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.
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.
Every member of School of Everything can add notes, links, videos, images, documents and other things to the site that help people learn or teach a particular subject. If you're learning, you can use it to keep track of your progress in your subjects and all the things that help you learn like useful websites or how-to videos.
If you're teaching, you can share useful resources and advice that you think will help people learn you subjects. You can tag each resource post with one or more subjects, and your posts will appear to other people looking for those subjects.
Don't be shy, say hello. We'd love to hear from you.
