Alex Toulemonde's blog » Education

4 Steps To Get Closer To a Better Education

admin — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 10:12:42 +0000

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This is an edit from my Quora answer to Etienne Depaulis’s question: “What changes could help the engineering schools of France produce more entrepreneurs?”.

1. Change the rewarding system to celebrate failure. Not only failure is key to accelerate the learning curve but it’s usually the first fear that stop students from becoming an entrepreneur. At school, failing is not perceived as an accelerator and slows down entrepreneurship.

2. Experiment to change the world instead of virtual project. I spent hours of courses trying to build stuff that have already been done. Not fun. Today technology can connect any problem to anyone who is willing to solve it. If teachers were pushing students to “try to change the world” during their courses, students would understand how motivational and amazing it is to be an entrepreneur.

3. Create a culture of “we”. At school, we don’t live or even learn how to build a great culture. Ranking students individually create selfish personalities. Schools keep promoting how much you can make with their diploma while the most important is how much your team or maybe your users can benefit from your work. Entrepreneurs have been raised to be altruistic.

4. Rethink the Business Model. Technology are moving about 10x faster than 10 years ago and it’s not likely to slow down. We can no longer let people who haven’t be facing to the “real world” for the past 5 years. School administration could offer projects and/or money to researchers, engineers and entrepreneurs to tell their story about “How they fail or succeed?”. Knowledge has become real-time as well so teachers should go part-time and executives should go back to school.

But first of all, changes come from people. Students need to stand up and say loudly how bored they are at schools. Lots of them would become entrepreneurs if the system was celebrating innovation.

Our children will need a way better education system to face the very challenging world we’re heading to. We need to start to change it now.

The best way to predict the future is to create it. Peter F. Drucker

–break–

Ted: “We built our school like Fast-Food.”

6 Videos to Convince You That Education Needs to Change

admin — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 07:53:06 +0000

Technology has radically changed the way we should educate the next generation. By providing an instant access to the best experts of the world, what become the roles of our teachers? Should we play those videos in our schools? What should we say to a teacher who has half the level of an online professor?

The world understands really well how internet is changing our life however when it comes to education it seems that nobody want to talk about it most of the time because the teachers don’t want to be face to this reality: their competition is now worldwide.

Example: http://academicearth.org/ or http://ocw.mit.edu

1. We have built our education on the model of Fast-Food

–break–

2. These kids will never fit in a traditional analogue classroom

3. We should raise entrepreneurs instead of lawyers

4. How Kids Did Better than Managers

5. The Worldwide School

6. Our education is failing desperately

If you know more videos, let me know!

4 Incredible Websites To Learn Online

admin — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 13:48:33 +0000

Here’s few sources from where I love to learn, you will find an incredible source of knowledge for your business (and your life).

I’m always wondering How The Technology Can/Should Change Our Education? . Do we really know how to push our brain boundaries? You will find some answers in those great websites.

TED.com – Ideas Worth Spreading

Google Talks

Poptech – World-changing people, projects and ideas

Fora.tv – The World is thinking

Update: I also recently discovered Big Think, 99 percent and Academia Earth.

What Web Events Can We Follow in April/May?

admin — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 12:22:24 +0000

There’s few events happening in April/May which could worth to follow up (online or not). I’m going to attend to those events to learn from the “best”. You can follow me on Twitter if you want to join to the discussion as well.

April 27/28/29 – TheNextWeb.com, Amsterdam – @thenextweb

May 3/6 – Web 2.0 Expo, San Francisco – @w2e

May 12th – Smash Summit, San Francisco - @smashsummit

May 20th – Zappos, Seminar “Culture for you and your organization”, Las Vegas – @zapposinsights

May 24/25/26 – Techcrunch Disrupt, New York City – @techcrunch

I’ll be finishing my trip in Vancouver and organize some free workshops to share and discuss about the topics seen during this trip. Contact me if you want to join to the conversation.

Iteem – Ingénieur, Manager, Entrepreneur

admin — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 15:13:24 +0000

Have a quick look on my school’s brochure. An innovating initiative which is the mix of an engineering and business program focused on entrepreneurship and business creation.

We have 16 months of internship in total (8 months abroad). So if you are interested in a young entrepreneur as an intern, visit the website http://iteem.ec-lille.fr/en or contact me.

Even if I think this program is one of the best education in France for entrepreneurs. I decided to leave after 4 years to dedicate my time to more concrete projects and a learning which matches better with my career. I am not graduated but still an actor in the student life.

Here’s a list of all of my ex-classmates who are on Twitter. About 65 students out of 350 for now. Interesting way to evaluate a school isn’t it?