But what is kood/?
No teachers. No tuition. No grades. No prior experience. No pressure. The attraction for kood/ not being a ‘traditional school’ has been great for those who lacked resources to obtain academic training. But with all the ‘no’s, what are the ideas the school of kood/ is saying ‘yes’ to?
The first yes.
Self-education is highly available in our day and age. People have the potential to become whatever they can imagine. However, too often we excuse ourselves with ‘I don’t have the time / space / money / people / opportunities to do this. Nobody will just provide me with these things so that I can unleash my potential’.
Then, someone just said ‘yes’. Here are people for you to work with, in a dorm to live and study in. Here’s a module with quests and the flexibility of time so you can do this whenever in the middle of your life. Here are companies who are waiting to hire you, curious what you will make of yourself. You don’t pay a dime for it. With all the chances given to you, do you still want it? If the answer is truly ‘yes’, you should also be ready to…
Say yes to crowdsourced learning.
At kood/ we come together to solve a common problem. When we think of the word ‘school’, most associate it with an ‘institution’ that ‘instructs’ knowledge. But kood/ is a ‘school of thought’, where we develop and believe in the movement towards problem solving through no-one-right-answer creativity. We’re prompted to discover knowledge in our own ways and share it with others. We’re all mentors to each other.
We share links, ideas , fails and fixes, and showcase our theoretical approaches. kood/’ers help each other optimize wherever they learn something faster. Most importantly, we only know as much as our ‘slowest’ kood/er; we build each other up so our collective pool of learning doesn’t go stale. After all, we only have each other to figure things out, like castaways on a deserted island!
Say yes to open source learning.
But we’re not castaways in a deserted island and are utilizing the power of the internet. kood/ believes in accessible learning. There are countless blog posts, wikis, videos, forums and more, sharing their experiences online. It’s so human to share discoveries and create value, and in time, kood/’ers will give our contributions to the ever expanding cosmos of information.
Like rivers inspired roads and tumbling stones inspired wheels, creativity doesn’t just come out of the void — it takes inspiration and passion to take someone’s work and honor it with another life, a different interpretation, a new version. And that is the beauty of open source learning.
Post Scriptum
Of course, that’s only the concept. kood/ is the people who act on this concept. Next post is just about that: the role YOU play in crowdsourcing the kood/experience.
The blog post was made by our student Anna-Maria Ninnas