Polishing Ideas from Reading New Ideas

02/19/15

So, I've been reading Hire With Your Head. I've been greatly enjoying the read, as I do with most of the books I choose to read. I've also been reading it much slower than previous books, as the time I had reserved for reading is also used for blogging and coding now. It might be a system I need to revise.

Anyways, for a long time I've played with a wish in my head which involves more-or-less raising the poor out of poverty. There are a lot of systems in place that keep the poor in poverty, and very few put in place designed to lift them out. The few there are are designed poorly, I think.

Now, I want to make a system that could slowly evolve into Universal Basic Income (UBI), but I understand that with my low resources and influence, doing anything that actually resembles UBI is basically impossible.

But, a little while back I got to thinking. Can I generate value out of the process of teaching others to learn marketable skills? Duolingo suggests that yes, yes I can. Which makes me think that all the MOOCs out there are doing it wrong. A massively colaborated class could probably generate a ton of value while each individual learns. Now, I'm sure there'll be cases where no, the taught content of the class can not be made into some sort of value, but even then it would be useful to make realistic-looking problems that can be solved via learning the material. I bet many of the classes not valuable to teach were valuable at some point in the past, too, so there's probably real-world problems to use, just ones that have been rigourously solved.

Anyways, that was the basic concept floating around in my head as I started reading Hire With Your Head. Right now, I'm in a section explaining the concept of the Performance Profile. The well-defined description of jobs that need to be done could be an incredibly useful lens for content to teach in MOOCs. It could also allow for real work to be done via students learning while doing actual jobs (though, there would be plenty of fake jobs as well, to prep readiness of a student).

The student and the teacher could then both be conpenstated for work done. A student getting paid to learn is much more likely to find the time necessary to learn in a day that's probably already packed too full of work and not enough play. Make the learning engaging and fun and it may even feel like play.