Q&A
Due to the success of Q&A sites like Stackoverflow, new sites with the same idea started multiplying like mushrooms. Quora is one example, SO guys themselves created new sites based on the SO idea, for different topics.
I hang out at one of these sites called math.stackexchange. One day I asked theoretical question on Calculus, and this dude answered – within hours, with three pages of math, history, and a detail so to the point that everyone was shocked and amazed at this outcome. The answer was exactly what I was looking and more that I cannot imagine something like this won’t have a profound effect on how education is structured in near future.
In our outdated classroom system, someone, somewhere might ask a great question, and maybe, get a great answer. SO and Quora allow a great question, anywhere, anytime to be asked, and be answered by anyone, anywhere, anytime. Better yet, this question and answer stream stays around forever, indexed by Google, accessible at a click of a button.
How is this not a game changer? How can education stay the same with the presence of such peer-to-peer technologies?
Noone certifies anyone to ask, or to answer a question on these Q&A sites [1]. Anyone can ask, anyone can answer, and anyone can rate the answers (the Q I mentioned before received tens of up votes). The system is distributed, peer-to-peer at each level.
And it is disruptive precisely for this reason. Tech such as this can and should replace the barbaric system we have today. If everyone needs quality education to compete in the 21st century and, as we saw in previous post Average Teachers that we cannot have millions of quality teachers, then restructuring our current system that uses 3rd Wave technology is a must.
Nothing less is sufficient.
[1] Specialization is a key point of the old industrial order. Guilds, unions are formed around esoteric skillsets, this guild craves influence, tries to exert power using its ability to issue certificates, carefully keeps others out and negotiates for more power and influence.
[2] The rating system of Q&A sites essentially replaces prior certification process. And let me tell you, the rating can get brutal. Any stupid, unrelated remark, comment gets down voted so fast the person in question won’t see what hit them. Great answers are up voted, without exception, and praise rains on them. SO also has this feature called “bounties”, you can actually assign some of your points to someone else in the form of a digital bounty, for great answers and questions. Needless to say, points collected from answers, questions are tallied on a user’s profile, and these points can and has influenced hiring decisions in the real world.
[3] We witness such “open to contribution” pattern a lot in Internet based tech. On open source software projects for instance, the source code is open to all to see, therefore, anyone can send a differential (an improvement, bug fix) in the form of a patch file – they can email it to the project. Not all patches are applied to the source base (this part is little different from Q&A sites), but just due to the fact that anyone can see, anyone can send patches raises the possibility of quality submits dramatically, and hence raises the quality of the overall software.