On Wednesday morning, we launched the first version of Knackeo. We’ve been stressed for the last few weeks, wondering what people would think. It’s been a bad stress, where we continue to tweak, change, and rework ideas, and potentially reversing them. However, releasing the website to the public has turned that into a good type of stress. We have a lot of things to fix, but so far the reaction has been quite positive among friends and family. We have a lot of things to work on (the list of TODOs has gotten pretty long!), but we are confident that we’ll fix those issues quickly. We also got a few possible paths that we’ll be able to iterate towards.  Thank you all for the support, clicking around our website, and soon people will be able to take some great classes from a great website.
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On Wednesday morning, we launched the first version of Knackeo. We’ve been stressed for the last few weeks, wondering what people would think. It’s been a bad stress, where we continue to tweak, change, and rework ideas, and potentially reversing them. However, releasing the website to the public has turned that into a good type of stress. We have a lot of things to fix, but so far the reaction has been quite positive among friends and family. We have a lot of things to work on (the list of TODOs has gotten pretty long!), but we are confident that we’ll fix those issues quickly. We also got a few possible paths that we’ll be able to iterate towards. 

Thank you all for the support, clicking around our website, and soon people will be able to take some great classes from a great website.

Source: zazzle.com

We are almost launched! You can go over to the main site right now at Knackeo.com, but it’s still a bit under construction. Put on your hard hat, as to protect yourself from falling <div> tags and loose Rails, but you should get a good idea of what we aim to offer in the next few weeks. We have many things planned, including: List your own courses Search by City or Zipcode Favorite/Comment/Rate classes you’ve taken And many others cool features! Oh, and by the way. Try out a few things while you are there! Make the screen skinnier, or check it out on your smartphone. You’ll see that Steve has done an great job figuring out how to make the site rearrange itself, based on the size of your browser. Pretty cool! I hope that you will stick around! Please follow us on Twitter (@Knackeo), and let us know what you are looking forward to learning!  -Danny (@DannyPage) 
View Separately

We are almost launched! You can go over to the main site right now at Knackeo.com, but it’s still a bit under construction. Put on your hard hat, as to protect yourself from falling <div> tags and loose Rails, but you should get a good idea of what we aim to offer in the next few weeks. We have many things planned, including:

  • List your own courses
  • Search by City or Zipcode
  • Favorite/Comment/Rate classes you’ve taken
  • And many others cool features!

Oh, and by the way. Try out a few things while you are there! Make the screen skinnier, or check it out on your smartphone. You’ll see that Steve has done an great job figuring out how to make the site rearrange itself, based on the size of your browser. Pretty cool!

I hope that you will stick around! Please follow us on Twitter (@Knackeo), and let us know what you are looking forward to learning! 

-Danny (@DannyPage) 

Source: flickr.com

The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.

William Gibson

William Gibson

Knowledge was once confined to the limits of leather bound encyclopedias. Now anyone with a phone can look up almost anything on Wikipedia. 

Education is confined to the limits of the physical classroom. Soon, anyone with a phone can learn something from a mentor. Knackeo and the rest of the education startups coming out of Web 2.0 will be striving to deliver this in 2012. It’s going to be a very interesting year! 

Danny

T-Minus 3…

If you tried going to www.knackeo.com today, you ended up here. Just so you know, we are trying to host the Rails application that runs Knackeo on our own hosting, and it wasn’t cooperating. Right now the alpha is being hosted on Heroku, and we may just redirect their DNS to our main site for the soft launch. 

We’ll keep you updated as we get closer to launching! We have many great classes lined up for the Raleigh/Durham region! We may be light on features to begin with, but that’s no reason to not show off all the cool classes that are happening nearby. 

-Danny

M.I.T. Expands Free Online Courses, Offering Certificates

infoneer-pulse:

While students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology pay thousands of dollars for courses, the university will announce a new program on Monday allowing anyone anywhere to take M.I.T. courses online free of charge — and for the first time earn official certificates for demonstrating mastery of the subjects taught.

“There are many people who would love to augment their education by having access to M.I.T. content, people who are very capable to earn a certificate from M.I.T.,” said L. Rafael Reif, the provost, in a conference call with reporters Friday.

» via The New York Times (Subscription may be required for some content)

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
Robert Heinlein via Lazarus Long, Time Enough For Love