The School of Continuing Education

Five outposts for ongoing learning, or how to master French cuisine, rock music, and sailing at your leisure.

People crave information — you’re reading this, aren’t you? And the fundamental human drive to seek out more and more knowledge has only grown since ur times. We’re still blown away by the recently mentioned 34-gigabytes-of-data-per-day diet of the average American.

One area where we’re really excited about the possibilities of on-demand data delivery is education. (Excitement we’ve voiced in a recent contribution to GOOD Magazine.) Whether it’s using online media to organize collective learning in the analog world, or the classes themselves take place online, the Internet enables people to seek out and receive education in ways they never could have before. These opportunities for lifelong learning take advantage of simple supply-and-demand economics — those who want to learn finding those who want to teach — for every conceivable subject, and then some. (Shoe Shining 101, we’re looking at you.)

Here, then, are five examples of extension-style schooling that can change the way we think about acquiring knowledge.

UNIVERSITY OF THE PEOPLE

The first tuition-free global education with real academic cred, University of the People was founded by e-learning entrepreneur Shai Reshef with the developing world in mind. It may not have the brick-and-mortar facades of McKim, Mead, and White but that’s precisely its point; thanks to open-source courseware and without the need for endowments, the University can focus on delivering degrees at the lowest cost possible. Requirements for attendance include a high school degree, fluency in English, and an admissions fee of $15 to $50 on a sliding scale depending on a student’s country of origin.

University of the People‘s first class of 178 students representing 49 countries enrolled in its grand educational experiment in fall of 2009. While the University’s results are as up in the air as its curriculum, we’re optimistic about what this virtual institution heralds for the future.

(UN)CLASSES

The product of LaidOffCamp, a BarCamp-style event for unemployed New Yorkers, (un)classes offered its first class in March of 2009. (It was “How to be a digital nomad,” a course on sustaining an itinerant lifestyle while still holding jobs.)

To set up an unclass, you register with the site and then create a new course listing, either as a prospective student or as an instructor. Other people in your area interested in the same topic can join in, and since the process is self-organizing, the group determines when and where to meet. Most unclasses are one-off experiences, since the site bills itself as casual learning for people “who have hectic lives and struggle to find fun and interesting ways to satisfy their intellectual curiosity in the limited free time they have. Think of it as educational snacking, a low-touch way to explore topics that interest you.”

(un)classes has built a base around major cities in the Americas from Bahru to Vancouver (with a strong skew toward California), offering a range of un-course options from Ayurvedic cooking to Zen meditation.

SKILLSHARES

With its roots in DIY, craft, and hacking culture, Skillsharing has gained adherents during the current recession as a way to acquire new skills without dropping a lot of dough. Volunteers donate their time and talents to organize a weekend of events that share a distinctly makers’ faire flavor; many of the offerings involve bartering and tinkering, whether with kombucha or Wii remotes.

At a recent Skillshare event in In addition to Brooklyn, participants chose from a session listing that included hands-on workshops in bicycle repair and screenprinting (above, respectively). Other major Skillshares exist in Austin and Boston, and we bet there are more — let us know in the comments if you’ve shared your skills elsewhere.

SUPERCOOL SCHOOL

Supercool School bears the tagline “Start your own online school,” and while it doesn’t provide physical materials, it does come with a host of virtual tools you’d want to create and customize an educational experience. The e-learning startup is based in Berlin, San Francisco, and St. Petersburg, where its founders are located.

Once you sign up to start your own school, you can choose between a free hosted version, which accommodates 15 students, or subscribe to access Supercool School‘s more robust suite of media options. (There’s also an enterprise-level service for heavy-hitting educators who really want to have more control over their online learning environment.)

Just think — where individuals and small collectives once had to raise extensive funds as endowments, they can now open a school with a series of mouse clicks. Perhaps the future of the Internet holds more than LOLcats after all.

SCHOOL OF EVERYTHING

With big-time investors like Channel 4 and Esther Dyson, and unique monthly site visits in the hundreds of thousands, the UK-based School of Everything is strongly positioned as a cross between a networking platform like Meetup.com and the online classifieds behemoth Craigslist.

A marketplace for learning opportunities, the School of Everything lets you browse by location or topic, and then register your interest in either learning or teaching. Instructors have the option of charging for lessons, so the site lends itself to the kinds of listings you were likely to see tacked to bulletin boards in earlier years, with a strong showing in arts instruction and tutoring topics. School of Everything recently received a contract from the British government to grow domestically, bringing more of everything to those who want to learn it.

We know that these five initiatives are but a sliver of today’s e-enabled education landscape. If this post has tickled your passion for lifelong learning, you might enjoy one of our favorite websites, Open Culture — a fantastic compendium of free and low-cost learning opportunities.

Just don’t blame us when you emerge hours later, bleary eyed but much stronger on the fundamentals of biology.

Kirstin Butler has a Bachelor’s in art & architectural history and a Master’s in public policy from Harvard University. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn as a freelance editor and researcher, where she also spends way too much time on Twitter. For more of her thoughts, check out her videoblog.

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The Red Book: When Carl Jung Lost His Soul

Psychotherapy as theater, or interpreting the imagery of one of history’s most famous interpreters.

In Jungian circles, it was as hotly anticipated as the new Dan Brown thriller, and the story of how it came to light reads like one to match. The Red Book — or Liber Novus (Latin for “New Book”), as it’s known by his disciples — was created by Swiss psychoanalyst and theorist Carl Jung over a main period of six years beginning in 1913. Like a cross between an illuminated manuscript, personal journal, and a tome of mini Buddhist mandalas, The Red Book provides a singular and extraordinary insight into one of the 20th century’s most celebrated minds. What’s more, it documents what happened when one of the world’s premier psychoanalysts lost his soul, according to some accounts.

We first heard about The Red Book when we enjoyed an article of epic proportions about its history in The New York Times. Jung, the founder of modern analytical psychology, started the book at a time in his life described alternately (depending on the account) as a mid-life crisis, a psychotic break, or a reflection of the chaos that enveloped Europe during World War I.

Regardless of your position on its origins, it’s hard to resist the Book’s intrigue, or its illustrations. Within the pages of the original, physical leather-bound red book, Jung practiced with himself what he was doing daily in his patient practice: taking deliberately deep dives into his murky unconscious and recording everything when he emerged.

Intricately painted pages alternate with accounts of his dreams, both sleeping and waking, and the results were bizarre enough that his heirs spent decades treating the tome like samizdat following his death in 1961. (The Jung family drama is reason enough to read the excellent Times piece, which captures the almost absurd sense of secrecy surrounding the book and its embattled history.)

Jung’s adherents ultimately won the battle, which is how The Red Book finally appeared in print last October. Now, after being subjected to scholarly treatment and high-resolution scans, Jung’s protean visions can be a part of your personal library. In the course of its 205 runic pages he takes a trippy journey accompanied by spirit guides, depicted in a manner that somehow simultaneously recalls D’aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths and so-called outsider art. And now The Red Book has also made the physical trip to New York City’s Rubin Museum of Art, where it’s currently on display until February 15th.

What we’re even more jazzed about, though, is the programming that the Rubin planned around the exhibition. In a series of talks called The Red Book Dialogues, the museum curated more than 30 fantastic pairings of cultural creatives and Jungian analysts to talk about the book, themselves, and the collective unconscious. Many of these talks are now available as podcasts from one of our favorite NPR station sites, WNYC.

Hear what happens when a range of famous names do cold readings of images from the book. Author Alice Walker, director Charlie Kauffman (“My first instinct was torture, but that’s me”), and Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan each offer fascinating free associations on Jung’s koans. We’re hopeful that more talks will come online soon. (In fact, might we be so bold as to suggest starting with composer John Adams, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, designer — and TEDster — Stefan Sagmeister, and comedian Sarah Silverman?)

Explore your own unconscious reactions to The Red Book via a preview, the Rubin’s film series, WNYC’s audio podcasts, or if you’re lucky enough to be able to make the trip, in person.

Kirstin Butler is writing an adaptation of Gogol for the Google era called Dead SULs, but when not working spends far, far too much time on Twitter. She currently lives in Cambridge, MA.

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Charting The Beatles

Some Beatles are more equal than others, or why there’s no yellow in Yellow Submarine.

We love data visualization. And we love The Beatles. Naturally, we’re all over New-York-based designer Michael Deal‘s Charting The Beatles project — an infographic exploration of the life and music of the iconic rockers, from sales statistics to personal biographies to songwriting contributions within the band.

Deal envisioned the project as a collaborative one, so there’s a Flickr pool where others can contribute their Beatles-charting exploits. There, you can find gems like Kristen E. Long’s rather convincing visual argument for The Beatles’ superior popularity over Jesus.

Besides the incredibly detailed and scholarly data revealing anything from common Beatles wisdom to little-known factoids (Did you know Ringo Starr only ever collaborated on two songs, “Dig It” and “Flying,” and “Octopus’s Garden” was the only track he wrote entirely by himself?), the project bespeaks the very richness and expanse of The Beatles’ music-turned-movement.

Charting The Beatles is the hipster answer to Christian Swinehart’s wonderfully geeky infographic dissection of Choose Your Own Adventure books. And between the richness of factual detail and the universal cultural resonance of the subject matter, it’s among the most delightful visualization projects we’ve come across in quite some time.

via Information is Beautiful

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