Vote sized learning is an innovative new and provocative way to teach students. It is part of a general outlook on modifying social behavior promoted by the Vote Sizing Institute and its partner organizations: the Democratic Empowerment Party - Canada, the Fair Choice Party - Cameroon, and Empowerment Inc. ... and parallels our promotion of vote sized elections, online vote-sized polling, vote sized businesses, and our vote flocking simulation.

The first detour that vote sized learning takes from the regular academic model is to allow students greater say in the curriculum by holding elections so that they get to decide for themselves how some of the instruction will take place. Even though this approach to democratizing learning maybe rare, it is not new or unknown as many schools and classes have already implemented some degree of student involvement in the decision making process. And, historically, during the middle and upper middle ages of Europe, western universities came into being based on the idea that the students decided what was relevant to formal education, not the teachers.

However, holding some kind of election or referendum in the classroom environment results only in voted learning. The second and more profound detour that vote sized learning takes is to use computer technology. to affect the actual size or weight of each students' vote so that, based on some criteria, some students have more say than others in the outcome of the decision-making process. In an academic environment, the logical choice is to use each students' grades to determine how relatively large or small their vote is.

Finally, the most profound step we take away from the regular way classes are run is to weigh each students votes inversely to their grades, effectively giving the poorer performing students more say than the higher performers.

This standing of conventional "wisdom" on it's head poses some risks to the class in that it is possible that failing students will drag everyone else down. However, it also offers the possibility to realize fantastic outcomes if it succeeds. Vote sized learning places cooperation above competition, pulls all the students into the process, and gets rid of the notion that a large part of the class - all the students who are not performing well) have absolutely nothing to offer.

How feasible is vote sized learning? Very! Already our online vote sized learning engine at Vote Sized Learning Engine which allows teachers to download a student survey template, modify the questions to suit their needs (and languages), print and distribute to his or her students, and then upload the results into the engine where it will chart the results based on a variety of inverse grade formulas (in addition to the traditional one-person-one-vote method).

This classroom exercise can be run just to see how different parts of the class think differently about what they are there for or, results can be used to decide the class direction in a one-time referendum style vote or else, on an ongoing basis for a set amount of time in order to fully discover how the students may be able to capitalize on each other’s wisdom and promote maximum participation.

The reason vote sized learning should be utilized is that the current academic model is not working to improve conditions for the whole of society or its citizens. Currently the academic system, along with the media and corporate system, form one of the four main branches of social order - opportunity (the other three being representation, rule of law, and reward).

Opportunity is how healthy economic structures are built. Since the most stable structures are pyramids and opportunity follows the rule by building economic models based on utilizing each of our own unique criteria such as ambition, ingenuity, confidence, and productive capacity.

Notice that there is no room for the commonly repeated misnomer of equal opportunity in the pyramid because the notion of equal opportunity is an oxymoron. The goal of the opportunity pyramid is to put the most talented, responsible, and ambitious in higher positions of economic authority. To thrive, the economy must be built by combining each of our own strengths and weaknesses so that we all can contribute to society based on what we do best. Striving for equal opportunity stagnates competition and undermines the markets. In order to have opportunity, we need to have inequality.

A corrupted opportunity pyramid becomes a patronage hourglass. This hourglass shape has a compacted opportunity pyramid in the lower half where most of us find ourselves in fierce competition with each other. At the other end in the top half of the hour glass, an inverted pyramid exists where slackers and cheaters can rise and hold their elevated position. In the middle of the hourglass is a bottleneck where it is very difficult for us to find advancement.

With corruption in play, the hourglass shape not only describes our institutions but our personal lives too. Patronage socially encourages all of us, successful or not, to think that we are better than we are. Add to this the time squeeze, relevance of status, and fear that comes with a world where talents and opportunities are ignored, and we end up with a lot of very smug people who think they can better, without ever being truly tested.

In the real, not symbolic world a patronage hour glass results in a bottom up caste system. At the bottom are people who live and work in the iron age. They are the homeless, the sweatshop workers, the internally displaced, and the refugees who toil with their hands providing the hard labor necessary for the rest of society to function. In the middle caste are people who live in the petroleum age. They are responsible for moving goods and people around. At the top are the few people who live in the information age. They are the investors and brokers who deal in information and the higher quality information they can assemble and withhold, the higher they will rise.

This is where academia fits in. By consistently being upward-looking and beholden to corporate and elitist interests, it encourages patronage and keeps the rest of us guessing about how to get collectively ahead. From a very early age, students are forced to take instruction, fit in, not to question authority and compete for the teacher's favor. As we look higher and higher at the academic world we encounter more and more racism and sexism. The Ivy League schools having the largest part of the curriculum dictated by corporate interests and the lowest percentages of women and/or ethnically diverse professors.

Like information, capitalism works through restricting access to property. Since we’re not able to just eat any apple off of any tree, farmers have the opportunity to grow enough apples for everybody. In the same way, government regulates behavior. Because we are restricted to drive in certain lanes, we all can get where we’re going in a reasonable amount of time. By limiting and restricting our rights and freedoms, there’s an overall net gain of rights and freedoms. However, negative space is a terrible place to operate information. Something is wrong when the premium information that really matters can only be found in Ivy league lounges, ski lodges, private boxes at sports events, golf ranges and board rooms; leaving the rest of us to sift through hysterical, unenlightening misinformative garbage. Regulated, crippled information does not make for a better society and should not be embraced by academia.

Vote sized learning bucks the corrupted patronagistic top down trend in academia by allowing the students who have another point of view to have their say. It opens the door to a completely new way of solving problems together and learning how not to just follow orders but how to create a dynamic interwoven world.

Student Survey

Completed Student Survey

Completed Student Survey - Online Results