No school holidays for us here at Everything HQ: we're hard at work on a big site redesign and some new features to be launched at the end of the month. (For a sneak preview, send me a message and join our beta testing group.)
As I comb the site looking for ways we can improve the product, I've been pondering this very elegant quote from our Chair JP:
Mary Harrington posted a note on 13 August 2008 - 4:27pm.
- That it's cheaper to get from Biggleswade to London at peak rate than I thought
- That Google has lots of tools to help you advertise using their stuff
- That not wearing socks is a bad idea in British August
- That Wednesday is an odd day to come back after a holiday.
There's only so much you can learn sitting at a desk: sometimes you need to get your hands dirty. That's as true for us at School of Everything as for the Year 8 students from Holmes Chapel Comprehensive that I met when I escaped the office for a day at The Blackden Trust.
You may have seen a few announcements on School of Everything recently about 'Dammy Bruce', who tried to abuse the School of Everything messaging system last week for a counterfeit cheque scam.
Several of our teachers reported this, so once we were sure it was a scammer we blocked 'Dammy Bruce' permanently. Thanks to everyone for your vigilance - we're glad this nuisance has been dealt with quickly.
Since then, we've been doing some more work on helping School of Everything's community stay safe and secure online.
Please give a warm welcome to Jenny Morecombe, who's joining Team Everything as community manager.
Jenny has run online communities and chat rooms for Disney, ABC and the BBC, and has lots of experience looking after online communities and making sure they're safe and happy.
She's also an inspired treasure hunt organiser, a bit nifty on a snowboard and an all round good egg. Here she is in the Rocky Mountains:
Hurrah - we won a UK Catalyst Award! We're very proud.
The other winners included Wheelies, the Freeconomy community and Slivers-of-Time.
We've had some complaints over the last day or so about suspicious emails from "Dammy Bruce", a suspected scammer using the School of Everything message system. We've suspended the account.
If at any time you think an enquiry might be suspicious, or you're asked for financial details or other sensitive personal information, please do report the user to School of Everything as soon as possible. We will suspend any user until we are confident that their enquiry is genuine.
Last September, School of Everything was a finalist for Seedcamp and applications are now open for this year's competition.
If you've got an idea and you're thinking of putting it into action, all of us would completely recommend you enter. It's a fantastic experience and as Saul mentions on his blog - a great way to validate your idea.
The 2gether08 Festival of Ideas and Action kept Everyone busy last week. Alongside a packed programme of talks and workshops (including one on social entrepreneurship and government that included Paul) the Fringe events took a playful approach to bringing people together.
At the Fringe, School of Everything hosted The Five-Minute Teach, a series of mini-sessions where people taught something you wouldn't expect them to teach. The only rule was: you have to be able to teach it in five minutes.
Team Everything has grown again. Hot on the heels of Sangeet, Everything's new designer, we're very happy to welcome Hugo Rumens to Team Everything. When he's not playing the guitar or being a bit of a foodie he's a brilliant developer, and we're delighted to have him on board.
Last night School of Everything won a New Statesman New Media Award, in the Inform and Educate category.
Here's the Every Thing, posing with our shiny new trophy.
We want to help people learn what they really really want - when, where and how they want. But up to now, we've been more focussed on supporting teachers than learners. In fact, if you didn't want to teach something, no-one could even find you on the site.
Well, fear not. After much technical huffing and puffing, today we're launching personal profiles for everyone. And we want to know what you really want to learn.
Here's how it works:
We've been nominated for the UK Catalyst Awards, in the Self-Help category. Hurray!
And as if that weren't enough, we're also finalists for the New Statesman New Media Awards, in the Inform and Educate category.
More news as soon as we have it...
We're very pleased to welcome Sangeet Gyawali to Team Everything. He'll be working on design and usability, and has already kicked off with some great ideas.
He tried to hide when we pointed a camera at him, so here's a picture of the very, very large Mac he'll be working at instead.
We've been looking around for inspiration about how to make School of Everything an amazing place to work. One fantastic story is that of Semco in Brazil. When Ricardo Semler inherited the company in the early 1980s he began to wonder why democracy was something that was talked about in relation to government but never to companies.
Everything HQ had a surprise visit this afternoon - all the way from Lithuania.
Darius Damalakas, a programmer and School of Everything teacher, flew over for a tech conference - or so he thought.
"I turned up at the venue," he explained, "but when I sat down in what I thought was the first session I suddenly realised I'd gatecrashed an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting".
The Science Department will be at Minibar tomorrow night.
Andy and Russ during the infamous Recorder Incident at Interesting 2008
They're being very cagey about what they're presenting. I can't promise recorders or lab coats. But it's more likely to include barbershop harmony than Powerpoint slides, which can only be a good thing.
If you're there, come and say hello!
Team Everything is much looking forward to next week's 2gether08 conference. Two days of talks, workshops, experiments and great people, plus the New Statesman New Media Awards" (which we've been nominated for), and a launch event for 4IP, Channel 4's new social technology fund - it's going to be busy, exciting and fun.
Last Saturday a lot of interesting people descended on Conway Hall for the day of joy that was Interesting 2008.
We were invited by Interesting organiser Russell Davies to do something interesting in the lobby. So, using materials close to hand (such as lab coats and ancient modems) we made an Interesting Machine.
We made some antique-looking punchcard type things:
We're heading to Interesting 2008 tomorrow. We're taking some vintage tech.
That's all I can tell you right now. But if you're there, come and say hello!
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.
