Freerice
Open Education: Learning and Giving in the Online World
- Spring term, Lewis 102
- Th 10AM -12 noon
- Professor Charles R. Nesson
Using freerice.org as a central case study of an entrepreneurial charitable educational enterprise, this seminar covers questions about learning in an open-access world. What motivates people? What is the situational psychology of being bored? How are values learned? What is the role of skepticism? How can we lead?
Open to all Schools of Harvard.
- "Let's think the unthinkable, let's do the undoable, let's prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all."
- ~Douglas Adams
vision and challenge
- Open Education Expressed in Code, Law, Integrated Public Media and Human Spirit -
- How can we maximize and release the brilliance that is in every child, the creative energy and the fantastic desire to learn that all infants begin with, and lead them to be joyful life long learners who feel connected to each other and to society and want and are prepared to make a better world?
- And how can we measure whether we have succeeded?
Imagine, then, that you are building in integrated media a technology-assisted free and open online learning environment.
Our public education system for all its aspiration fails to deliver to many of our children. We are still "A Nation at Risk." Bill Gates description of our public education as "obsolete" still holds.
The net is our opportunity to change the rhetorical frame of childrenâs upbringing not by forcing them but by attracting them to learning, and by attracting their teachers, mothers and fathers, family and friends, all who would support their learning.
Class Roster
- Professor Nesson
- Caity West
- Stefani Wittenauer
- Rebecca Argudin
- Kira Stanfield
- Kevin Adams
- Shahira Ali
- Yaw Asare
- Yvette Wohn
- Josh Deutsch
- Daniel Brown
- Evan Engstrom
- Tobias Snyder
- Daniel Brody
- Dan Ray
- David Levine