Comment by basch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by basch | Hacker News Reader

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Education and News are two sides of the same coin. At some point the majority of the adult population makes the decision to learn about the world from entertainment companies. We should reanalyze what news and continuing education mean, relative to each other.

https://theconversation.com/ and http://www.worldcrunch.com/ make good starts, as do aggregators like http://www.aldaily.com/ and https://redef.com/

As far as pure education companies, we need more software platforms for building curriculums collaboratively, some combination of wikia, github, wirecutter, and khanacademy.org. You may be thrown by my inclusion of wirecutter, but concensus based consumer reports type information, leading to populations making better decisions, helps cut through the paradox of choice. It also teaches people HOW to make decisions, and how to evaluate choices. It should be easy for anyone to fork, remix, contribute, or request corrections. Even collaborative documentary editing software, or the ability to sift through ALL the worlds lectures on a topic, and assessable the best bits. As long as teams of strangers can collaborate and fork, the world will have more shoulder standing giants, and less reinventing of the wheel.

As a teacher, I would kill for a collaborative curriculum and assessment tool. A "backend" service for creating, managing, and personalizing curriculum materials would go a long way to mitigate the absolutely astounding amount of redundant labor that goes on in schools (you're really creating a comprehension quiz for To Kill a Mockingbird from scratch?).

Contrary to popular belief - even here on HN - teachers are chronically making known sub-optimal instructional tradeoffs because they lack the time to complete tasks as they should ideally be completed. Very little seems to be done to create tools to improve the instructional process (that doesn't involve removing the teacher from that very process - e.g. MOOCs, Khan Academy, Knewton, etc.). Those digital alternative absolutely have a place, but there's a lot of opportunity to fundamentally improve the instructional work being done by teachers in classrooms every day.

Your suggestions are a great place to start:

- network instructional materials and lessons so they can be accessed in their entirety by other teachers

- network assessment materials that are tied (on the question/answer level) to standards and common goals (e.g. comprehension quip above).

Email is in profile if anyone would like to continue this discussion in a more detailed manner outside the thread.

I think there's massive scope for improving the delivery of educational material, but most of my ideas have been related to later secondary education and university and to what I as a learner have wanted, not what the teacher/educator has wanted.

It's been an open question for me how to improve education in earlier years where there's probably less scope for self-learning, and more focus should be on how to improve the teachers' efficiency and effectiveness. Since my own kids are starting school now, these earlier years have taken on new significance, but since I don't have a background in education, I haven't known where to start. I'm more at the point of "How can I help?!", since I have very little visibility into the frustrations that teachers experience on a day-to-day basis, but I can build software, if software can be part of the solution.

Sent you an email, but I'm sure there are others who would love to be involved in the discussion...

Thanks for the comment. I'll get back to you this evening.

Hey check out Common Curriculum [1] they are part of the way there.

[1] http://www.commoncurriculum.com/

how do teachers who have never met each other find each others work and collaborate?

this product looks like only people within the same team can work together. that means thousands of teachers all repeating the same steps.

dont you think at some point the optimul remix of Roman History 101 University lecture clips, might exist, and then it becomes a process improvement task to make it a little better all the time, rather than constanly recreating a nearly similar lecture for each school.

I really believe forking is important. People might disagree with concensus and have a better way to do things that is looked down upon by the mass. One curriculum for all sounds like every egg in one basket.

(i decided i like optimul better than optimal)

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