First I'd like to say that the idea of this board is awesome, bookmarked. I know the intent of this board is to share material, but I think it makes sense to post what I want to discuss here.
Ever since I first had personal contact witht he Internet I got my mind thinking nervously on the possibilities of learning and sharing knowlege through it. [b]Do you have ideas for edu, specially freedu, sites or softwares?[/b]
When Steam came around I begun to think on something like this: Steam can give you "free" stuff if you do this or that, like participating in a vacation championship, etc. They can do this because as a business that relies on having people making accounts there, the relationship they have with their clients is more than straight, impersonal sales, like games used to be sold before steam.
So I thought on something like this: imagine that Gabe sets up paralel to steam an exam system, he could also create a learning system but I find this unnecessary since people could just use anything on the Internet like Khan Academy or Wikipedia. The idea basically is: you get good grades in our exams, you get credits to spend in our stuff. I don't know whether this would be better for people in school age or adults (testing stuff non-related to their area of knowledge). Of course, it would be better that whatever being evaluated must be related to what the person could spend credits on. So for a video game business, like Steam, some areas could be worked like everything related to computers, logics, some parts of Internet, storymaking, design, etc.
Do you think this idea could be developed further? What I always wanted to do is not to make a business then create an edu system paralel to it as if it was just charity, what I want to get at is a system where people will activelly dedicate themselves to go through the exams. Steam simply gave me the idea of doing it in an effort/reward based mechanism.