open education isn’t the materials made freely available and easily discoverable via the internet, it’s the milieu that produces and consumes them.

Five years ago, I graduated from my public high school in rural Pennsylvania where there wasn’t much of anything except for trees. And when I went to college that fall, I found myself surrounded by people who went to high schools with full-fledged software engineering departments, extracurriculars that sent satellites into space, group theory and quantum physics courses, intricate knowledge of how the American university system works, and more.

Note: I wrote this somewhere else in May 2021, and I just got around to posting it here.

Note: I wrote this in September 2021 somewhere else and I just got around to posting it here.

There’s a somewhat unsettling pattern I started to notice in the space about a year ago. Over the past few months I’ve seen it play out more and more, and I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s brought it up. But I haven’t seen any good articles about it, I decided I’d share my thought on the matter.

So you’re learning how to build stuff. That’s awesome. Before you waste countless hours watching videos, reading blog articles, and doing tutorials, there’s something I want to tell you: