Red Squirrel's Nuts

An experiment in self-organized learning

[Edit: I tweaked the “How do we reward desired behavior” section to have the awards be iPull credit, rather than cash.]

I’m interested in exploring ways to expand and decentralize educational opportunities for as many people as possible. With the sale of Obtiva to Groupon and Mad Mimi’s steady growth, it’s now easier for me to ponder ventures that are less profit-driven and more purpose-driven. Most of my time in the coming years will be focused on developing a world-class software development culture at Groupon that inspires technical innovation through developer happiness. But in the background, like I said, I’m interested in decentralizing education, so I’ll be spending off-hours on that.

While I was off the grid in June, I came up with a crazy idea for a software platform that would help groups of people get together to learn with, and from, each other. For now, I’m calling it iPull, based on the principle that in today’s world of increasingly cheap/free and open knowledge (such as Kahn Academy, Wikipedia, and iTunesU), it’s becoming less imperative that knowledge is pushed at students, and it has become possible for learners to pull knowledge toward themselves. I know I’ve found this to be the case in my self-directed education as a software developer. (For software-development-specific themes around this, see my book, Apprenticeship Patterns.) A long-recognized feature of higher education is that most of the value comes from your peers and subsequent network, and comes less from the degree and hoops you’ve successfully jumped through.

“Those things for which the most money is demanded are never the things which the student most wants. Tuition, for instance, is an important item in the term bill, while for the far more valuable education which he gets by associating with the most cultivated of his contemporaries no charge is made.” Walden, p. 46, Henry David Thoreau, graduated Harvard in 1837

Dale Stephen’s UnCollege has more to say about this theme. So, what would happen if a fraction of the young people who are now thoughtlessly entering the US undergraduate system and heaping career-limiting loans on themselves decided to organize their own education together? iPull is my attempt to provide a platform to answer that question.

I’m finally blogging about this because I’ve had some conversations recently that are helping me drill down into the core problem that platforms like this face. At this point, the core problems are:

• Should iPull be opinionated about the internal structure of courses? Should it impose limitations on course duration and number of learners? My current thinking is that we should keep this open, but provide suggestions once people move outside the “sweet spots” for group learning.
• The downside of being open and flexible is that people who use iPull will likely have a “now what?” experience. This should be solved, especially initially, with lots of one-on-one advice from an iPull course coach via phone, chat, and email.
• How do we keep learners coming back to courses? My current thinking is that the simplest way to get people to commit is to have them pay for the course.
• How do we reward desired behavior like consistent participation, attendance, leadership, helpfulness, teaching, and insipiration? My current thinking is that course participants can use iPull to grant awards to the course-mates who are being most helpful to their learning. A participant’s award would be iPull credit, equivalent in dollar value to the cost of the course. These awards would be displayed publicly.

With all of these questions, I’m choosing the most radical answer I can think of. I’m choosing to err on the side of openness and flexibility and simplicity and non-tradition. That’s why iPull is open source. That’s why I want to see any money that flows into iPull to flow back out to the learners via food, beverages, and monetary awards from peers. That’s why I won’t use the word teacher, despite the fact that people who have a knack for teaching could most certainly use iPull to string together a set of courses that earns them a consistent income. There will be courses where one of the participants will naturally fit into a leadership role and spend significant amounts of time explicitly teaching. There will be courses where these people emerge and fade depending on the current topic. There will be courses where someone intends the former, but the latter happens. I don’t want iPull getting in the way of any of these scenarios.

I’ve been developing iPull in my off-hours for some weeks. I’ve put no effort into the front end yet, and am mostly exploring how to accomplish a minimum viable platform with the technologies I’ve chosen. If you’re curious, and have sufficiently low expectations, you can head over to iPull.org to play around.

If you’re a software developer who is interested in this project, you’ll want to know that I’m using a similar philosophy in my technical decisions. I’ve chosen a platform that I’m not very experienced in (node.js + Redis) and I’m learning as I go. If this entire idea crumbles, or the experiment fails, I selfishly want to ensure I get something out of it. In this case, I’ll leave the experience with a deeper understanding of some technologies that I enjoy. Find out more about the project over at Github.

I’d love to answer questions, hear your ideas, criticisms, and suggestions, so fire away with comments!