Resources for Everything

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!

We've seen several orchestras' worth of music teachers joining the site this month – but if piano lessons aren't your thing, there are some more unusual instruments on offer. To give you inspiration, I put together a School of Everything hit parade. Hold onto your hats for a musical rollercoaster…

When I was doing a talk at a conference last week, a number of people thought it was strange that School of Everything was set up as a company. So I thought it might be worth setting out why we chose this structure and some of the things we've built into the model that make us a bit different.

Legally speaking School of Everything is a company limited by shares registered in England and Wales. It's the most common form for any company in the UK and the form that almost any internet start-up here takes.

It's not the most Edupunk of musical reference points (more on that later), but I woke up this morning thinking about the video to REM's 'Everybody Hurts'. You remember the one: gridlocked traffic on the interstate, the camera panning across silent faces stuck in cars, subtitles captioning their unspoken grievances...

I've been having a bit of a think recently about Free Schools. I always learn a lot, every time I host a Free School - so I always get something out of it. For the others who come it feels like it's good as

- a chance to do something random with interesting people
- a space to talk about open learning and DIY culture
- a chance to find others in the area who have skills that might be handy.

It's not so good as

- a way of finding a teacher for a specific subject (who turns up is too random for that to be reliable)
- a space to do sustained learning.

When starting a school, it helps if you can find some teachers. Over the last few weeks, Claire and I have been contacting people who are already advertising their teaching online, to invite them to join School of Everything. The response has been encouraging - a big increase in the number of new teachers joining the site and some lovely emails from people who really get what we're trying to do.