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

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 EverythingHQ 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.