nytimes

they are looking for nothing more than a diverse set of skills from its members, so that they might come together organically to form the blockbuster start-ups of tomorrow. “It’s an ecosystem,” Mr. Ryans said. “A lot of places focus on creating an environment where it’s like a lake, you’ve got four species of fish. We think we’re the Great Barrier Reef.” The very layout of Neuehouse is meant to suggest that work nowadays, at least for entrepreneurs, is a glorified version of hanging out.

Today’s ideal social form is not the commune or the movement or even the individual creator as such; it’s the small business. Every artistic or moral aspiration — music, food, good works, what have you — is expressed in those terms.

Call it Generation Sell.

When you visit The New American Academy, an elementary school serving poor minority kids in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, you see big open rooms with 60 students and four teachers. The students are generally in three clumps in different areas working on different activities. The teachers, especially the master teacher who is floating between the clumps, are on the move, hovering over one student, then the next. It is less like a factory for learning and more like a postindustrial workshop, or even an extended family compound.

Video tutorials welcome students to Treehouse Island, where they arrive in a zeppelin, meet a mysterious, eye-patch-wearing ambassador (see photo above) – think Mister Rodgers transposed to “Lost” — and unravel mysteries while learning to code in HTML, Ruby, Python, PHP and JavaScript. The service went live in November and offers three beginner-oriented learning tracks: Web design, Web development, and iPhone/iPad application creation.