EduGeek Journal

Greetings guys and gals! Great to be back … kind of. I do miss my little gal. Janelle is doing *great*, by the way. :)

I read an article recently in Wired called Rise of the Instapreneur. The article discusses sites that allows anyone to upload designs/blueprints for furniture, houses, clothing, etc., and a user/shopper can browse through these user-generated ideas and actually purchase the final product. It gives the example of a man who designed a piece of furniture, uploaded the design document to a site, made it available to shoppers, and so far two of his pieces have been sold.

So I began to think about how this could affect education, and I began to realize how learners increasingly have the opportunity to get a type of on-the-job training. It’s easy to see how Web 2.0 has affected the areas such as journalism and creative writing with the inception of blogs, podcasts, vodcasts, etc. Students’ work can immediately be published for the world to access, critique, and potentially collaborate with. Now people can publish their ideas and potentially make a profit. What started with sites like Cafe Press that provide the ability to upload homemade graphics and instantly get them printed on t-shirts, ballcaps, etc. is evolving into sites that will allow learners to publish their ideas/projects for the world to peruse and potentially purchase. As a learner, teacher, consumer, and potential designer, I’m intrigued.