Garrett Smiley 🙂
@gw_smiles
Redesigning education as co-founder/CEO @soraschools
The education industry is stuck optimizing a broken system. We can’t incrementally innovate our way out of this hole. "The most common error of a smart engineer is to optimize a thing that should not exist." -@elonmusk
Progress is not only possible, but it’s happening. Stop listening to the news, start helping others.
Everyone thinks that creativity and motivation come from tapping into your childhood issues and trauma. In fact they come from tapping into your childhood wonder and enthusiasm.
I wish all major company announcements were accompanied by a dramatic A24 style movie poster
Today, we're beginning a new era at Sora. We're now powering public schools. Read more about this and our first partnership here: soraschools.com/partner/tca
Today, we're beginning a new era at Sora. We're now powering public schools. Read more about this and our first partnership here: soraschools.com/partner/tca
Knowing the profit margins of most major companies is enough to shut down 95% of economic populism.
How many more pandemics until humans collectively decide we’d rather be vegan? I think 2 or 3.
Looks like Sam jumped on our Black Friday sale! @LuisMunguia store.soraschools.com/products/unise…
We need much more corporate whimsy!
just your quarterly reminder this is what the Epic headquarters in Wisconsin looks like Yes, the electronic medical records software company worth dozens of billions of dollars
The teenage years are just as important as infancy. FMRI studies of the brain prove that teens are HIGHLY capable; they just have a different value system. Like how infants are guided by curiosity, teenagers are guided by respect. Their top priority is conforming to the values…
Schools must prepare students to be Curious and Useful. Those are the skills that will help students thrive in the modern world. But, traditional schools often encourage the opposite. At Sora, we do things differently: 🔍 Cultivating Curiosity • Traditional: Learning is split…
You can see this as a policy failure, which it is. But you can also see it as something deeper than that. High school has *always* been an awkward problem. Going back to the Ancient Greeks. K8 (or, in my view, PK8) is suitable for general education. Middle adolescence is not.
A large proportion of students do not learn much past the eigth grade. That is a lot of wasted time.
Adolescents are fundamentally different from younger children. Their motivation shifts dramatically, often turning their relationship with school upside down. For those familiar with the underlying neuroscience, this is no surprise. At Sora, we specialize in working with…
We’re thrilled to announce our first-ever online camp experiences, happening this month! • Create a play with a Broadway actor 🎭 • Conduct surprising science experiments 🧪 • Make your own board game 🎲 • Compete in educational SEL video games 👾 • Explore the science…
Been thinking a lot about AI and edtech. Having a lot of conversations. It’s very hard for me to envision a significant* change in education that isn’t quite directly about schools or their equivalents (i.e. home school). The environment of growing up is everything.
We’re 18+ months into the ChatGPT tsunami, and none of the major ebook readers has yet introduced a single AI feature, when reading augmentation is one of the most obvious use cases. I want: 1. Obviously, a way to chat with my book — both the whole thing, or just a passage I’d…
Steve Jobs sent himself this email in 2010.
Students today are all trained for academia. They’re taught to be: Mathematicians. Literary theorists. English dictionaries. History encyclopedias. But almost no student learns how to be useful. They come out of the education system with facts in their head, but they don't feel…
Please propose (or just build) a good default path of scaffolded internet affordances for children between the ages of 4 and 15. Ensure that this onboarding can evolve at the pace of technology. This is the actual problem worth solving.
It's a pleasure to announce Sora's Trends in Education for 2024! The education system faces tremendous pressure to change, from the school choice movement to the ESSER funding cliff to transformative technologies like AI and VR. What do you think? soraschools.com/trends/2024
Can you imagine if Schwarzschild, Feynman, or Einstein had access to ChatGPT? Watching that level of curiosity engage with the god machine would have been magical. Given today's deluge of instant gratification from one's infancy, I fear nobody will ever be cut from the same…