Bartering for Knowledge & Giving it Away

I wrote last Wednesday about how to mine your home school community for rich resources. But what about people outside the homeschooling community? Is there a trend towards freely sharing our knowledge with each other in ways that will benefit everyone?

I’m happy to say, yes, there is. Maybe not a big trend, but it’s definitely growing. Maybe it’s the economy and the unreliability of working for someone else. Or maybe it’s because we’re developing a better understanding of what true community is; but more people are exchanging their skills and knowledge with each other and changing the face of learning.

Here are four places where people have decided to form communities to share or barter knowledge. These are not homeschooling/unschooling sites. They’re simply people who have decided that it doesn’t take four years of college, $20,000 a year, or learning from someone with fancy titles after their names to learn the things they want to learn and are interested in.

1) Zero Tuition College Here’s a quote taken from the vision statement of Zero Tuition College

– We argue that the choice is not between college and no college. Instead, there is a third way. Competency, community, exploration, and self-knowledge are not monopolies of the college institution. ZTC says that you can achieve each of these with self-directed learning—often for a much lower price than today’s college tuition.

That’s why ZTC exists: We offer a concrete strategy for giving yourself a higher education through self-directed learning. We don’t just criticize college; we acknowledge its virtues and then attempt to replace them. We’re a community of students and mentors who support each other’s journeys. And we don’t charge tuition or ask you to go into debt.

2) Trade School: Barter for Instruction

Trade School 2011 from David Felix Sutcliffe on Vimeo.

 

3) CommuniTeach Here’s from the site’s About page.

CommuniTeach is a platform that connects real people like you with others in your area so you can meet in person and learn for free from each other. We make it easy to arrange both 1-on-1 “skill swaps” and group “LearnIts,” where a bunch of people learn a skill at once. Everyone has something they can teach, from digital photography to web design to piñata making, that others would love to learn. And when people start sharing their skills with one another, their world and the world becomes a better, more interesting, and connected place.

4) Khan Academy “With a library of over 2,600 videos covering everything from arithmetic to physics, finance, and history and 204 practice exercises, we’re on a mission to help you learn what you want, when you want, at your own pace.” This is the opening quote of the site. I love the tagline – A free world-class education for anyone anywhere. It’s an amazing, free collection of resources, highly concentrated in math, science and history for now, but it’s growing every day.

So what can we take away from this for the homeschooling community?

It’s an open invitation to develop more resources and places where we can share our skills and benefit from each other. The way we’re going to learn and work and live in the future is rapidly changing. We can Google all the information and facts we need right when we need it. Most of us learn best by doing; we also learn best by working alongside people who are passionate about what they know and can do.

Photo Courtsey of Irini Slutsky
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