Teaching another person, without expecting financial gain, is a precious and positive concept. I don’t want this to change.

What if the future of education is about teachers taking on roles more like traffic cops- pointing students toward and guiding them through flows of information that best facilitate learning?
Well, it’s an interesting thought.

When you do a search for something specific, you can browse the map. Why not just allow random map browsing? There are a lot of things I am interested in, and quite a few things I am sure I`d be tempted to have someone teach me if I saw the option available… I also split living time between two locations, so would like to be able to check the vicinity of both – something that “near you” clearly doesn`t address.

We launched mindbites.com last year with a similar goal, that of connecting people to share knowledge and earn money for themselves or charity. Our focus is slightly different however, allowing users to sell video instructionals online, vs. aiding the connecting of people in the physical world. What we have found is that people do indeed thirst for sharing and learning very targeted and specific knowledge from things such as Sewing a Pillowcase Dress, to How to Sign with your Baby, to How to Buy a Used Treadmill.

I’ve got to respectfully disagree with dejamuse on a few points: 1. Starting a business is a hard and noble cause, please respect these guys blood and tears and don’t call it “cute”, 2. Talk with the people who make their living teaching others, they do indeed care about making money, and 3. While I wholeheartedly agree that the market for knowledge online is still sorting out, it is way too premature to say that all knowledge is going to be free. Just look at Kindle, the sales of books and magazines, and even Chris Anderson’s new book.

Congrats again SOE. Would love to meet sometime and compare notes.

On the other hand, this site seems to provide a space in which a person might get one-to-one, focused tutoring. It is not the same thing as a friendly chat online. If someone willingly gives their time, at arranged intervals and to a requested degree of expertise, with a structured program, maybe the person should be reimbursed for their time.

Are you suggesting that only ‘official’ working teachers should be paid for teaching? Should I not be a free-lance teacher if I have the skills to be so? Should I only do so if I have an RL parallel-career?

“The Public School is a school with no curriculum, located underneath TELIC Arts Exchange. The Public School is an open structure, or maybe a stage, on which ideas about school perform new realities. At the moment, it operates as follows: first, classes are proposed by the public (I want to learn this or I want to teach this); then, people have the opportunity to sign up for the classes (I also want to learn that); finally, when enough people have expressed interest, the school finds a teacher and offers the class to those who signed up.” (http://thepublicschool.org)

I would have wanted learning/teaching captured and archived and the resulting archive to form a video version of eHow. Additionally, I would have ad-sponsored the archive and split the resulting revenue equally between teacher and learner. This would’ve been meant to give an incentive to get people to use the service to learn various things as they might have expected an eventual payback.

In addition to imagining this idea as a web based service, I also imagined it to be of service to help people with micro-problems. Suppose you need to format a text document in a certain way, or you need to figure out some aspect of a program. Instead of banging your head against a wall for two hours (as often happens when you’re trying to figure out programming/computer related things), hire someone by the minute from anywhere in the world.

How would you know that such a person was qualified? Well, you would be able to see samples of their past work, and, of course user rating. If they had the answer you were looking for and you were satisfied with their work, you would save them in your favorites.

Suppose, however, that the person contracted determined that they were not going to be able to help you. They could then refer you to someone they knew who might. Thus, 2Know would have comprised a set of meta knowledge which could be described as knowledge about (those who have) knowledge.

There are also strong social networking possibilities with such an idea

Maybe these are ideas SOE can incorporate later, or, perhaps they are ideas they have already thought of. In any case, I hope that the school of everything does well.

The more one really thinks about the possibilities of this idea, the more one realizes that, properly implemented, it could profoundly improve the world.

This is where mindbites.com comes in. I was receiving hundreds of people a week asking for advice on how to sign with their babies. I would spend time answering them but it was hard to describe what to do in an email as sign language is a very visual language. So I decided to offer short instructional videos on mindbites.com This is a place that offers videos for $1.99 to the public and shares the sale with the author (teacher) 50/50. It is a great deal for people wanting to learn something and a great way for me to teach people that I wouldn’t normally reach. It has been huge success for me and in fact it has allowed me more time at home with my daughter because I can easily work at home around her sleep time.

Here is an example of my first video:
How To Sign With Your Baby
http://www.mindbites.com/lesson/145-how-to-sign-with-your-baby

Laura, Founder of My Smart Hands

Porori – thanks, that’s useful feedback, I’ve added a bit of explanation and a couple of useful links on the ‘Near you’ page that may help , but we’ll have a think about how to make the geographic browse/search more usable and work in different locations too.

On the free/money issue, we actually started out wanting to help people share knowledge and learn from their peers for free, but we quickly realised the importance of helping people make a living doing what they love. When you sign up to teach and learn now, you can say whether you’re looking for financial transactions, skills-swapping, helping people or just meeting people, so hopefully all the different types of transaction can co-exist and benefit each other. We’ll see how this evolves for our community and for other sites.

The key thing for us now is to give people all the information they need to find each other and make informed decisions. And on that note – back to work!

The only thing that I wonder about the site is how the teacher’s qualifications are shown. I worry about paying up front for something as subjective as teaching. It’s not like ebay where an item either arrives or it doesn’t, is what it was listed as or not. If a seller doesn’t ship an item or misleads about it, I can file a Paypal claim and get my money back. How would someone prove that their teacher didn’t teach them adaquately? Whether or not you learned what you wanted is a bit harder to quantify and prove. Not just as a student, but as a teacher. I don’t know what would prevent students who just didn’t pick up a skill as easily as they’d hoped from giving bad feedback to a qualified teacher.

Although we’ve been focussing on the UK up to now, the site actually works from anywhere in the world. It’s the School of Everywhere!

Are you involved with School of Everything? If so, has no one bandied about the idea of making this web-based, more or less?

Although we’ve been focussing on the UK up to now, the site actually works from anywhere in the world. It’s the School of Everywhere!

Of course, it’s important that people who have spent time studying in order to _teach_ a vocation are paid. However, I think promotion of the idea that hobbyists and enthusiasts should charge for their services is very poor.

Recently I’ve been using the internet to develop my latest hobby, electronics hacking. Much of my learning has been dependant on the generosity of people who are more knowledgeable that I am. I’ve accepted the knowledge and guidance that I’ve been given, with a tacit assumption that I will go on to help others in the same way. I’ve been astounded by just how much support and advice people are willing to give. No money has changed hands – it’s heartening to think that people are still able to help people without wanted something in return.

I believe that education should be free and that knowledge should be shared freely. Having highly-developed skills and knowledge doesn’t make a person a good teacher, especially if getting paid is a motivation.

Sorry if I sound a bit down about this concept… but there’s only so much ‘social-networks-can-change-your-life’ a person can take without becoming a little critical. Education is already being re-invented; and this revolution is occurring all over the internet. My main hope is that this revolution is not monetised; school-of-everything seems a little bit like a shop.

Is it wrong to pay a tutor for catch-up lessons? Or a yogi to teach yoga? Not everything is free, people are surely allowed to make an honest buck off their talents?

While I think the skill-share / trade approach sounds great – I’d say that this would tend to compliment professional services/business as much as change the existing dynamic (like ebay).