Since I started thinking about the concept of a self-organised or “DIY” Masters degree, most of my time has been spent communicating with other people interested in the theory of self-organised education. We’re looking at how we can improve current systems to make self-directed education more social, flexible and accessible. As I mentioned in my post Joining The Learning Tribe, the concept of self-organised learning has become a research and hopefully a professional project in itself.

But what about my own self-organised learning path – the original DIYMasters? Maybe it’s time for a brief check up?

• Open Education:
  I’m slowly making my way through the Introduction to Open Education courseware provided by Brigham Young University and thinking about Open Education as part of the greater self-organised learning project. I’m particularly interested in how learning objects can be remixed by students.
• 150 Things About Friendship / Friendship Theory
  This is the element of DIY Masters that was always going to be the most scattered and drawn-0ut. I wish I had more time to spend on doing or making “Things”, but it’s also the most time consuming and expensive element of the project due to the equipment I’d like to get hold of (video camera, audio recording equipment). I am reading about friendship theory as much as possible, though currently I’m limited to accessing journal articles available on the internet.
  I’ll be writing and publishing a list of 100 Potential Things About Friendship very soon.
• Interactive Electronics (Arduino, Processing, Fritzing)
  This is one of the subjects I’m most excited about and one which I’ve actually been able to plan myself. I’m going to blog in detail about this, but I’m hoping to produce my own remixable Open Educational Resource (OER) course book as a result of my learning. That’s in addition to producing actual Things About Friendship which blink and bleep and ping.  I’m super encouraged as Amazon tells me that someone bought me a copy of Tom Igoe and Dan Sullivan’s from my wishlist… I can’t wait to find out the identity of the person who sent it! Thank you as yet unknown supporter!
  
• German
  The subject that’s taking up most of my time and attention at the moment is learning German. For the last 11 weeks I’ve been attending class for 16 hours a week at the collective language learning center Babylonia and studying for an additional 5 hours.
  Because I’m very interested in the social sides of self-organised learning I’m really enjoying learning with peers and teachers in a classroom setting. I even met my swell Quebecois flatmate Glenn in class!
  I’m now at a level where I can talk comfortably about food and have very basic conversations both written and spoken. I’m still confused about the akkusativ, nominativ and dativ cases, but using them is becoming a little more natural. Up next… The future tense and the conditional!

At a more general DIY Masters level I’m thinking about the more directed path I’d take if I were starting the project again. The way my learning project is working is a bit of a test-ground for the concept. So far I’m pretty much going it alone without a mentor to help guide me through the process of deciding what to study and in what order.

I mentioned in my last post 100 Things I Want To Learn, I’d probably have a different list of things to learn if I’d specifically asked “What 100 things do I want to learn / achieve as a result of this learning path?” In the next week I’ll be writing such a list and using it to map out a long-term path of study for the next year.

One other thing that I’m truly excited about and that will change my life is that I’ll be getting access to a university library soon.  I discovered that the Freie Universität Library has free membership for residents of Berlin, and I’ll be able to order in books from other university libraries.  I love libraries. An awful lot.

Which is making me think, how can libraries be brought into a self-organised learning model?

One of my favourite songs by one of my favourite bands, The Van Pelt, is called “Let’s Make A List”. I love Chris Leo’s vocal delivery and the guitar line, but it’s the lyrics about frustrated teachers that really get me:

let’s make a list so we can feel like we’re accomplishing something, so we can feel like we’re working together…

I’m a big fan of making lists, especially as a creativity and brainstorming technique. List-making also has a tendency to come out as part of my writing style and has been a method for one of my 150 Things About Friendship. I often wonder whether I get more or less things done as a result of list-writing, but the act of making them is somewhat satisfying and meditative.

Usually I just list my most immediate thoughts and ideas, rather than pushing through to a specific target amount. Recently, a friend added the article “Tackle Any Issue With a List of 100” to their delicious feed and it started me thinking about “extreme “listing. I’ve been meaning to write a Learning list for a while as part of the DIY Masters project, so I decided to attempt a list of 100 things I want to learn.

I think my question was very general which resulted in a list of general learning rather than “100 Things I want to achieve with my DIY Masters Project”. Most of the 100 things are skills that I want rather than a body of knowledge. Looking over the list I can divide the list into skills I can learn as a result of the DIY Masters project (highlighted), some long-term general learning (botany, musical skills) and a lot of smaller life skills.

Since writing the list earlier this week I’ve found that there’s a local printing museum which runs bookbinding and letterpress tutorials in German. And I keep on coming up with even more things I want to learn, like 101. How to assemble a yurt. As I eventually want to build my own Mongolian style yurt / ger, I might just have to make a new list 100 Things I Want To Make.

But that is another list, for another day.
Anyway, here is the list of things I want to learn in the order they came out of my head:
100 Things I Want To Learn (More) About…

1. Botany
2. A musical instrument: guitar or cello
3. Haircutting
4. How to make a sponge cake
5. How to maintain my bicycle
6. How to make bagels
7. Throat Singing
8. Bookbinding
9. Basic Arabic
10. How to make better Karelian pies (more…)

Over the last months I’ve realised that there are two major components to my DIY Masters project: DIY Masters as a learning concept and the field I want to work in, and the actual learning and skill development I want to achieve as a student. I’m happy with the way the project has developed, as achieving clarity about a long-term career path is something that has been very important to me.

The major goal that I professionally want to achieve with DIY Masters is to develop a sense of greater learning community and help provide tools and services which support self-organised learning networks. My long-term study goal for the project is to find out more about how people become friends and to explore creative ways of representing and exploring these connections beyond social network graphing.

In my first post exploring the idea of a self-organised ‘degree’ I wrote:

How do I give myself a practical and theoretical grounding that will help me be recognised as someone who knows and creatively works around the issues of friendship and society in a technological, globalised urban environment?

It turned out that the societal, technological and globalised issue I want to explore professionally and academically is the self-learning community itself. How convenient is that?! Just to remind you though, this “convenience” is one of the benefits of making your own learning experience, you do have the opportunity to shape your learning experience to your needs and interests.

Luckily, I’m part of a growing global community looking at ideas of future learning and post-graduate educational systems. A few of the lovely people talking about this topic are:

• Andy Gibson and Dougald Hine from School of Everything have been very inspirational to me. Over at they’re thinking about similar concepts and Andy gave me a great write-up on the SoE blog today.
• Andy and Dougald also introduced me to Alexander Pagidas from San Francisco, entrepreneur and author of “Creating the University of the Future”.
• And recently on Zen Habits there was a great (and very topical) post by Jonathon Mead about the pros and cons of self-learning called Land Your Dream Job: Ditch School and Get a Library Card.

I’m really looking forward to growing this community, if you want to talk DIY Masters and self-learning in general – please contact me. I’m also looking for mentors, teachers, peers, task masters and sponsors to support me throughout this project.

During January I recorded a video about starting a DIYMasters degree which has recently been uploaded to the Bank of Common Knowledge.

I met Olivier and Ninon from Barcelona based cultural co-operative system Platoniq while they were running a Free Knowledge Market at Club Transmediale. Their project, Bank of Common Knowledge, was active in one of the display rooms at Kunsthaus Bethanien.

Bank of Common Knowledge operates both as a website and real time skill and knowledge sharing environment. That’s just the type of service that works really well with the concept of DIYMasters, not just as a way of receiving information, but as a way of sharing what you’ve learnt.

As I’ve been having this dream without fail at least twice a year it seemed only reasonable that I actually put some of that nervous energy into actual learning.

And so, DIY Masters was born.

An experience that I really wanted to work, didn’t turn out the way I hoped and tried for.

So I’m Talking To Myself, applying ointment and gauze bandages to my still-beating, growing-ever-stronger heart and thinking about this poem by my friend Mark Niehus:

Note To Self
Forget all the heroes.
Forget all the friends.
Forget your family.
Forget your work
and catch sparks for a living
and think about what those sparks
could be in your hand
and take those sparks as far as you dare
and never ask where they come from.

And reminding myself that when there are two fires trying to burn, there is not much oxygen to spare and soon a window needs to be opened.

A wise woman* once described her self-help ethos to me:

“It’s called ‘Having a talk with yourself.’”

And it was all based on the understanding that it’s far easier to give other people advice than it is to apply those same principles to your own life. When one followed the principles of Having a talk with yourself, you basically talked sense to yourself rather than wallowing and repeating the same behaviour.

If you were feeling sad you should cheer yourself up in the same way that you’d cheer up a friend. Apart from ensuring you ate high quality chocolate, you’d also have a talk with yourself.
Not sure what direction to take your life in? Have a talk with yourself!
Broken up with your girlfriend? Have a talk with yourself!

Of course, it’s far easier to give other people advice than it is to apply those same principles to your own life. Sadly, the wise woman never actually wrote the book or provided me with any more advice about the practical side of having a talk with yourself and taking action afterwards.

Though, I have an idea that one of the best ways to do the “talking” is with regular journalling. The summer that I moved to Helsinki I made some amazing life changes and I feel that the main reason for that action was that I was writing Morning Pages every day for several months. Every morning I effectively was sitting down to a conversation that was about the things I needed to deal with in both the short and long-term. And because I checked in with myself every day, I made sure I took action. It was brilliant.

Frustratingly in the couple of years since I left Finland, I haven’t been able to return to the habit of writing 3 pages a morning. I’ve tried to restart the a couple of times and it just hasn’t felt like the right or the easiest thing to do. Now though I feel like I could start to develop the habit of Morning Pages again. I’m waking up earlier and I have a calm, light room that I want to spend time doing things in. I have a chair I found on Skalitzer Str and a desk my landlord gave me when he was cleaning out the cellar. Now I just need to try and keep waking up earlier every day!

* The wise woman is my old housemate Marlaina Read. You can check out her photos or take a look at the online arts journal Invisible City that’s she’s launching this week.

One of the reasons that I’ve become so interested in the process of friendship creation is that over the last 3 years I’ve been moving from place to place. I’ve stayed in Helsinki, Sheffield and Berlin for a minimum of three months each, which is long enough to develop a collection of acquaintances and friends in each city. As a result of actively trying to make new friends with each move, I’ve increasingly become aware of how my friendships begin.

I think that I’m most interested in the ‘betweenness’ of two people becoming friends and one of the topics I wish to explore is how a developing friendship is acknowledged: how do they negotiate and acknowledge that transition, what level of formality is assumed, are there cultural associations marking the transition of friendship?

To elaborate on this point, I’ll paraphrase my Quebecois flatmate:

How many of your Facebook friends do you kiss [on the cheek]?

I have close friends in all of the places I lived who I hug or kiss upon greeting, but from my perspective that is not part of my formal culture as it is for other, particularly French speaking people.

At a language level does the shift from the formal to informal pronoun (vous/ tu in French, Sie, du in German) happen before, at a similar time or after the cheek kissing? I have a feeling that traditionally, language shifts would have been a more important signifier of intimacy in Europe, but what about with languages such as Japanese of Korean?

I’m interested in exploring this cultural friendship marker further, at some point after first meeting, two people decide that they are now “kissing friends”. What type of developments and conversations happen to encourage that transition? At what level of intimacy and shared personal histories does this happen? Are most people unaware of this transition or do they make a conscious decision to move a friendship forward?

This article from the Psychology Today website that has really helped me focus some of my thoughts about the process of how we become friends. I’d particularly like to get hold of a book by Beverly Pehr called which is mentioned in the article and unavailable in Berlin libraries.

If you’d like to support my DIYMasters you can make a donation, or you could buy Friendship Processes or another item from my Amazon wishlist.

The motivations for Open Educational Resources (OER) have changed over the history of OER, particularly for individuals and institutions in the developed world.

Motivations for the continued development of the Open Education Resources (OER) model as part of the open education movement can be broken into several categories that result from openness and alternative licensing models: quality, adaptable and accessible to all.

Initially the move towards electronic learning objects seemed to have been motivated by the glories of technology and the compulsion to do something impressive with the potential. For an educational institution to be recognised as contemporary and viable in the modern world, they had to show how they were using all the bells and whistles available to them. How could institutions use technology to develop flexible and effective learning content?

Seeking permission to use copyrighted materials was time consuming and costly, and the dream of micro-payments across the web never really came into being. As the difficulty of trying to make flexible and reusable learning objects became apparent, there was a move to a content model that wasn’t restricted by copyright.

Quality
Quality of learning materials are improved under an open license as there is a motivation to maintain their creator’s reputation. ¹

When learning objects are published under an open license, anyone can review their content. If content is visible to not just students, but fellow teachers, private investors, parents and the media, there is a motivation to produce higher quality learning materials.

OER are also more likely to be maintained with timely changes. Objects that are published under an appropriate license such as Creative Commons By ²
are able to be modified as long as the original author is attributed. This enables a user to “remix” the content, eg. incorporating updated statistics that support the credibility of the original document.

Adaptability

OER are more likely to be flexible as they become objects that can reused by a greater audience. In order for objects to be used by a greater number of people, the resources may need to be changed to suit their audience.

Translation from the original language into one or more target languages is a primary example of how learning objects can be adapted. Over 100 of MIT’s OpenCourseWare courses have been translated into more than 10 languages.³
Materials that contain a Creative Commons No Derivatives clause as part of their license are not able to be translated. ⁴

Educators may not have the time or money to develop original course content as required. If they choose pre-existing course modules and order them to create a course of study for their students, they are adapting the content.

As with making any changes to OER, this reordering of scope and sequence depends on the license the original materials have. The ability to remix individual course modules also depends on the granularity and format of the content. ⁵

Accessibility

Personally I feel that whether it’s for technology or education or plant seeds, the move towards openness inevitably becomes a discussion about equality and access. If educational institutions are to have the right of open content, they also inherit the responsibility to maintain and share the open content with anyone else who requires it.

This transition towards (open) educational resources for the common good is motivated not just by theory, but by need at the level of a basic human right:

Universal Declaration of Human Rights Article 26.1

(1) Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.

If there is a significant time and financial cost when trying to access to materials containing knowledge worth learning, then surely that textbook, video or course module isn’t going to be equally accessible.

In the primers available at www.right-to-education.org, there is an emphasis placed on primary education funding and rights. This is a just emphasis as in order for people to enter into further education or to participate in life-long learning, they need to have basic education.

However, even with an estimated 100-to-150 million children around the world excluded from basic primary education ⁶, there is also a strong need for open learning models for those requiring higher education learning environments:

Today, there are over thirty million people who are fully qualified to enter a university but there is no place available. This number will grow to over 100 million over the next decade. To meet the staggering global demand for advanced education, a major university needs to be created every week.
Sir John Daniel, 1996

Spreading a Message
The lecture and several of the course readings describe the spreading of the Seventh Day Adventist Gospel as a motivation for OE. While this is a motivation that I don’t personally subscribe to, I do recognise that for some institutions such as the Brigham Young Institution this may have been something they considered when moving to an Open Education model.