School Blog

If you live in London and get the tube, you may have read about us on your way to work this morning. If not here's a little peek at the The Ridiculant feature in today's Metro (our favourite bit): '...you should really look at the rather excellent School of Everything... sort of like a dating website, but for knowledge instead of sex. And they've recently introduced a new gift feature that allows you to buy lessons for someone else.' I'm now a big fan of Tom Phillips (the man who wrote the article) mainly because of the picture caption multi-pun and the memory lesson joke - they make me happy.

Stop the press! School of Everything Bread Making teacher Tom Baker (Yep, that's his real name) made the front cover of the Birmingham Post Magazine last week. Tom is a busy man because he is also one of the first teachers to have signed up to our new gift scheme. You can now buy a Bread Making lesson with Tom for one of your friends or family - the perfect Christmas present. It's so much better than socks. Take a look at our other lovely gifts and write to Santa quick. The gifts are growing so keep checking back for new ones and let us know if there’s a lesson you’d like and we’ll see what we can do to track down a teacher for you! Learning's not just for Christmas.

After the overwhelming response to our last competition we thought we'd run another! As you may have noticed we now have subject images on School of Everything but there aren't quite enough, and that's where you come in. All you need to do is send us a photograph to use on the site. You can pick any subject and send us as many photographs as you like but we'll only be picking one winner! The prize this time is a brilliant little Lego Digital Camera. Good isn't it? Send your entry to picturesmeanprizes@schoolofeverything.com by 30 September 2009.

Oh and congratulations to David Brown as the winner of the paragraphs competition. Well done you! Here is what he said about his subject, it will be up on the site soon:

'Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Jet Li - which one are you? Hopefully none of the above. You may aspire to imitate - admirable, but to be them - questionable! You're unique, individual, so why not just be yourself. Give jujitsu a try. Train hard, have fun and get fit. Meet interesting people and get to punch, kick and throw them. Of course you’ll learn some basic self-defense skills as well, they may lack the flash of the silver screen but then life’s a bit like that, if only there was someone always there to shout: cut, let’s try that again.'

Last week's School of Everything: Unplugged! was a lot of fun - and we're going to be back at the Royal Festival Hall foyer, from 10.30 to 12.30 this Wednesday.

This time we'll be joined by Sofia Bustamante, who's going to share her work-in-progress on London Creative Labs. This is a really exciting project, inspired by time she's spent with Mohammed Yunus's Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. It's still at an early stage, but it reminds me a lot of the meetups out of which School of Everything emerged in 2006.

There's more information here. The format will be similar to last week - come with or without your laptop, get some work done, drink lots of coffee, have interesting conversations and meet new people...

I've just written a long post on my personal blog about School of Everything: Unplugged! - the meetups which Tony Hall and I are going to be running on Wednesday mornings in London. You can read the whole thing here. The short version is that I'm hoping these meetups can be one way of keeping us connected to the longer term vision for education which Pete wrote about a few weeks ago - and to the experimental, improvisational learning culture of the projects that School of Everything came out of.

We need to focus on building the technology and the business that will ensure this site is viable in the long term. But none of us went into this simply to build a website or a company. Unplugging from the office and hanging out face-to-face with anyone who wants to come along seems like one way of getting back to our roots.

Over the next few weeks, I'll be there every Wednesday from 10.30 till 12.30 in the Foyer of the Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank. Other members of Team Everything will be coming down, so it will be a chance to talk about what the site should do next - and to get a makeover for your profile, or help with creating one. But it can equally become a space to discuss other possibilities for free-schooling, deschooling and e-schooling, to share ideas and experiences. What happens depends on who comes along.

You can bring your laptop and work off the Southbank Centre's free wifi, or just come and hang out with us for the morning. And if you have other ideas about what we should do with these meetups, let me know.

Directions to the Royal Festival Hall are here. Once inside, we'll be in the foyer area, to the left of the dance floor, from 10.30 till 12.30. I'll take the big orange furry Every Thing along to make us easy to spot - but if you have difficulty finding us, give me a ring on 07810 650213.

So yesterday we had our first School of Everything morning meetup at the Southbank Centre!

We were a small group, but perfectly formed. Besides me, there was: Tony Hall, our favourite photography teacher and the man who's initiative it was to organise a meetup; Katerina Symiakaki, who comes from Greece and is studying Innovation Management at St Martin's College; and Vinay Gupta, the inventor of the hexayurt, who joined the site during the meetup and is now offering his services as a Meditation and Appropriate Technology Swami.

Conversations ranged from different styles of teaching and the possibilities of empty shops as learning spaces, to ideas for film plots and a discussion of the social possibilities of dog-walking. (Katerina confirmed that it was a good way to meet girls, but recommended borrowing no more than one dog at a time - or two, if you can find a matching pair.)

The Foyer of the Royal Festival Hall turns out to be a great location. There's lots of space, it's not too noisy, there's free wifi and you can hang around for as long as you want without any pressure to buy anything from the cafe. It's also such a wide open space that you can spot people from a distance, so finding the right group is not too intimidating. (I took along the big orange furry Every Thing to make us easy to spot.)

So we've decided to carry on meeting up there for the next few weeks and see what happens. If you're free on Wednesday mornings, come and join us for coffee, conversation and/or co-working. We've started a Meetup group, so you can sign up there for updates - and to let us know you're coming, so we know to look out for you!

As you may have seen in our August Newsletter we have a little competition - fancy winning a nice prize? All you need to do is write a paragraph about why your subject is tip top and everyone should give learning it a go. 100 words maximum (we don't want English teachers running away with themselves). Oh, you're waiting to know what the prizes are aren't you? Well you will get your paragraph published on School of Everything and we will send our favourite entry a Flip Video Camera. Good isn't it? Send your entry to paragraphsmeanprizes@schoolofeverything.com by 30 August 2009.

Flip camera by Nick J Webb

* This is happening today - Wednesday, 12th August! *

A couple of weeks ago, one of our teachers - Tony Hall - suggested a regular School of Everything meetup in London. We thought this was a great idea, so this morning, Tony and I will be hosting the first meetup at the Southbank Centre.

We'll be there from 10.30 to 12.30, in the Foyer of the Royal Festival Hall. As Tony says on the forums, there are lots of ways this could develop:

For me that would mean just taking my work down there and going mobile for the morning. Other teachers and learners, or anyone interested could come along and have open discussions about learning and teaching and School of Everything.

This can be a completely open forum. As long as it is a regular place and time people will eventually come along, bring other people with them, and become involved in big discussions and specific conversations.

So if you're in London and you want to join us, come along for coffee and conversation. Feel free to bring your work, your kids or anything else that seems appropriate.

If you come into the Royal Festival Hall from the terrace above the river, we'll be in the main foyer area, past the bar and to the left hand side of the ballroom floor. I'll bring the big orange furry Every Thing, so look out for that - or, if you really can't find us, call me on 07810 650213.

If you go down to the park this summer, you might get a big surprise - at least if it's Regents Park in London.

A pair of large treehouses and a surrounding village have appeared beside the boating lake. The Treehouse Gallery is the work of some of the artists who organised the Temporary School of Thought, back in January, and over the next few weeks it will host all kinds of workshops, discussions and events.

Lots of School of Everything folk have already been involved in the first couple of weeks of treehouse activities - the multi-talented Rachel Rose Reid was the star of the opening night, with her storytelling; while last weekend, our occasional psychologist-in-residence Tom Stafford gave a great talk on 'Technologies of the Mind'.

This weekend, the theme is 'The Roots and Shoots of Knowledge'. On Saturday at 5pm, I'll be giving a talk on Ivan Illich's 'Deschooling Society', one of the books that inspired this site. Then at 6.30, we're hosting a discussion about the varieties of schooling, with speakers talking about their experiences in and out of the mainstream education system.

There will also be workshops going on all day - and we're inviting any School of Everything teachers who would like to come down and give a taster lesson to join us!

If you're interested in teaching in a tree, drop me a line at:

dougald@schoolofeverything.com

Or just come along and join in.

(Oh, and as if that wasn't enough, you can also join The Beekeepers and friends for a day of Pirate Adventures this Sunday, starting at Blackfriars Bridge at 2pm and converging on the Treehouse Gallery for 5pm. Details are here.)

Yay, we've now got a beekeeping teacher on School of Everything! His name is Sasha Mrkailo.

Here's a bit more buzz - a great video from Help The Honey Bees:

The Bearfoot Beekeeper tells you how to keep bees the natural way, and here is a free PDF about sustainable beekeeping. Sweet as honey, ain't it.