Decentralizing Education

Has been a while since I have written anything. I have been listening - or trying to at least. It seems that listening has not become the norm when it comes to input, we crave reaction more than reflection, and I often have the fear of “falling behind” in a similar fashion. I find it increasingly difficult to want to create content of some sort for fear of just “adding to the noise” which I think we can all agree is a key issue we have as a larger society: too much noise for the signal to come through.

That said, I am slowly realizing a bit of a path I would like to pursue moving further into unknown territory and wish to finally begin even taking just the first footstep. In that vein, the topic of this direction is one that I believe many will agree with, understand, and perhaps even wish for themselves already - that of a truly decentralized education.

Even prior to Covid-19 changes the rules of the land earlier this year, the University model was already pretty flawed in regards to the goal of achieving an education. Sure it helped forge friendships, allowed you to rub elbows with the best voices in academia via professors and networking events, and even utilize some of the best research equipment in the world depending upon the University in which one studied. However, how much of that has been terribly useful for 90% of those students who went through the Academy? An Academy that only produces Academics may quickly be seen as a net-cost to society when compared to an Academy that focuses upon producing Scholars, however miniscule the difference may be.

At this stage, I cannot offer any key wisdom or grandiose ideas on how to “fix” the current University industry, most solutions would be otherwise ignored and certainly unable to be quickly applied in this current attempt of Pandemic Education. But for now, I wish to focus upon the other side of this, how can an Education be made Decentralized? There exists the material for a lifetime of quality education available via various Internet platforms and the ability to directly engage with other curious minds around the connected globe. Sifting through the nonsense, here, becomes the harder task more than anything else, and that is something that can be figured out.

Moving forward, this Decentralized Education Project harbors the potential to change our relationship with the Academy (open-access projects, free lecture and syllabus resources etc.), the media (a refreshing review of journalism and other media reviews), as well as each other (the fostering of direct, community-driven instances of education rather than mass-consumption of cookie-cutter information). All these threads have a fair amount of importance, relevance as well as scholarship about it, and I am looking forward to getting into all of them and more.

Some ideas I would like to see explored in this endeavor:

How our shift towards a “digital species” can affect the way we learn and teach, at both personal and institutional levels;

How Deep Learning and other AI-adjacent studies will change our view of the human brain and spirit in relation to scholarship and community;

Perhaps one-day modest podcast interviews with various voices from the frontier of enlightenment regarding how they learned via both official and unofficial channels;

Creating sample syllabuses comprised of free and accessible resources for a variety of relevant or niche topics (for example: Covid-19);

A focus upon OSINT (open source intelligence) methodology as applied to the social sciences and journalism as a whole;

Deeper understandings of Philosophy of Science and Epistemology and how the 21st Century and the concept of a “Wired Brain” heavily impact these notions once taken for truth;

Much more than I know how to put into words yet, my notebook overflows with inspiration but is wanting for tangible direction and prose.

This last point is why I have decided to, instead of endlessly researching and redrafting in a vain pursuit of perfection, to just start writing things. I wish for this to facilitate community-growth so I will need to start engaging with something resembling a community at some point. I realize that about 99% of “content” out there is not low-quality noise but was never meant to be “content” in the first place. As much as I fear adding to the problem, I will try to act from a place of authenticity and desire to construct something worthwhile, even if it is just noise into the abyss.

Let me know your ideas, I am excited about this and ready to hear more than I speak. What kind of online courses, books, applications, what have you are you using these days? We are able to better ourselves in quite spectacular ways, we just need to find the direction in order to do that - let’s find that direction together, it will be quicker that way.