All posts by 402653mcg

Students4Students – The future of tutoring


Every students knows the feeling a few days before an exam: wondering if you paid sufficient attention in class, stressing because you might not understand an example mentioned in the lecture slides, etc.

You realize the teacher will not be in her office during the weekend and it usually takes her a few days to reply to e-mails. Asking the question via e-mail will require a long answer and therefore isn’t the ideal option anyway. You can call a classmate but you doubt that he or she has time for your question and you wonder whom to call in the first place. There is always the option of hiring an expensive private tutor but the government does not transfer your student loan until next week. Now there is an extra option for the stressing student: Students4Students!

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Students4Students is a tutoring-platform where the tutors are students providing sessions to their struggling peers. The platform will take away the inconvenience and psychological barriers (Collins, 1997) that come with scheduling a face-to-face meeting with the professor. It is also more interactive than the supply of online videos, writing a complicated e-mail and receiving an even longer and more complicated answer. But above all, it is a cheap option to get a better grasp of the topic on which the exam will be.

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How co-creation can literally create value


Introduction
Cryptocurrency might be the one example where co-creating meets value creation in the most efficient sense possible, without additional transactions co-creation is turned directly into money. More specifically co-creation means creating money when it comes to cryptocurrencies such as the Bitcoin…

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What is cryptocurency and how does it work?
Cryptocurrency is a form of digital currency. Nowadays many different types exist of which the Bitcoin is probably the most well known variety. Other popular cryptocurrencies are the Ripple, Litecoin, Peercoin, and Dogecoin. All these currencies have their origin in the 2008 paper by Satoshi Nakamoto. Satoshi Nakamoto is a bit of a myth himself and all sorts of rumors revolve around this person or group. A Bitcoin can be seen as a chain of signatures that are recorded from transaction to transaction. Transactions are recorded digitally in a public ledger. The currency is also decentralized, meaning that the transactions are not checked by one entity but many entities at the same time, and really the network holds ownership of the Bitcoin technology. The payments take place in a peer-to-peer system thereby getting rid of intermediaries such as banks or credit card companies. Requiring a lower fee for the transactions. Furthermore the currency can be anonymous in the sense that, if someone wants to go through a bit of hassle, nobody can see who is behind a certain “digital wallet”. The main advantage is that Bitcoins are easy to trade and a fee for the transaction is only optional (if you want to jump ahead of the cue). The main downside however is the high volatility with the price of the Bitcoin rising steeply around December 2013, to drop almost as steeply as well soon afterwards.

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How does co-creation play a role in cryptocurrency?
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Viva il vino! Exploring wine with Vivino


Today many companies provide options to rate products. Some go a step further and turn user ratings into the service they provide. Vivino is an example of an app that does just that. I have used the app for a while now, mainly to keep track of the wine I drink and thereby increasing my extracurricular learning experience. Now I decided to have another look at the app and see with what kind of suggestions it provided me, something the app is also intended for…

How does it work?

It starts by manually adding a wine (although this function is a bit hidden away) or scanning the label of a wine manually. In case of the latter Vivino generally finds the wine you scanned within seconds, you then need to check whether it scanned the right variety/type, as the vineyard is most of the times properly recognized, the various wines per vineyard can sometimes be a bit more of a hassle. In case it is not directly recognized Vivino’s team will manually match it for you. After you scanned a wine you can rate it (using a 5 star rating system, with half star intervals), add public or private notes or update information about the wine manually, such as the grapes, price et cetera. This seems to be a powerful system. As the database now holds over a million wines and more that 4 million people using the app worldwide.

Recommendations
Based on the users ratings the user will receive recommendations for other wines. In the recommendations tab you see an overview of wines, with a note to it as to how many ratings you have in common with a certain person that likes the suggested wine.

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Crowdsourcing education with Codecademy


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Over the years education has seen a lot, and at the same time little change. One of the initiatives that seems very succesful in redesigning the shape of 21st century education is the Codecademy. But its more than just a philantropic endeavour…

History
Founded in August 2011 by Zach Sims and Ryan Bubinski, the platform started with free online tutorials in which anyone could start to learn JavaScript. Soon after its start it had already attracted about half a million users and already a thousand developers had added content to the website. The Codecademy has grown extensively, and more than 24 millions of users today. Now Codecademy also provides tutorials in the programming languages jQuery, PHP, Python, and Ruby, and the markup languages CSS and HTML. Over the years not only the amount of programming languages increased, the amount of courses grew into thousands. Now the Codecademy also found its way to the mobile apps for iPhone and iPad providing the possibility to learn to code wherever you go.

How does it work?
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