Free School meetups are back!
After a bit of a hiatus during which School of Everything went international, announced a round of seed investment, helped out with Social Innovation Camp and moved the whole office around, I'm delighted to say that we've finally agreed a date to revisit the lo-fi version of what we do.
The next Free School will meet at the Gallery Cafe, Old Ford Rd, Bethnal Green from 6-9pm on Tuesday 29 April.
We're very pleased to announce our first round of investment.
Our investors are Esther Dyson, Rocco Pellegrinelli, JP Rangaswami and Channel 4 Education.
The Young Foundation - who have already supported us in so many ways - have also invested in this round.
JP and Rocco have agreed to come on to the Board (JP will become Chairman). They will join Andy, myself and Andrew Brough from the Young Foundation.
The School Science Department is looking for a new developer.
Do you know PHP? Want to learn Drupal? Want to work for the hippest and most socially-conscious start-up in Bethnal Green?
Or do you know a technical whizz-kid who we should talk to?
Check out the details at www.schoolofeverything.com/jobs/coder.
"Bring on Internet Explorer", it's not something you hear often around the Science Department. Normally IE is a kind of lament, a punishment for the sins of a past life. Firefox is our browser of choice, but in this case, we are very interested in watching it fade.
The School of Everything Science Department has been busy working on the innards of the site. The biggest chunk of work has been opening it up so that anyone around the world can create a teacher profile.
Until a little while ago, we used UK postcodes for our locations. If you happened to live in the right place, we could show everyone exactly where you were – not always a good thing. Unfortunately we had to turn away anyone from beyond the island because we couldn't plot them on a map. To fix this, we went back under the hood, and made some changes.
A few weeks back, with some inspiration from Stefan Bucher's Daily Monster, Team Everything (plus Aleksei Aaltonen, Matt Jones, and other Friday afternoon escapees) joined cartoon villain Louie Stowell for a class in How To Draw Monsters.
Check out the results below.
We're all very excited at Everything Towers, because School of Everything is now international.
Up to now, teachers have only been able to give their location as somewhere in the UK. (For a little while, if you gave a non-UK postcode't the system put you down as based in Lexington, Kentucky. We never figured out why.) But all that's changed now.
Last Friday, we had our second Lesson in Everything. Louie Stowell of Usborne Books joined us in the Three Kings pub in Clerkenwell for a session on How To Draw Monsters.
I was laid up in bed with the most horrible 'flu I've had in years, and am still gutted I missed it. But Dougald's promised me he's putting together a proper monster showcase. Watch this space.
Meanwhile, here's a teaser monster to be going on with.
Our current education systems tend to separate learning from the rest of life. It's something that happens at particular ages and in special buildings, away from the rest of society.
Our next Lesson in Everything is going to be How To Draw Monsters. I cannot wait - I'm planning big pieces of paper, huge green pens, and perhaps some glue so we can all get stuck to things.
We'll be posting our monsters in due course. Meanwhile, here's the first ever monster from Stefan Bucher's Daily Monster, the original and best source of regular monster input.
So I wrote a few days ago about how we were planning an evening together with CityMine(d), to see what we could learn about skills and sharing.
The CityMined crew cooked waffles for people, and asked them about their skills in exchange for the waffle.
Aneeta Patel, School of Everything teacher and knitting expert extraordinaire, just emailed us to say that her book is out!
McDonald's is the first company to launch its own qualification, supposedly equivalent to an A-level, BBC Education reports.
Last year, the company launched a campaign against the use of 'McJob' to mean an unskilled, low-paid job with no prospects.
This afternoon we had our first of hopefully many Lessons in Everything. Aneeta Patel came in and gave Team Everything a special two-hour introduction to knitting.
We've got a bit of practising to do before we can knit ourselves an orange-and-white printer cosy. But in just two hours we've learned how to knit garter stitch and how to change colour - and also that I knit left-handed and can't be persuaded to do it the right way round.
Last night's Soirée Micronomique with the lovely people from City Mine(d) uncovered a wealth of skills in Holloway. The smell of hot Belgian waffles turns out to be an effective motivator for getting people talking about their passions.
Skills offered included Tai Chi, basic Czech, video FX and mate making.
It's good to hear a government minister in Britain talking about adult learning as something which has value in itself, as well as being a route back to work. It's even better when the minister in question, after invoking the rich history of the mutual improvement societies and the Workers' Education Association, mentions School of Everything as part of the future of that tradition.
Self-organised learning is something we're passionate about here at School of Everything - so it was great to get along to this afternoon's first meeting of the Tower Hamlets' University of the Third Age. The U3A is a huge learning network, made up largely of retired people who get together regularly to learn about things which interest them.
School of Everything is getting together with CityMined, a collective interested in city life, to spend an evening looking at the things people do for love and the things people do for money. Especially on the pretty frequent occasions where these two don't match up.
The idea is that guests talk about something they can do, for as long as it takes to cook a Belgian waffle. Then they get the waffle. School of Everything will be down there looking for London's hidden teachers.
Every member of School of Everything can add notes, links, videos, images, documents and other things to the site that help people learn or teach a particular subject. If you're learning, you can use it to keep track of your progress in your subjects and all the things that help you learn like useful websites or how-to videos.
If you're teaching, you can share useful resources and advice that you think will help people learn you subjects. You can tag each resource post with one or more subjects, and your posts will appear to other people looking for those subjects.
Don't be shy, say hello. We'd love to hear from you.
