matt Dalio. Thank you so much. What a pleasure. For our deep dive on the week in EdTech. This week we are speaking with Anne Trumbo, who is an old friend and the author of the Teacher in the Machine, a new book about education technology. It is a really, really good book, highly recommended.

Let me read a little bit more about her. Anne Trumbo, EDD is the Chief Digital Learning Officer at the Sans Institute for Lifelong Learning at the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business, and she's the co-lead of the Stanford Center on Longevity's Future Fellows Program in education and learning.

Her research and practice centers on the intersection of technology, pedagogy, and human capital development with a particular focus on designing inclusive and future ready learning systems that span the lifespan. She's also a former Coursera employee. She was former Warden Digital Learning lead. I don't have the exact title there, and has been in EdTech in higher ed for a long time.

Welcome to the podcast and trumer. 

[01:17:13] Anne Trumbore: Thank you so much for having me, Alex. It's so good to see you again. 

[01:17:16] Alex Sarlin: It's so good to see you again too. So let's talk about the book. This was such an interesting book. There's sort of two sections of the book, and the first one focuses on some really important historic figures in education technology, with the premise that understanding how they thought about technology would be incredibly useful in today's age.

You talked about Patrick Spu at Stanford, Seymour Papper at mit, and Don Bitzer at the University of Illinois. How did you choose these three figures and tell us how their work is relevant today? 

[01:17:47] Anne Trumbore: Sure. So Pat was easy because Pat hired me at Stanford to build Stanford's first computer adaptive program in grammar.

So Stanford had had multiple math adaptive programs, but never one using the internet in humanities to the extent that grammar's humanities. And I got to know more about Pat just by working with him. And it was actually when I went to course super early on, right, early in 2012, that I realized that I.

Everybody there knew who Pat was, but everybody was kind of ignoring that. Pat existed. And then through another Stanford connection from the Stanford Online High School, which was one of the projects we worked on, Rick Mazzeo, who's the math department chair at Stanford, was our faculty advisor. He had studied at MIT under Minsky and he said, oh, do you know about PA lot of the stuff that you're doing, especially when I moved to NovoEd, a lot of the stuff you guys are doing P was really into, you should read about him.

As with the platforms, both Coursera and NovoEd were becoming more robust. People started saying, well, this is just Plato all over again. Right. And so that's where I started. And then as I went through and started tracing funding reports from NSF and who was getting money in the sixties for education technology, it really was, those three guys was really, were really at the forefront.

So I kept it there and they each had a particular approach that I think is still relevant today. 

[01:19:17] Alex Sarlin: I think so too. So is it Seymour P. Prepare? 

[01:19:19] Anne Trumbore: It's Prepared and 

[01:19:21] Alex Sarlin: EZ Prepared and Sez did not know either of those. Thank you for that. So yes, let's talk about these. There are approaches that are relevant today.

You talk about, Patrick Supe has been doing basically this concept of a personalized tutor for every student. He's been dreaming about that since the sixties. You had Seymour Peper who has been talking about constructionism and students actually making their own tools, making their own reality. He created Lego Mindstorms among other really interesting things, and Don Bitzer.

Plato is this interconnected, almost like social network with touchscreens and plasma screens for learning that is just way ahead of its time. Tell us about each of their approaches and what you think is relevant for what's going on right now. 

[01:20:02] Anne Trumbore: Sure. So I think overall I'll get into the specifics, but I think the overall takeaway is that what we're seeing now and trying to replicate now and do now with education technologies and also with technologies that were not designed for education like Chachi PT, is to fit them into these.

People are saying this is brand new and it's not new, and I think that's important to recognize. One, it proves the validity of the pursuit, right? Like if we've been thinking about trying to get a personalized tutor for nearly 70 years. There's something in there, right? So it's not all negative, like, oh, we've been here before.

It actually can be seen as a positive, but I think this forgetting that happens so that things can be new, has a downside as well, which is that we don't look at the data for what worked and what didn't. So, you know, was really, and I knew Pat personally, so this is not objective. He was a character. He did distance learning from an ATOL in the South Pacific with the University of Chicago during the Second World War, right?

Like he was cantankerous, he was brilliant, he was awesome, and he was always a bit ahead of his time. And he really believed in this idea of opening up access, using technology to open up access and to deepen understanding. And he would always say, 'cause we worked at a program that at the time was called the Education Program for Gifted Youth.

And I would say, pat, you know, I don't love this title of gifted. And he said, Anne Giftedness occurs across the top 10%, if any population. And that is not who is in our schools. Right. Our top schools. And he was saying this in 2004, right? And so his idea of using technology for access, I think is important.

And I think it's one that obtains and this idea of individualized instruction, right? How if you wanna move ahead, you should be able to move ahead. You wanna keep students engaged. And that's really what prompted all of Pat's decisions around how to use technology. And I think that's really important.

The parrot was the sort of 180 and used to take little pot shots at Pat, which is hilarious, right? You know, and from the book, like these professor wars from 1972, but he's also very valid and I think extremely important right now, right? We shouldn't let the technology program the child, right? Or the, even the undergraduate, right?

Right Now everyone's saying, oh my gosh, we have to infuse AI into the curriculum. And I think that's fine. But that's not the end result. Right? The goal of college is not to teach you how to use technology so that you can get a job, right? That's called workforce training. So like I think this idea of keeping technology right sized, it's not a God.

It's not something we're subject to. It's something we have control over and should maintain control over, I think is the big lesson from Pear. And then Bitzer, who was the man who wrote Brian Deere, who wrote the sort of definitive biography of Bitzer, and Plato called him it. He was like, he was just an engineer and he used car salesman.

His dad literally had car lots. So he really, he really was. And just this idea of using the efficiency, like Bitzer was trying to solve the problem. They all were. Of compute time. I mean, computers were really, really expensive in 1968 and being able to have the computer be efficient and have also people on it at the same time was a huge problem to solve.

And I think it was Bitzer's engineering approach with a student-centered mindset that also brought in, you know, using the guardrails of the technology or the constraints of the technology and then coming up with something brilliant and connected. Bitzer really was all about how do we use the technology to connect?

So I think these three folks have. Three clear lessons that certainly obtain to today. 

[01:24:03] Alex Sarlin: Definitely. And I think a through line of the book is also about the sort of commercialization of technology in the education space. So you have each of these folks thinking about how to take these academic technology and these approaches and commercialize them and prepared this logo.

And then Lego later and Plato becomes a big company with lots of users, it expands, but then sort of doesn't quite break through. And C, CC, I think is the name of Super's company and it ends up being bought by various people and, and continuing to survive for many, many, many years. But like, tell us about your thoughts on the commercialization.

'cause I think you have some really interesting nuance takes on how commercializing good academic technology is possible, but also there's so many off roads, right? Commercialization has so many potential pitfalls when you start going that way. 

[01:24:48] Anne Trumbore: Exactly. And so, you know, I had that exact same question in draft one or two of the book, and I was just sort of accepting like, oh, okay, well it got easier to commercialize in the nineties and then in the 2010s as you get venture capital more involved.

And then actually was feedback from some early readers and they said, why am I reading this? Like, what changed? And I was like, huh, what did change? It wasn't about the professors. And so that was the light bulb aha moment. And that sent me back to a whole new set of reading. And I realized what changed was the nature of how we were thinking about education.

So when these guys were trying to, you, you know, when prepared and EZ and Bitzer were trying to commercialize, first of all, their institutions were like, okay, you're, you know, good luck and God bless. And they entered a world where there really wasn't venture capital, there wasn't private equity, and education was seen as a public good.

And because it was a public good, the amount of money that you could borrow for an education was capped. And so, even if you went to the most expensive college in the country in. You were still not paying. Right? More than, I think it was like one half of a middle class income in America today. And today it's almost equivalent.

Right? You know, it's a hundred thousand dollars a year to go to Vanderbilt, you know, famously. Right? And that's close to the median income. So I started thinking about that and reading more. And really what happened was the shift, this country shift towards thinking about education as an investment in an individual.

And there then it becomes a commodity. Then all those rules about commodification are invoked and start to apply. But that's happening before the internet. And then the internet happens, and it was like gasoline on the match, right? And suddenly everyone's like, oh my God. Even these top name schools. I think it's hilarious that places like Yale and Stanford and Oxford and Columbia were trying to make money on education, technology and scaling education in 1999.

[01:26:58] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, a great book by, uh, Tyler Cohen about Right Unlocking the Gates. Really fathom in all learn in all of these sort of early higher ed attempts to turn things inside out and basically create content for the masses and sell it in many cases, sell it. And they didn't quite work at the time, but it's.

Michael Crow who started Fathom now head of a SU is, is still doing some of the most experimental things. It's really interesting. So in the second half of the book you talk about these three innovators and these amazing things happening, and then the second half book goes into this. Okay. Zoom forward to this moment in time when education becomes commodified in this way, especially higher education and early 2010s.

And you start to get into your own experience with Coursera and the sort of Coursera, edX, Udacity, Stanford plays a huge role in all of this. Tell us a little bit of that story. I know we don't have a lot of time now, we're gonna have to come back and do a really a much longer interview 'cause there's so much amazing stuff in this section of the book.

But give us a little overview of what it looks like when VC and when academia knows that the possible value of something spinning off is. Yahoo or Google or something massive. It's not just good luck, it's, oh wait, you're walking off with something that might change the world and make billions. How did that change the landscape?

[01:28:11] Anne Trumbore: Yeah, so a lot of it comes down to something very boring, which is technology licensing, right? Right. So, you know, Stanford's endowment is huge in part because they have a piece of everything you just mentioned. Same thing with MIT. And so, you know, this idea that the university can profit from the intellectual property of the faculty is new, right?

That doesn't exist when prepared and those guys are working. That does exist when Kohler and you know, ING and Arawa are right. And so that's very different. And secondly, at least at Stanford, they're sometimes the same people. You know, the president of the university was, you know, at director at Foundation Capital and at.

Oh my god. You know DURs place? 

[01:29:01] Alex Sarlin: Kleiner Perkins. Yeah. 

[01:29:02] Anne Trumbore: Kleiner Perkins. Right. You know, it's unbelievable. And so that adds a whole new component to it. And I'll say, when I joined Coursera, I was anywhere, there are three of us joined on the same day. We were, we were 18 through 20, you know, in the number employee.

And I have to say, no one really understood, even Daphne and Andrew and you know, obviously can't speak to them. Daphne was married to a venture capitalist. I think she had a better idea. It's not that they were. Didn't understand. I think you don't, you can't understand that world, right? Until these guys are walking in the hallway and you know, Andrew and Daphne are on the Google plane and they're being, and suddenly the scale is like, well, you gotta do this and you gotta get these users or whatever.

We didn't have a paywall at that point. There was no paywall, like our original paywall we had to put in in, in like 72 hours. And then we just pulled Braintree, I think hole and you know, just stuck it in the back. Like it was not designed for profit. And we honestly thought everybody who worked there, and I believe that Andrew and Daphne as well really we're committed primarily to the success of this technology to scale education.

And we did not fully understand the power of the forces behind it that we're thinking long-term around profit. 

[01:30:21] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. And I think that tension between that very brilliant and idealistic vision of how can we change education through technology and then the giant sets of forces that includes, you know, capital and the profit motive.

It includes academic perspectives and faculty decision making and all it shines throughout the book. I think it's a really important. Aspect of educational technology that I don't think we often focus enough on that there's this sort of inherent tension. Sometimes they work together, but tension between trying to do the best thing for education and the profit motive.

I mean, to put it bluntly, you know, it's not like nobody thinks about this, but I think you spell it out in some really interesting ways, sort of across 50 years of EdTech history. It's a really, really great book. I wish we had more time. We have to come back and talk more because you and I both were early employees at Coursera.

You were there before me by quite a bit, but I was, I was there pretty early too, and so I saw some of that frontline stuff too. I'd love to do another chat. I also want to talk about sort of EdTech literature. I mean, you have Audrey Waters and Justin Wright on the back. Uh, Mitchell Stevens, all great authors of EdTech books, all skeptics in, so in a lot of ways about education technology, and I'd love to talk about that skepticism versus optimism in EdTech literature as well.

But we'll have to say that for another time and. Just last, last, last question, just in a few sentences. Tell us about, you know, what was your most surprising learning in all the research you've done for the book? 

[01:31:47] Anne Trumbore: How much the mood of the country, the way we think about education influences, all of these different, all the forces that you just, you know, laid out like the power of the narrative.

Is critical because the, the reauthorization of the Higher Ed Act in 1992 doesn't happen without this narrative that education is an investment in an individual. Right? Coursera doesn't happen without this idea of, you know, education as a commodity, right? It doesn't like the narrative. The story really is primary, and that is not something I thought.

When I started the book, but really, yeah, words matter. 

[01:32:30] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, yeah. No, I totally agree. So fascinating. Antrum boar, chief Digital Learning Officer at the Sands Institute for Lifelong Learning at the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business. That's a lot of words. And the author of fantastic new book about education, technology, the Teacher in the Machine.

Thank you so much for being here with us on EdTech Insiders. 

[01:32:49] Anne Trumbore: Thank you so much for having me, Alex. I look forward to a longer conversation in the future. For sure. 

[01:32:53] Alex Sarlin: Let's do it. Let's get into the weeds of Coursera Life. 20 20 13, 20 12. Alright. See you soon. Thank you. Okay, 

[01:33:00] Anne Trumbore: bye. 

[01:33:01] Alex Sarlin: Thanks for listening to this episode of EdTech Insiders.

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