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Last night I entitled a post: “Poor College Students Sacrificing Precious Christmas cash for Ron Paul“. I finished the post just before I headed out on a Saturday evening date.  My intention was to write a post that would influence my small readership and more of my family and friends to donate, I hadn’t even proof read the post. When I got home from my date it was just after midnight, I shut my eyes and clicked “donate”, giving the $100 I have saved up over the past month. It was an awesome feeling.

It was then that I realized that I had 111 Diggs!  I had three emails from friends congratulating me for getting on Lew Rockwell’s home page. Feeling rather embarrassed realizing that thousands of people had read my poorly written (I hadn’t even proofed it as I ran out the door to my date) blog entry, I some quick fixes.

I also want to thank the two of you who offered to donate a little to my school tuition. I didn’t intend to solicit donations to me, but thank you.

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Yesterday my roommate introduced me to a video on YouTube called Brainiac Alkali Metals. It is a video of a British fellow, from UK Sky One series Brainiac, using Alkali Metals and water to make experimental explosions. My roommates dad, who is a highly respected chemistry professor here at Brigham Young University (BYU), is using this video in his class today. If you search for “braniacs” on YouTube, you will find a number of their videos, all of which are really entertaining. You will also notice how many times each video has been viewed, this one on Alkali Metals has been viewed 38,000 times in 3 months! All you would need is a group discussion after viewing this video, and a quiz to jog your memory, then you would never forget the things taught about alkali metals in this video.

I just keep thinking that between, Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg, online news sources, YouTube, and a growing multitude of other fantastic educational sources online; we have all the keys needed to learn just about anything we want these days. From private schools, to home schooling, to the public school system, to our current advanced education system, there is an incredible need for better, less expensive (in tuition for private schools, but in the absurdly high taxes for public schools, and grants for college), educational recourses in this country. The business world is quickly latching onto the principles of the internet; but, now with this plethora of great online educational recourses in this world, how might we optimize education, give parents the time they desperately need with their children, and create a more competitive educational system?

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This semester I am taking Business Management. I feel like we are cattle all being herded around a single persona of learning, and then graded against each other on the curve. The class is sort of a general academic business class, and it has more than 200 students in the class, and it is quite a culture change being a newly transferred student from LDS Business College (a school with no more than 30 students per class). Andrew Holmes, our professor from Texas, is a very entertaining man, especially here at BYU. Regardless, I have found the class completely ineffective and very hard to stay alert in. When you get behind or lost in a lecture it takes a special kind of person to stop the class continually just to ask a single question that may, or may not, contribute to the overall lecture. I probably make as many comments and questions as any, but most are not this vocal (there wouldn’t be enough time in class if we all were this vocal).

A few days ago, Seth Godin, made a refreshing, short, remark about the effectiveness of learning in groups. Here is what he said:

Listen to this…

What’s the point of talking to a group?

I’m serious. We spend a lot of time in presentations, or at the United Nations, or sending our kids to school. We have orientation sessions and keynote speeches and long-winded oratory on the floor the Senate. Why?

One reason: to incite. To share emotion. To sell. And that’s never going to go out of fashion, as far as I can tell.

But most of the speeches I’m talking about don’t incite. I heard an excerpt on the radio the other day… someone at the EU going on at length about admitting Romania and Bulgaria to the EU. There was even a mention of food safety issues. Thousands of people listening to one person drone on about food safety. This wasn’t an emotional speech designed to sell us on an idea. Instead, it was designed to teach us.

To teach us the way a schoolteacher I heard recently teaches: by reading a text. She stands up at the front of the room, and along with a few web images, reads a text to the class.

Here’s my point: In our scan and skip world, in a world where technology makes it obvious that we can treat different people differently, how can we possibly justify teaching via a speech?

Speech is both linear and unpaceable. You can’t skip around and you can’t speed it up. When the speaker covers something you know, you are bored. When he quickly covers something you don’t understand, you are lost.

If marketing is the art of spreading ideas, then teaching is a kind of marketing. And teaching to groups verbally is broken, perhaps beyond repair. Consumers of information won’t stand for it. We’re learning less every time we are confronted with this technique, because we’ve been spoiled by the remote control and the web.

If you teach–teach anything–I think you need to start by acknowledging that there’s a need to sell your ideas emotionally. So you need to use whatever tools are available to you–an evocative powerpoint image, say, or a truly impassioned speech.

Then, and this is the hard part, if you’re teaching to a group of more than three people, you need to find a way to engage that is non-linear. Q&A doesn’t work for a large group, because only the questioner is engaged at any given moment (if you’re lucky, the questioner represents more than a few, but she rarely represents all).

If it’s worth teaching, it’s worth teaching well. If it’s worth investing the time of 30 or 230 or 3330 people, then it’s worth investing the effort to actually figure out how to get the message across. School is broken. Legislative politics are broken. Linear is broken. YouTube and Bloglines, on the other hand, are new platforms, platforms that enable the education of millions of people every day, quickly and for free.

I have decided that I am going to label this auditorium style education “Old School Education”. It is out dated and less effective. I think that if you are a student you know exactly what I am talking about. As my brother, Neal , said after he got his Masters Degree, “My education had a lot of fuzz in it.” Neal talks alot about education on his blog.

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