With liberty and open access for all

Have you ever heard of open access? It means “even people who aren’t in college should be able to read the results of our country’s best researchers and thinkers.” Well, not literally. But that’s the general idea.

Think about the parents of a child with a rare disease, who want to read the latest medical journal articles. Or a small-town journalist struggling to understand the implications of a local enviornmental problem. Or even an amateur enthusiast who wants to see the research published by this year’s Nobel prize winners.

If you’re not a college student or professor, you’re largely left out in the cold when it comes to vast amounts of useful information (much of which we as taxpayers have helped to fund). For example, my own alma mater will not allow alumni to purchase access to their library databases for any price. (For $200/year, you can sit in the library and look at a printed book, but millions of journal articles and other electronic resources are forbidden.)

Even if you are in college, costs can be an issue. I remember being shocked that a “bulkpack” of readings for one of my classes cost $70 — and that was years ago. For students who are on scholarship and/or working their way through school, expensive coursebooks and readings are a significant barrier to getting the class materials they need, promptly and effectively.

The good news is that some passionate and visionary people have been working to change the current, locked-down system. Go read one of them now.

posted by Sra. Bibliotecaria ⋅ Comments Off ⋅ tagged Uncategorized, academia, free culture, research, unschooling

Do schools kill creativity?

I just watched Sir Ken Robinson’s speech from last year’s TED conference. It’s old, but definitely worth a look if you’ve got 19 minutes:

First, I think his diagnosis is mostly right on target. Of course, this isn’t much of a surprise given that I’m highly skeptical of traditional schooling and subscribe to Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, which Sir Robinson seemed to be advocating. In sound-byte form:

We are educating people out of their creative capacities.

One critique: It may sound pedantic, but I think he really should have said that we are schooling — rather than educating — children out of their creative capacities.

Second, his delivery method was fascinating. I can’t remember the last time I saw humor blended so thoroughly and effectively into a speech. His talk is at heart an argument — a somewhat radical one, at that — against schooling as it is currently practiced. And yet he managed to avoid framing the issue in terms of “us” versus “them,” or seriously antagonizing large groups of people. Too often when we feel even slightly attacked, our defense shields go up and we stop listening. By putting everyone at ease through his humor, Sir Robinson doesn’t obstruct his message but instead makes it possible for us to actually hear it.

Lastly, I loved this:

If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original.

I think I’ll re-read that line every day for at least the next month.

posted by Nicholas ⋅ 2 comments » ⋅ tagged TED, education, unschooling

Launched

This site is, in short, a collection of things that I think and care about. Those things include free culture, educational philosophy, design, current events, technology, and engineering. I particularly like it when these things overlap.

This site is also my formal web-presence. Given that I spend about as much time online as I do in meatspace, I decided it would make sense for me to formally exist online beyond the confines of Facebook.

I should probably take a moment to say a bit about this site’s name. Unschooling is a liberal^[1] form of alternative education that falls under the ecumenical banner of “homeschooling” but, apart from the fact that it is an alternative form of education, shares virtually nothing in common with the traditional view of “school at home” (i.e., mom teaching biology to her socially deficient kids at the kitchen table). Unschooling philosophy is based first and foremost on the idea that children are naturally curious and should be free to learn about and explore the world largely as they see fit.

As you may have now guessed, I am an unschooler. This means that prior to going to college I lived without grades, tests, homework, formal curricula, and just about all the other trimmings of the modern-day American school-system. I deeply believe that unschooling is good both pragmatically and philosophically. Expect posts on this in the future.

It’s taken much deliberation — as well as a little inspiration — to decide to finally start blogging. My reasons for not starting earlier are pretty standard: I worried I wouldn’t have enough time to write and that the site would quickly stagnate. I feared the inevitable public judgement and criticism of putting my thoughts online for any and all to see. And I always had the lingering fear that the whole thing was more than a little narcissistic.

Those concerns may have faded a little, but they have certainly not disappeared from my mind entirely. What’s changed is that the reasons I do want to blog have managed to surpass my trepidation. Besides, I need to find a new way to procrastinate, as I’m starting to suspect I may have actually seen all of Facebook.

Just recently, I remembered a quotation I hadn’t thought about for nearly five years:

“Anything that I have ever done that was ultimately worthwhile, initially scared me to death.”^[2]

My first regular entry comes tomorrow. Stay tuned.

-Nicholas Bergson-Shilcock

1. I use liberal here mostly to mean free and not in the political sense. Unschooling respects the freedom of children and young people and is thus strongly non-coercive but ultimately not strictly tied to a single political movement. For what it’s worth, most of the unschoolers I know are politically left-leaning.↩
2. I have no idea where I first heard this. A little googling shows that it is attributed to Betty Bender, who, according to her search results, is famous for saying the above quotation.↩

posted by Nicholas ⋅ 1 comment » ⋅ tagged about, intro, unschooling