Freeschools

Here's a video of a talk I did for my friend and Sociability Associate Saul Albert back in October, explaining my Freeschools project. It's a bit long and more than a little rambling, but some of you might find it interesting, if only for the fluffiness of my hair.

[googlevideo=http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=-581629410176628745&q=%22Peer+Education+briefing%22&pr=goog-sl]

It picks up from about 7 minutes in. (There's also a transcript and some interesting marginal discussions on our Freeschool Commentpress site.)

The Freeschools concept is my favourite "social technology" project right now because it's so simple. Through the simple application of two colours of post-it notes and some simple "social software", it is possible to turn any group of people into a learning network. We're starting to spread this concept via the School of Everything now, and already people are beginning to run these evenings all around the country. If you'd like to have a go at starting your own freeschool, the instructions are here.

The Freeschool concept is based on the experiments of the Palo Alto Free U, on which the School of Everything is based and which I explain a little in the talk. You can see a Freeschool experiment in action in the second half of the video. I think as a social research project, it demonstrates two very important things: firstly, all people need to begin sharing their skills is a clear process for sharing what they know, and what they need; and secondly, you never know what people know.

Freeschools are more than just experiments for me though, they are a good example of an emerging methodology for designing social interactions, once called "social engineering" but which might now be termed social design. In modelling processes for constructing interactive software applications, we are discovering new ways to model all the other interactions in our lives too.

In each strand of my work at the moment, my underlying purpose seems to be to reduce what we're doing to the simplest format possible. For the RSA Networks we reduced the process of incubating projects to "propose -> discuss -> support". For Croydon Council last week I was modelling citizen-led campaigning as "Be heard. Get involved. Make change." My colleague Mary recently reduced the process of a peer-to-peer project support group to "what are you doing, and what do you need help with?"

It may feel like oversimplification, human interactions are surely too rich to really be defined in such crude terms. But that's the joy of complex systems: a few simple rules can have huge and unpredictable consequences. After all, Go is a very simple game. So is football for that matter. Freeschools are a very simple idea, but their potential for impact is complex and far-reaching. And most importantly, they demonstrate that you don't need the internet to have social technology.

If:blog

Last week I gave a talk on peer learning with Ben Vershbow of NY think-tank if:book. He's been doing some fabulous things in collaborative reading, which I think could have big implications for the way blogs and discussion forums interact. If:book have developed a hack for the Wordpress platform which places comments to the right of each paragraph of a blog post. It's based on marginalia in old-fashioned academic texts and is intended to allow collaborative annotation of academic texts - but it's such a simple tool that I think it's got much wider implications.

We've been playing with an installation of the system based on the talk we gave at www.futureofthebook.org/freeschool, with some success.

The software itself is available for free at www.futureofthebook.org/commentpress. I strongly urge you to check it out and put it to good use!

Wikimania

I've been thinking about wikis a lot lately. I've been plotting various wiki projects for Skillset around job profiles to establish the "official" and the "actual" stories about what people really do for a living. The new Wikimono app on Facebook looks very interesting. And I had a good chat with Paul Youlten yesterday about his new WikiLaLa project for film and TV. Maybe there's something in the water at the moment. I like the concept of wikis. Any software that assumes everybody can be trusted seems to be aiming in the right direction. But they can be tricky to get right. I created a wiki for my FreeSchool project, but I didn't really manage to create the communal area that I was looking for. We've used them for School of Everything too, but the biggest problem there was that on any important issue, the debate would progress offline and the wiki would often end up being inaccurate. They also don't handle decision-making terribly well. Major exceptions like Wikipedia aside, I think wikis work best when they're contained within a community. If there's a pre-existing team working on a project, a wiki can be a great repository of information; a space for recording progress and keeping notes. Wikimono may work well too, by providing wikis for events, groups, communities that create manageable chunks of collaboration. Let's see how it takes off.

For more fluid activities though, other paradigms may be needed. There are "blikis" - blogs as the front-ends for wikis - which neatly introduces a time dimension into the wiki information to give it some context. MediaWiki can often be more useful for its comments engine than the wiki itself. I'm also meeting the guy at if:book who developed the CommentPress engine on Wednesday, so I'll keep you posted on that too. The search continues.