Meaning =What Matters Most
It’s why we wake up in the morning. It’s why we work, why we struggle. It’s what orders our lives. It’s who we are, who we were, who we want to be. It’s what we want to learn. It’s the impact we want to make. It’s what holds the world together.
About Us
Robert Rectenwald
Founder, Principal Consultant
Bob’s career has had a singular focus: to provide low- to no-cost, high quality educational experiences to anyone, anywhere. He cut his teeth in the early days of online education in 2005 by designing a web-based academic advising experience to support nearly 100,000 online, non-traditional learners. From there, he assumed leadership of online live lectures and faculty support for 175,000 learners and 4,000 faculty. He designed customized experiences for multimedia collaboration and assessments at scale.
He then transitioned to product development by co-designing a virtual classroom platform to help Georgetown University launch its Master of Science in Finance program online without sacrificing any of the quality or rigor of the in-person, “case method” approach to pedagogy. He helped Wiley University Services redesign its organization to support 60+ university partners at scale, leveraging systems and best practices to ensure that all parters received the same level of service. He then worked to design an enterprise solution to manage course-related data and artifacts at scale so that universities and online program management firms could compare apples-to-apples when it comes to investments in technology and resources to build online courseware.
He currently works on designing context-engineering tools to support AI collaboration with human content developers, educators and learners. His vision and execution have helped secure multiple enterprise partnerships and have helped some of the world’s leading institutions realize their own distinctive vision online, at scale.
Meaning-making over Control
Cognitive systems historically have focused on stimulus/response or input/output (behaviorist) paradigms while largely ignoring the contents of learning experiences. This was partly due to the fact that no adequate technology substrate existed to model the meaning within a system. The connectionist paradigm and advancements like deep learning have ushered in an era where, for the first time in human history, we have access to tools that can make explicit the meaning that is implicit in our systems. Relationships between entities matter.
Our Values
Learning = Meaning transfer
Embodiment over Externalization
The AI Revolution has ushered in an era where humans are free to outsource many of the tasks related to knowledge management. Yet, unless we remain protective of our shared humanity, we run the risk of outsourcing the very intelligences we attempt to model. Therefore, learning experiences must retain an embodied approach, where learners engage with information and assimilate it into their own internal systems and only then decide how to externalize or automate parts of the process.
Knowledge = Power
Roots under Branches
We are the grateful recipients of global traditions of knowledge dating back millennia. Millions of brilliant, hard-working people have worked on the challenges we face. We are not the first and we are not alone.
We have a duty to present and future generations to ensure that the same fruits that we have enjoyed may be available for many years to come. We honor the wisdom of the past by applying it to the present for the sake of the future.
Cultivation ≠ Extraction