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Professors are also being left out of marketing decisions, personal branding campaigns, and how the intellectual capital of their life’s work get’s disseminated.

In addition to academic prowess, future SuperProfessors will be ranked according to attributes like influence, fame, clout, and name recognition. Future criteria for winning the FacultyRow SuperProfessor designation will likely include benchmarks for the size of social networks, industry influencer rankings, and gauges for measuring effectiveness of personal branding campaigns.

Currently we are seeing a tremendous duplication of effort. Entry-level courses such as psychology 101, economics 101, and accounting 101 are being taught simultaneously by thousands of professors around the globe. Once a high profile SuperProfessor and brand name University produces one of these courses, what’s the value of a mid-tier school and little-known teacher also creating the same course? As Ball Corporation executive, Drew Crouch puts it, “Education is definitely moving from a history of scarcity to a future of abundance. Just like Gutenberg freed the written word, the Internet has freed information.”

focus on shape instead of number

it wasn’t clear that preschoolers really understood “winning” or “losing”

Since December, 20,000 teachers from kindergarten through 12th grade have introduced coding lessons, according to Code.org, a group backed by the tech industry that offers free curriculums. In addition, some 30 school districts, including New York City and Chicago, have agreed to add coding classes in the fall, mainly in high schools but in lower grades, too. And policy makers in nine states have begun awarding the same credits for computer science classes that they do for basic math and science courses, rather than treating them as electives.

coding looks less like an extracurricular activity and more like a basic life skill, one that might someday lead to a great job or even instant riches.

But the momentum for early coding comes with caveats, too. It is not clear that teaching basic computer science in grade school will beget future jobs or foster broader creativity and logical thinking, as some champions of the movement are projecting. And particularly for younger children, Dr. Soloway said, the activity is more like a video game — better than simulated gunplay, but not likely to impart actual programming skills.