Resources for Everything

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.

We've been nominated for the 2008 New Statesman New Media awards.

If you want to add your voice to that, click here.

Go on - choose Everything!

Years ago, in my first job, I spent a lot of time skiving off my 'proper' work and playing with those early social media platforms. These days, social media is no longer what I stop working to do - it's my job.

A day at Everything HQ takes me across

- our Facebook page
- our Twitter feed
- our Get Satisfaction account

Tomorrow, at the Free School meetup, Dougald's going to teach how to fly the Everything HQ miniature helicopters. And there'll be the usual freeschooling, idea-swapping, tea and cake and loveliness.

If you're in the area, come down! But if you like the idea, but can't make it, then you can always start your own.

Here is a picture of Dougald starting a school. You can see how easy* it is.

We've got copies of Accepted (the story of Everything, in teen movie form) to give to the best photos we get of signs in unexpected places that say 'THIS IS A SCHOOL'.

Send photos to accepted [at] school of everything dot com .

*Now keeping a school going, that's a different story...

The idea for School of Everything came out of our own experiments with open learning, and out of our thoughts about others who've tried it. What happens when a group of people with different skills and interests gets together in a friendly context and looks for ways to exchange what we know?

I went swimming this morning, and realised I had room to improve. It has been many years since I have done a a decent number of lengths, but, after a few mornings, the flow is coming back to me. Keep your body aligned, create the minimum disturbance of the water, trim and adjust. I grew up in South Africa and I got a lot of swimming training, many people in the UK were not quite so lucky. We could probably all use a bit of help.

The Free School went to the Shine 2008 social entrepreneurship conference last weekend.

It was the most challenging Free School I've run. This surprised me - I thought that a building full of social entrepreneurs would be all over the idea of open peer learning. But as it turned out, there were relatively few offers.

I learned a few useful things though.

I like to pretend I'm more of a arthouse fan, but secretly I quite like teen movies. Breakfast Club, Teen Wolf, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, American Pie.... I've actually also watched High School Musical (cough) twice.

So when Andres from Meetup sidled up to me after I did a talk about School of Everything a few months ago and said, "You know there's a really cheesy college movie about School of Everything", I was on Amazon like a shot.

Want to come to breakfast with Charles Leadbeater?

Our Tech Advisory Board (Stowe Boyd, Kelly Brough, Matt Jones, Euan Semple and Colin Tate) came in yesterday to grill us on how we're developing the site. They gave us a good going over about our future tech priorities, how we can start conversations between our users, and how we're measuring the success of what we've built so far. It's great to have such experienced people on hand to help us build something of real value.

Team Everything was on its way to lunch earlier today and spotted this lovely lady spinning in the street. So I went over to say hello.

Rachel is one of the co-founders of Prick Your Finger, a wool and craft shop just round the corner from Everything HQ. "I think I'm going to do this every day it's sunny", she said. "I end up teaching passers-by how to spin all the time!"

Everything just made a corporate purchase of two fighting helicopters.

We couldn't find them in orange, but needless to say next week will be VERY productive.

So yesterday evening, the third Free School meetup got together.

As is now Free School tradition, people wrote on big pieces of paper what they could teach or wanted to learn. Offers and requests ranged from tap dancing, sword fighting and making Sunday roasts to advanced Photoshop, Linux and small business accounting.

There was also lots of tea and cake and chatting.

Free School! Free School! Free School!

Don't forget to come down and swap what you know with other lovely people tonight, 29 April, from 6 to 9pm at the Gallery Cafe in Bethnal Green.

For more info, click here.

Just booked my tickets to Manchester for the Futuresonic Social Tech Summit this Thursday and Friday.

Should be a great conference - it's not often you get Richard Stallman and the Wu-Tang Clan's RZA on the same bill.