revolutionize.School

Free Education for a Free Society

Learning is Awesome.
Everyone's a student.
It's time to give away what you know and learn something new.

The Future of Education

The potential to truly revolutionize education exists in the potential to profoundly improve the learning experience through competently designed, intelligent instructional material.

By "profound", consider this: the first lesson for the lrn software takes an entire semester of state university's Intro to Python Scripting and puts it most appropriately into one single lesson that you can do and understand completely in an hour.

This is not reasonably better, it is absurdly better. It's improved by such an order of magnititude that it makes the capitalist marketplace of academia look no better than a racketeering industry.

The term "gap between academia and industry" has been used widely to discuss this problem in nice non-accusing language. It refers to commonality and frequency of students coming out of a four-year computer science degree program successfully with certificate in hand, going to coding interviews for a new job, and simply being unable to write any code. Get real: this is fraud.

The Pedagogy of Uselessness

If you can't use it, don't use it, never make any use of it at all — what use is it?

None. It's useless. It cultivates a cognitive style or pattern of retain and regurgitate to only then forget and seldom comprehend in an intelligent way.

It follows a cognitive style or mental model or pattern etc reasonably described as:

  1. Retain
  2. Regurgitate
  3. Forget

…and repeat.

The world of education is plagued by this pedagogy of uselessness, from elementary school through technical courses in universities.

The pedagogy of useslessness is a crime.

Praxis is the Point

Praxis is an educational term for the application of knowledge while learning.

Praxis is essential for learning to be effective and rewarding.

Competently designed, intelligent instructional material

There's an incredible potential to revolutionize education and learning through the visual design and presentation of information. While there are numerous other factors for improving learning experiences, visual design of the information itself carries potential that is truly revolutionizing.

Edward Tufte has very effectively demonstrated the contrast between terrible information design well-designed sets of information. Someday I'll get the presentation I've derived from his volumnous work posted right here.

The Revolution

  1. instructional/educational material as described — free database of lessons on the making and doing of all things.
  2. access and format — free lessons/courses/curriculums to learn what you what when you want, allowing learning to happen in any kind of setting (standard or non-standard)
  3. culture — mentorship culture, lift each other up, no bullying, no authoritarianism, inter-age and intergenerational mingling

Lesson Hubs - decentralized repositories/databases of lessons

Comprehensive database(s) of lessons on the making and doing of EVERYTHING

Git servers, such as Gitlab and Github, provide an excellent means of collaboration among software developers and can work just as well for facilitating collaboration in developing lessons.

Widespread collaboration among:

…can all collaborate to produce lessons, without necessarily needing to ever meet in person.

Lessons will be a set of svg, md, yml and other plain text (generally speaking, media files can of course be supplemental but the most profound potential for improvement exists not in going multimedia but through solving the most-wretched-state of neglect in the realm of diagrams and sane visual explanations) files.

A couple simple plugins will be needed for the vector editors (inkscape/illustrator/etc) and git server ui to accommodate lesson/curriculum specific functionality.

Stay tuned I guess… and pray…

revolutionize.school is work of the Lamb