I was directed to an awesome collaborative learning site by one of my favorite podcasts (School Sucks Podcast, which I should do a separate post about) a few weeks ago.

"Alekese.com is a fresh approach to learning high-tech job skills. You collaborate to build skill maps, and then students use these maps to connect with live tutors or tutorials. Alekese remembers what you learn, so when you claim knowledge of each skill, it color-codes it every time you run into it on the site. If you finish a skill map for JavaScript on one day and then tackle one for AJAX the next, then the skills you've already learned will be colored blue so you'll know to focus on new ones."

Alekese is to classroom education what open source software development is to Microsoft.

My understanding is that current educational methods practiced in classrooms are largely based on techniques invented almost 100 years ago in the Prussian empire. Even if that isn't the case, how often have you seen a text book that was published 30 years ago still in use in a classroom? Imagine if we treated our computers the way we treat our brains: We'd be running MS DOS and staring at black and white text on our multi-gigahertz, multi-gigabyte machines.

Alekese is education for the modern human. It lets everyone share their knowledge and produce trees of dependent skills that combine to define knowledge of a particular area. Think of it like Wikipedia, mixed with a choose your own adventure book, mixed with the combined knowledge of the entire internet.

First, a 30-second overview. The heart of Alekese is the "Tree", which maps out a skill like AJAX or C programming. Trees are like wikis in that you can easily make small improvements to another person's map. Better-yet, you can rip off another Tree by copying it and building on top of it, or import whole sections of another Tree into yours. Each skill on a Tree can connect you to free tutorials and paid tutors. Finally, there's a verifications system that lets you verify another person's knowledge of a skill. It's an extremely flexible framework for learning and teaching.

Why is this exciting? Think about how we learn skills, especially programming skills: There's nothing linear about it. It's a process of iterative research and experimentation. No plain tutorial and no possible lesson plan can ever reflect that kind of learning. Humans are not linear learners -- we are generally only able to effectively learn skills as they become relevant to the task at hand. Here's how this iterative research process looks currently:

Step 1. Read about new skill from a tech blog or hear about it from a friend or coworker.
Step 2. Google it, find examples of it, download something that uses it, mess around with it, and then try to build something with it.
Step 3. If you're stumped, look for a tutorial, blindly hoping you've learned everything it assumes you know before reading it.
Step 4. If you can't find a tutorial that doesn't suck and are still stumped, buy a book that was probably published at least 6 months ago.
Step 5. If you can't learn it out of a book, look for someone who knows this skill and hire them to help you.

This process violates DRY / DIE in 4 out of 5 steps, because of that it is inefficient and rapidly becomes frustrating.

Hundreds of people are independently Googling each new coding technique, and as good as Google is, it wasn't designed to tell you what goes into learning a new skill. Why should these hundreds of people be independently repeating the same trial-and-error search for information that's easy to share in a knowledge map?

Next, tutorials have to assume you know something before starting, but static ones can't tailor themselves to what you do or don't know. When you scan through a list of search results looking for a tutorial, you're spending valuable time processing each one and deciding whether or not it has pre-reqs you haven't learned yet. Then, when you actually select one and go through it, you're spending valuable time figuring out which sections you can or can't skip because you already know them. With a site like Alekese, you can claim knowledge of a skill and it will remember what you've already learned, saving yourself this scanning time.

If you buy a book from a good publisher, then you're benefiting from all the thought that went into it, including an easily-digested list of what you should know beforehand. You're losing out, however, on all of the thought others have put into the topic in the 6 months or 6 years since it was published. And you still waste time deciding which things you have or haven't already learned. Plus you have to spend money and wait for delivery.

Finally, if you use conventional means to find and hire someone to help you with a tough problem, then you're missing out on the wealth of knowledge accumulated by everyone who tried to hire anyone for this skill. If you're using an easily accessible marketplace that supports large-scale verification of individual skills, however, then you're benefiting from all the knowledge others have shared, saving you time and money.

Alekese short circuits all of this by letting you quickly check off skills you already know, figure out what skills are "in the way" of learning your "target" skill at a glance and then find exactly the resources and people you need in order to work your way up to the particular skill you are interested in developing. The site is small now, but it's growing rapidly. What it needs most is people who have skills to build out the Tree directory and people who want to learn skills to validate the content that is already there. It looks like their first major push to get things moving is in programming: they've got an "Alekese.com Coders" Facebook group, I've personally created a C Programming Tree, and hopefully anyone else who reads this will join in -- learning from what's there and contributing their own knowledge and Trees.