Education Through the Blockchain - Making My Dream A Reality
Bitcoin showed me that if the system is irreparably broke, you don't try to super glue it together, you build a new one, a functioning alternative just waiting for the world to come aboard. It's a life raft on the surface, but a luxury yacht when you get on board. I want to repeat this process for education.
https://steemit.com/education/@derekareith/steemit-s-model-applied-to-education
https://steemit.com/steemituniversity/@derekareith/steemit-university-emergent-education
Talking about this topic extensively the past few days, I remembered a Twitter exchange I had a ways back:
The moment I found out about Bitcoin, and really started to "get it", I realized that the principles behind cryptocurrencies would create ripples far and wide through our society over the next 20 years. Steemit is one of these ripples. Steemit University just may be the next, and I want to help make sure that it is.
I put my posts up inspired by an idea I had to expand Steem's role in changing the world. The amount of positive feedback these posts received has been nothing short of amazing. After just a few days, I now realize that this is not only possible, but it's going to happen, and YOU can be a part of it.
Let's build an open source educational platform that will pay students to learn and educators to teach through the Steem blockchain. It will take a lot of far more talented people than myself, but fortunately there are people out there just as passionate about these ideas as I am.
I want to introduce everyone to Kieran Nolan @kdnolan:
To say that Kieran is doing remarkable things would be an understatement. He reached out to me through Steemit and now we are going to start trying to make this idea really happen.
I mentioned @limitless in my last post. He's interested in making this real, as well. Look at what his friend @nphacker has built:
I honestly am amazed everyday by this site. Seeing people already building these things, and new people being drawn to these ideas, has inspired me to do everything I can to help make it real. This is why I am making this post. I want people with the talents we need to see this project through to join us.
If you want to contribute, simply post under the #steemituniversity tag, or reach out to me here. I want this to be an open project that grows organically by drawing in talent as we build it. And even if you can't contribute, spread the word of it, spread the idea behind it. Just like Steemit, we can all do the little things to make this a reality.
So, I ask, will you help change the world?
hi I have added you to a channel in steemit chat
Awesome, dragonslayer! I haven't been on there in a while. I was a little disappointed at how money-centric all of the chat was in the time I was on there. I can't deal with that noise. This is about much bigger things here and I am so glad to have you on #teamhumanity. I'll reach out to you on there in the next couple days, because I haven't forgot about you, and I am still making some real good progress on the stuff we talked about before. Take care!
This is a good idea. Curating the education will be important. Share information and don't censor it. If we can break people free from indoctrination so they take ALL info they can make decisions for themselves I truly believe the world will be a better place. That does not mean we cannot and should not have opinions and share them. We should. We should just clearly indicate when something is opinion and teach people that when they hear an opinion it is okay for them to agree with it, it is okay for them to not agree, and it is okay to ask questions if they are unsure.
I've always said the only thing I think can actually fix our world is the following:
IMO
I've been working on my thoughts on censorship further. @pussycat recently replied to one of my posts about NSFW content on Steemit:
My response:
As you know, I am not an advocate of full censorship. Immutability of information is a key feature of a blockchain. You should always be able to find that information. That being said, as we open up these various windows to the steem blockchain, it will be essential to soft censor posts that try to make their way on to the wrong window, in my opinion. This frees up steem to become a dominant, multi-faceted tool for our world. That is, unless you want to see things like land registries in the new feed XD
It was more views I was concerned about. Let's take religion. People want to teach creationism. So be it. People want to teach evolution. So be it. For a truly enlightened world such posts would include the fact that some people do not believe these things, they believe X.
Years ago I thought for awhile about making a reddit like website but with a really different approach. My working title for the concept was PERSPECTIVES.
I am going to switch to WW2 instead of religious for the example.
Let's say I am writing about a specific event in WW2 from the perspective I was taught in the U.S. I think it'd be awesome for people to be able to add a tab that is for say the german perspective, french, etc....
The end goal being that if you wanted to know about that event in history you'd go somewhere and find people sharing information about that event from a whole lot of different perspectives.
You then have a chance at being more informed and not blindly following one perspective that might be heavily censored. If all the perspectives are quickly available it makes it hard to truly censor differing opinions.
Apply that to ANY topic, whether it is religion, evolution, democracy, anarchy, you name it... having all the different perspectives at your finger tips would I think be extremely valuable for making an informed decision.
Oh, I got you now. I was thinking for opinion (steemit window) vs education (steemituniversity window).
I think you hit the nail on the head with:
Failure to do that would certainly be flag-worthy, on an educational platform. This is all really good stuff, @dwinblood. I never thought about this side of the project: how it could open up every available avenue of learning for everyone, whatever their preferences are, even if those preferences aren't the socially acceptable norm. But you're right, there would have to be some solid moderating ensuring that creationism, for example, isn't taught as fact. While curating would be a massive undertaking on the site, just like here, there will be an incentive for steem whale investors to develop bots to perfect this process. Like @dantheman said in his most recent post, bots are the new ASICs, at least for Steemit and other steem window-ed sites to come. I am confident that over time, this arms race, of sorts, will result in a much better flow all around, as bots are precisely crafted to solve these problems.If people want to say creationism is fact. I'm fine with it as long as there is something linking to people who disagree with things. I think if people cannot so easily censor ideas, and we are armed with REASON as a tool that it will be really difficult to indoctrinate people. It is easy to paint whatever picture we want if we censor thing. And please please people stop falling for APPEALS TO AUTHORITY... you have your own mind, use it.
Could you imagine if someone made childrens' books teaching the concepts of reason and critical thinking?
Sorry this book disagrees with you, so you must be wrong XD
Really, though, I agree with that nuance below. They CAN teach it as fact, but ought to link alternate views, if they value their potential payout.
I can see a sort of cheetah bot that scans "controversial" feeds, such as creationism for example, to detect whether the post has a fact warning and/or links to alternate data. Cheetah would simply let curators know when a post is lacking these, and then it would be up to curators to decide if it is a flagworthy offense or not.
Oh yeah. All I was saying is I don't care if people state whatever they want as fact as long as they link to alternative views. Anything less than that is just indoctrination and forcing a specific view upon others. Sure share what you believe, but inform them of all of their choices and let them use their mind and decide for themselves. This kind of goes against some of the "save their souls" mentality, and honestly I think that is why it is in religion in the first place. It is kind of a mind virus encouraging people to force their views upon others to "save them."
I don't endorse any particular religion and I do believe in freedom of/from religion. So I don't have a problem with any of them. I needed to say that so you'd understand I am not endorsing a religion when I say the next part.
A friend of mine linked some weird book published by the Church of Satan it was just an image of the cover. It was called satanism and witchcraft and kind of is in a children's book format... he posted it under #funny in a private slack.
I responded as follows (I'm generally not really funny... kind of suck at it actually)
I've actually seen children's books like these. I know I bookmarked it, but can't seem to find them.
But I agree. That's the most important part of this project. Kids aren't learning the most important life skills that they should have been acquiring during their 12 year "stay". Instead they are learning a lot of stuff they'll forget, a lot of stuff they don't really want or need to learn, and waste that capital of time that could have been spent learning stuff that would have added value to them, their relationships, and the world.
Bastiat's seen and unseen in perfect display.
They are being taught how to conform. That is truly not what they should be being taught. They should be taught to love who they are and revel in their own individual qualities.
XD haha yeaaa satanists do a shit job living up to their image.
BTW, replying to @dwinblood's joke below...so other people don't think this comment is weird as all hell.
And this X 100: