The best way to learn was discovered by Socrates more than two thousand years ago in Ancient Greece: there’s nothing better than a private tutor. Among his many creative acts, Steve Jobs reinvented the private tutorial, giving people the ability to use his products as tools for the things they wished to do, which inspired me to start my own education company. Let me explain how that happened.
Back in 2008, I had a new book coming out, We Dare You! Hundreds of Fun Science Bets, Challenges, and Experiments You Can Do at Home (Skyhorse Publishing). It is a bind-up edition of previously published books of irresistible challenges to kids, stuff that looks impossible but is doable, and stuff that looks easy but is impossible. The truth behind the challenges is based on science. I’ve long believed that watching kids trying these tricks would make great videos but I was never successful at selling the rights to these activities to a TV or film producer. In anticipation of the book’s publication and with the advances in technology making the whole process a lot easier, I decided I’d learn how to make videos myself. So I bought my first point and shoot (i.e. no-brainer) camcorder and pressed my grandchildren into service, directing videos of them doing the activities.
As the footage mounted up, it became time to bite the bullet and face the problem of editing the videos. I had read that I-Movie, a program for Macs, was the easiest way to go. This meant that, as a PC user for all these years, I not only had to learn a new program and skill but I had to go into a whole different computer system. Undaunted, I walked into the Apple Store in the Westchester Mall where they are well-staffed to handle the neophyte buyer. I told the personable and well-informed salesman, Mike, what I wanted to do. He quickly put together exactly what I needed. I bought a MacBook Pro, with the Leopard OS X, 2 GB of memory, and a processing speed of 2.4 GHz. (I’ve upgraded since then and now have their latest OS) Best of all, for an additional $100 I could receive 52 hours of private instruction over the next year from their platoon of mavens called “One-to-One.”
At the beginning, I never missed a week. Always one to plunge intrepidly into a learning situation, I began to teach myself how to use my Mac. When I got stuck, I went online and scheduled a session with a personal tutor. The Westchester Mall is only minutes from my home and I quickly learned where to park and which elevator to take to the store for my tutorial session. At first, as I was learning to use the new computer, the tutors were all interchangeable young people, patient and knowledgeable. As I became more proficient in my editing skills, I was assigned tutors who knew about film editing. I went right up that learning curve: See for yourself: Here’s a video to my first one-minute video (with three of my grandchildren.)
And, if you like it, there are at least sixty more on my website. The brilliance of the concept—making private tutoring from experts available and affordable and allowing the learner to control the timing of the lessons for when they were needed—struck me as an extraordinary innovation. The proof of its success is its filled appointment schedule. Why not apply it to the world at large?
The model of Apple’s One-to-One is behind my Outside-the-Box proposal for Authors on Call. We are currently embarking on a pilot program to test its merits. I predict we are a harbinger of the future. We are reinventing the guild: Masters of art, literature, science, business, whatever, will band together to offer other groups of interested and motivated learners, timely and personal instruction via technology. Online learning is already happening, but much of it is without the personal interaction of a live tutorial. The effectiveness of a tutorial lies in the social contact between the teacher and the student. My company, INK Think Tank, is pioneering this concept—working with teachers, who are using our books about the real world in their classrooms, through their personal interaction with the authors themselves.
I hope Steve Jobs’ brainchild works as well for us as it did for him. Thank you, Steve.
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