The SelfReliant Microenterprise Institute Do a quick Google search for the phrase "experiential learning" and you'll find there's a growing trend in higher education to facilitate experiences for students, which they can then reflect on and learn from. Alex actually took two such courses at Duke University, one at the Sanford Public Policy institute and another with their Education department - both were amazing opportunities for growth. A funny thing about experiential learning though is that we're having experiences all the time, every day, but we're not getting credit for it. The only time we hear about academic credit being distributed for real-world experience is when honorary degrees are awarded. Bill Gates got his from Harvard, Bob Dylan from Princeton, and the list goes on... But although experience may be the best teacher, accreditors understandably have a hard time nailing it down outside of a formal setting. Experiential learning has gained favor in higher education in part due to an ability to track experiences more carefully, often using the Internet, and thus keep records of what was learned. Without records, noone can evaluate the learning that has taken place, even if it was incredibly powerful. And if you can't evaluate learning, it can't be accredited, and it can't become education - which is fundamentally a social phenomenon of every advanced culture. So What is a Microenterprise? Chances are, you've already engaged in a microenterprise of some kind. You might have characterized it for 'hobby', but it's more than that. Every microenterprise starts with an idea, is then enabled in some way by Internet or mobile communications, and then yields experiential rewards. SelfReliant believes that the maintenance of a diverse array of real-world microenterprises is going to emerge as the new focal point for education in the 21st century. Not seminars, not tests, not reports, not oral presentations... In order to better visualize microenterprises as a learning keystone, we developed the Knowledge Farming Metaphor - please click that link for our explanatory graphic. Knowledge has an organic lifecycle on the Internet, and microenterprises are best defined within this context. The Microenterprise Research Program at SelfReliant If any of you are familiar with our previous FreeWebs site, SelfReliant maintained presences on multiple Web 2.0 sites that all pointed back to the SR home page. The purpose of actually getting our hands dirty and working on these different platforms is so that we're building our own Internet expertise in-house at SR. This active research effort into Internet best practices will be an expansive one, and it will inform all the future course content provided to our self-educator community. On the new site, we'll be going even further with this concept. All online projects owned and operated by the Microenterprise Institute (MEI) and SelfReliant LLC will be labeled as such, but they will not necessarily relate to SR's core business. Here are the core questions MEI will be trying to answer with each Web 2.0 platform it works on: - What are the best ways to learn and self-educate on this platform? That knowledge and understanding of the available web tools will become proprietary for SelfReliant LLC. We will provide it in seminars and courses to our self-educator community at some reasonable price. So stay tuned for a special section of SelfReliant's website devoted entirely to the MEI and its many research projects online! |
