📓 content/Project-Fluid.md by @houshuang ☆

#public
So the basic idea is, this is so 2007. I’m, in my last year, my undergrad in International Development Studies in Toronto.
And this was at the time before MOOCs, but after Open Courseware,
- so you had 2 hour classroom recordings from MIT, but with Creative Commons licences,
  - which is actually in some ways, much better than what we have today, sadly, but different, right.
  - And, and these websites were 1.0, right? You couldn’t log in or comment even if you wanted to.
And I’m really interested in Creative Commons, open educational resources, how the open source kind of ethics and way of doing things, ideas can be applied to other domains
- So the main idea was just like, here’s a group that was very small scale.
- And so I’m at this conference in Croatia, an unconference on education.
  - So we’re sitting around the circle, and I’m like, again, like last year of undergrad, I don’t know anyone, like I’m reading people’s blogs, I’m excited. But nobody knows my name. Nobody. I’m not in the community but I want to be. So I go to this conference.
  - And I’m, we’re sitting around, they’re like, Well, why are you here?
    
    And I said, I want to think about what the University of the future looks like. Without, you know, we don’t need gym, we don’t need the library. We don’t need a lot of the things that we have right now. But there’s still something that I think we do need. I want to figure out what that is and how we can provide it, you know, at scale.
  - And then there’s three or four others in the room who say "I’m interested in that too".
    
    And so the facilitator says okay, you four, there’s a room right there, there’s a whiteboard, you’ve got two hours. And I’m so grateful to that facilitator who gave us that space – I’ve never seen them before I sat down.
    
    One of them was Philipp Schmidt, who’s now at the MIT Media Lab. I mean, all the others were a bit more senior, they’re more connected than me.
    
    But we basically sat down, we started thinking, and then you know, we started, we kept in touch. And eventually, what we said is, okay, we have all this amazing material.
    
    We have lecture videos, we have open access books, we have journal articles, we have Wikipedia, we have documentaries on YouTube.
    
    So one thing we need is to curate,
    
    we need someone to kind of say, hey, if you want to learn machine learning, like probably this is a good place to start.
    
    And don’t just put machine learning in Google and click on the first five links, right.
    
    And then we need a learning group.
    
    We want someone to discuss with, a cohort,
    
    and someone called Mike Caulfield wrote this really nice blog post about the power of cohorts,
    
    so you want someone to move through it with you together.
    
    Then we talked about using different platforms, more problem based learning.
    
    Eventually, we developed this idea of digital badges with Mozilla and this idea of having challenges.
    
    That’s now blown up to be something huge, right? But we were actually on the ground floor of that, where that was actually developing kind of a web Academy with Mozilla. That never quite came to fruition.
  - And initially, we also have this idea of like, the long tail of courses.
    
    We launched in 2007. with seven courses,
    
    we found people who were interested in teaching or facilitating, and we had courses like,
    
    "learning game theory through poker", and, you know,
    
    "reading science fiction"
    
    not productive basic courses
    
    Everyone does Econ 101, right.
    
    Some of these people were like famous professors who were like "I could never teach this course. at my home institution, but I’ve always wanted to teach it".
    
    And so there’s like a really cool group of people.
    
    And we were experimenting with all kinds of different platforms.
    
    We built our own crappy one,
    
    people using GitHub and blogs and aggregators.
  - It was a really nice community, in terms of meta learning, like
    
    we’re training people how to run courses,
    
    we’re documenting it,
    
    we were doing workshops,
    
    we got some money from Hewlett to actually do we yearly meetups.
    
    So we have 2030 people from all around the world in Berlin, you know, hacking for a week,
    
    it was the best time of my life.
- And then a lot of different stuff happened.
  - I’m not going to take you through the whole history.
  - Basically, we I think we kind of got scared by the MOOCs, and thinking like, oh, we’re like they’re taking over and we need to scale up
    
    which I was totally against.
  - I think there was this idea initially that this was supposed to be like for the disadvantages, like kind of Wikipedia style.
    
    We want to make education available to the world.
    
    And then we realised that, you know, the people are signing up for courses all have master’s degrees and full jobs.
    
    and to me that was like, Yeah, but for years, people have been talking about the need for lifelong learning. And here we are providing this amazing lifelong learning for professionals. How is that a bad thing?
    
    Yes, I agree that there’s all these unfilled needs, but do we have to do everything,
    
    so we kind of pivoted
    
    first, they scaled way up, and they’re like, okay, we’re not gonna have cohorts, we’re not gonna have quality control, we’re just going to, like, let anyone create courses and, and we’re going to have, you know, self paced and we kind of presaged the whole MOOCs transition.
    
    And we’re gonna have badges that mean nothing like I filled in my name, I got a badge and so it collapsed,
    
    like there was nothing of value left basically.
    
    After that they pivoted again
    
    now they’re actually doing learning circles with libraries. To try to increase reach.
    
    And that I think is a really cool idea. But it’s just doing something very different from what we were starting to do. And so they’re really focused on "here’s a 17 year old who didn’t go to finish high school, how can we actually help them" – that’s awesome.
But the amazing thing is I’m sitting in 2020. And I’m thinking like, Hey, I really want to study Greek philosophy. And I really want to study neuroscience, because
- after I left academia, my time horizon has radically expanded
  - Like I’m following this course called [[Awakening From the Meaning Crisis]], which really dives into all kinds of really interesting stuff.
    
    I’m like, man, if I want to really understand what he’s talking about, in terms of like, literally, Greek philosophy and neuroscience, palaeontology.
    
    That could take me 10 years.
    
    Hmm. And I’m like,so I should get started now, imagine how much I’ll know in 10 years,
    
    which is so different from my my reaction a year ago, right where I was in a postdoc, and I knew that I only had a year left before I lost my job and I was applying and I had probably have to move to another country and stuff. So I was like, Okay, can I get a publication of this next six months?
And **so I’m looking around and I’m thinking, hey, I want to learn with other people. **Right?
- I’m pretty self efficient learner, but I want to learn with other people.
- And I realised that the need that we were trying to fulfil 13 years ago is still unfulfilled.
And so I’ve been talking to a bunch of people and I have a concrete idea.
- So I have, I have a note in my system called [[E: Ad hoc book clubs]],
  - like there’s all these people on the internet.
  - And I have all these articles I want to read.
  - And I wish there was a platform where I could just say like, hey, I want to read this article. Is there anyone else who wants to read our article and meet with me and we can talk about it?
And the point is, there’s so many things that I want to read. And the order I read them in is somewhat arbitrary.
- And so if I was on that forum, and I saw that, hey, Rob, is reading Doug Engelbart original essay. Do you want to read it with him?
  - I’m like, Yeah, I was gonna read that at some point. Right. But it would be cool to discuss it with Rob who I know and I’m connected with him on Twitter. I know he’s a smart guy. So I’m going to read that now.
    
    And also inspired by some of the stuff I’ve been seeing on Twitter, I figured that a really simple MVP of that
    
    you actually don’t need any technology
    
    you just like, hey, anyone that wants to read something, like put your your name and your topic in a Google form, and I’m going to manually match people just to try it out.
So that so that’s how it started.
But as I’ve been talking to some people, with Brian Tobal we had this idea of getting his former I think university advisor and because we all stuck with larger groups like and you
- would you want a facilitator and would you be willing to pay 20 bucks to have like a professor facilitate reading group with really smart people?
  - Yeah, I’d pay 20 bucks for that.
    
    I’m in a different position now than when I was 18.
    
    There are a lot of people out there who are willing to pay for newsletters, for really high quality content/interaction without wasting time.
- But one of my concerns is, let’s say we got four people together, who are interested in education, and we get some interesting deep article on education
  - that would already be awesome. It couldn’t fail, kind of,
  - But I fear that we would be spending so much time just kind of like ad libbing about like, "yeah, because when I was like doing this boot camp", "that’s how we did at P2PU", "my friend told me about this new startup", etc.
    
    which is super interesting, but it’s not really going into the depth of engaging with the material.
  - And actually, that’s the reason why you’d kind of want a sequence of papers because if you know that they’ve all read an article by Piaget, an article by Dewey and one by Vygotsky
    
    We’d have more of a shared, understanding that now we can analyse a case together and maybe get more theoretical rigor
**when you’re bringing people together for the first time, the depth that you can go is is pretty shallow. **
- It can be a really rewarding experience, it can be really enriching in that like, sort of community building sense, but the depth that you can go, you’re not going be at the fronttier in meeting one, you’ve got to you’ve got to sort of get to like a level of shared understanding of that topic.
So I’m taking you through my thinking here. You have this challenge.
- But then of course, once you want people to sign up for a sequence, now you start worrying about like,
  - Oh, that’s a big commitment.
  - The scheduling doesn’t work for me.
  - I’m going to drop out,
    
    what happens when everyone’s dropping out?
- Also, the thing is I really like one on ones.
  - Because I’m on so many meetings.
    
    Even in good meetings, I’m half the time on Twitter and stuff because whereas now with you, I’m 100% engaged
  - My PhD thesis was orchestrating a MOOC for 2000 teachers
    
    using all kinds of cool technologies and designs,
    
    and it was actually really cool.
    
    So it is possible to create even large scale classes that are very meaningful, but it’s quite complex
  - whereas with a one on one, you get a lot for free
- So my idea was what if you have a community of people. So so then you say, Hey, you know, I’m really interested in reading Piaget.
  - But then what if there was a sequence that built on each other
    
    kind of like a skills graph,
  - where to be able to get something out of this, you need to read these three other papers.
  - So I start by reading the Piaget paper with you
    
    and the next time I’m setting up a meeting with someone I know that that the next person
    
    could be someone brand new, could also be you - depending on when people have time, how quickly they want to progress through the sequence
    
    but I’ll know that they’ve already read the Piaget article
  - This could be whatever topic right?
    
    And also this functions as kind of social proof because if I’m at the third level, I know that it’s going to be at least someone who’s like put in somewhat some effort.
  - And in fact, my idea would be to say,
    
    you first read the paper,
    
    then you write a little blog post about it.
    
    And this could be on the system, it could be on your own platform or whatever, Discourse or whatever.
    
    And then then you actually unlock access to the other person’s blog post,
    
    you read their blog post, and you comment on it
    
    and maybe there’s some prompt
    
    Then you’d meet for half an hour.
    
    And now I think that discussion is gonna be so much richer because a you have social proof that you read it, because you wrote the blog post
    
    You can’t just come in like, oh, sorry, I just skimmed it on the way here, let’s just chat
    
    no, you can’t actually start the meeting until you’ve written the blog post or something.
    
    And it’s a conversation starter - you already know a lot about both the article and each other’s ideas
    
    and you’re like, "Hey, I read your thing. I read that thing."
    
    And so you discuss
    
    maybe you’re taking some notes together,
    
    but the idea is, at least you should come up with like three main takeaways or three questions.
    
    And so you’ve done the reading, you’ve done the blog post, you’ve read the other person’s blog post, you’ve come up with three take-aways or three good questions
    
    and now you unlock access to everyone else’s notes and questions from that same reading (previous cohorts/pairs)
    
    Because the thing I’m trying to balance here is on the one hand,
    
    I think it’s really valuable for people to try to figure stuff out from first principles.
    
    So like if we just had the paper now by Piaget, instead of like, going and reading 50 critiques of Piaget, just like literally just reading the text, and thinking through it based on our own principles and experiences and stuff, and then discussing with other person I think is really valuable.
    
    But then once you do that, obviously, like, oh, here’s someone who made a connection to, you know, barefoot schools in India, and here’s someone who made a connection to the fireman academy and like, that’s super enriching.
    
    And it’s also like this cool thing where you’re building kind of a community knowledge base, but without having this problem where like, Initially writing on Wikipedia was actually a way of learning. Right? But now if you go to Wikipedia for most topics, you feel like you have nothing to add unless you’re an expert. So right now you can you can learn by reading, but you can’t learn by creating.
    
    Maybe you’re we’re even trying to crowdsource like,
    
    what is the best discussion prompt?
    
    Or what is the best blog question?
    
    "So you read this article? Here’s two different questions. Which one works better?"
    
    Or "here’s three discussion questions which one was the most useful to you?"
    
    Or maybe you do like an A B test on different groups
    
    depending on scale.
    
    maybe it’s something around spaced repetition.
    
    Andy Matuschak, in one of his podcasts talks about, like, crowdsourcing, even like collecting data from SRS questions around articles and being like this question has a better retention rate. But is that actually a good metric.