When you think about the future of education or the future of learning, there's one question that I think really matters and that is really important - 'Who's the teacher?' Because 'Who's the teacher' ultimately is a decisive factor in what
When you think about the future of education or the future of learning, there's one question that I think really matters and that is really important - 'Who's the teacher?' Because 'Who's the teacher' ultimately is a decisive factor in what we learn and how we learn. And when I’m talking about teacher I’m not referring to just a school teachers, but in larger sense of the term – ’Who is the person that we learn from?’.
As you can see, I’m an artist. No, I’m not, but I’m very proud of the drawing. To illustrate a short history of the evolution of sharing knowledge: It all starts with cave men around the fireplace sharing their stories about the best hunting ground. Fast forward: Johannes Gutenberg invents the printing press, so you don’t have this one-to-one sharing, but one-to-many, where one author can have many readers, thanks to new technology. Then, Jimmy Wales brings us Wikipedia and with the Internet, we now know that it is possible to not only have one-to-one or one-to-many sharing model, but many-to-many model of sharing knowledge: many contributors writing an article, many people reading it. And, YouTube was invented, and since then, humanity watches cat videos.
Well, there are not only cat videos, there are educational videos out there. There are platforms such as Coursera edX and MOOC University courses that you can watch online and there are great websites for educational videos such as KhanAcademy or TED Talks. Well, what all these projects that I’ve just showed you on the slide have in common is that they still embrace the old educational model of one-to-many or few-to-many, so you still have this elitist club or few teachers from great universities (e.g. Harvard) or these celebrities at TED who share their knowledge or spread their ideas to the rest of the world. What I think is where we're going towards is the same trend as what happened to books to Wikipedia, to pass on from one-to-many to many-to-many model. And this also in the case of educational videos.
So, you might say: ’There is YouTube’. Let me ask you a question: ’Who of you has created a YouTube video?’ Please rise your hand. Ok, so there are some hands in the room. Now, think about that last YouTube video that you made. ’What was it?’ ’Was the main purpose of that video entertainment? Did you for example filmed you cat or a holiday video or was it a party video? Or was the main purpo