Rethinking School System Curriculum
21 Jan 2014
Education is how the world develops and progresses. If no one chose to share their knowledge and experiences with others, everyone would just make the same mistakes and discover the same things. The lack of learning from the past slows down humanity’s progress greatly. Just like everything else evolves as obstacles come along, education needs to evolve to match the speed of technology.
The Problem
Going through school in my generation we were using books that were 5 - 10 years old, and that was based on the publication date. Those books could have easily taken 1 - 2 years to write and put together. Current school systems have newer books that are 1 - 2 years old + the amount of time to put them together. Even if you get a book that was just written it will be out of date in a couple months to a year. So, how do we teach current and future knowledge?
The Solution
After joining The Iron Yard, I started to brainstorm around what they are currently doing and how I could expand upon it. The curriculum setup now is very fluid and open to manipulation as the class goes along. Currently we have notes about what is taught in a Github repo. Im hoping to open it up with more information about how we will cover sections and when. Basically a textbook as a repo.
The Experiment
I will be building TIY’s iOS curriculum on a public facing Github repo. This will allow for some very interesting interactions :
- Instant updates as technology improves or is created
- ex: a new library, framework, or API is created… so I change tomorrow’s lesson to cover it
- students graduating with up-to-date technologies is so desirable
- Feature requests
- ex : a student requests to learn a particular technology within the iOS community
- ex : a company asks for students to learn a technology for job placement
- Pull requests to allow for instructor collaboration on the curriculum
- Bug requests to allow for holes or issues that might arise in the curriculum
And this is just the tip of the iceberg for what will be able to come out of a repo based curriculum. Once I have the repo setup, I will update this entry with a link to it.
Photo Credit: Chris Devers via Compfight cc