The former head of Google India is drawing with a whiteboard marker on the glass cover of his white office desk. He is showing me the organizational structure of his STEM education resource, search, and curation portal called Gooru.
Prasad Ram — Pram to his friends — started Gooru as a 20% time project while still at Google. Like the beta project that once was Gmail, Gooru grew to reach primary significance in its creator’s eyes. As he came to realize the potential that Gooru could have for education, Pram felt that Gooru would need to operate as a nonprofit for it to be everything that he had envisioned…
Question Tank 
A friend of mine who read this post pointed out that the 10,000 hour rule is not Gladwell’s. It is referenced by Gladwell, and the source is a cognitive psychology paper by Simon and Chase.
these results aren’t too bad, and it only took a second — plus teachers get compensated for their hard work rather than always being asked to contribute their time for free:
http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/search?keyword=cellular+respiration&subjectarea=0&startsearch=1
the community weeds out the poorer materials through user ratings/comments. quality is increasing quickly due to free market forces. and the materials are not left alone — like a lot of open source stuff — to get stale. the best sellers are constantly revising, updating and improving their materials and buyers get access to these revised versions for free.
“valiant” implies failure. disagree.
Paul Edelman
Founder, TeachersPayTeachers
Paul,
Thanks for your comment. As you obviously determined, my sample search was not on your TeachersPayTeachers engine, nor was it made on the Curriki engine I also referenced in this article. I am a big fan of both TeachersPayTeachers and Curriki. Crowd sourcing teachers and either paying them for their work as your site does, or showcasing their free, open source work are both commendable pursuits.
I particularly like Gooru, as a science teacher because it is a focussed search. I suspect as the field evolves, that specialization is a likely direction that the educational resource aggregation field will take.
that said, gooru seems very cool and would love for them to index our over 14,000 (to date) free resources 🙂
paul
Jack, thank you for the heads up on Gooru! I can’t wait to give it a spin!
jack,
cheers for the reply and clarification. btw, i think you’re one of the most thoughtful ed tech bloggers out there. look forward to every post. thanks!
best,
paul
Great piece Jack!