Resources for Everything

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.

Our next Lesson in Everything is going to be How To Draw Monsters. I cannot wait - I'm planning big pieces of paper, huge green pens, and perhaps some glue so we can all get stuck to things.

We'll be posting our monsters in due course. Meanwhile, here's the first ever monster from Stefan Bucher's Daily Monster, the original and best source of regular monster input.

So I wrote a few days ago about how we were planning an evening together with CityMine(d), to see what we could learn about skills and sharing.

The CityMined crew cooked waffles for people, and asked them about their skills in exchange for the waffle.

Aneeta Patel, School of Everything teacher and knitting expert extraordinaire, just emailed us to say that her book is out!

McDonald's is the first company to launch its own qualification, supposedly equivalent to an A-level, BBC Education reports.

Last year, the company launched a campaign against the use of 'McJob' to mean an unskilled, low-paid job with no prospects.

It's just 24 hours since my knitting lesson with Aneeta. Here's how my School Scarf has progressed.

Hurray!