A collection of notes / ideas / work in progress to do with topics in my DIY Masters:

Friendship / 150 Things About Friendship

Introduction to Open Education

Physical Computing

German

DIY Masters in General

So far the biggest challenge I’m encountering with my DIY Masters is a lack of structure and long term direction. I’m really enthused about everything, but I need to take a step back to work out what to do next and how to find mentors to guide me through this process.

Eventually, I’d like to work out a specific research question that I can use to approach the larger topic of friendship at both an academic and creative level.  I’m hoping to focus on representations of friendship and friendship networks (for want of a better word) but I’m not too worried about finalising a research question and creative approach just yet.  Instead, I’m allowing myself to study other subjects that I’m also interested in as a way of introducing some good study behaviours into my lifestyle.

Right now, there are three to four topics that I’m focusing on: German language (run by babylonia), Intoduction to Open Education (run online by Brigham Young University), 150 Things About Friendship (self organised creative exploration) and Physical Computing (theory from a textbook, practical work tbc). Luckily, some structure and guidance is provided by German class and the Open Education course.

The combination of subjects I’m studying may sound a little bit random, but they all directly feed back into the greater life improving career enhancing goal of DIY Masters:

1. I need to and am interested in learning Deutsch.
2. While I’m interested in ‘friendship’, open / self-organised education is something i’m very interested in. I feel that the topics do connect particularly in the ways society as a whole can be involved with informal education models.
3. 150 Things About Friendship allows me to explore creative / artistic practice in a low pressure situation.
4. Physical Computing is something I’d like to use as a medium for some of the more involved ‘Things’.

I’ve been loving the feedback and encouragement I’m getting from friends, family and newcomers to this blog.  I’d like to think while this DIYMasters is a personal project, the approach and methods are something which many people can be motivated by.

As a result of my Academy of DIY post, I was introduced to Rose White aka yarnivore.  She mentioned that there was a freely available course about Open Education being run by an actual university!

Luckily I’ve been able to get involved with the course at the last minute and I’ve just started to catch up on the video lectures and readings.

One of the interesting things about the online course structure is that it uses the character class and guild model of organisation which is commonly used in networked games such as World of Warcraft.  As I’m a nerd and have dabbled in a little bit of Dungeons and Dragons and worked in the games industry, I’m well aware of this structure. However, I wonder how a student without a background knowledge of games culture would interpret the use of otherwise ‘historic’ language such as artisan, monk and bard?

In honour of Australia Day I figured I’d make something tasty and Australian to share with my housemates and to take to German class tomorrow.

If I’d thought ahead, I’d have protected my clothing with the lovely apron that Sarah M gave me, but I forgot. Instead, here’s a photo from when I baked pavlova at D’s place for Weihnachten (Christmas).

There was one major problem – I couldn’t actually bake anything since the oven in my current flat has no temperature control. Actually, most things in the flat have some fault that one needs to overcome.

For example, the washing machine:

Everytime you put a load of laundry on, you have to wedge the door in place with a piece of wood and strap it all down.

It’s not really the weather to barbecue and while I’d love to whip up some proper meat pies^, or to bake Anzac biscuits or a pavlova, they all required baking.

So, in the end I chose to make lamingtons, as I could buy a premade vanilla cake and then do the messy bits of chocolate coating and coconut shaking.  Even though lamingtons are fairly traditional Australian fare, I can’t remember ever making them as a kid, so this entire process was new to me.

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I finally bought a package of jasmine tea today. Along with the recent purchase of a proper hairdryer, it’s a sign that I’m letting myself feel more comfortable in Berlin. It might not properly feel like home, but I’m beginning to feel normal and myself. It’s a little silly, but access to (jasmine) tea and dry hair are some of the things which make me feel more together.

Jasmine tea has always been important to me when living overseas. My odd penchant for cold and wet places means that I keep on missing out on important stuff like sun and flowers. One of the ways I’ve got over that is by drinking jasmine tea, closing my eyes and thinking about Adelaide.

I think that one of the reasons why I’ve begun to focus on friendship is that it actively draws my mind back to people I care about. I have a strong academic and creative interest in the theory of friendship which is very important in motivating me to explore the area. But there is also the payback of regularly acknowledging the presence of the people I know, whether they are my most intimate friends or people I used to serve beer to.

, originally uploaded by .

I’ve been thinking that in a community with a size of 150 (commonly cited as Dunbar’s Number), not all of those people will be friends.

Even though I have a Facebook friend list of over 450 people I wanted to see if I could quickly name 150 people who I wanted to actively maintain, create or repair friendships with. I gave myself a limit of about half an hour to make the list.

Some limits:

• I didn’t look at Facebook.
• Family members and “romantic” partners were eligible.
• I had to have met people ITRW.
• People on the list had to be alive.

At the end of half-an-hour I had 89 people on the list. Compared to my Facebook friends, that’s not that many people.

The vast majority of people were between the ages of 23 and 40. I felt a little sad that I don’t have that much interaction with much older or much younger people. In the future I want to return to this topic as I feel age range is an important element of community.

Only two people on the list were from Berlin and I’ve known them for longer than the two months I’ve been here. I think that’s a sign of how friendships evolve – there are some lovely people who I like in Berlin, but I’m still not sure if they’re going to become friends.

I intend to repeat this exercise in the future so that I can compare how people drift in and out of the list. I won’t compare the lists until I’ve done several.

For a few reasons I won’t reveal the list:

• Even though I’m consciously and publicly thinking about friends – they are still personal relationships.
• I feel weird about listing people’s names on the internet without their permission.
• I don’t want awareness of whether someone’s on the list or not to alter their behaviour and our friendship.
• Future Things may be dependent on the secrecy of the list.

Prompted by: the Love / Hate lists I wrote in diaries in primary school.

I’m starting off my list of 150 Things with Practical Uses For Jedi Mind-Tricks, the session I ran at BarCamp Sheffield at the beginning of December last year.

Running that session helped me focus my thoughts on a topic more than anything else I’ve done in the last year or so.  The feedback I received really encouraged me as it showed that thinking and talking about how friendship works is actually interesting to other people too. I feel that I learnt a lot more about the topic of friendship and how people feel when they have to consciously talk about it.

One of the other things that has helped focus me was that I really enjoyed leading the discussion and asking people questions.  I’m hoping to make more of my 150 Things recordings of interactions or tools to prompt interaction about friendship.

I’m still thinking a lot about how to approach the studying and academic side of my DIYMasters, but on the creative side I’ve become a bit more relaxed.

For a while I was feeling intimidated that I would have to set myself “assignments”, whether I had to create  an electronic friend “sensor”, a film or a sculpture made out of marshmallows and toothpicks.  Instead I’m giving myself permission to do small exploratory actions and reminding myself that anything, no matter how tiny it is contributes towards a body of work.

So I’m setting myself the rather grand task of recording 150 things that I create and do during this informal study of friendship.  I’ve chosen the number 150 because it is commonly cited as Dunbar’s Number, or the upper end of group sizes in which people maintain stable relationships with each other.  Of course how many of those people we count as true friends is probably much smaller, so it’ll be interesting to see how many of the 150 “things” are significant pieces of work.

So that I don’t start off with a feeling of being overwhelmed at doing the first Thing, I’m going to list my BarCampSheffield talk on friendship as the number one action.