Netcohort Institute - student powered peer to peer education

A goal of accommodating change will never be enough; we must undertake to constantly initiate radical change.

The Netcohort Institute will become an educational center dedicated to helping students gain experience and build valuable reputations. Lets start from bare ground and consider some ideas we may be able to use.

It used to matter where an idea came from - media and government were the source, anyone else was ignored. It used to matter where you got your knowledge - recognized colleges and think tanks got heard, everyone else was just shouting to a few neighbors. Today the most successful ideas and knowledge can come from you, and they can change the world.


Use the Netcohort Institute to focus your audacious dreams.

"You don't need a longer book or more time with a talented consultant. What you need is the certainty of knowing that you ought to do something (one thing); then you need the will to do it." - Seth Godin

What we will provide is a way for creative student teams to form, self-regulate, and manage reputation for future projects. To really have value we need a web 2.0 approach - let the students develop the courses they need - let all students vote their courses up or down.


The Netcohort Institute does need your efforts. To empower yourself, so you can empower others, so all will profit. Here is a general business plan for development of the Netcohort Institute.


* An open system like Wikipedia or Mozilla

* A community / communications organization like an online poker room with a general lounge and breakout rooms

* A reputation measurement similar to what e-bay had

* A way to stop or isolate spam, x rated, flame, and other submissions inappropriate for a general audience

* A voting system like Digg employs

* A tiered, twitter like, follow/friends function to grant permission for access to selected personal areas. Let's avoid the "tragedy of the commons."

* and a lot of stuff I probably haven't thought through yet. Maybe that is your job.


You have the audacious dreams - you can make them come true.

What is cool is that favorite courses will be determined by students; each course can be as complex or simple as it's author desires. Any how to or do it yourself Squidoo lens could serve as a pattern. How much will others want to know about your favorite subject?

What sort of resources can a P2P educational network offer? As a start look at this Squidoo lens about renaissance learning. To adjust to a full college level course you could add the frame work at the Bastiat Free University lens under the heading Create Your Own College Course.

In fact Squidoo is a resource we may want to use for course creation until we can develop our own open source project. Squidoo is easy and enjoyable, and you can actually earn a little money with it. Top rated courses should get lots of traffic.

Think of thousands of students creating courses, thousands of students voting on what is most valuable, you deciding on what is most valuable to you - and doing it.

Then think of thousands of students joining on small project teams and creating value for all of us. The teams will serve as a further platform for reputation development.


Continuing development of the Netcohort Institute will not be easy - it will take visionary volunteers wanting to shape the future of education while building their own valuable reputation.

Creation is satisfying.

But for Institutes users access to the volunteer's labors must remain simple.

For you, course creation is just the start; the reputation you build within your learning teams may qualify you for inclusion in serious start up projects - within a Netcort Institute incubator, or on your own.

There are further visions, ideas, and plans beyond hatching a business incubator; but first we need to prepare the nest.


What can I do immediately?

Make a great Squidoo lens and add it to the following list

Put Bastiat Free University or the Netcohort Institute into into a Wiki or forum - or add your bit to one already there.

Post this page to your favorite social media; Digg, del.icio.us, stumbleupon, MySpace, etc.

Leave a comment on this page so we can start connecting with each other.

How can I financially support enhancement of the Netcohort Institute?

First, thank you for any size gift - from a cup of coffee, to a new server, and the hiring of a programmer and editor.

Use the BFU donation or bequest form and designate the Netcohort Institute or make a gift to BFU with credit card or PayPal and note the Netcohort Institute in the comments. Your gifts will help expand and improve peer to peer education.

unlike ignorance -
a small gift to improve education doesn't hurt
Give $5 a month
to support BFU as it improves the netcohort Institution


How do I register at the Netcohort Institute?

Register at no charge in Bastiat Free University for now, together we may decide to develop a special entry portal later. You can already list The Netcohort Institute on your BFU student ID when you create it.

The Netcohort Institute is too big and too important for just me, it needs all of us. It needs you.

Before we get to history of the Netcohort Institute, let's discuss the faculty of the Netcohort Institute.

This may be a surprise, but peer to peer education is not the final goal. Anyone can join the Netcohort Institute here at no charge, and develop experience and relationships; but that is not the end of the project.

After we develop a core of caring and productive learners we will create an incubator for development of real, useful, profitable products. Membership in the incubator(s) will depend on reputation, and a small fee - perhaps $10.00 a year. The goal here is teams drafting from Netcohort Institute students and projects those that have the most promise. But this is not the final unstructure, these are not the "faculty" of the Netcohort Institute.

There will be two groups able to draft talent from the membership base of high reputation performers.

The first will be serial entrepreneurs that need team members and free lancers to develop the next new, new, thing. They can offer guidance on projects at the incubator level - they can offer mentor ships to exceptional students they feel may push their projects higher. They can even offer to help push an incubator project to the next level; as an angel, VC, or partner.

There will also be teams of specialists discovering the potential of crossing solution methods. Subspecialization has created many distinct approaches to finding solutions to problems - sharing of a mathematician's approach, with a biologist's approach, and comparing with an MD's approach for instance, will be a source of major breakthroughs.

As a generalist (dilettante) I will try to guide the bedlam that results - by providing tools - and then staying out of the way of you, the producer of dreams. Here is what we have to fight:

Institutionalized schools have approached uncertainties by pretending to be certain. Subspecialization in increasingly narrow disciplines has encouraged us to believe that we share inclusive general knowledge. Instead specific information is a mile deep, but a desire and an ability to combine it with unrelated knowledge and hence create opportunity, is paper thin.

Subspecialties unconnected to other disciplines, is the real challenge facing the learned. A better future for all must incorporate a cure for the common education.

I'll add to this later: for now a bit of the historical foundation underlying the Netcohort Institute.

Introduction To The Early Netcohort Institute

This will be the first course offered as The Netcohort Institute is established. (For now We are not offering degree or certificate programs - use what we have available for free)

This first course will be available once financing for administration and review is in place. If you want to get a head start, many foundational materials are now available that will probably be included in the final course. This will be one of ten courses required for graduation from The Netcohort Institute. This will give you an idea of what is to come - register and login at no charge -- and enjoy ...


We are entering an era of individual and team achievement unbound by age, location, nationality, or other arbitrary social rules - a Netcohort Society will be functioning in this new Netcohort Age. The emphasis of The Netcohort Institute will be on enabling and enhancing their participation in collaborative projects.

Once ten challenging courses have been created to serve internet-centric knowledge workers the second step will be taken. We will begin to use relational tools to enable our internationally diverse student body to work together as creative teams.


The third step is empowering these flexible teams of passionate Netcohort students so they may achieve shared goals. The Netcohort Institutes's ultimate mission is to enable student's creative, audacious, and even outrageous dreams.

This is of course a general guideline - life and technology are moving too quickly to guess what will come next. We plan to equip students so that they will be adaptable and able to grasp opportunities as they arise. There are further plans to lead change as the Netcohort Society emerges - our goal for The Netcohort Institute is simple: to be the relational focal point for the creative netcohort.

"Since we can't know what knowledge will be most needed in the future, it is senseless to try to teach it in advance. Instead, we should try to turn out people who love learning so much and learn so well that they will be able to learn whatever needs to be learned." - John Holt


Bring your most audacious dreams - join us in the adventure.

As you can see - the new ideas in this lens are far more challenging, and potentially far more effective, than what we originally envisioned; although John Holt is still correct.


It is time to not just "bring your most audacious dreams" - it is time to create them.

It does not matter what tribe our ancestors roamed with - we are finally individuals that can choose our own associates. We can choose collaborators in creative ventures unbound by any arbitrary social segmentation - and the are free to choose us.

The original free universities were founded by students. They found experts they respected and paid them to teach relevant courses. The pendulum has swung to the far side where authority picks the classes and content and requires attendance. It is time to take back your education.


We are developing plans and ideas, and compiling materials we will use in the first course of The Netcohort Institute. There are several short essays, a couple of entertaining articles, and even some books that may find their way into the final mix.

the future is being fashioned by netcohort teams.

How will individuals like yourself transition from passion directed learning to unbound community interaction? BFU is a catalyst to ignite learning, but in concept is still too close to the formal schools of the industrial past it is being designed to replace.


There needs to be a next step. (That step just became a leap ed.)

We need to develop a way to empower passionate individuals united in flexible project teams based on relationships and reputation - The Netcohort.

Join us in the adventure - bring your dreams.

The Netcohort Institute will therefore emphasize enabling and enhancing netcohort participation in collaborative projects. The focus will be on developing collaborative projects that require increasing skills, knowledge, and wisdom in order to be completed.


Relationships and reputation will be built during student interactions allowing further growth and opportunities.

Are you ready to leave the industrial society? There is good news if you want to join the international netcohort society and earn some personal freedom.


YOU will help create that good news - right here - right now. You will be able to create based on your dreams and your actions.

Congratulations!

The above quote from Seth Godin left on the Allan Wallace lensography appears to be in response to a comment I left on Captain Squid's blog an hour or two earlier (and perhaps Seth's comment was tongue-in-cheek, I don't know how to reach him to ask).

Squidoo is tightly held, and has a very small netcohort team building and maintaining the site. Squidoo, created by master marketer Seth Godin, now has over 750,000 user created pages, and they are continuing to expand rapidly. You should consider adding Squidoo to your Internet tool box.


Here is part of my comment:

"I'll try to limit this. ... Squidoo has a very clever ability to create volunteers to promote their product, these they treat ok. Free work is always appreciated.

They do give to charity; 5% of net revenue, which is 10% of their cut as I read it. They have said they hope to give 200 million to charity - a highly admirable goal. At 10% of revenue, that means 2 billion in revenues; that should yield a huge reward at a public offering or buy-out. Think minimum 30 x earnings. Equity interests will have great value for a few key players. Squidoo could also remain privately held as a purple cash cow.

Their goal is profit, I admire that also. I just feel sorry for those that dedicate themselves to Squidoo with little reward. That is the goal of web 2.0 - and it works well. You get community and recognition - they get (maybe) huge monetary rewards (YouTube).

Squidoo is a great tool and I have a fair bunch of lenses. But we may be best served by asking ourselves if we would do what we are doing if they might disappear or radically change by next week, month, or year.

For now I've limited my soliloquy to online relationships - with difficulty. There is broader application to the rule:

Our time is valuable; we should not be more dedicated to any person, movement, organization, or party - than they are dedicated to us and ours."
Allan Wallace


There are some after thoughts, it's nice that the net provides a way to clarify what you have said.

Please note that those revenues would be stretched over several years, and there are many other considerations I did not include in the 'short" comment. The point is - these very few technology enabled, creative individuals, are a netcohort team developing a useful and hopefully profitable tool.

In the Netcohort it is what you know and accomplish that are important, not where you learned your skills. Reputation management provides opportunities to enhance your reputation and success.

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We are about to bridge the gap to new opportunities.



100% of direct income from my lenses goes to Bastiat Free University and to micro-finance solutions for world poverty provided by the Grameen Foundation. The Grameen Foundation is creating a rising tide of positive influence upon our world.

"Dispersed technology is an enabler of freedom; replacing totalitarian centralized bureaucracies that are anti-civilization & anti-society" - Allan R. Wallace