 As a New America Foundation sports fellow, I'm going to be working on online education and how it's reshaping the American political landscape. Obviously online education is kind of a sexy topic, but it's also wonky. It also has a little bit of a boring internet kids' sleep at their desk's angle. So what I'm hoping to do is write about the ways that policymakers are addressing the changes that online education is bringing to education and also how it's changing public schools. One thing that got me interested in online education is my own experience with some online courses. These are just little teeny online courses that are used for professional education or other things that you associate with kind of grownups. So a little unit on how to learn how to do accounting or an ethics course for the New York Times, something that I did when I worked there to many years ago. But it's far more interesting to see what happens when online education trickles down for kids. Right now I have a year and a half year old daughter and she's great on my iPhone. She's great on my iPad and the idea that she's going to be shuffled into a classroom when she's five and told, sit still, write your letters on a piece of paper, look at your lessons on a blackboard just seems ridiculous to me. So one reason that I'm interested in online education is for my own children, for my own daughter, to see what her classroom experience will be like and how it will be different from mine. But I'm also interested in it from a public policy perspective. American schools are in trouble. They're really a mess right now. And I think online education can be much more than an add-on. I think it could be a way to rethink, start over and really solve some of the problems with education in this country. Now I actually think that computers will replace teachers in many instances. I think that we're seeing huge budget crunches on the state level. States are having trouble paying teachers. And a lot of the discussion about online education is very careful to say, well there's still a place for people, right? We're not talking about the Jetsons here. We're not talking about Rosie the Robot delivering lessons to the kids. But I actually think we hopefully are talking about the Jetsons a little bit. We hopefully are seeing a future where certainly there's still a role for human beings in education. Certainly there's still a role for teachers. But there are a lot of things that a computer or a computer with humans on the other end of the line, on the other end of the email, on the other end of the chat program, can do better than a human in the classroom.