When people collaborate, better ideas become reality.
This Is The Dawn Of A Golden Age Of Learning And Opportunity Right Now.
Open source allows a special kind of collaboration where people build upon one another's best ideas without worrying about infringing on someone's intellectual property.
Adding to the dynamism of open source, but often even separate from it, we see that the sharing economy delivers true power and sustainability to those of us that are willing to produce and share source. It is my belief that if we continue to focus on combining these two principals, we will revolutionize the power structure of society to the benefit of those willing to participate.
This revolution is already happening.
There are a lot of examples of what open source and the sharing economy is accomplishing but in this article, I want to focus on the swing itself.
We Are Experiencing A Huge Swing From Centralized To Decentralized Teaching and Learning.
In the last several years we have seen the proliferation of knowledge and skills from centralized platforms such as YouTube, UDemy and a whole array of others that distribute content in a decentralized way. What I mean is that a company owns and controls those platforms, but individual people create the content for those companies. This is a big step away from the previous generation of gatekeepers of knowledge and a significant step in the direction of a decentralized teaching/ learning way.
This is happening in our schools too, albeit in a different way. The results are equally powerful.
Back to the technology side. Using these platforms has increased our ability to "learn how to learn" as we need to figure out what we want, find a good answer, and then turn that into action all on our own. Check out this story of a family that built a house by watching YouTube videos.
With these changes in place, the economy seems to place a high value on quality content from competent teachers. In other words, teachers are going to be the new super stars of the future, but the way they do it is going to look completely different from anything we have seen yet.
As amazing as that is, we have been seeing trouble with these centralized corporate platforms. There is an increasing tension in using them because censorship is suddenly a widespread and often seeming arbitrary problem. This is a problem that is shaking the confidence of users and the reputations of the platforms themselves.
Now, with the development of blockchain technology and meshnets, we might be seeing the dissolution of corporate platform censorship in exchange for peer censorship such as that on Steemit or even no censorship, which is possible on LBRY. Censorship in itself is not a bad thing, so long as there are choices. I think a platform with no responsibility is likely to devolve into an ugly and useless place so we need evolving and intelligent censorship from our peers. That is more free and open way to build more diverse and healthy communities.
These technologies and their communities are all still in "beta" and need more tuning and polishing before they are ready for mainstream use. As they continue, can you imagine the the advances in society we can see, especially since we have seen so much change already from platforms that are substantially inferior.
Oh, how the times are changing!