School of Everything
This is a novel Web 2.0 approach to learning that combines social networking and user content in a simple interface to connect students and teachers around the world. The School of Everything allows the registered user to connect with a teacher of the topic that they want to learn about or for teachers to advertise what they can teach. It was started in the UK but recently launched internationally. The website states that: “We hope that teachers will use the site to find learning, and that people who start out learning will find something to teach through us.” so it would seem that they is no qualification to registering as a teacher on the site, so caveat emptor. The students can be anybody who wants to learn about a topic. According to the Terms of Service you must be 18 to join the site.
“At School of Everything, we believe that learning is personal, and starts not with what you ’should’ learn but with what you’re interested in. Our goal is to do for education what YouTube has done for television, or what eBay did for retail: to open up a huge and fertile space between the professional and the amateur. A space where people teach what they know and learn what they don’t.”
While the site won’t have a direct impact on your GPA or number of course credits, it is a creative new approach to learning. I couldn’t find an Esperanto teacher on the site but it could just be a matter of time before this idea catches on. Imagine something like this was offered within your school, could it work?
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For Esperanto courses and teachers look at http://lernu.net
Thanks for the tip, the site looks pretty good.
What makes you think you need to have a teacher for everything you learn?! Many of the fluent Esperanto-speakers I know taught themselves from a book without ever attending a class. True, it might have been done more efficiently and quickly with a teacher, but nevertheless the effort required to teach yourself Esperanto is minimal, compared to any ethnic language. After you have grasped the basic grammar, buy yourself an interesting novel and a dictionary, and listen to the daily Esperanto programs from Radio Polonia:
http://www.polskieradio.pl/eo/
You raise an interesting point. I think the need for a teacher depends on the learning style of the individual. Certainly, there are those who can learn independently. Perhaps the due to the nature of Esperanto, it attracts those who have a tendency towards self-directed learning. Despite the fact that Esperanto is not widely taught within many school systems, and it is rarely a mother tongue, there are still several hundred thousand to a million speakers worldwide according to Wikipedia. Dankon por l’ ideo!
Hi Mark, thanks very much for the link and the feedback.
Just wanted to pick up on the point about not needing a teacher for everything. I agree, and/but we also want to help people find “learning buddies” – not a teacher or someone you pay, but someone who’s on a parallel track to you, with whom you can swap ideas and resources.
This is the role that lots of clubs and societies play for people, and I’d like to see that recognised alongside more formal teacher-student relationships as a way people support their own education. We haven’t quite got the language right though. “Find people to learn with and from” is how we sometimes describe it, but it’s a bit dry.
Anyway, back to it, and thanks again for thinking of us.