This is the video my son is watching right now. Earlier today, he wandered into my office holding a math book with a confused look on his face. One look at the page of quadratic graphs led BOTH of us to have confused looks on our faces. First thing I did after fumbling through the pages of the book trying to figure this stuff out, was to search on Google for solutions, but I got really awful results (so much darn SEO crap). So I turned, in desperation, to Twitter:
And got back multiple replies: offers for help, introductions to professional tutors online, links to websites and suggestions for resources (including the awesome YouTube video above from YourTeacher.com).
Within minutes, my son was watching the video on YouTube and went from utter confusion to ‘a-ha!’ – disempowered to empowered. And all that needed to be in place was:
- People who are generous and wonderful enough to spend the time to create these awesome resources online (for free!) to empower kids.
- Generous and knowledgeable friends in my network.
Okay, so it’s not as simple as I make it sound, but this is the most powerful personal experience I’ve had on the web in a long time. It solved a real-world problem and made a huge difference in the life of my son, who I care about more than anything. This is the real promise of the social web. Let’s not forget that.
November 10th, 2009 at 12:56 pm
Nice little vignette.
Disintermediation and re-mediation
rocks. Go, Web!
November 10th, 2009 at 1:06 pm
Nice story. Now, if someone could’ve told me why knowing this will matter later in live I would’ve paid more attention.
November 10th, 2009 at 1:14 pm
I must said I learned Quadratic Equations on-line too. Sadly I don’t remember anything except the things i use for basic economic analysis which is done by a huge calculator i have programed (god forbids I lose my old Casio).
Great way to use twitter. I think that asking twitter is really a good way of finding relevant and awesome stuff. While Google is ‘hacked’ by SEO we sometimes find ‘the company’ but not the data while doing a search, while on twitter we find what we want through a human filter which is the best of all (the brain is the most amazing computer). It’s sort of the real human powered search (couldn’t find other words to describe it).
November 10th, 2009 at 1:15 pm
@michael
I used to ask that question all of the time! The sheer fact that I haven’t used it since (so have no recollection of learning it) says there is something wrong with our education system anyway. But that’s a whole other post.
November 11th, 2009 at 5:45 am
Thank you for sharing this. I am 40 and studying for the GRE and brushing up on high school math-so I need this. When I was in high school, the internet as we know it did not exist! Long live the net.
FYI I recently signed up for a service you may enjoy and have locally: a time bank. It is a way to donate some time to others and have them donate time to you. The serves as a connection point for folks hoping to volunteer help to others and to also ask others for help. In my case, I would be happy to rake leaves for somebody and I would in turn ask somebody in the bank for math tutoring help. The time bank does a background check on all members including an interview and maintains a web site to allow people to search for and offer services …See if you have a local timebank here: http://www.timebanks.org/directory.htm
November 11th, 2009 at 5:46 am
Apparently we learn it so that we can at some point tutor our children without having to turn to the web
Nice story Tara
November 12th, 2009 at 7:56 am
I witnessed this on Twitter and thought it was wonderful. It seemed to take about ten minutes from being alone and confused to connected and empowered.
November 15th, 2009 at 12:04 am
I’ve been testing this exact same thing both on Twitter and on http://vark.com lately. The nice thing is that when one doesn’t give you the answers (because the circle of people you run in or are followed by – or lack of followers), the other usually will.
Both are great resources showing off the power of crowdsourcing… and even better than that, serendipitous whuffie making.
Cheers…. and welcome to San Diego btw.