Free-Range Drama Farm

Derrick recently did a great interview with Steli Efti about Supercool School, a new global online school that Steli is working on. Steli’s got some great ideas about education and making learning fun and interesting - rather than focusing on assimilating to the rules, structures and expectations of a formal school system, he’s working on creating a platform for people to help each other find the knowledge they desire and need. It’s actually a lot like the “open-source education” idea that Derrick and I both wrote about a while back.

You should definitely check out the whole interview, but here’s an excerpt from it that particularly spoke to me:

We want to get the sauce tasty. I often use the analogy of inventing tomato sauce. Tomato sauce was a huge invention - a great idea per se. But if you got the recipe wrong - it’s not tasty and people won’t eat it. So in our case, we believe that what we wanna do is a great idea and it will succeed. But we’re not 100% positive that the recipe is perfect right now so what we want to do is get it out there to as many people as possible and get feedback. If people say “mmmhhh…tasy” that’s great. If not, that means back to the kitchen table and more experimenting till we get it right.

This is exactly how I feel about where we are with the Drama Farm right now. We’ve got what we think is a great idea, but now we need to test it out and see how it works - where the obstacles are, what needs to be tweaked and fixed to make it better, and also what’s really great about it and what we should keep.

Steli talks about using Facebook as a way to get feedback from a large community of people, and I’ve been thinking about ways we could do that too. I’ve also been thinking that we need to just jump in and do it - maybe create a small “beta version” of the Drama Farm, and try it out next summer. I think we won’t know exactly what we’re getting ourselves into until we try, so let’s do it!

If you’re a student, theatre professional, or just interested in what we’re doing, and you’d like to be one of our “beta testers”, leave a comment below or drop us an email. And spread the word to other people you know - the next step is to build a real community of people and get as much feedback as we can, as we start to put together a program for next summer. This is one case where too many cooks will definitely not spoil the sauce!

Also, check out Steli’s post elaborating on his tomato sauce analogy, and take a look at Peopleized, where Derrick did his interview - I haven’t played with it a lot yet, but what I’ve seen is very cool!