Trade School, a p2p learning platform, is now open source! The organisers have shared with us why this is exciting news.
What is Trade School and how did it start?
The Trade School network is made up of self-organised barter-for-knowledge schools across the world. It started in 2010 with a small group of friends in New York and spread to Virginia and Milan in 2011. In 2012, we built a better version of our barter-for-knowledge web platform so that they could share it with organisers elsewhere. Connecting an international community dedicated to the power of non-monetary value, artist and Trade School organiser Or Zubalsky conceived of and created software that makes possible a conversation between 10,000 teachers, students, and organisers who participate in barter based learning in 20 dialects in 50 cities.
What does it mean to be open source?
As an online sharing platform, we are proud that Trade School’s internal structure reflects our public goals of reciprocity between students and teachers in classroom. Trade School is organized by a collective that shares decision making power. Now, for the first time, Trade School is also built with an open source software that anyone can share and modify, embodying our principles of cooperation and mutual aid. With international organizers giving input from Indianapolis to Athens, Guadalajara to Paris, the software was built with teaching and learning in mind.
What’s a particularly memorable teaching or learning moment?
Or Zubalsky, the artist and Trade School organiser who built the software that enables 50 chapters internationally, taught another Trade School organizer, Christhian Diaz, how to write code. He said:
If only one person knows how to do something (like me, writing code), it depends on that person and the responsibility and power held by that person is not good for the group. I also didn’t want to work alone. It’s not fun. It’s scary. I don’t like making decisions that effect 50 chapters and over 10,000 students on my own. So I asked Trade School organizers if they’d want to learn how to write code. We started meeting every two week two year ago, and slowly Christhian got really excited about it. It took a long time to teach him, but now Christhian has made translations possible in over 20 dialects, and he can help other organizers open Trade Schools chapters and write code to fix issues that they find in the site.
What are the advantages of Trade School compared to more traditional ways of learning or Massive Open Online Courses?
Trade School offers a complement to the traditional learning options, not a replacement. Our complement includes organizing, as well as a relationship between student and teacher that forms on the basis of mutual aid, with the students paying teachers with barter items rather than cash. As Trade School organizers, we are committed to resisting the rising costs of tuition while creating spaces of hope and belonging with our barter-based learning platform. As for Massive Open Online Courses, we are less interested in structures that are exclusively online because these forms of learning largely ignore the ways that in-person interpersonal dialog can lead to deep relationships, jobs, tactile experiences, and empathetic debate.
If you want to organise a Trade School in your area, click here.
