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Scolaris
By Jon Dron 22 October 2012 @ 4:16pm Comments (1)
http://scolaris.ca/
A great idea - modelled broadly on crowd-funding sites like Kickstarter, this provides an opportunity to connect students with funders for scholarships, tuition fees, courses, etc. For funders ('philanthropis'), this is a great way to pay it forward for individuals who can fund as little or as much as they like, including the option to create scholarships as well as to choose who they fund, and a nice opportunity for businesses to support potential or actual employees. For students, especially those who fall between the cracks for traditional grants, scholarships and funding schemes, a great way to get an opportunity for education.
A Canadian site, so none of the worries about privacy etc found on US sites.
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Jon Dron
Jon Dron
still learning, never learning enough
Comments
It's practical, given the education system we have. I wouldn't blame any student who needed and took the money.
Still, on seeing this, my first thought was towards the article Mark recently recommended by Max Haiven on the pressure to "develop a neoliberal work-of-the-self fundamentally based in social networking: building tenuous and disposable linkages to maximize personal leverage in a world without guarantees." This seems almost like a case-in-point, not only speeding things along as more and more responsibility for funding education is downloaded to the individual, but charging a 4% fee to do so. When students with less access to education are coming from families and communities that can't afford to crowdfund them, the government is strategically de-funding Humanities scholarship, and media attacks on critical research are commonplace... it seems like crowdfunding can only fill so many cracks, and if everyone in your community has already been told your research is useless, obscene, unpatriotic, "politically correct," etc., there might not be a crowd available.
Students right now might get further organizing and educating our communities for sustainable public funding than harassing our Linked In buddies for spare change.