The Learning Exchange

Here’s an idea that randomly occurred to me. If anyone likes it, I’d be more than happy to build this, it would probably take no more than a week to get a MVP online.

The Learning Process

I am a learning addict. I love learning new things and experimenting around with them. But often times I get stuck or make a mistake that I spend hours and hours trying to figure out because I’m still new to whatever it is I’m working on. All the time I think “If only I had an expert to help me out when I get stuck, I could learn so much faster.” But it’s not only getting stuck, sometimes I would love to have someone look over what I’m working on and just tell me what I could be doing better, if there’s anything that’s poorly executed, insecure, etc. Just a quick review.

Sites like Stack Overflow are absolutely fantastic for when you are stuck (with a programming issue), and extensive use of search engines is usually what gets me to the solution eventually. But it would be so much better in every way to have someone who knows what they are doing look over my stuff and help me. Unfortunately, getting that to happen is not only difficult because you have to find someone who is willing to do it out of nowhere, but also because when you do, you probably will have to pay them a decent amount just to spend their time reviewing your shit.

An Example

What would be great is a learning exchange. Since I work in tech, I’m going to pose my example as such, but I’m sure this could apply to any other career. Let’s say you go on this hypothetical site, the learning exchange, and you make a profile, putting in your location, things that you are good at, and things you want to learn. You are then matched, dating site style, with someone who is in your area, wants to know what you know, and can help you with what you want to learn. You guys can then set up a time to get together and work. And whenever someone else signs up who is a good “match” for you, it lets you both know via email or something.

Here’s what I’m imagining. I go on the site and get a match. We exchange emails and meet up at a cafe with our laptops. I’m a web programmer working on an iPhone app, and the person I’m with is an iOS programmer working on a web app. Every once and a while, one of us would run into a problem or be looking for feedback and call the other one over to help, getting some guidance and feedback on what they are doing.

Other Thoughts

This is very unstructured. Of course there are potential problems. One person could know practically nothing, never google things, and be really annoying. Sure - then just like a date you don’t go out with that person again. Perhaps there could even be some feedback on the site for who is good to work with.

In addition, the style could be totally different from my random example. Perhaps both people know absolutely nothing, and we’re talking about two very different career fields. It could be set up as two short presentations that each person gives to the other. Like a one on one class. It could be whatever really. I honestly don’t know how it would work, it would be an interesting social experiment.

So my question to you, my dear reader, is this: Would you be interested in something like this? Do you like this idea? Is someone already doing it somewhere that I don’t know about? What could go wrong? Do you want me to make this?