"Learning and the Web. Two powerful forces of change converge in a public square. Their dimensions are unpredictable, and many of the outcomes of their convergence will be unintended, but this experiment is not entirely uncontrolled. This group of scholars, hackers, and activists has calculated the likely conditions, wired in all the right connections. When lightning strikes, they’ll be ready.

You are reading the ebook version of Learning, Freedom and the Web by Anya Kamenetz, published by the Mozilla Foundation. This ebook was designed and built by faculty and students at Emily Carr University's Social + Interactive Media Centre, with the assistance of Steam Clock Software."

"Parallel school of art is a virtual and international school where those who want to self-educate themselves can share what they are doing and thinking about, as well as their interests and projects.

Parallel school wants to generate and spread work emulation through the development of self-initiated projects such as publications, meetings, lectures, workshops, etc.

Parallel school would like to bring together the knowledge, experiences and energy from students all over the world.

Parallel School is an umbrella that is free to use by anyone interested in doing so."

"…one summer day 3 years ago, I visited…a little bookstore in Portland…asked the owner what her favorite books were. "That one!" she said w/out hesitation, pointing to The Teeneage Liberation Handbook…by Grace Llewellyn…<br />
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When I returned to Oberlin that fall, I realized that there were no courses covering the things I most wanted to learn. No sex classes…friendship classes…classes on how to build an organization, raise money, navigate a bureaucracy, create a database, buy a house, love a child, spot a scam, ask the right questions, talk someone out of suicide, or figure out what's important. Those are the things that enhance or mess up people's lives, not whether they know economic theory or can analyze literature.<br />
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So I quit…& enrolled …at the University of Planet Earth, the world's oldest & largest educational institution. It has billions of professors, tens of millions of books, and unlimited course offerings. Tuition is free, & everybody designs his or her own major."

"1. A huge wave of homeschooling will create a more self-directed workforce…Gen X is more comfortable working outside system than Baby Boomers…<br />
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2. Homeschooling as kids will become unschooling as adults…school does not prepare people for work…Gen Y has been very vocal about this problem…<br />
3. The college degree will return to its bourgeois roots; entrepreneurship will rule. The homeschooling movement will prepare Gen Y to skip college, & Gen X is out-of-the-box enough in their parenting to support that…<br />
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Baby Boomers are too competitive to risk pulling college rug out from under kids. Gen Y are rule followers—if adults tell them to go to college, they will. Gen X is very practical…1st gen in US history to have less money than parents…makes sense that Gen X would be generation to tell kids to forget about college.<br />
90% of Gen Y say they want to be entrepreneurs, but only very small % of them will ever launch full-fledged business, because Generation Y are not really risk takers."

"About vizKlut: This panel is part of vizKult, a loose band of artist and writers exploring the ‘cult of vision’. This group explores the ways in which the visual operates in our society and the mechanism which manufacture, shape, and control the world around us. In this sense VizKult’s emphasis is on the process rather than the products of our contemporary visual condition."

"Ultimately, Zoch maintains, all education is self-education. The secret of academic success is no different from success in other fields of endeavor, and it involves hard work, the will to succeed, and practice, practice, practice. Yet when students fail or become bored, critics insist that it is the teacher's fault. Zoch shows persuasively and in great detail that progressives derided instruction but never held students accountable for their own learning; it is always the teacher who is to blame if the children aren't motivated. Consequently, students have come to expect that their teachers must entertain them. As one of Zoch's students said to him one day, "Maybe if you'd sing and dance, we'd learn this stuff.""

"All education is self-education.  Period.  It doesn’t matter if you’re sitting in a college classroom or a coffee shop.  We don’t learn anything we don’t want to learn.<br />
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Those people who take the time and initiative to pursue knowledge on their own are the only ones who earn a real education in this world.  Take a look at any widely acclaimed scholar, entrepreneur or historical figure you can think of.  Formal education or not, you’ll find that he or she is a product of continuous self-education.<br />
<br />
If you’re interested in learning something new, this article is for you.  Broken down by subject and/or category, here are several top-notch self-education resources I have bookmarked online over the past few years.<br />
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Note that some of the sources overlap between various subjects of education.  Therefore, each has been placed under a specific subject based on the majority focus of the source’s content."

"Raised by independent-thinking bohemian parents, Taylor was unschooled until age 13. Join the filmmaker as she shares her personal experiences of growing up home-schooled without a curriculum or schedule, and how it has shaped her educational philosophy and development as an artist."

[Book list mentioned in the intro is here: http://blogs.walkerart.org/ecp/2009/10/14/astra-taylor-on-the-unschooled-life/ ] [Similar interview here: http://citizenshift.org/node/21634&term_tid=100004 ]

[Blogged here: http://robertogreco.tumblr.com/post/1567646430/make-some-time-to-watch-astra-taylor-on-the ]

"Look people in the eyes when you are talking or listening to them. The best teachers are the ones who treat their classrooms like a workplace, & the worst are ones who treat their classroom like a classroom as we’ve come to expect it… Libraries are a good place. The books are free there, & it smells great… beat them by being more thoughtful. Thoughtfulness is free & burns on time & empathy… The best communicators are gift-givers… Don’t become dependent on having other people pull it out of you while you’re in school. If you do, you’re hosed once you graduate. Keep two books on your nightstand at all times: one fiction, one non-fiction… Buy lightly used. Patina is a pretty word & beautiful concept… Learn to write, & not school-style writing… Most important things happen at a table. Food, friends, discussion, ideas, work, peace talks & war plans. It is okay to romanticize things a little bit every now & then: it gives you hope… Everyone is just making it up as they go along."

The paradox of self-education is that there are intellectually stimulating endeavors which don’t have a direct impact in the job market or in school. While learning is generally a valued skill, and the knowledge attained by it sought after, there is a limitation of the desire to learn (and by extension, produce) due to these systematic social constructs...

[Response to: http://www.adambossy.com/blog/2009/02/19/the-paradox-of-self-education/ ] [Very close to my concept of taking retirement every few years as creative sabbaticals rather than in a lump sum at the end of my career.]

"My goal now is to live frugally so I can set aside big enough bucket of money to get me through year w/out work. Then...I’ll spend a year learning something of interest, possibly making small amounts of money on side. When needed, I’ll start working & hopefully keep repeating this process. If something I do makes me tons of money, great. If not…well it’s not about money.

"What a shame. Reading Rainbow was a relic of an old world. A world where asking “Why?” was just as important as “How?” Seems that the more complex we make our lives, the more everyone feels we need to explain the How. It’s been a priority shift in education and in what we perceive as the best way to cope with the complexity of the world.

"College works on the factory model, & is in many ways not suited to training entrepreneurs. You put in a student & out comes a scholar.

"Our aim is to foster a reckless kind of genius that rips across disciplines and is always conscious that the work of the classroom should not stay in the classroom. Are we a training camp? Are we an observatory? Are we a university? It is yet to be determined.

"the skills that are easiest to teach and test are also the ones that are easiest to digitize and outsource

"James Bach...just published Secrets of a Buccaneer-Scholar, tale of how he dropped out of school, became self-taught games programmer & scored sweet gig at Apple—all before turning 21...main purpose, illustrated by excerpt...is to show how education is not about pieces of paper on walls, but knowledge you cram inside your own head. His book is a discussion of his mindframe as he embarked on a life of self-education...became what he calls a "buccaneer-scholar."...sneak away & read...studying without interruption..not just about software...find solutions to problems in other disciplines....pattern I experienced at Apple would be confirmed almost everywhere in computer industry: most people have put themselves on intellectual autopilot...don't study on their own initiative, but only when forced to do so. Even when they study, they choose to study the obvious & conventional subjects. This has the effect of making them more alike instead of more unique...an educational herd mentality."

"He had taken what nature had given him"—a robust native intelligence, a strong will & a commanding physical presence—"& through ­observation, self-scrutiny, thoughtfulness, perseverance, & industry reached a point that others saw him as a potential leader." Quite an attainment for a relatively poor, untraveled & totally self-educated younger son of a minor planter, although Mr. Ferling thinks that lucky timing had a lot to do with it. Washington...was "precisely the right age for every epic event of the 2nd half of the 18th century." But so were countless other people born in 1732, only to live & die in obscurity. Consider the crop of egomaniacal liberators & revolutionary ­heroes-turned-caudillos who soon afterward made a mess of Latin America—not to mention Napoleon, whose infatuation with his own destiny led to European tyranny & slaughter on an epic scale—& the conclusion is inescapable. Revolutionary-era America was lucky to have George Washington, not the other way around.

"Much of the Web's value is experienced at the personal level and does not show up in productivity numbers…Each day more enjoyment, more social connection, &, indeed, more contemplation are produced on the Web than had been imagined even 10 years ago. But how do we measure those things? That question -- and I don't yet have a full answer -- reflects the state of flux we're in today.…I call it the "human capital dividend." The reallocation of consumer time into the "free sector" on the Web will liberate the efforts of many producers and intermediaries…A second part of the human capital dividend comes from our productivity as Web consumers. Billions of people are rapidly becoming more knowledgeable and better connected to one another. Self-education has never been more fun, and that is because we are in control of that process like never before…it may sound counterintuitive, but the more time you spend staring at your screen, the bigger that human capital dividend will be."

"Philippe was so impressed by Sugata Mitra’s presentation of his hole in the wall project (which received more than 25′000 views on liftconference.com and ended up being published on TED talks) that he flew to India to shoot street kids experimenting with self-education." see also: http://www.flickr.com/photos/phitar/sets/72157609414016354/