Learning Exchange 02

In Learning Exchange 01, I suggested that learning has some similarities to common-pool resources. We all have stuff we know, and we all have other stuff we want to know. If there was a mechanism for organizing exchanges of what we’ve learned, then individually we might all benefit.

In the present post, I begin exploring a simplified example of a learning exchange by introducing three participants. Please meet Alice, Barbara, and Cathy.

Alice is a graphic artist. She has a son in grade 8 taking algebra. The teacher created a course web site, and Alice contributed something she calls Graph Aerobics [Quicktime]. Graph Aerobics is a series of slides that show various algebraic equations that can be graphed (eg, y = x). The slide show is set to music. The teacher has students dance to the music and use their arms and bodies to display what the equations look like when graphed. For example, at y=x students pose like a airplane banking for a left turn, with left arm low and right arm high to portray the equation (a straight line at an angle of 45 degrees). It’s a fast paced dance through a series of equations. Kids love it. But Alice and the teacher want to make the slide show into a movie. Alice has heard some buzz about the new video tag in HTML5 but isn’t certain if this is a good idea or how to get started.

Barbara is a database architect who designs and builds relational databases. Her mother is now somewhat elderly and frail, so Barbara started recording stories of family history. She’s now heavily into geneology and has uncovered quite a few family treasures. Among the most priceless are photographs of relatives, some barely remembered even by her mother. Many of the photographs are not in good shape. Barbara would like to scan the photos and then use a tool like Photoshop to remove the blemishes caused by mold and general wear-and-tear. If these plans work out, she’d like to make a web site with the photos so that any family member could see them. But she’s never used a graphics tool like Photoshop and she’s never constructed a web site.

Cathy is a web designer skilled with such client-side tools as HTML, CSS, and Javascript. This work is great fun, but she’d like more responsibility. A friend who works at a local university recently told her about a job that will soon be posted. It sounds wonderful, but there’s one possible problem. It would require web design of data driven student registration systems. Behind the user interface sits a mammoth database with student, faculty, and course information. While she’s worked with small databases previously, her SQL skills are rusty and she finds the prospect of dealing with a large database a bit intimidating.

In a learning exchange, everyone is both a teacher and a student. In other words, everyone is a learner. In my next post I’ll discuss how transactions might occur in a learning exchange. How could Alice, Barbara, and Cathy exchange what they know for what they’d like to know? The question includes the issue of money.