Clyde suffers from an acute form of professional attention deficit, otherwise known as iPAD. This is due, primarily, to his love for wildly divergent ideas and fields of studies. First and foremost is his love for his family. After that, and in no particular order – nature and biomimicry, design, AI, regenerative agriculture, the Make community, the Marx Brothers, Will Rogers, play, the future, science books, the smell of solder and freshly dug up soil.
Good luck in trying to detect a pattern. If there is one, it is simply this – Clyde loves to learn and to make things and has a knack for knowing what lies just around the corner.
After several fits and starts, Clyde’s career finally kicked into gear after an interview he gave with the founder of Global Schoolhouse for a cable technology show (think CNET with a quarter of the budget). Halfway through the interview, Clyde had made up his mind. He knew this is what he wanted to do for the rest of his life. He quit his day job teaching design at a local college, quit the TV show and went to work for Global SchoolHouse. Within months, Clyde was building learning communities in Uganda, Ghana and South Africa.
Within several years, he helped develop some of the most influential projects in ed tech including CyberFair, World Links for Development with the World Bank, and ThinkQuest. It was here that Clyde learned what kids could actually accomplish given the right platform, the right tools and the freedom to create. Those principles for collaborative design became the foundation for the “Harnessing the Power of the Web” which he co-authored with Al Rogers and was distributed to over a quarter of a million students worldwide.
Soon, the siren song of Silicon Valley called with its promise of big things and even larger funding channels, and Clyde helped develop and launch several large scale social platforms. But, he grew restless and began to miss the simpler days of working on projects with meaning and decided to head back to the classroom. Taking all that he had learned as a product designer, tech leader and community builder, Clyde set out to change how students learned online.
So in 2007, after a conversation with his friend, colleague, and future business partner, Hugh Norwood, Clyde thankfully said goodbye to Silicon Valley and the corporate world and set out on a new adventure; co-founding Trinity Education Group. In the past 17 years (!?!) Clyde has helped design and launch award winning education products from A+RISE, to the Gateway which earned the IMS Global Learning Impact Award for Innovation. In addition, Clyde published the Amazon best-selling, and award winning, Young Adult novel, Girl Out of Time, that encourages young people to help build a radically better future.
After witnessing dozens of ed tech hype cycles and developing a filter for what is useful and what is fluff, Clyde is now helping pave a path towards a smart and meaningful application of AI and technology. The goal is to use tech as not an end in itself, but as a way for us to become better people engaged in the world around us.