Title: Knowledge and Power Subtitle: A Democratized Model of Tutoring and Teaching
Since I read The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch in high school, my love of learning has grown exponentially. Unfortunately, learning is quite a lonely adventure---textbooks don't make the best conversationalists.
On a parallel note, if you take a fresh look at education, it's obvious that the tools and techniques they use are incredibly archaic. The bureaucratic hoops that one must jump through to do anything in education is fatuous in the least.
For the past year, I've been obsessed with the idea of a learning social network.
This idea was inspired by the work of Philip Rosedale, Salman Khan, Roland G. Fryer, and my professor at RIT, Jon Schull.
In the following model, I'm making a few assumptions. First, I'm assuming a flipped classroom or MOOC. Second, I'm assuming a middle-class student because that still leaves a huge group of people that could benefit from a distributed tutoring system. Once this model is fully formed, I imagine it could be easily juxtaposed into lower-class areas where it is desperately needed. Third, I'm assuming the students have access to the Internet and are at least partially tech-savvy. Finally, I'm assuming this will be implemented in high school- or college-aged students. This doesn't mean the students are necessarily in school---indeed, this model could be fantastic for home-schooled children.
Research has shown that tutoring is the most efficient and effective form of learning. The question is, then, how do we emphasize and facilitate those one-on-one interactions? Is there a way to systematize and augment the tutoring process?
Yes, in fact, there is. This problem has already been solved---by Amazon.com. And the solution can be easily illustrated with the following story.
In 1988, Joe Simpson wrote a book called Touching the Void in which he recounted his traumatic near-death experience while mountain climbing in the Peruvian Andes. His book was a modest success, but soon forgotten. Then, a decade later, Jon Krakauer wrote another book about a mountain-climbing tragedy called Into Thin Air. Krakauer's book became an hit, and Simpson's book suddenly started selling again.
Now, Touching the Void actually outsells Into Thin Air by more than two-to-one. The reason for this is Amazon.com's recommendation engine. When anyone bought Into Thin Air, they were suggested Simpson's book as well. People took the suggestion, love Simpson's book, and wrote raving reviews. The wheel began turning: more sales led to more reviews led to more recommendations led to more sales.
Chris Anderson, Wired co-founder and author of The Long Tail, wrote an article that expands on this theme. Amazon's business model relies on the long tail distribution. While it certainly caters to large companies selling their products through Amazon.com, it also does an incredible job at facilitating one-time sales interactions. This is evident in the 3rd-party selling program that Amazon features in the center of every product page.
Amazon.com is a platform as much as it is a business. That is, it allows any book to be sold, by anybody. If Simpson's above story took place in Barnes & Noble instead of Amazon, Touching the Void would have been removed from the shelves because it wasn't selling. Thus, it never would have been rediscovered and turned into a best-seller ten years after it was forgotten. Instead, Amazon.com allowed individuals, small & unknown bookstores, and even the publisher itself to list extra copies of the book for sale as either used or new. There are thousands of books that fall into this category. The math is quite simple: a large number of products selling at low-volumes equates to the same (or better) profits as a few products selling at high-volumes.
An even better example is Rhapsody, the subscription-based music streaming service. Anderson explains:
Chart Rhapsody's monthly statistics and you get a "power law" demand curve that looks much like any record store's, with huge appeal for the top tracks, tailing off quickly for less popular ones. But a really interesting thing happens once you dig below the top 40,000 tracks, which is about the amount of the fluid inventory (the albums carried that will eventually be sold) of the average real-world record store. Here, the Wal-Marts of the world go to zero - either they don't carry any more CDs, or the few potential local takers for such fringy fare never find it or never even enter the store.
The Rhapsody demand, however, keeps going. Not only is every one of Rhapsody's top 100,000 tracks streamed at least once each month, the same is true for its top 200,000, top 300,000, and top 400,000. As fast as Rhapsody adds tracks to its library, those songs find an audience, even if it's just a few people a month, somewhere in the country.
In education, we can plot the number of students impacted by the number of teachers in a long tail-fashion. The professors of the world will fall on the left side---that is, they impact the most amount of students at a time. The tutors will fall in the long tail---they impact only one or a few students at a time.
However, the long tail---the tutoring---is where the most effective learning takes place. The goal of the ideal learning system, then, should be to provide easy access to the few professors that impact many students, while creating an atmosphere that facilitates the individual, one-on-one tutoring.
If you look closely, you'll notice that Khan Academy is the perfect model for the first element of this system. The second element can be easily handled by two things: (1) a plugin for Google Hangouts that lets users collaborate and draw on web pages in real-time, demonstrated in the video below, and (2) an ecosystem---a social network of sorts---that pairs tutors with tutees, rewards and facilitates tutoring and learning efforts, and makes it fun in the process. The rest of this article will discuss such a social network.
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In the above interview, Philip Rosedale describes his recent startup, Coffee & Power, which aims to be a mobile co-working network. The coffee shop is a "workclub" that acts as meeting place and incubator for anyone to meet and work either collaboratively or individually on their project, usually software developers, designers, and entrepreneurs.
"A mobile co-working space" => A mobile
- some people just aren't good teachers. Or, they don't contribute their fair share to the collective learning atmosphere. We don't want too many of these types of people in the environment because they reduce the overall value of the system for everyone---they water it down.
- strategies:
- giving priority those that have the most experience points or K$.
- social network hierarchy <- splintering of social networks
- Broadcast what you have to offer, and people will flock to you. It is almost too humbling to go to other people for advice---don't expect other people to do it. (Philip Rosedale)
- Profiles will show the skills each person has and their availability for help.
- Model, content, and important info for profiles
- Previously established hierarchy (K-bucks) can be drilled-down to make sub-categories
- how can you maintain the relationship after the initial help?
- Location is huge: if you have a physical space, you're more likely to see the same people than if a random generator picks someone to work with over the internet. So, having a physical tutoring space is important.