I’m writing this blog post from unused space in the San Francisco Chronicle building. The Chronicle has had to scale back recently, and so the space is getting used by number of early-to-mid-stage web startups. A few dozen feet from me is Change.org, a nifty activism platform that’s busy delivering customizable content on a suite of customizable platforms to a generation that hasn’t cared about a newspaper in over a decade. What does that generation’s kids think of textbooks?

Educators face an incredible challenge: constructing and delivering compelling content to distracted audiences with very few resources. The apocalypse and emerging rebirth of news media is an important example of how the systems which deliver this sort of content can be radically reinvented. Many of the tools making up this new wave of media can be directly applied to educational challenges, when they can’t they serve as an important inspiration.

There’s no question that the education system is structured more like a newspaper than a mashed-up twitter prediction algorithm, and for the time being that’s probably a good thing. Still, it’s worth asking what a reborn education system would look like. (more…)