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"In essence, it is a just a distributed ledger to record transactions. What makes it special is that it is durable, time-stamped, transparent and decentralized. Those characteristics are equally useful for managing financial transactions as for a system of reputation. In fact, you can think of reputation as a type of currency for social capital, rather than financial capital."

"The internet should be either a post-capitalist good, or a public good. A public utility. Like a town square. Things like Facebook and YouTube and Twitter never should have been capitalist at all. Like all town squares, the rules of civilized speech should apply. I can't call someone a nasty name, harass them, intimidate them, bully them there - nor should I be able to here. The capitalist internet is one of history's great failures, my friends. Whether we know it now or not, our grandkids will certainly regard it that way. They'll be incredulous that we were seduced and then addicted by its garbage culture, its trash spectacles, its junk food for the human mind and spirit, all so we could get a desperate hit of feeling power and control…while our planet, democracies, future, and lives were all melting down. It's up to us to build a better internet, and do it now. And whether we do that through post-capitalism, or through public goods - or both - that challenge is very real, very urgent, and very noble."

"Today, computer science is absent in 95 percent of high schools in the U.S. Yep. Why? Because developing curriculum for these subjects requires time and expertise, and finding the qualified candidates to teach these subjects demands significant capital to lure talented programmers away from high-paying jobs in the private sector.  That's where CodeHS comes in. Founded by Stanford students Zach Galant and Jeremy Keeshin and incubated at StartX and Imagine K12, CodeHS is an online program built for high school students (and teachers) with no previous coding experience that intends to provide an easy and fun way to learn computer science."

The students in the Independent Project are remarkable but not because they are exceptionally motivated or unusually talented. They are remarkable because they demonstrate the kinds of learning and personal growth that are possible when teenagers feel ownership of their high school experience, when they learn things that matter to them and when they learn together. In such a setting, school capitalizes on rather than thwarts the intensity and engagement that teenagers usually reserve for sports, protest or friendship.

A true educational Commons would be a force for reducing academic hierarchy and income inequality. I'm all in favor of that. You say you are too. But is that what you are telling your partners in finance and university administration? Or are you telling them that they can accumulate even more of what they already have-money and prestige-while appearing to be giving it away? I will know my course has been successful when my students understand Coursera's business model behind offering free higher education globally (along with the promise of greater social equality) as an exciting venture capital investment opportunity through which to increase privately-held wealth and lock in existing educational hierarchies.

As college debt skyrockets to over $35,000 per student, the state of Oregon has proposed a novel investment approach to loans: free tuition at public universities in exchange for 3 percent of earnings for the first 25 years after graduation. Just like a venture-capital portfolio that earns its profit from a few star investments, many students would end up underpaying the cost of their college, subsidized by the school's star businessmen.

"THE BOOKSTORE as we know it is doomed, because many of these establishments are going to go from making a little bit of money every day to losing a little bit. And it's hard to sustain daily losses for long, particularly when you're poorly capitalized, can't use the store as a loss leader and see no hope down the road. The death of the bookstore is being caused by the migration to ebooks (it won't take all books to become 'e', just enough to tip the scale) as well as the superior alternative of purchase and selection of books online. If the function of a bookstore is to stock every book and sell it to you quickly and cheaply, the store has failed."

"The new university/company AI partnership model will resemble the current online program management model, in which the AI company de-risks the AI investment with up-front capital and resources, and is paid by a revenue share."

"To enable learning environments of greater quality, scale, and power, with continuous and instantaneous digital connections to information, services, and communities, the learning management system of today must be reimagined. New systems are needed that capitalize on the transformative possibilities of technology to personalize instruction and integrate the diverse resources that support learners."

"Under Chairman of the Board Martin Lipton and President John Sexton, New York University has been to operate as a real estate development/management business with a predatory higher-education side venture. A group of 400 faculty members at NYU, Faculty Against the Sexton Plan (FASP), have been working for years against what Pam Martens has called "running NYU as a tyrannical slush fund for privileged interests." FASP just published a devastating document, The Art of the Gouge, which describes how NYU engages in a mind-numbing range of tricks and traps to extract as much in fees as possible from students, while at the same time failing to invest in and often degrading the educational "product"."

"these days when we say "textbook" we seldom mean textbook. We mean course materials. As the Vox article makes clear, the book is not always (not usually?) the hideously expensive part of the deal - the online access codes and other ancillary materials are. Certainly, there are amazingly expensive books out there that get assigned in classes (I hear law books are hundreds of dollars, I know some economics books are, some science books, etc. Even in Literature, a relatively inexpensive field, big anthologies can be pricey). But often - and maybe even usually - when we complain about the cost of books, we're complaining about the cost of supplemental media, password-protected websites, and other items that may include text but are certainly not books. The term "Open Educational Resources" recognizes this. It's a strange habit of language that has kept us from parallelism, though: What OERs oppose is not textbooks, but CERs, Closed Educational Resources."

"Publishers claim that new technologies, like digital textbooks and Netflix-style subscription services, make textbooks more affordable for all. But affordability advocates say that if anyone is to blame for the fact that textbook costs have risen more than 1,000 percent since the 1970s, it's the publishers - and, advocates claim, these new technologies are publishers' attempt to maintain their stranglehold on the industry while disguising it as reform."