As the documentary, The Invisible Heart, begins its Canadian tour, I felt it an appropriate time to revisit a couple of talks given by Sir Ronald Cohen. Cohen, an important figure in UK venture capital, put together the first social impact bond deal. I’d like to thank BubbleBlower / @DoubleDutch31 in the Netherlands for the […]

On September 13, 2018, the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation released a public service announcement outlining risks associated with the collection of sensitive student data through educational technologies. Many applaud the FBI’s actions. I do not. I believe it to be yet another calculated move in a long range campaign to misdirect the public […]

This week Jeff Bezos of Amazon announced plans to direct $2 billion, in part, to the creation of a “Day 1 Academies Fund,” which would underwrite the costs of full-scholarship “tier one” Montessori model preschools in low-income communities. Within moments of hearing the announcement I began poking around to see where the connections were. What immediately […]

This spring I visited Boston for an education conference, and while there I spent an afternoon exploring MIT and Harvard with a friend. I wanted to see with my own eyes the spaces where these destructive policies of social impact investing (Harvard) and digital economics and Human-Computer Interaction (MIT) are being incubated. In many respects […]

Classrooms have always been sites of struggle. We find ourselves in the midst of a battle pitting human agency and relationships against technologized surveillance and predictive profiling. Can schools evolve into places of community where new ways of being in the world, ways that begin to address past harms against oppressed people and the earth, […]

I realize my Blockchain video presents an abundance of information that may be difficult to absorb all at once. For that reason, I’ve pulled together images from the video and accompanying text into a slideshare that people can review at their own pace. Access the slideshare here. Access a PDF of the script here. I […]

I should have anticipated the response to my Blockchain video would be muted. Digital wallets for e-vouchers and lifelong learning badges probably seem like a distant threat to most people. And yet as we begin a new school year I can’t help but reflect on the fact that more than a handful of people I […]

Campaigns have been launched across the nation to document and address chronic deficits in state-level education funding. Undoubtedly, the intentional underfunding of our public schools is a serious concern. One such campaign was recently announced in my home state, PA Schools Work. According to their website, the coalition, which includes a number of union and […]

I created this video as a follow up to the one I prepared last year on Social Impact Bonds. It is time to examine the ways in which Blockchain could interface with social impact investing to further concentrate power and wealth and exacerbate long-standing forms of global oppression under the guise of philanthropy. This narrative […]

This piece expands on my previous post about IXO Foundation’s development of the Amply DApp, a proof of concept for a social impact token on Blockchain developed in South Africa’s preschools. It is an open source protocol designed to leverage Internet of Things monitoring to “prove” impact for those investing in the UN’s Sustainable Development […]