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Ask HN: What do you think of the idea – the social network for education

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Re: Ask HN: What do you think of the idea – the social network for education

#21

Post by jtheory »

I've been thinking about this in terms of my own (7-year-old) educational website: http://eMusicTheory.com -- interactive online drills for music theory students/teachers.

The entire experience would be much more interesting for students if they could compete with friends (like with apps on facebook, for example), but I'm not sure making yet another FB app is a good idea here, plus you'd be stuck competing with other music theory students.

My half-baked idea is a central educational social networking site in which you could earn education points by achieving scores on lots of different member sites, not just mine... so a music theory whizkid might use their stats/achievements/reputation/karma/whatever to compete with their math nerd friend, even though they're focusing on entirely different specialties. There'd have to be rough equivalency in the effort involved to achieve points on different sites, but that's not a big hurdle (and weighting could be adjusted automatically based on students' relative speed of advancement.. if students tend to go tearing through achievements on a given site, the value of its points would be reduced in the global stats).

I'll dig through some of the sites linked above when I have time, but at the moment nothing seems to match up with this concept.

Is this a good idea? (Is there anything out there heading in this direction? I don't have the time to develop it myself currently, though I'd happily offer tons of advice).

Re: Ask HN: What do you think of the idea – the social network for education

#22

Post by JeanPierre »

kuvkir wrote: post #10
JeanPierre wrote: post #4

Do you think of learning management systems ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_learning_management_sys... ), or do you think about it being open to all? I know some of those systems has the option for fora, and my experiences with those has just been good. If you're looking for good ways to work with an open-for-all system, I suggest looking at the most used fora in e.g. mathematics and physics, and then take som…

I think of it as a open-for-all online university, in the beginning at least for Russian speaking students as I have access to many Russian universities and professors who might like to participate. Regarding the problem of schoolkids misusing the community to solve their homework, if the project is targeted for people who really want to learn something, doing so is cheating themselves. Also, for university students…

Well, if you're backed up by professors, then this sounds promising.

What I would start with if I was working with this issue, is how to present the information for the students in the best way. At least for me, linear algebra and physics becomes way simpler with good visualisations/videos. If you could somehow make it easier for professors to present the content well, then you have a good start for a good website. So, all in all: Find out what makes people learn the easiest - I'm pretty sure there are some studies out there elaborating the way to teach students. If you make this way of teaching students easy to do on your website, I'm pretty sure that this idea might work out well.

Re: Ask HN: What do you think of the idea – the social network for education

#23

Post by imp »

I've built a website to do that! It's called Curious Reef http://curiousreef.com/ and I launched it a few months ago. People have been steadily learning a variety of subjects together since then.

The most active class so far is MIT's OCW 6.00, Intro to Computer Science: http://curiousreef.com/class/mit-opencourseware-600-introduc...

There are others learning Vim, SICP, bash, etc. I'm also experimenting with a guitar class.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on the site. My goals when designing the site were exactly as you have described above.

Re: Ask HN: What do you think of the idea – the social network for education

#24

Post by kuvkir »

imp wrote: post #23

I've built a website to do that! It's called Curious Reef http://curiousreef.com/ and I launched it a few months ago. People have been steadily learning a variety of subjects together since then. The most active class so far is MIT's OCW 6.00, Intro to Computer Science: http://curiousreef.com/class/mit-opencourseware-600-introduc... There are others learning Vim, SICP, bash, etc. I'm also experimenting with a guitar…

Seems very promising. I like the slogan – "explanatory social learning".

How many users do you have at this moment?

Have you contacted content owners to ask them for permission to place the videos directly on your website? It'd be awesome if you can do so.

Re: Ask HN: What do you think of the idea – the social network for education

#25

Post by imp »

kuvkir wrote: post #24
imp wrote: post #23

I've built a website to do that! It's called Curious Reef http://curiousreef.com/ and I launched it a few months ago. People have been steadily learning a variety of subjects together since then. The most active class so far is MIT's OCW 6.00, Intro to Computer Science: http://curiousreef.com/class/mit-opencourseware-600-introduc... There are others learning Vim, SICP, bash, etc. I'm also experimenting with a guitar…

Seems very promising. I like the slogan – "explanatory social learning". How many users do you have at this moment? Have you contacted content owners to ask them for permission to place the videos directly on your website? It'd be awesome if you can do so.

Thanks, there's over 1200 registered users, but I wouldn't quote that as active users. The site got redditted when it launched and there's some people who signed up initially and haven't been back. I don't have a number for active users off the top of my head, but there's always someone submitting homework, writing a comment, or starting a discussion every day.

I haven't looked into hosting content yet. I feel that others do that pretty well already, but it would be more convenient to have it all in one place. What type of content do you think would be most beneficial to be hosted on Curious Reef? Embedded videos, PDFs, etc? Or are you thinking of something like replicating the content of all of OCW's classes?

Re: Ask HN: What do you think of the idea – the social network for education

#26

Post by kuvkir »

JeanPierre wrote: post #22
kuvkir wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think of it as a open-for-all online university, in the beginning at least for Russian speaking students as I have access to many Russian universities and professors who might like to participate. Regarding the problem of schoolkids misusing the community to solve their homework, if the project is targeted for people who really want to learn something, doing so is cheating themselves. Also, for university students…

Well, if you're backed up by professors, then this sounds promising. What I would start with if I was working with this issue, is how to present the information for the students in the best way. At least for me, linear algebra and physics becomes way simpler with good visualisations/videos. If you could somehow make it easier for professors to present the content well, then you have a good start for a good website. S…

Good point, will think on that.

Re: Ask HN: What do you think of the idea – the social network for education

#27

Post by kuvkir »

imp wrote: post #25
kuvkir wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems very promising. I like the slogan – "explanatory social learning". How many users do you have at this moment? Have you contacted content owners to ask them for permission to place the videos directly on your website? It'd be awesome if you can do so.

Thanks, there's over 1200 registered users, but I wouldn't quote that as active users. The site got redditted when it launched and there's some people who signed up initially and haven't been back. I don't have a number for active users off the top of my head, but there's always someone submitting homework, writing a comment, or starting a discussion every day. I haven't looked into hosting content yet. I feel that o…

Maybe not hosting content yourself, but embed it somehow into your website.

Re: Ask HN: What do you think of the idea – the social network for education

#28

Post by kuvkir »

kylemathews wrote: post #17

I'm leading a project doing exactly this, building an open source social learning platform on Drupal. You can check it out at http://eduglu.com . I made my second release yesterday - http://kyle.mathews2000.com/blog/2010/06/01/second-release-e... Things are early on still so if you wanted to pitch in, you could be a lot of help.

Thanks for suggestion, will definitely look at it.

Re: Ask HN: What do you think of the idea – the social network for education

#29

Post by kuvkir »

Thank everyone for participation. Did some more research and found out two interesting projects:

http://smart.fm – a next generation learning platform from Japan featuring personalized learning techniques.

http://grockit.com – a social learning tool to help students prepare for SAT, GMAT, etc. With elements of a social game.

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