It’s been a while since I blogged about what we’re up to at School of Everything. I’ll try to do it a bit more often over the next few months because there’s lots going on.

The very cool thing that we’ve just launched is School of Everything Gifts so instead of buying your loved ones socks for Christmas, why not get them a lesson? We’ve already got some great gifts available including memory lessons and bread making but we’re also growing the list of what’s available every day. And let us know if there’s a lesson you’d like and we’ll see what we can do to track down a teacher for you!

Ivo and the team have put the whole of Us Now up online for everybody to watch. So you’ve got no excuses for not watching me in slightly soft-focus.

Us Now from Banyak Films on Vimeo.

We found out yesterday that School of Everything has been made an Official Honoree for the Webby Awards in the Education category. It all makes me feel very proud of the team and grateful to everybody who has helped us along the way. It’s been so rewarding to see something through from just an idea to award winning site with tens of thousands of members.

[This is a slightly adapted version of a short talk I gave at MASS LBP on 10 March 2009 in Toronto, Canada]

It feels a bit unfashionable in tumultuous times like these but there’s something you should know about me before we start. I’m an optimist - a practical optimist in that I like making things happen and changing things for the better. I’m a great believer that the direction of human progress is towards greater and greater ability to solve problems. People are getting more intelligent individually and groups of people are getting even smarter because of new tools for collaboration and new ways of co-ordinating activity.

This talk stems from some things I’ve learned over the last five years about what’s possible when you try to take ideas that could change the world and put them into action using web technologies. It’s also about a quote that I made in a film called Us Now that got me in a little bit of trouble with my political friends:

“Representative democracy is based on the assumption that people are thick. And that’s just not true.”

It was one of those things that just came out of my mouth without much thought beforehand. The advantage of saying it on film is that I’ve had to think about it afterwards. What I meant was that by putting decisions and the provision of public services in the hands of a small group of elected representatives we miss a massive opportunity to tap the power of people to solve their own problems.

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Ken Robinson says in his now pretty famous TED talk that if you mention to someone that you work in education you can watch peoples’ faces drop, but ask them about their own experience of education and you can’t shut them up. So it was just over two years ago when a bunch of us sat in a room to talk about how we might set up a new school. One by one we talked about our experiences – good and bad – of education whether primary, secondary, at university or at work. What was obvious to all of us by the end of the day was that education was still designed for the industrial, factory based era and had barely been updated at all. It is still basically a one-size-fits-all system where information is passed down from people who know to people who don’t.

Two years later and I share an office with several of the people in that room. Rather than starting a school, we went away and founded a company, raised investment and built School of Everything. We spotted an opportunity to use the internet to connect people who have something to teach with those who want to learn directly, without the help of educational institutions. It’s growing fast, not just in the UK but in other countries too. We’ve found that there’s a desire to organise learning in a simpler more efficient way.

We’re not the only people trying to do it. In the UK Beanbag Learning, and in the US start-ups like Teachstreet, Edufire and Grockit are all trying to find ways to revolutionise education and it’s a growing scene. Today we got a bunch of UK start-ups together in London to swap war-stories and tips about how to change education from the bottom up at Bettr. Then at the SICamp meetup we got people together to pitch new education start-up ideas and try to find the people who can help them to make them happen.

But why start-ups? Why can’t established large companies or agencies innovate? I believe that small, cheap, nimble organisations using technology to develop new products and services will be better at coming up with completely new ways of thinking about the structure of the education system. When you decide to put your energy into a start-up, you don’t start from the perspective of ‘designing a faster horse’, you think differently. You have an interest in the overall success and scalability of the project, not in a contract. You focus on the end user rather than what somebody would like who already has a vested interest in the way things are organized now.

And despite the downturn, education is one area where the investors are still interested. The penny has dropped that education is a massive opportunity, almost no matter what the economic climate. As the renowned venture capitalist Fred Wilson has said “It’s the entire education system that’s stuck in the past. I’ve been thinking a lot about it lately, and I’ve come to believe that we need to completely reinvent the way we educate ourselves.” Silicon Valley commentator Umair Haque has also said that reorganising education is one of the biggest opportunities of the 21st century.

At School of Everything we’re trying to change the way people organize their learning. We’re not out to put professional teachers out of a job or commoditize education (plenty of people offer to teach on School of Everything for free). We think the old ways of finding information and collaborating with others will still exist, but education needs a real shake-up and to imagine a way of organising itself that is very different from the industrial age. It’s been start-ups that have done that for the way we buy and sell, the way we find information and the way we communicate with friends and family. Education is already changing but the sense of opportunity is growing. In 10 years time, the way we organize learning will be almost unrecognisable from today.

Wednesday next week is going to be a busy day. During the day it’s Bettr (co-organised by Beanbag and School of Everything) where we’re getting together as many start-ups working on revolutionising education as possible. It’s going to be an unconference so no big speeches. Then in the evening we’re hosting a Social Innovation Camp Meetup all about education start-ups too. It does seem like the kind of technology and education world that we’re working in with School of Everything is an area that’s hotting up. That’s a very good thing.

There’s an interesting piece in New Scientist this week by perhaps an unlikely education policy commentator, Richard Hammond of Top Gear fame.

“It’s not a case of getting kids interested in science. You just have to find a way to avoid killing the passion for learning that they were born with. I think it’s no coincidence that kids start deserting science the moment it becomes formalised. Children naturally have a blurred approach to acquiring knowledge. They see learning about science or biology or cooking or how not to close a door on your feet as all part of the same act - it’s all learning. It’s only because of the practicalities of education that you have to start breaking down the curriculum into specialist subjects. You need to have a timetable, and you need to have specialist teachers who impart what they know. Thus once they enter the formalised medium of school, children begin to delineate subjects and erect boundaries that needn’t otherwise exist.”

It’s not big and it’s not clever as I point out on the Guardian’s PDA Blog today. I should also say that the idea really comes from a far cleverer person than me. Tim O’Reilly uses it in this fantastic talk.

A few weeks ago I had an argument about the future of the human race that baffled me. I won’t say who with, but he’s an environmentalist of note (who is in his 50s I guess). It went something like this:

Him: We have a problem.
Me: Agreed.
Him: It’s really bad.
Me: Yep.
Him: You should be really scared because you’re under 40.
Me: Not really.
Him: But unless we convince people that it’s really, really bad nothing will change.
Me: I’m not so sure - I don’t think scaring people makes them change.
Him: How do you expect governments to regulate the problem unless people are really scared?
Me: I don’t assume that governments will do anything. I think fantastic ordinary people will create sustainable ways of organising themselves and the planet’s resources. I’m sure governments will catch up in the end but there’s no point waiting around.

At that stage we had to agree to disagree. He believes pessimism will save the world and I don’t. I’m an optimist - probably with a little bit of anarchist libertarianism thrown in. The two don’t really mix.

The last couple of months have been the most economically turbulent of my lifetime, the future is the least certain of any I can remember and I’m very aware that it could get worse. I also know the scale of the even bigger problems. I’ve seen poverty, suffering and injustice first hand and I’m fully aware of the numbers when it comes to climate change.

But I’m still an optimist.

A few days after the optimism argument I was with my friend Rob at the spot by the Brooklyn Bridge in New York where you look out over the East River to the downtown Manhattan skyline. The market was collapsing around us but we had a beer and the air was still warm. We’ve both now done some time in start-ups and we were talking about the highs and lows of start-up life. If you want a quiet time, we agreed, don’t try to change the world.

But the other thing we realised was that we were confident about our futures because no matter what happened we knew we could make things happen with almost no resources. Learning how to start something up means that you know you can turn your hand to most things and it gives you a confidence that anything is possible.

Yesterday I met Ali Clabburn who has gradually built up Liftshare over the last ten years. Each day 40,000 car journeys are not made because Ali was an optimist when people told him it would never work. Since the 1960s average car occupany had dropped and dropped. But for the last three years, it has risen. Liftshare, with it’s 300,000 self-organising members has started to turn the tanker.

Then I look at all the young campaigners in Battlefront including the amazing Zuhal who I’m mentoring (really she’s mentoring me). These are kids who are supposed to be thick, apathetic and pure individualists (if you believe the Daily Mail) who are setting out to change the world. None of them lacks ambition. And yes, they are optimists.

And then tomorrow we will choose the finalists for Social Innovation Camp 2. I have no doubt that we’ll find some more optimists there.

So while sometimes I do get a bit uncomfortable being called an entrepreneur (I don’t think I have enough chest hair to fit that particular mould), I’m happy to call myself an optimist. In fact, I’ve come to realise I’m a practical optimist and proud.

There was a really nice piece about School of Everything in yesterday’s Financial Times. It was quite funny for me because Jonathan had told me that it was coming out on a Wednesday and I have a long running battle with my local newsagent who insists that the FT isn’t published on a Wednesday and so never stocks it.

Anyway, I think the main theme that comes out is the difference between motivations on either side of the Atlantic for creating web businesses. Obviously it’s a huge generalisation because there are some fantastic ‘change the world’ businesses that have come out of silicon valley, but I do feel that London is more of a hotbed for Umair’s ‘next industrial revolution’ and Tim’s ‘web meets world’ stuff at the moment.

On that note, do submit your ideas for Social Innovation Camp. Just a week and a bit to go until the deadline. And here’s a fantastic little video that explains the concept from the wonderful glovepuppet.