Education/Compiling the best educational material

Some rare people have an exceptional talent at explaining difficult concepts clearly and interestingly. Masters of verbal explanation include Alan Watts, Carl Sagan  and David Attenborough , but there are also those with talent at crafting visual, diagrammatic, experimental, interactive or other non-verbal ways to convey ideas. Hans Rosling's colorful visualizations of data are examples of this.

With open collaboration we have the opportunity to pull all these educational materials together in one place, covering every level of education and every subject, and make it freely available to the world's youth.

It is a matter of finding the best teachers in the world and encouraging them to contribute to a common educational resource for humanity. It may be necessary at first to perhaps incentivize contributions from these people, and it is vital to publicize open-source education as much as possible, to generate the greatest possible collaboration.

The Viewpoints research Institute is one organization engaged in gathering the best educational materials and has released Etoys, a learning program with effective interactive educational demonstrations, and Croquet, a virtual world (like those used in computer games) that integrates seamlessly with learning programs and demonstrations. Both of these are free and open-source software and Etoys comes as standard on the XO-Laptop that has been given free to over a million children in developing countries. The Wolfram Demonstrations Project is another attempt to compile visually striking, interactive demonstrations of hundreds of phenomena in science, mathematics, music and other areas and make them available under a Creative Commons license.

Alan Kay, the founder of the Viewpoints Research Institute, in his TED talk gave some remarkable examples of the power of good explanations, including a method of teaching differentiation to six-year-olds.

Another way to get good material is to let anyone freely submit their material and the promising parts can be incrementally improved by other editors and contributors until perhaps it reaches a high standard as in the wiki  process. Connexions is an example of using open-source collaboration to create learning materials.

The good material will bubble up to the top, with the help of ratings, recommendations and dynamic testing. One feature of an open-source educational system with large-scale collaboration is the possibility of dynamically testing different explanations so that the most effective can be found. Imagine three different animations have been created to illustrate molecules coming together in a chemical reaction. If these are put into an open-source learning hub, they can each be shown to thousands of users. After seeing the animation, the users are tested on their understanding of the chemical equation. From the results of these tests, the software will be able to know which of the three animations is most effective at explaining the chemical reaction.

Teachers if they wish could then use any of this material where appropriate, and use their own skills to check it has been understood by their students and elaborate further where necessary.

With open collaboration, we have the opportunity to create a global educational curriculum for all levels of education and all disciplines, built from nothing but the most engaging, most colorful, most entertaining and effective explanations. It will be exciting to see just how much more effective this will be than old-fashioned classroom based education. How much music, physics, chemistry, mathematics, programming, engineering will a young person of eighteen have mastered when they have studied these materials full-time since the age of three or four? How many languages will they speak? How will our medical system change when doctors can be trained by 3-D interactive visualizations of human anatomy and biochemistry?
What we are talking about here will be more powerful than any educational system yet seen. However, unlike the "best" educations of the old system, these materials will be as available to a farmer's daughter in Malawi as a politician's son in New York.