While you’ve probably made your way to this blog from www.SelfReliantLLC.com, you may have found it through a search engine or by just clicking serendipitously around the Internet. I’m here to tell you, you’ve come to the right place. Please have a look below for a sampling of SelfReliant LLC’s educational philosophy, and a taste of what you’re going to find if you bookmark/subscribe to this blog. It’s going to be a fun ride, so please join us, leave comments and questions, and email Alex any time if you’d like to get in touch.
SelfReliant LLC and its founder, Alex Kaufman, is a company positioning itself to be a 21st century catalyst for Internet education and broad educational innovation. The theme of self-reliance speaks to Alex’s belief that self-driven learning or self-education, which is now a nearly ubiquitous mode of learning thanks to the Internet’s rise in our culture, is really the most effective lifestyle choice for becoming learned. As Henry David Thoreau said that he went to Walden pond, “To Live Deliberately”, we here at SelfReliant want “To Learn Deliberately”. This deliberate, self-driven learning, is traditionally an activity that exists outside the traditional school system because it is hard to benchmark and accredit – and it doesn’t neatly match any guidelines, curricula, or top-down requirements that we’ve been told make us “learned”.
Self-education on the broader Internet truly changes that, because for the first time ever, we could accredit self-educational activities. The fact that you wrote 500 Wikipedia pages that were then vetted for quality, and generated dozens of popular science book reviews on Amazon, and publish scholarly work every day to a WordPress blog, is the new numerics of grading self-educators. These numbers and records, like your Google hit number, LinkedIn score, or Second Life 3D portfolio – are tools that approximate the same function as grades in the traditional educational system. With a little tweaking, they may very well be able to supplement or supplant grades all together in the coming decades, as even more people realize they can learn more by spending 2 or more hours a day online, than they could get from similar time (and untold tuition dollars) spent in academia. In short, SelfReliant believes that teaching oneself through deliberate online research and social interaction is going to evolve into the dominant and perhaps only educational system at some point in the 21st century. We would like to see you be ready for this transition, by getting individuals, small business owners, and even large corporations on track to understand these robust Web 2.0 social applications. Many of these applications are educational without intending to be so, because they provide an experiential education, rather than a “canned” lecture- or seminar-style education. Learning has no deadlines and certainly does not neatly start and stop in hour-long periods.
Of course, there will have to be incentives for getting positive lessons from these online experiences, and that will be one of the greatest challenges of online education. One solution, which SelfReliant founder Alex Kaufman has proposed, is that the Internet adopt educational currencies that are in turn acceptable to universities, academies, and K-12. For example, an educational currency would serve as an accrediting reward for an online activity that means some standard of excellence. Let’s say you just spent a week writing a Wikipedia article on ancient Rome – hey, you like ancient history – it’s cool. Submit it to an expert on the subject online and get rewarded for your self-driven effort with 60 (official) Harvard points. Once you get 1,000,000 Harvard points you get your virtual ‘diploma’. No need to show up at a physical school building anywhere in the US, or outlay massive capital for classroom-style teaching, which is grossly ineffective anyway. Educational currencies would allow us to accredit self-education, something that would have benefited famous malcontents with the education system, such as Mark Twain, who said, “I never let my schooling get in the way of my education.”
Here’s to that sentiment, and the fact that schooling, when innovated rigorously and consciously, might one day serve the needs of education and learning, rather than distract from them.
