Resources for Everything

Bumped into my friend Sarah last week and was talking about work, in the slightly manic way that running School of Everything and a mental health campaign (http://mindapples.org) gives you.

When I mentioned that my mental health campaign was going really well, she replied: "which one, yours, or the one for other people?"

Nice line, and point taken. What were my 5-a-day again?

About a month ago, I wrote about the WI-Icon competition on this blog - a contest to find the ultimate Women's Institute member. School of Everything teacher Valerie Wood-Gaiger was up for the prize, and it was my hope that our community could help her win it by voting Valerie.

She's just emailed School of Everything to say that she's co-winner of the prize. She says:

Good thoughtful advice on how to hire staff and grow a start-up team, from the increasingly successful guys at www.huddle.net.

To celebrate the Knitting Institute's National Knitting Week next week (12-19 October) and the fact that we have some great knitting teachers on School of Everything, I've been looking around at what's available online for knitters. So here's our pick of 10 websites for all things knitting.

10 Great Knitting Websites

It took us a while, but we've finally made some badges and buttons for you to use on your blogs and websites.

So please put a badge on your site and link to us, or better still link to your own profile. Download them at http://schoolofeverything.com/useful/badges

And let us know what you think of them, or make your own weird and wonderful versions and send them to us. Our brand guidelines are "go on, we don't care"!

My mother left school with no qualifications. But after she'd started a family, and the three of us were old enough to be more independent, she started looking around for what she should do next. She did a degree with the Open University, trained as a teacher and now - at the age of 60 - has just been ordained as a minister.

One of the things we're trying to do with School of Everything is create a more flexible way of organising your learning, so that it fits with your life and your needs. A nice example of this came up the other week.

There's a great concept which I've been hearing about for years called the Human Library. As the name suggests, it's a library which loans out people instead of books. For the Danish guys who came up with it, the purpose was quite specific:

Instead of going out for lunch every day, School of Everything has started Lunch Club: get lots of picnic type food, and turn the boardroom table into a dining-room table at lunchtime.

What are people looking for when they search online for 'Fresh yeast'? According to our website traffic, it might well be - not fresh yeast, as you'd expect, but School of Everything.

School of Everything teacher Tracy Lee Jackson is one of the creators of Pause Now Pose, which organises mass outdoor yoga meets in London locations.

They're getting together on Dafoe Place, in the Barbican Estate Walkways, this Sunday (21 September) from 11am.

If you want to register to take part, email rsvp [at] pausenowpose.org. Or if you just want to watch, the performance runs from 4pm till 4.45pm.

I've been spending some time looking at where School of Everything's visitors are coming from, especially the ones who find us through search engines. If people come from another website, that's much more likely to be because people are talking about School of Everything generally, as an idea. But if people come via a search, it's much more likely that they were just looking about on the internet, spotted something that might be interesting, and stopped by to take a better look.

School of Everything teacher Valerie Wood-Gaiger has been nominated in a contest to find the ultimate Women's Institute person. Can School of Everything's community help her win?

Well, there's hardly been time to stop for breath since our launch last week. Thanks to Cory and all the others who blogged about us - and welcome to everyone who's joined the School of Everything community over the last few days!

Last night Team Everything and friends celebrated our official launch in style.

Big thanks to Channel 4 for hosting us and to everyone who came for making it a cracking night.

Here's the room starting to fill up early on:

Big thanks to JP (below) for chairing the evening, and to Geoff Mulgan, Matt Locke and our very own Paul Miller for giving such inspiring - and concise - speeches:

It's the beginning of a new school year, and time for School of Everything to get a shiny new look.

We've gone live today with a sleek new design (thank you Sangeet) and various new features including:

Here at Everything HQ we really, really want to find out a bit more about how we're doing.

So we've made a little survey. It's very short. We'd love it if you felt like using it to tell us what you think.

Click here to go to the survey

Thank you!

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:

- 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.