AK: At the “hacking education” summit at Union Square Ventures last spring, one of the most frequently re-tweeted lines was about classroom teachers today being like bank tellers of the 1970s. Do you think that’s true?
PW: I was a management consultant with Accenture in the mid-90s when the Internet first came out. Every financial services client we had was panicking about disintermediation: that banks, travel agents, brokers would all go away. You know what? It’s not so much they’re all gone today but their roles have changed. They have to be better at what they do, redefine roles or add different kinds of value. I think likely that some level of that is going to happen to what we call schooling. It will be part of a whole ecology of institutions or modalities of access available to learners to enable them to develop an interest, engage, deepen and extend their learning.
