Edtech Insiders

From Memes to Mastery: Exploring Antimatter Systems’ Innovative Learning Tools with Jonathan Libov

April 29, 2024 Alex Sarlin Season 8
From Memes to Mastery: Exploring Antimatter Systems’ Innovative Learning Tools with Jonathan Libov
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Edtech Insiders
From Memes to Mastery: Exploring Antimatter Systems’ Innovative Learning Tools with Jonathan Libov
Apr 29, 2024 Season 8
Alex Sarlin

Send us a Text Message.

Jonathan Libov is the CEO & Founder of Antimatter Systems which seeks to bridge the gap between how students learn in the classroom and how people learn in the real world using a suite of modern AI tools for formative assessment, like student-created memes, text message conversations and socratic dialogue with LLMs. Antimatter has recently launched the pilot of their Universe Program, which gives students the opportunity to teach the world and learn how to lead online. Before founding Antimatter in 2021, Jonathan has spent his career in and around startups as a product executive and investor.

Recommended Resources:

🤖
Replit by Amjad Masad
🤖
Synthesis by Chrisman Frank

Show Notes Transcript

Send us a Text Message.

Jonathan Libov is the CEO & Founder of Antimatter Systems which seeks to bridge the gap between how students learn in the classroom and how people learn in the real world using a suite of modern AI tools for formative assessment, like student-created memes, text message conversations and socratic dialogue with LLMs. Antimatter has recently launched the pilot of their Universe Program, which gives students the opportunity to teach the world and learn how to lead online. Before founding Antimatter in 2021, Jonathan has spent his career in and around startups as a product executive and investor.

Recommended Resources:

🤖
Replit by Amjad Masad
🤖
Synthesis by Chrisman Frank

Alexander Sarlin:

Welcome to Season Eight of Edtech Insiders where we speak to educators, founders, investors, thought leaders and the industry experts who are shaping the global education technology industry. Every week, we bring you the week in edtech. important updates from the Edtech field, including news about core technologies and issues we know will influence the sector like artificial intelligence, extended reality, education, politics, and more. We also conduct in depth interviews with a wide variety of Edtech thought leaders, and bring you insights and conversations from ed tech conferences all around the world. Remember to subscribe, follow and tell your ed tech friends about the podcast and to check out the Edtech Insiders substack newsletter. Thanks for being part of the Edtech Insiders community enjoy the show. Jonathan Libov is the CEO of Antimatter, a platform for teaching and learning through memes, puzzles, games, and other experiences that bridge the gap between what it's like to learn in a classroom and what it's like to learn in the real world. With Antimatter teachers can invite their students to create memes about their current units for formative assessment. Sorcerer by antimatter is an instructional coach for students that asks differentiated questions to each student according to their individual mastery level. Antimatter is also launching a product for students to teach other students around the world through memes, empowering them to not only augment their college application resumes, but earn real world rewards. Jonathan is a first time founder. He's also lead product at the Medical Education Network figure one and is a former investor at Union Square Ventures. Jonathan Libov, welcome to Edtech Insiders.

Jonathan Libov:

Thank you so much for having me.

Alexander Sarlin:

I am incredibly excited to talk to you because your products were introduced to me by Matt Tower, who's a real edtech enthusiast and expert. And when I started actually trying them, I just felt like I was seeing a totally different future of what AI in education could and should look like. And I just have wanted to have you on the show for a while. So I'm really excited to talk to you. Can we start by just give our audience a little bit of a background on what brought you into edtech? And what you're doing with antimatter?

Jonathan Libov:

Sure. So I am not an educator by trade. I've been a technologist for two years and investor in my career, I like to say that we didn't invent antimatter, we discovered it. So to give you a little bit of the origin story for antimatter, the first germ of an idea happened in May of 2020. Right, this is like peak pandemic. And, you know, the world was burning. Twitter was just nothing but Doom scrolling, and it was rotting my brain. And so I resolved to, you know, spend my free time on my phone on Reddit, rather than Twitter. And one of the subs that I joined was the physics memes sub that's our slash physics memes, where it's generally composed of students and graduate students who post memes about physics. And I realized this was the third learning meme community that I had joined. So the first light bulb was that this idea of learning meme communities as a compound noun, I hadn't thought about that before I also belong to on Instagram history in memes. Underscore explained. It's really brilliant. It's like a meme. And then you carousel through the photos to get an explanation of the meme. And the other was daily Roman updates on Twitter, which is really, really great account. I encourage everybody to join all of those accounts. So first light bulb, learning meme communities, hmm, that's a fit. The second light bulb that went off was about maybe a month later, where there was this really elaborate video meme in the physics memes sub about the double slit experiment. So that was, the meme itself was impressive. But what was really interesting is that the top comment was something like, I don't get it. And a comment below that, and all the comments below that. Were helping that person understand the meme. And so that tipped me off to two things that are related. The first is that you don't learn from memes, right? Memes are puzzles around which people congregate. I mean, this is true all over the internet. But it's also true in these kinds of learning meme communities. It's not a gag. They're genuine puzzles that have this really nice binary outcome that you get them or you don't, and in order to get them to solve the puzzle While it derives from your understanding of the subject matter, and then related to that, it was a beautiful thing to see other students and graduate students pitching in to help this person understand, right, they were behaving as teachers in situ, which is just a beautiful thing to see. Right? This is real peer to peer teaching and learning. So that was the second light bulb went off. The third is that I took these observations to my best friend from college, who's now a high school history teacher. And I was, you know, expecting him when I when I presented this idea to say, That's a cute idea. And what he actually said was, I use memes in my classroom all the time, I create memes to help my kids with test prep. But more importantly, I invite them to make memes about the current unit, in order to help with understanding to do what teachers call formative assessment, right? The idea being to create or to interpret a meme, you really have to understand the subject matter. And similarly in his classroom, it would facilitate really great discussions. I mean, I was not familiar with Bloom's Taxonomy before. But I guess the listeners of this podcast are again, I was not an educator by trade. This is just Bloom's Taxonomy made expedient, right? The tippy top of Bloom's Taxonomy is creation. This is the most aspirational form of learning to demonstrate that you understand something where you're going to prove to yourself that you understand something or to grapple with a subject matter, you should be able to create in another medium, right? Right, a 3x play about the double slit experiment, that would be probably the best thing you could possibly do to demonstrate your understanding, or to grapple with it. And so means are just puzzling, short stories. This is Bloom's Taxonomy made expedient. And similarly, this the second level of Bloom's Taxonomy is evaluation, right? Same idea I mentioned earlier about the Reddit thread is that to interpret a meme, you really have to understand the subject matter, because the punchline derives from your understanding. And so we had not one but two emergent behaviors on our hands. One, the growth of these learning meme communities, and to the abundant use of learning memes in the classroom. That's the origin story for antimatter.

Alexander Sarlin:

Yeah, exactly. And it did. You know, and you're talking about the participatory nature of internet culture, you're talking about very modern ways of communicating and our digital age through memes. I do want to take a half step back, because I realized some of our listeners might be much more familiar with even the concept of a meme in the way that you're using it than others. So you know, meme is a philosophical concept is like an idea that spreads. But an internet meme means something super specific. Can you just explain to our audience, when you're talking about these mean communities, or a physics meme or history meme? What exactly does that look like? And just give us a little bit of an overview of that, just to make sure we're all on the same page? Sure.

Jonathan Libov:

Well, you know, I'd say that in the meme communities that I mentioned, those do look like fairly traditional means there's an image template, which is essentially a prototype for a story, and a caption, or multiple captions, layered on top to fill out that story. Now, with that said, we do have something of a broader definition of memes more than the lowercase your sense of the word meme. Interestingly, I don't know if everyone in the audience knows the origin of the term meme. It was invented by Richard Dawkins, in the book, The Selfish Gene, it is the last chapter of that book. And his point there is that means spread in the same way as genes, right? The novel thesis, that book is that it's not survival of the organism. It's the proliferation of the gene, the gene just wants to proliferate. And if it has to cooperate with other genes on the genome, it will do that for its own self interest. And memes are similar right memes. even think of jingles as a form of meme. Right? I have a six year old who sings You know, be K Have it your way, right? Like God knows that's not the meme of sorts, traditionally online, whether they take the form of like, maybe 10 years ago, it was top and bottom text over some sort of image. And now I'd say it has evolved to the point that it is just instantly highly visual information conveyed with a deliberate an interesting juxtaposition between the imagery is and the subject matter. In many ways. It's better to think of memes as language. There nothing if not like, puzzling, short stories, that compress information, right? There are vehicles for telling stories and conveying information, which, you know if anyone here has any sort of confusion about what a meme is, like, take a reaction GIF, right? People often lump those with memes, because you know, they're fun internet gags right? Now, a reaction GIF is the most amount of pixels you can use to tell the least amount of information, right? Usually you paste a reaction GIF, and you get like, yes, no, excited, right? That's very little information. Whereas memes are often intricate stories told with just a single image rather than a moving animated GIF. Yeah.

Alexander Sarlin:

So memes are the sort of juxtapositions there are words and images that go together to sort of almost create this transcendent idea. And I mean, they can be used for all sorts of purposes, right? I mean, education is probably one of the least commonly used purposes for memes. They're used for communication of all different kinds. But this educational repurposing of memes that obviously you didn't invent was already being done on the internet, being able to sort of harness that power inside a tool is really what you're doing with antimatter. So tell us about how antimatter facilitates learners and educators ability to use memes in the classroom. So

Jonathan Libov:

I would go as far to say that all memes are educational, right, in the sense that they are vehicles for compressing and conveying information. That's fair, they may not be academic, normally. But when you're scrolling through Twitter, and you see a meme, it's usually I mean, Twitter is an information sharing network, right? It is a learning network in many ways that you're learning about the world interspersed with obviously, silly stuff. But it is often about you go to Twitter to learn about the world. And so memes are certainly used in Twitter and elsewhere on the internet, to convey real information about the world. They're not always used for academic purposes. And that stress, right, they have a very particular role within education, and even in the sequence of a unit within school, that memes are sometimes used as bell ringers. Right? If you know for the audience, we had experience with those as like Thomas Nast cartoons, right. It's a puzzle to kick off the class that makes you think, and it's only funny, if you understand the subject matter. Like if you did the reading the night before. The Thomas Kuhn is funny. If you didn't, it makes no sense, right? There also uses bellringers, but they're most commonly used for formative assessment, which is to say, teachers not grading the students, but trying to understand which of their students understand what and the students are able to demonstrate that by either again, creating novel interesting means that are you can serve as puzzles, or in the interpretation and discussion of those memes after the creation period. So they're typically used either as bell ringers, or during formative assessment, and

Alexander Sarlin:

antimatter as an actual edtech product. What is sort of the feature set that allows teachers like your history teacher, friend, who was one of the inspirations to use memes in the classroom in a more sophisticated or more rigorous or more consistent way than they would you know, just doing it casually.

Jonathan Libov:

So when I was researching the idea for antimatter as a company, one of the things that I heard from teachers and I still hear this from them today, is that for teachers who invite their students to make memes, they'll often send them off to image flip, which has ads on it, or, you know, Google Slides, or Canva, which are not really meme gents. And so what we created for teachers was a suite of activities for the teacher to invite their students to make memes and then to discuss them, right? We never supply the memes. We're really in the business of facilitating great discussions, which is where the learning happens. So we have three activities, which in brief, are heatmap, where students make memes on the guy shared workspace or a grid, and the more they get blessed in our parlance, the more the memes glow. The second one is called meme quiz, where the teacher creates just a topic and multiple prompts, and the students are randomly assigned to one of the prompts. Which means that when that review time comes, the students have to guess which meme belongs to which prompt it turns them each meme into a multiple choice quiz. And the final one is This new phone who dis, which going back to the sort of the lowercase sense of the term, meme, new phone who this enables simulated iPhone chats between two historical figures, fictional characters, or even concepts or ideas. So it could be between what would Oppenheimer and Einstein say, if they were on a textbook? What would covalent bonds, say to ionic bonds, etc. So those are the activities that we offer to teachers. Again, it's a scaffolded activity. So they go from like a lobby to a creation period to a discussion period. And then the final part, which is extremely novel within the EdTech world, is that we share the best of creations on antimatter from students and teachers with our entire community, right? And tech is for obvious reasons. Usually, it's like Vegas, right? What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, what happens in the classroom stays in the classroom. But because one of the reasons is you would never want to read another kid's essay or see them how they did a brilliant exercise. But these are memes that have you know, no, personally identifying information, there's no front facing camera. And memes are puzzles in the beginning in the Richard Dawkins sense, that want to be free and want to spread, right. And so you know, every week, we send out a meme of the week email that celebrates the best of creations within our community. And so you could be a kid in Dearborn, Michigan, who makes an outrageously great meme, we just had a activity on the Toledo war, which is you know how Michigan ended up with that upper peninsula, that gets celebrated with students around the world, you have a student in Taiwan, or Tokyo, who might learn a thing or two about the Toledo war from a thing that you made in class. That's one of the really novel things about antimatter. Yeah.

Alexander Sarlin:

So there are so many features of this that feel, you know, for lack of a better word, hypermodern, right. I mean, just the concept of memes as an educational opportunity. And as an educational medium, is it just a very internet age kind of thing to do. The new phone, who dis you know, just the name of that makes me chuckle, but also the idea of text threads. And conversations between different, you know, ideas, or historical characters is also a very internet age type of activity. There's one more I also consider it a very internet age type of activity that you do in antimatter that I'd love to hear you talk about, because this is one that just gets me incredibly excited. Can you tell us a little bit about source for

Jonathan Libov:

sure. So we have two main products right now. They go hand in hand. One is the meme creation activities. The other is sorcerer, which is an AI, but it's almost the reverse of every other AI you've seen for learning in the sense that, you know, think of chat, GBT, right, you asked chat, GBT a question, and it gives you an answer. Sorcerer asks you questions, and you give it the answer. And then it will follow up with a differentiated question. So if you demonstrate that you really understand the topic that you're given, maybe assigned by a teacher in sorcerer, and you give a great answer, it will ask a more advanced or more piercing question. And if you answer the question, well, it will also increase your mastery score. It's tracking from zero to 100. What is your understanding of the subject matter? And if you don't understand the subject matter, we have very carefully designed it to be extremely encouraging, right, still differentiated and responsive to your answers. It will follow up with that's okay. Why don't we start with you know, x, y, z, it will never give you the answer, it will just point you in a different direction, and encourage you to keep going. And so that is in almost the polar opposite of every other AI that you see, which generally helps kids, right or, you know, serves as a resource for kids. We get the same way that we are not in the business of supplying memes like supplying resources, we are in the business of facilitating really rich, great educational discussions. And at first blush, it might seem well, what is the AI have to do with it? Well, it's the very same thing where we're facilitating great discussions between students and either other students or in this case, an AI. Yeah,

Alexander Sarlin:

educators listening to this podcast may recognize this educational format of using questions of and then you know, varying the questions in differentiating to really, you know, pull out information or get students to think about things as the Socratic method. It's certainly a very close corollary to the Socratic method and as you mentioned that you know, blue This taxonomy is sort of baked into your main product where you're doing creation and synthesis and evaluation, you know, as a way to, to assess or sort of, you know, make sense of your own knowledge and construct your own knowledge source or allows the Socratic method to come to bear and allow students to make sense of their own understanding, and then and then push it forward or fill gaps. They're so interesting. So one of the things I want to ask you about, these are very novel concepts in edtech. I mean, you've named I think, three or four, even five different types of activities, all of which feel quite different than what you usually see in edtech products. What has the response been from both the educators that you have been working with? You're sort of relatively early adopters and the growing community and the students, what do they say when confronted with this brand of edtech? Well,

Jonathan Libov:

I'd say it's something of a two sided coin in the sense that, you know, I'm not an educator by trade, no one on the team is an educator by trade, we are all, you know, lifelong learners, we are all very curious people that you wouldn't have fun working antimatter, if you weren't, I mean, like, I'm the one who reviews all the memes that get, you know, shared with our community. And I find myself, you know, all the time as a busy startup founder with two little kids, you know, two little startups at home, I shouldn't be spending my time researching, say, like some concept within chemistry. But when I see a chemistry meme that I don't understand, I'm like, compelled to go look it up on Wikipedia, for example. So it's a two sided coin in the sense that I think us not being from coming from education means that we don't build products that are outside the box is probably the right way to put it. Right. It is at times challenging, because I think, especially in the early days, we missed a lot of the kind of scaffolding that made it necessary to be a productive activity. Like, you know, we didn't have a lobby, we didn't have an explicit discussion period, you couldn't join late, which God knows is a thing that every teacher needs, right? These are things we weren't aware of, because we're not teachers. We do have one advisor, who's a veteran teacher and a Teacher of teachers. But you know, like I said, it's been sort of a two sided coin, I do think the response has been phenomenal, because so many teachers were already in even this predates sorcerer, this is the meme activities. So many teachers were already doing this, but cobbling it together in a clunky way, that I wasn't expecting someone to build this, but thank God somebody did. And sorcerer has it started out as like a hackathon project, right? It kind of spun out of our new phone who dis activity and it's taken on something of a life of its own, both amongst teachers and students. Because it is really extends, what any individual teacher or even a parent could do, because you have what's really an instructional coach that is available to get every every teacher and student in the world. 100%

Alexander Sarlin:

and listening to you talk about it in that way, it sort of strikes me as almost, there are many educators in classrooms who have, you know, one foot in internet culture and understanding, you know, how their kids spend, spend the days on the phones, and are trying to sort of bridge the gap between academic learning and the informal learning that people do with things like memes. What strikes me as really interesting about what you're doing. And antimatter is, as you say, you're you're not coming from an educator background. But you're seeing so many interesting overlaps and potential opportunities for these two types of types of thinking, basically, to come together. And by creating these tools, you're, of course, I imagine you're your earliest adopters, or people who, like you mentioned, we're already thinking about memes in the classroom, maybe we're already using them, you're sort of starting on that bleeding edge of the most, you know, the coolest, youngest, most internet savvy teacher in the school. What has been the reception so far among teachers who weren't using memes in the classroom who weren't thinking about conversations between types of bonds? Or weren't thinking about AI at all? Do you feel like you've made any inroads in that educator community yet? Have people sort of had these epiphany moments about shifting the paradigm of regular schooling to how can this match how students think about their digital world? So

Jonathan Libov:

a couple of notes, one is that it's actually generally not the youngest, like savviest, most online teachers who really take to antimatter. It's partially because when you're a young teacher, you're learning how to orchestrate a classroom. Right? And so introducing a variable like memes could actually make your life more difficult. Right? Right. You know, when you're a veteran teacher, right, you already Have a good command of the classroom, you understand how to pair students together and how to get the most out of classroom discussions. And you're spending less of your brainpower thinking about just how do I make sure I execute the lesson and more on how do I make sure that synthesis is happening in the classroom and more sort of higher order activities are happening in the classroom, but you're already kind of comfortable with that idea. And, you know, which is not to say that there are many teachers like that who are like memes, right? One of my biggest challenges from a marketing perspective, I mean, it's memes in the classroom certainly grabs your attention, right? Because it's so novel, one of our biggest challenges from a marketing perspective, is that initially, there's almost like a gestalt that happens because initially, you're like, oh, memes in the classroom, you know, it's kids love memes. Social media is fun, you know, you're trying to engage the students and meet them where they are. It's not why we do this, it's we do it for Bloom's Taxonomy reasons, right? foundational ideas, or theories and all of education. So that is one of our challenges in terms of marketing. As for sorcerer, it's interesting, because, again, it has taken on a life of its own, but you know, I can relay here, there's of all the folks who sign up for sorcerer versus our meme activities, it's a much lower rate of activation, because, you know, we're only maybe, you know, two years into everything that's been happening in AI. And you see many, many tools that, you know, for example, matter school or pure pod that, you know, help that use AI to help teachers, prepare lesson plans, write recommendations, whatever it is, from my observation, there's still a lot of very reasonable hesitancy about putting AI in front of students that will come. But it's something that teachers are only starting to get comfortable with, I think, yeah, well, I

Alexander Sarlin:

appreciate the correction to my totally incorrect assumption that it would be the the internet savvy educators who first come to something like antimatter, I'm very happy to hear that

Jonathan Libov:

I was expecting the very same thing. And in fact, not only did we see the most activation amongst veteran teachers, the richest best memes, they all come from there, and teachers were clearly very comfortable organizing and orchestrating a classroom.

Alexander Sarlin:

It's a really great point, you know, we are definitely in this transitional moment when AI is mostly used by educators sort of behind the scenes in the classroom. And we haven't quite seen it really become mainstream for student use, at least in a sanctioned clear, you know, way. We did see chatty bt 3.5 Just open up for, you know, you can go into it without logging in, which obviously makes it potentially able to be used in the classroom more. I think one of the things that's so interesting about what you're doing with Sorcerer is that it just doesn't feel anything like the traditional AI experience. It's not about coming to the AI asking it to do something for you. It's the AI sort of coming to you and pulling information asking you to retrieve and make sense of what you already know. To me that feels like the future of how AI should be used in the classroom. That's totally

Jonathan Libov:

correct, right? We, one of the not to get too grandiose, but the history of technology is in many ways, making things that were previously scarce, abundant, right, you know, music used to be scarce. Before there were, you know, there was recorded music, and then it became completely abundant. And then all the economics change, and everything about the world changes, right? Obviously, the internet made many, many, many, many things abundant that were previously scarce. So broadly speaking, it is our view that, you know, this is a golden age to be a teacher or a student, there's certainly a lot of bumps in the road right about and rebury very, very reasonable concerns about privacy, et cetera, et cetera. But, you know, learning material used to be really scarce, right? Like we have a teacher who's we're close with, says to us that he you know, he has, he'll have students who watch YouTube videos. And then before the class starts, they ask a question about what they saw in the YouTube video as it pertains to what they're learning. How would that have worked? When you and I were students? Right, you would have had to, but go to the library, find the right resource. And then even if you were that motivated, if you were to ask a question at the top of the class about the upcoming lesson, you'd be like laughed out of the classroom, right? And that just shows so many like, reflects on so many things that are so different, and right now, one of them is that it's cool to be smart in a way that it was not when we were kids, but also learning material is so abundant, everything from Wikipedia to YouTube, and now to AI. Right. And so it is the reason we designed a sorcerer, the way it is, is that we think it affords teachers and parents and you know, even homeschoolers, you know, the opportunity to give the kids abundant resources so that they can use scarce in classroom, or instruction time, not on instruction, but rather on synthesis.

Alexander Sarlin:

I love that I really recommend I know, some of these things are a little hard to envision when you're not actually seeing them or experiencing them. I really encourage everybody listening to this to go to antimatter and use sorcerer and use the meme Gen, that meme generator and really start to see this vision of what Jonathan is really pitching here, because it's really very, very different way of thinking about edtech, frankly, than than I'm used to. And I've, you know, see that a lot, a lot, a lot of products. So Jonathan, to finish up this really interesting conversation. What do you think is the most exciting trend in the EdTech landscape right now you've named in a number of different possibilities that our listeners should keep an eye on for the future. So

Jonathan Libov:

this really kind of ties into what I was talking about earlier, in terms of learning material, once being scarce, and now being abundant. Our mission at antimatter is to be no less than the largest learning network in the world. And obviously, that sounds ambitious. But I think it goes hand in hand with a trend that is still relatively small, that we're seeing in edtech, where you can offer products to teachers, that students obviously get to little, it helps them with their understanding of the subject matter. But also you have something of a relationship with the student. And you can help them go further, right, it used to be almost like you had in classroom products. And you had out of classroom products at Princeton Review, generally an out of classroom product, Kumon an out of classroom product. And I think, in many ways, there's more of a, you know, a gradual or a seamless transition between those two things, which is a really beautiful thing that a teacher has even, you know, a more obvious way to set their kids on a phenomenal path that extends beyond the classroom, right? Again, even thinking about like that YouTube video, right? Like, that kid has a deep relationship with the subject matter. And so that is something that I think is very interesting that's happening with an ed tech like prodigy game, where teachers get an in classroom tools, and students have a phenomenal way to learn math that they can use outside the classroom if they need to augment their understanding. It's also where antimatter is going, you know, today, we offer products for teachers in classrooms, we are soon going to offer students the opportunity to not only learn from other students around the world, but teach other students around the world, right? I have, I have a six year old and a three year old at home in 10 years, I want them teaching 10,000 other students on anti better not just because I run the company, but you know, even if we don't make it something like antimatter, I want that more than them getting, you know, A's and classes, I would like both, you're getting straight A's. But if a kid can teach online, and can learn from his peers online, that kids, those are the skills that make people successful in life, right. And so that's where I think edtech is headed. And that's where we're headed. It's a really

Alexander Sarlin:

exciting vision, and what is a resource or a Twitter feed or a blog that you would recommend for somebody who wants to dive deeper into any of the topics we discussed today?

Jonathan Libov:

Sure. So one of the people that I followed, as it became, again, we just sort of discovered antimatter. We didn't invent it. And as it was becoming apparent to me that I was going to be an ed tech founder. Right, I started following a bunch of people who had never followed before. You know, Amjad from repple. It, Crispin Frank from synthesis are two people that I've looked up to ever since it became apparent that I was going to be leading, alerting a red tech company, in the sense that those company know that synthesis is not oriented around classrooms, per se. But they are both about empowering kids to go as far as they want to go using many of the same rails and mechanisms that help people learn and be successful online. And so I would definitely recommend following those two people on Twitter and wherever else, they're publishing and sharing their work. That was

Alexander Sarlin:

Amjad Mossad, who's the founder of Replit. And Chrisman Frank from Synthesis, thank you. That's really interesting suggestions and I love Have your sort of outsider, you know, take on this. I feel like you're coming into the EdTech world with lots of big and really sweeping and really exciting ideas about the future of the field. Thanks so much for being here. Jonathan Libov of Antimatter.

Jonathan Libov:

Thank you so much.

Alexander Sarlin:

Thanks for listening to this episode of edtech insiders. If you like the podcast, remember to rate it and share it with others in the tech community. For those who want even more Edtech Insider, subscribe to the free Edtech Insiders newsletter on substack.