Jiva Technology

Beanbag Learning and the Creative Commons

We’ve been engaged in a lively debate this morning about our site Beanbag Learning. As the site has grown rapidly over the last year or so to become one of the biggest online tutor directories in the UK, it has attracted its fair share of competitors looking to lure away tutors or use Beanbag Learning as a recruiting tool for their own sites. The natural reaction is to consider such free riding as negative behaviour and warn them away, but is there another viewpoint? Within reason, don’t tutors want their skills to be as widely advertised as possible and don’t potential customers want it to be as easy to find them as possible? In other words, would sharing make us good citizens? Should we take a creative commons approach and promote sharing of information with other sites? For sure, if we take that approach it needs to be done in a controlled way, so that tutors can ultimately decide if their information is shared, but there’s clearly a DEMAND for the information, so why should we stand in its way if we can do it so that tutors benefit, users benefit and we benefit.

‘Conversational’ Q&A

As part of our ongoing assault on the barriers between ‘people who know’ and ‘people who want/need to know’, we’ve been working on an update to that hoary old chestnut: the Q&A site. Part of our approach is to create something that’s truly conversational. After all, if you’ve got a question that needs an answer, how many times does a single, straight answer give you what you looking for? Too often, there’s a bit of clarification etc involved, more like Q&A&Q&A…

So we’ve been taking a good look at Q&A 2.0, or more like Q&A 2.1, and I’m really please to see that’s it’s a lively area of development on the web at the moment, with our friends at Aardvark, Hunch doing some really interesting things. As is so often the case, simple problems are sometimes the hardest to solve and we’ve been really grafting hard to produce something that’s as simple to use and robust as possible. Usability is everything. We’re more than interested to talk and share with anyone in the field, so feel free to get in touch. As usual, our starting point is education, tutors and tutoring, but we don’t expect it to end there.