Resources for Everything

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.

There's a lovely piece about us in today's Guardian PDA.

We had lots of fun on the Everything photoshoot, courtesy of Joe Lee. Sadly he wouldn't let us do an emo band-style photo; so here we are on the roof of the Young Foundation, looking as respectable as we can, as broadcast in the national press.

An Every Thing just appeared in our office.

After the orange logo, and the orange ethernet cables, and the orange Gaffa tape, it is probably the orangest thing about Everything HQ.

(Everything else is the colours you'd expect. We're not obsessive or anything.)

Are you going to the Shine unconference? Look out for impromptu gatherings of people sharing what they can teach and want to learn.

School of Everything will be out and about during the weekend, with a mission to infect 600 social entrepreneurs with our love of Free Schools and open peer-to-peer exchange.

We'll keep you posted on developments. Meanwhile keep an eye out for 'THIS IS A SCHOOL' stickers...

Before we had an office, we used Twitter as a way of sharing information within Team Everything. So we couldn't really share our updates with the rest of the world.

Now, we have a lovely office, and can talk across the desk. So we're twittering publicly instead!

You can keep up with School of Everything's latest news by following EverythingHQ.

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.