b a t t l e c a t . n e t

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.