When I changed battlecat servers at the end of last year I briefly read over my previous I Would Like list and removed the list from my major links. I’d just moved to Berlin and was feeling very unsure of myself, so I didn’t take the time to review what I’d achieved in the 2 and a half years since I wrote the list, nor did I consider adding any new goals.

This week however, there’s something in the air which is prompting me to look over the list, refresh it and then work on it. Maybe it’s the slightest hint of the forthcoming spring, the return of my beau from 3 weeks abroad or the realisation that I’ve now spent more than 3 months in Berlin. Realistically I think a lot of this feeling has to do with the latter idea, specifically with the knowledge that I stop subletting and move into a permanent flat with a great flatmate this week.

For more than a year now I have been hopping from country to country and from temporary housing situation to temporary housing situation. The last year hasn’t been about travelling, and it hasn’t quite felt way I imagine a nomad’s lifestyle to be either. My experience has in some ways been exciting, but primarily it’s been exhausting and unsettling. While I wouldn’t say that my relatively privileged position of some saved funds and usefully flexible citizenship is anything like that of a refugee’s situation, I now have a greater understanding of the feeling of displacement.

So, this weekend I’ll finally have A Room Of My Own again. I’m not sure whether to panic and run away, or to celebrate and invest in very heavy objects that are difficult to move. Even though I’ve spent the grand sum of 9€ on an extremely portable desk lamp, I think that I’ll be commemorating this move with reviewing these lists and working out how I can move forward without having to move for at least 6 months.

Primarily it’s the fact that I’m pretty tired of cold, wet weather but my thoughts are turning to magic portals and instant travel back to Adelaide in the next couple of weeks. While I love Spring in Adelaide and would happily return for visits in October, future returns home will probably happen in February and March as that’s the time when Adelaide really comes alive!

Visitors to Adelaide during festival season (Adelaide Festival of Arts, Fringe Festival and Womadelaide) are given a strange impression of the town, there are people energised and out partying on the streets every night! There’s culture down every alley and even if you don’t like ‘culture’, there’s also a very loud car race which happens around the same time. The rest of the year, while it can be difficult to remember the party face the city puts on, it is still a lovely place that I miss.

Foolishly I’ve managed to miss out Adelaide Fringe and most frustratingly, Womadelaide for the last few years as I always seemed to book my flights back to Europe in winter just in time for slushy side walks and freezing winds.

If you’ve never experienced Womadelaide festival you really should. For three days the most beautiful park in Adelaide is full of world music, hippies and happy, relaxed, white-middle class families wearing ethnic clothing bought at the previous year’s festival. It is a time of picnics, temporary camps under amazing old trees, children wandering around and playing diablo, amazing art installations and all my favourite people.

This year I feel even more sad that I don’t get to be in Adelaide at this most wonderful of times as during Fringe there’ll also be the first Format Festival, run by some very dear friends of mine. Only last week did I realise that maybe I should have tried to organise a simultaneous Academy of DIY here in Berlin as part of my DIYMasters project. So while there won’t be a Berlin Academy of DIY this March, I’m hoping that in the next couple of months I’ll organise a similar event celebrating self-organised learning and informal teaching and community.

I won’t be around in Adelaide for the festivals this year, but if you’re in Australia make your way over to my home town and have fun on my behalf. During February / March 2010 though, is when I’m planning on making a short return to a festival filled Adelaide, my friends and family and the smells of dry earth and eucalyptus leaves. Until then, I’m looking forward to watching Berlin move from grey skies to blue and experiencing this city as it wakes from its winter hibernation.

Update Below!

So far, it feels that I’ve made very little progress with my DIYMasters work, as I seem to do more thinking about what I intend to do rather than actually sitting down to write, study or create.

Overthinking and never taking action is so much easier to do when you don’t have an opportunity to talk about your ideas.  When I have a chance to discuss a concept with someone else I am far more likely to move to a new level of understanding and be more likely to commit to an action. Which means I need to bring other people into my DIYMasters project.

I’m looking for people to become involved with my DIYMasters at several levels:

• Mentors
• Teachers
• Peers
• Task Masters
• Sponsors and Funding Angels

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I’m not sure what people’s minds were like before this whole internet thing came along, but one of the results of growing up alongside the internet and web is that I notice and want to record links between everything I learn and hear.

A slightly trivial example is that I was listening to an In Our Time podcast on the history of Heat the other day and my immediate response was “XKCD!”

There have been moments when the potential world of knowledge seems to concurrently shrink and expand as I make connections between seemingly disparate topics such as a war in Congo being related to minerals running out. A connection is made, but it opens up so many more questions and things to learn.

Other people are thinking this way and are developing tools with which to record these connections. We can connect the people we know in networked graphs and record similarities between musical artists. We can draw mindmaps on pieces of paper, or represent them visually through software like The Brain or connect topics with tags as on delicious.

But how can we make and represent these connections in the real world?

When I meet a person who has a similar interest to someone I already know, I immediately want to introduce them so that they can benefit from their ideas.

That’s one way of making a connection, but besides that introduction being recorded by electronic social media such as Facebook how could these connections (and their history) be recorded and ‘tagged’ physically?

I guess part of this thought comes from a fear/worry that if the internet suddenly ceased to exist I would have no connection to the 450+ people I am connected to on Facebook.

If that situation occurred, would I really care? Are all relationships meaningful enough to be recorded in the real world?

Should I tie thousands of kilometres of string to the people I care about and am interested in, or do I take a photo? Should I send 471 postcards a day letting people know my status, and would they send a postcard back?

To that end, for 150 Things I’m thinking a lot about making tangible tokens as a way of recording the relationships I have with people.

I’m slowly making my way along the very meandering path of my DIY Masters degree.  Thankfully, for both academic and everyday-living-in-Germany reasons, I’m beginning to make some progress with learning German. That is of course when I wake up early and energised enough to ride my bike across the cold, windy, often snowy and icy streets of Berlin to class.

In my own way, I’m also participating in the Introduction to Open Education course being run by the Utah based Brigham Young University.  I started almost a month later than the other students, and found it very difficult to catch up with the reading and assignment work so as to participate in some of the group tasks, so I’ll not be keeping to the official course schedule.

A couple of other factors apart from my start-time influenced my decision to utilise the course-content but not the infrastructure of the course.  One of the questions I had when I first thought about a DIY Masters program was “How do I share my knowledge?” and I was interested to see if an online course would provide enough interaction. Instead I found that the communication between the 20 or so students was primarily based around comments on blog posts, limited mailing list usage and no real-time communication.  Not really the communicative and shared experience that I’d been looking for.

The other problem that I’d actually been expecting (from a Utah based university), was the use of the course content to talk about Seventh Day Adventist gospel spreading as a motivation for the Open Education movement. The missionary overtones are a great example of Free / Open Source content being used in the manner of Richard Stallman’s “Free as in Speech” philosophy about the FLOSS movement.

Regardless, even though I’ve been loving thinking about Open Education and reading the non-religious content, I felt the need to work outside of the strange role playing structure of the course.  More than anything, trying to catch up with an increasing study load reminded me of the recurring nightmare I have to this day that I’m enrolled in a university subject and have forgotten all about it incurring both a Fail on my academic transcript and an increased HECS debt.

So, I’m still studying the course content, but in order to explore the interaction side of self-education, I’ve invited Marc of Un_Understand to be my study partner so that we can follow the course content at our own pace.

Even though thoughts and ideas about representing friendship are still mulling away in my head, this meta-topic of self-organised education is something I’m increasingly interested by.  Ridiculously, especially since I’m only at the start of the whole DIY thing, I’m thinking about a proper academic degree researching how individuals and small groups use Open Educational Resources outside of official learning institutions.  Or you know, earning some actual money by working within the area of open and self-run education.

I guess for me the line between what I need to explore creatively (friendship and society) and things which might get me a much-needed job and career path (education and society) can be somewhat blurry.

Though I have, as part of this process begun to make a distinction between things I’d like to learn in general as hobbies (eg. permaculture, bookbinding and guitar playing) from topics which I would otherwise explore in a traditional academic environment.

As I mentioned earlier, this is a slow and meandering and often self-centred exploratory process. It’s tempting to start a movement of Slow Education as sibling to Slow Food.

PERSONAL RESPONSE

It’s great to see how individuals and institutions have responded to the possibility of shared educational resources over the last 7 years particularly. I’m sure that as more people and organisations (commercial, educational and non-for-profit) become involved, there will be even more developments to write about in 7 more years.

One thing that I’m particularly interested in watching is the development of the Open Participatory Learning Infrastructure.  I feel that people will increasingly view Open Education as something greater than just a licensing model and method of information distribution.

My hope is that participation won’t just mean downloading a video and commenting on a website, but that learning and participating in learning (and teaching) will become a lifestyle choice.  If possible there will be more activity surrounding learning communities, definitely online, but I hope that this movement will transcend the online and move into the true social.

If you’re interested in reading out more about how people are participating with each other (on-and-offline) you might want to check out We Think] by Charles Leadbeater.

My responses to the video and Quest 0/1 are after the jump:

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While waiting to try out Platoniq’s SOS device during CTM09 I started talking with some Brazillian guys about friendship and happiness.

Alexandre and José were in Berlin for Transmediale 09 talking about the Houses of Happiness project by DesCentro.

Sadly, I couldn’t make their session, but I recorded them talking about food, cooking and friendship as part of 150 Things On Friendship.