Apologies for the clickbait-y title, but it gets to the heart of one of my lingering ruminations about the Recurse Center. Over the course of each batch, a pool of new knowledge collects within RC, distributed across the minds of each Recurser in self-directed study. Then, as the batch fades, much of that knowledge drains out of the space, leaving a vacuum to be filled with the fruits of the next batch’s labors.
Stated differently: at the Recurse Center, curriculum is ephemeral. My feelings about this swing from “it’s a lost opportunity” to “it’s a tragic waste!” Though I leave room for the possibility of another view: “it’s the system working as intended.”
My point is: a whole lot of energy is used to generate curricula at RC, and I wish it were captured, stored, and organized.
If I had a magic wand, I’d automagically save all of our ad-hoc, personalized curricula and organize it into a map to learn anything that anyone has ever learned at RC. Let this be the starting point for every new Recurser, and let it be a guide to anyone anywhere who wants to become better at programming. (If I got a second wave of the wand, I’d record every breakout session and recurring working group and every Thursday presentation and save them for posterity.)
But perhaps what I should really be wishing for is a pile of money to pay for an RC archivist. Because the reality is - tracking this information might be difficult. It’s a lot to ask Recursers to take on the overhead of recording how they’re learning, in addition to the great effort of learning itself. (I have a feeling that if it were easier, the RC wiki would already serve this purpose.) It would be interesting to see how this might function if there were someone at RC who was responsible for collecting this information from each batch member, and managing/organizing the resultant archive.
I’m curious to know how this kind of knowledge base would affect the RC experience. Would it allow newcomers who know what they’re hoping to learn more quickly answer the subsequent “how”? Or would it unintentionally tie would-be explorers to a track? (though there’d certainly be nothing preventing them from ignoring its existence)
But I’m also curious about the impact this lets RC have on the world. If there’s a question of how RC can expand its reach beyond the in-person retreat, this may provide an interesting answer. RC is already a generator of curricula for how to make yourself a better programmer. What if that knowledge were open-sourced?