That’s why Airy Labs, an ed-tech enterprise creating mobile and tablet games with core educational missions, which was founded by Thiel fellow Andrew Hsu, 16, was thought to be an organization positioned for success. The proof was also in the money: in a first round of funding, Airy Labs gathered $1.5 million from big name capitalists.

But on Saturday, TechCrunch reported that most of Airy Lab’s 20-person staff has been laid off. Ex-employees reported of paranoia and mismanagement. The news sparked Audrey Watters of Hack Education, and other ed-tech journalists, to speak about the possible implications the Thiel Fellowship has on such ventures:

What does the failure of Airy Labs say about Thiel’s whole argument for dropping out? What does it mean for his argument that the best bet lies in backing young entrepreneurs and paying them very handsomely to drop out of school to start companies?

I’m offering the argument that it’s not so much the gateway of higher education that is the problem. Instead, it’s the way that higher education is structured. In a world that is so interconnected and evolving at an exponential rate due to technology, universities need to not just continuously update the technology on their campus, but also update their curricula and approach. Students can’t sit through a semester of computer science classes anymore and learn coding. They need to be actively participating in tangible, real world projects that help them holistically understand the full scope of the tech industry. And simple “internship” opportunities aren’t going to be enough, there needs to be a curriculum that shapes students’ understanding of how the world is evolving.

A college education in its current state isn’t necessarily ineffective because the statistics don’t lie: College degree holders still earn more in their lifetime than high school graduates. However, the trends of rising tuition prices, decreased State support, coupled with program eliminations and lack of updated curricula, aren’t the necessary recipes that promise graduates with jobs nowadays.

Here are my suggestions of where universities can begin to restructure:

• Increase programming opportunities that will prepare students for the realities of the interconnected and globalized world
• Allow students to customize their education, in partnership with an advisor, to help students shape their higher education experience into something that is practical for them.

Highly successful entrepreneurs like Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library are literally telling people to quit jobs that they feel unhappy with or aren’t truly passionate about. Once people find something they truly love and are happy doing, the success will come as a byproduct, Vaynerchuk said. So many other successful businessmen and women believe the same mantra.

So if we all want students to do what they love because it’s proven to help you feel happy and succeed, then why aren’t we asking them to explore such a question once they enter college? Why aren’t we increasing program opportunities to do such exploring? Why aren’t we allowing students to then create a customized education that makes the most sense for their professional goals, especially if the original purpose of college was to help students prepare for the realities of our world–a reality which has changed considerably?

The late Steve Jobs who co-founded Apple and Pixar Animations gave a commencement speech at Stanford University. He talked about his affinity for a “personalized education” where he could “take the classes he wanted to take.” He talked about how the experiences he gained outside of the classroom—like being resourceful for food and taking entrepreneurial risks with great ideas—are things that eventually helped him become largely successful.

But beyond that, even as a college dropout, Jobs also talked about how he “connected the dots looking backwards” and found that his higher education experience, albeit limited, helped with his success as well. He talked about taking classes at Reed College during his 16-month period of dropping out. He spoke specifically about a calligraphy class he took in college which eventually spawned the foundations of typography, the beautiful san-serif and serif fonts, on the first Macintosh machines. It was a class he was interested in, it opened his eyes to a new experience, and it eventually had practical application almost a decade later.

Forget the “higher education bubble” and which side you’re on regarding whether or not it’s about to burst. Forget about the rising level of student loans. Forget about the low college graduation rates. I know, these are bold statements of forgetting, but what really needs to be examined is the content and approach of higher education institutions, not just in our nation, but also around the world. We are entering a truly incredible time period of transnational cooperation and competition, exponential evolution of technology and interconnectedness. The world has changed so dramatically, it’s about time higher education catches up.

“More students are involved in the OWYP program this semester, and in D.C., we are including another classroom in Hart Middle School,” says Ossob Mohamud, OWYP Alumni Fellow, who helps manage the program locally and internationally.

University student project ambassadors facilitated the first lesson on presenting culture and identifying cultural misunderstandings in middle/high school classrooms. Students created “Culture Cubes” or lists of six different aspects of their own culture (Heroes, Languages, What’s Cool, Right/Wrong, Holidays) and determined ways to present these elements to people from another culture. The students would then share these Culture Cubes with their classroom peers in Prishtina, Kosovo, through film, pictures and voice messages.

“We’ve found that these skills and understandings are directly applicable to the students not only in cross-cultural settings, but also in how they interact with peers from their very own classroom,” says Mohamud.

“In the schools that we’re working with, students interact with people from different backgrounds on a daily basis. We hope that these sessions and activities are giving them the skills needed to interact with their peers from all diverse backgrounds and cultures. The goal of these first few lesson plans are to enable students to make connections with their daily life and what it means to be a global citizen.”

The OWYP curriculum serves to complement other courses and help students meet existing educational standards. As an example, the OWYP sessions led by Jaimes are integrated in a world history class, and according to him, the OWYP lesson plans gets students even more excited about world history.

“Last year I’ve had the most outstanding and enriching experience,” says Jonila Fetiu, Project Ambassador at the University of Prishtina in Prishtina, Kosovo. “Watching the children communicate and interact was priceless. Starting with the same enthusiasm this new semester made me realize how helpful these lessons were to the students. They started to see the world in a different view with a richer knowledge about the things that surround them.”

One World Youth Project is a 3-semester program for university and secondary school students. OWYP trains university students to lead a global competence curriculum in local secondary schools, and connect their classrooms with classrooms abroad. This is OWYP’s third year working with Georgetown University in Washington D.C., U.S.A., and the University of Prishtina in Prishtina, Kosovo. OWYP is launching in five additional universities in the U.S., Guyana, Turkey, Kosovo and Pakistan for the 2012/2013 program year.

To learn more about OWYP’s work this year in Washington D.C., U.S.A., and Prishtina, Kosovo, check out this short video:

Click here to view the embedded video.

OWYP is based in Washington D.C., but we’re a global organization with partnerships around the world. Not only has technology allowed students to gain global competence without the need for resource-heavy international travel, but it has also shaped the way our organization manages our partnerships and programming.

As the partnership director, I manage our recruitment and partnership building with universities. Most of our partnerships are established long-distance via technology. Our contracts are signed electronically via e-signing tools like EchoSign. Meetings with the University Champion to discuss how to launch OWYP’s programming are done over Skype. Our interactions between partners are tracked via a client relationship management system called Salesforce, so that nothing ever slips through the cracks. In the future, I hope to engage university administrators with Google+ Hangouts, and host informational Cisco WebEx webinars for individuals to learn more about our program. As an organization who strives to equip students with the global life skills needed to succeed in an interconnected 21st century, we have also developed tech-progressive operations that align with our mission as well.

While technology has made things easier and more efficient, it isn’t a sole substitution for in-person dialogue. This is especially true for areas that don’t have Internet tech available. As an organization that aims at making global education an equal access opportunity, utilizing on-the-ground support from in-country advocates is a necessary and helpful step. We effectively crowdsource the support that comes in from all areas of the globe by asking the question: How could OWYP be best implemented in your community?

Using innovative technology to complement traditional approaches has helped us not only develop strong partnerships, but retain them as well. As connective technology and its diffusion continue to evolve, there will continue to be advancements in the way we build partnerships around the world.

Click here to view the embedded video.

OWYP is officially launching at 5 additional universities in the U.S., Kosovo, Turkey, Guyana and Pakistan. Follow along on program updates in schools around the world on One World Youth Project TV and connect with us on  Twitter .

Jocelyn Fong is one of the eight OWYP Project Ambassadors at the Georgetown University Hub. This is her second year volunteering for One World Youth Project, leading our global citizenship curriculum in middle and high school classrooms in the Columbia Heights Education Campus and connecting her classrooms with classrooms abroad.

Thinking back on a year of OWYP classroom visits, I visualize a whirlwind of images – post-it notes, smiles, maps, laughs, and silliness. It’s been quite the trans-national journey, our classes delving into societal issues plaguing places as far away as Kosovo and South Africa and as near to our backyard as Washington, D.C. And that’s why it’s been such an amazing experience – our students have come so far from the Columbia Heights, Washington, D.C., USA bubble, growing in their understanding of what it means to be a global citizen, a citizen of the world:

From Lucy, who bridged the gap between the ideas of “us” and “them” with her understanding of the significance of cross-cultural communication, her recognition of the cultural stereotypes embedded in media as pervasive as Family Guy, and her ability to see generalizations’ detrimental effect on inter-cultural relations.

To Adrienne, who enriched our understanding of world interconnectedness with her recognition of global interdependence, her analysis of China’s inexpensive labor markets and cellphone’s negative feedback loops, and her realization that global connection does not translate into global equality, either between countries or within countries.

And Antoinette, who inspired us to apply our classroom knowledge to our own lives with her perspective on homelessness attuned to the needs of the individual, her self-confidence to get involved in the D.C. homeless community, and her initiative in making a list of soup kitchens, clothes drives, and shelters at which she could volunteer.

Students who once didn’t look really much beyond their classroom, much beyond their community are now emerging as reinvigorated citizens wanting to engage with the world. It’s moments like these when I see the power of OWYP coming to life. For me, it’s seeing our students transform from learners to leaders, their ideas transforming from scribbles on paper into realities in life. It’s them being empowered enough that they know they can make a difference, change the world a little bit at a time.

As a literary master once said, “Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.” With our OWYP classroom visits, we are both broadening students’ awareness of the wider world and increasing their toolboxes for tackling its challenges. We’re encouraging them to think outside the box so that they can imagine a different world that they have the power, desire and will to create.

Check out a short video on our work in DC middle/high school classrooms:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Cady Voge serves as the Program Director and is responsible for designing and implementing all three major annual trainings for OWYP’s university student volunteers, supporting the volunteers throughout the program year, and managing the partnerships with OWYP secondary schools. Read more about Cady.

Remember when going out and buying “The cell phone” was a family affair? Then for a few years every time you were going on an outing with Dad, he’d take the cell phone out of the drawer a few hours before and make sure it was charged. He’d put it in his coat pocket on the way out the door (it obviously wouldn’t fit comfortably in anyone’s pocket) – “So we can call Mom to pick us up after the basketball game,” he’d say. And what a relief it was that you wouldn’t have to wait in the cold on the decided-upon street corner at the decided-upon time and hope the stars aligned with no miscommunication about this carefully crafted plan. Remember that?

This was one of the memories that came to my mind when browsing through the tweets with the currently trending hash tag “90sproblems”, so many of which poke fun at how archaic things like Walkmans and pay phones seem today. Well, if you’re around my age (20-something) and grew up in the US with a household income that could afford one cell phone in the 1990s (which WikiAnswers says cost around $325.00), you might relate.

So, not a huge proportion of the world shares my exact association with their first taste of mobile communication, but many people alive today can relate to memories of the first cell phone they used, opening their first email account, and perhaps the experience of reconnecting with someone from their past through a social media platform. It’s easy to forget what it was like before the Internet and cell phones in a time when new innovations in communication technology occur so frequently that each time they do, we’re less and less impressed.

It seems that the novelty of being able to communicate with anyone anywhere in the world has worn off, and yet we have reached nowhere near our potential to dramatically change the world with the technology available to us today. The technology exists, for example, for students in a classroom in the Atlas Mountains to learn about rainforests firsthand from students who live in The Amazon by video conferencing between two basic personal computers on opposite sides of our planet. These are experiential learning experiences we could have only dreamed of 20 years ago.

We share a planet, we impact each other’s economies, we go to war with each other, and as our world becomes more interconnected than ever before, it is essential for youth to gain experience communicating and collaborating across cultures. One World Youth Project promotes this in classrooms worldwide by training university students to visit local classrooms to facilitate a new lesson each week, which always ends by using technology to produce that week’s “exchange component”. These exchanges range from photographs of student posters, videos showing and explaining their community to their partner classroom, and live Skype video chats. Now that the tools are at our fingertips, I say we get used to having conversations and working with each other instead of against each other.

Cross-posted from Mezimbite.com and written by Martin Segal, a director of the The Segal Family Foundation.

The Segal Family Foundation is a young organization that has a common sense approach toward making a difference in the lives and communities of people in Sub Saharan Africa.

We did not begin with an elaborate development strategy and none of us have a development background: My dad, Barry, who started the foundation, wanted to donate a portion of the money he had earned throughout his life toward an area of the world where there was the most need, and then figure out a way to make the most impact.

Sub Saharan Africa seemed a natural place to focus his time, his energies and his philanthropy. In SSA, funds go a lot further than many places. For the past year and a half the core team – executive director Andy Bryant, board member Antoine Chiquet and myself, along with family members Janis Simon, Rich Segal and our founder Barry Segal, have been going around a learning curve to make a sustainable difference in our work.

It has been an adventure and in the past 18 months I have traveled several times to several countries, including Kenya, Uganda, Burundi, Rwanda and Malawi.

Since we have a business background, we adopted a business-like approach to funding and empowering grassroots organizations that have strong skill sets and objectives but may be lacking in certain strengths. We try to invest in smart people and smart ideas and get out of the way- we are listening to those who are more knowledgeable than we are.

We stay within a general mission of supporting basic needs like food and agriculture, health, education, alternative energy and family planning at the community level. The common denominators across projects are dynamic leadership, roots in stable communities, and remote, underserved locales. We also have select partnerships with larger organizations like Planned Parenthood, BRAC and Habitat for Humanity when we feel these larger entities will lend their technical expertise to our grassroots partners.

We try to invest in smart people and smart ideas and get out of the way- we are listening to those who are more knowledgeable than we are.

One lesson we learned early on is that many of these grassroots efforts work independently and don’t do a great job communicating with each other although they may have overlapping skills and needs.

We realized that we can add value by serving as a network facilitator amongst these fragmented efforts to help them develop a more cohesive strategy and become more interdependent. In practical terms, this means that, for example, if a health clinic needs electricity, we will fund that need with a solar power suitcase from another organization that specializes in solar power. Or perhaps when an organization specializing in school food security needs partners, we will link them with our education partners for joint projects.

One of the advantages of having a business background is that we are sometimes willing to take informed and calculated risks. We receive a lot of proposals all the time on social media like Facebook.

One time, we had a group of pastors in eastern Uganda ask us for some money, we worked with them on their proposal and decided to give them a few thousand dollars. It was site unseen, and yes, it was a risk.

On a subsequent trip to Uganda, my team and I were gratified to see what these pastors had turned our funding into: they had built an orphanage and a school both of which were thriving! So, it’s a learning curve: you try things, you make informed decisions, you take sensible risks and sometimes, the unexpected happens.

We have found a common sense approach that works well for us and we are looking in the future to build on this. Last year, we worked with about 130 different grassroots organizations within several Sub Saharan countries. We invited about 90 different representatives to our annual meeting in New York, and this year, we expect representatives from 120 partners. Slowly but surely, we are expanding our network, strengthening our impact in communities on the ground, and learning valuable lessons along the way.

The Segal foundation is not accepting donations, as it states on their website in this quote from Barry Segal, the founder:

“The foundation is currently healthy and is not in need of external funds. If you are inspired by the things the Segal Foundation is doing, you can use our website to help you learn more about the issues, causes, and people that are making a difference in Sub Saharan Africa”.

About the Host Site: The Mezimbite Forest Centre eliminates poverty in forest communities by providing sustainable economic alternatives that protect and restore the forest ecosystem. The Centre is a community-based program with an integrated sustainable design, forest management and education/training center. The heart of the Mezimbite project lies in Mozambique but Mezimbite’s services and programs are expanding into neighboring countries.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Cady Voge is OWYP’s Program Director. She designs and implements annual trainings for OWYP’s university student volunteers, supports the OWYP volunteers and manages partnerships with secondary schools. Read more about Cady.

The buzz-provoking “If I Were A Poor Black Kid” piece by Gene Marks this week is cringe-worthy. My first thought: Who is this guy? Ohh, an accountant who writes a tech column and has published a few books on small business management? That makes sense because I work for a small global education not-for-profit and today I’m writing this post about an idea I thought of yesterday while riding the bus about how I’m going to cure cancer.

Many counterattack articles and blogs are presenting the countless reasons why our hero/savior Marks’ simple plan for success (for all the poor black kids out there) is condescendingly over simplified. I agree with these rebuttals. And I cringe not only because Marks’ simple proposals offend me but also because it’s embarrassing that he might think these ideas are novel.

In his gracious response to Marks’ piece, Ta-Nehisi Coates presented an idea I’d like to explore, the role of empathy in gaining a deeper understanding of race in America:

“Some weeks ago I met a student who was specializing in economy and theater. She said that what she loved about both fields was that she had to presume a kind of rationality in studying her actors. She had to surrender herself–her sense of what she would like to think she would do–and think more of what she might actually do given all the perils of the character’s environs. It would not be enough to consider slavery, for instance, when claiming “If I was a slave I’d rebel.” One would have to consider, for instance, family left behind to bear the wrath of those one would seek to rebel against. In other words, one would have to assume that for the vast majority of slaves rebellion made no sense. And then instead of declaration (“I would do…”), one would be forced into a question (“Why wouldn’t I?”).

“This basic extension of empathy is one of the great barriers in understanding race in this country. I do not mean a soft, flattering, hand-holding empathy. I mean a muscular empathy rooted in curiosity. If you really want to understand slaves, slave masters, poor black kids, poor white kids, rich people of colors, whoever, it is essential that you first come to grips with the disturbing facts of your own mediocrity. The first rule is this–You are not extraordinary. It’s all fine and good to declare that you would have freed your slaves. But it’s much more interesting to assume that you wouldn’t and then ask “Why?”

“This is not an impossible task. But often we find that we have something invested in not asking “Why?” The fact that we — and I mean all of us, black and white — are, in our bones, no better than slave masters is chilling. The upshot of all my black nationalist study was terrifying — give us the guns and boats and we would do the same thing. There is nothing particularly noble about black skin. And to our present business it is equally chilling to understand that the obstacles facing poor black kids can’t be surmounted by an advice column.”

I’ll never forget a tense class discussion about experiencing race in America my senior year in high school after watching Los Angeles Burning (a beautiful portrayal of the many perspectives in the Rodney King Riots by Anna Deveare-Smith). When I raised my hand to share my opinion I offered every caveat I could in an effort to timidly apologize for my white privilege with, “I mean, I don’t actually know but I think that maybe…” when my classmate finally interrupted me to say, “We know you’re not black and you won’t ever know what that’s like, but just say what you have to say.” Now I carry this value with me at all times: the only experience we can all truly be experts in is our own and we all have the right to share it.

Despite dedicating my life’s work to the pursuit of bringing empathy education to the attention and top priority of anyone who will listen, the above experience makes me question if enacting true empathy (the ability to understand and share the feelings of another), is possible. Is it not presumptuous to believe you can understand and share how another human being experiences the world? My problem with Marks’ words is not that he is a white man talking about racial inequality but rather that he is a white man who seems to believe he is practicing empathy, and most offensive of all that he’s got all the answers.

I believe the key to practicing empathy is not only building our muscles to ask the more challenging questions and to think holistically about the social forces at play for why every poor black kid doesn’t just (as Marks suggests) try a little harder, as Coates calls upon us to do. Practicing empathy requires humility. Humility reminds us that our experiences are not universal, our ideas aren’t the best (even if we’re a Forbes columnist), and that it is neither the job nor the expertise of one middle class, middle-aged white man to liberate all the poor black kids from centuries of systemic discrimination. Inequality hurts everyone. Own your skin in this game, but don’t own that of others.

ABCnews, I’m sure, had a benevolent idea but they tried to tell the story of Native American students without letting the students tell it themselves. What they did instead was essentialize and reduce communities into images that would garner ratings. When young people themselves choose the medium of their own stories, we get a video that might not be as professionally produced but achieves a level of honesty that no prime-time newscaster could.

This is why we need a medium for people to share who they are, in their own words, to each other and to the world at large. The educators at Todd County HS are incredible for providing their students with that avenue, just as OWYP educators do. Until we have more of this, too many people will continue to believe the tropes and images. We need young people to tell their own stories instead of being cast in someone else’s legends.
 
Kudos to you, students and teachers of Todd County for taking your story into your own hands! Hopefully your example will encourage others to do the same.