Teaching Through Bits @Tor Vergata University of Rome

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This was my first public talk: presenting the project of our digital education startup, which at the time was called Oilproject and now is known as WeSchool. The festival was broadcast live on the educational channel of RAI, the Italian national television station. In the audience were professors and leading experts in the field, while my fellow panelists included representatives from two major school publishers and a renowned school principal. I was 25, bold and eager, with much still to learn but driven by a strong desire to create positive change.

Back in 2012, the Italian web was a very different landscape. Facebook dominated online life, especially among students. Instagram had just arrived, mostly used by iPhone-owning photography enthusiasts. Most traffic still flowed through forums, blogs and news websites. Smartphones weren’t yet ubiquitous; WhatsApp was just beginning to replace SMS. There were no food delivery apps, no Netflix, no TikTok, no ChatGPT or mass-market AI of any kind.

At Oilproject, we were dissatisfied with the traditional Italian school system. We believed the Internet could offer a participatory, bottom-up alternative—one where students could co-design courses and share their knowledge. In our vision, the roles of teacher and student were fluid: anyone with something valuable to teach, and an audience willing to listen, could become an educator.

It was, in many ways, a naïve approach. Issues around information accuracy and education quality soon pushed us to form a qualified team of expert reviewers and to build partnerships with professional educators. Still, that early vision shaped much of what WeSchool would later become.

Below are the original slides of that first event: a kind of ancient relic that I’m not sure whether makes me more nostalgic or more embarrassed.