Among the happy things the internet brings me, from time to time, is a bit of writing so striking it stays with me. Nothing to do with facts or the immediate moment. Rather something about what it is to live right now. In this manner, I held onto an essay on cities and loneliness, by a writer named Olivia Laing. The essay is part of a book, which turned out to be a book I very much wanted to read. I found her site and learned that this book, which touches on themes I am obsessed with, strangers and cities and how it is to live among them–this book did not exist yet. The last line of Laing’s page about the book is this:

If you’re interested in supporting The Lonely City, I have a wishlist of research material here. All donators of books will be thanked in the acknowledgements.

So I did it. I sent her a book from her Amazon wishlist of research materials she needed and couldn’t afford. And I tweeted that I had done so. Someone who follows her asked for the link to the list, and this morning I found out that I am not the only one to have sent her a book. Which is the most wonderful outcome I can possibly imagine.

What I’m interested in here is how in our culture right now, the ivy of generosity is growing over every structure we have built. The research and first printing for Don’t Go Back to School was funded by Kickstarter backers. We create, publish, and sell our work now outside traditional channels, and we make communities in the process. None of this is new, but its pervasiveness is new.

One of the most significant findings of my research for Don’t Go Back to School is that people learn together. They form communities and learn with and from each other. They have as much access to experts as any enrolled student would. The people I interviewed told me stories about asking experts questions–polite, respectful questions (in the book they give advice about how to formulate these). They told me stories about those experts taking them seriously and helping them.

We are deep in the culture of generosity now in how we learn and think and create and contribute and live. It did not seem strange to me to ask strangers to support a book I wanted to write, and it does not seem strange to me every time I support another person’s creative production. It did not seem strange at all to me to send a book to a stranger, a writer whose work I wanted to read more of. It does not seem strange to me when people ask me for advice about independent learning. It does not seem strange to me when people write to me after reading my syllabi on the internet and ask me to suggest further reading on specific topics they’ve discovered there. None of those seem strange at all. They are a part of how we live now. If you are not living that way, you are doing it wrong.

Except it wasn’t mundane at all. I printed postage labels for around 900 people who were about to become my readers. I saw their names, wonderfully colorful and wonderfully common. I saw the names of their towns and cities, wonderfully colorful and wonderfully familiar. Nine hundred real people, every single one of whom knows how to reach me and tell me what they think about the book.

Writers don’t get this, under ordinary circumstances. Readers remain abstract and mysterious unless they come to your readings. Writing is terribly, terribly lonely, any writer will tell you this. All those names made it less so.

Writers don’t print their own postage labels either, under ordinary circumstances. I’m not trying to tell you it’s fun, it’s not. But it’s also a task I hope every writer will have a chance to do sometime in their careers. It represents a newly-possible relationship between writers and readers. We’re all real people here.

This book is a radical project, the opposite of reform. It is not about fixing school, it’s about transforming learning—and making traditional school one among many options rather than the only option. I think all the energy and money reformers spend trying to fix school misses the real problem: that we don’t have good alternatives for people who want to learn without going to school, for people who don’t learn well in school settings, or for those who can’t afford it.

Because while you don’t have to go to school to learn, you do have to figure out how to get some of the things that school provides. Since most of us grew up associating learning with traditional school, we may feel at sea without school to establish an infrastructure for learning. This consists of things such as syllabi to show us an accepted path, teachers to help us through it, ways to get feedback on our progress, ready-made learning communities, a way to develop professional networks that help with careers later, and physical resources like equipment and libraries. In its best and most ideal form, school provides this infrastructure.
But not very many people get to go to school in its best and most ideal form, and my research shows that many learners feel they do it better on their own. People who forgo school build their own infrastructures. They create and borrow and reinvent the best that formal schooling has to offer, and they leave the worst behind. That buys them the freedom to learn on their own terms.

I speak from experience. I went to graduate school at Yale and I dropped out. I had been amazed that I was accepted, and even more so that I was offered a fellowship. Surely this was the fast track to something impressive. But leaving all that behind, to my great surprise, was one of the easiest decisions I’ve ever made. A gracefully executed quit is a beautiful thing, opening up more doors than it closes. I had invested long years and a lot of work in the degree I walked away from, but I also had innocently misguided reasons for wanting it in the first place. I was fresh out of college and my only thought was that I wasn’t done learning.
Nobody had told me that liberal arts graduate school is professional school for professors, which wasn’t what I wanted to be. Here’s what my graduate school experience was like: I took classes for two years and learned one thing. It was not a fact, but a process. What I learned was how to read a book and take it apart in a particular way, to find everything that’s wrong with it and see what remains that’s persuasive. This approach is useful to people who are focused on producing academic writing, and it’s a reasonably good trick to know, but I could have picked it up in one course. I didn’t need two years, and it’s pretty annoying to only get to talk about books in such a limited way.

My third year, on the other hand, was bliss. I was left alone for a year to read about 200 books of my choice. I spent that time living far from school in a house in the woods, preparing to demonstrate sufficient command of my field to be permitted to write a dissertation. This was the part of grad school where I really learned things. And for me, what was most significant about the year was that I learned how to teach myself. I had to make my own reading lists for the exams, which meant I learned how to take a subject I was interested in and make myself a map for learning it. As I read the books on my lists, I taught myself to read slowly, to keep track of what I was reading, and to think about books as part of an ongoing conversation with each other. I learned to take what was useful and make sure it was credible and leave the rest aside. I did this with a pen in the margins of the books and by talking to people about what I was reading. I had the luxury of a year to devote to it, but I devour a lot of books even when I’m busy working at a job, and I could have done the same thing over a longer stretch of time. I learned that I didn’t need school after all.

Years later, I ran into a young, successful woman who was known for hosting a popular monthly salon on art and technology and for her work as a blogger for a cultural institution. She told me she was toying with the idea of going to graduate school, and wrinkled her nose at the thought. But she lit up when she started describing the things she wanted to study, such as art history and curatorial skills. I reached back to my own hard-won lesson about what liberal arts grad school is really for. I asked her if she wanted to be a professor. She said no. So I asked, “Why do you want to go back to school?” She shrugged a little, and said, “Well, I just want to learn things and be smarter about the things I do.” That’s when I got excited. I had some really useful advice on this, and I got to be the person to tell her about it. You don’t need school for that.

OpenNews Learning works by example, through case studies written by a stellar set of journalist-developers, designers and hackers about projects they’ve worked on, describing the hairiest coding problems and hidden ethical issues they’ve come up against. You’ll find out how they solved them, and more importantly where they didn’t. You’ll see where there are opportunities to kick ass and take names to keep information free and make democracy more democratic.

First up are cases by Jacob Harris of the New York Times, on how much you can and can’t learn from Federal data sets on food safety; developer Adrian Holovaty on data parsing problems in the journalistic context; Miranda Mulligan, executive director of Northwestern University Knight Lab, on the significance of color decisions in mapping and visualization; Jacqui Maher of the New York Times on making lightning fast sense of the deluge of data in the 2012 Olympics; and journalism professor Matt Waite of the University of Nebraska on the unexpected ethical snarls of making an app from police records.

Join the community, learn the ropes, hack the news.

The model here is designed from the perspective of putting teaching online. That’s not the future of education. No one is talking about learning because the people who are talking here and designing systems are education reformers. Reform is not nearly enough to change education now. We need a revolution. We have to start thinking of all this as putting learning online.

What we’re getting now in open classes detaches teaching from physical classrooms and tuition-based enrollment. What MOOCs should be working toward is more radical—detaching learning from the linear processes of school. That’s not the goal of the designers of MOOCs, but it absolutely should be.

What would this detached model of learning with access to the resources of school look like? It looks like the forms of independent learning I’ve been researching and writing about for Don’t Go Back to School. People getting the resources to learn what they want to learn, in contexts in which that knowledge or skill is necessary to the learner, or something they are passionate to learn. Some people learn very well in the constrained modes of school, and that’s fine. But the model of independent learning allows people to learn the way they need and want to. As one among many examples, let’s say you’re taking a class in modern poetry. You’re doing this because you like to read it and want to understand its context, or there’s one poem you love and you want to read more. Neither of these is necessarily well served by a linear class structure. What if you could start with the poem you love and find your way backward and forward and sideways from there, using syllabi or timelines and lectures to contextualize the poem. You could find sideways paths to other contexts of the poem, history, what’s going on in art, or politics, to other writers and poetry. You end up with a broad, insightful, deep, and pleasurable learning experience and outcome. You remember what you’ve learned. That’s what independent learning is like, and that’s what school disallows. That’s the assumption we need to model open education on.

This is important for learners’ experience and for feeding their motivation. It’s also important for a changing job market. Increasingly, at the leading edge of hiring in some businesses and at the center of hiring for other professions, the ability to learn on the job, independently and quickly, is the most crucial qualification.

MOOCs have other challenges besides ditching linear formats. The most important condition for independent learning reported in my research is learning in the context of a community. MOOC designers make only a token effort to incorporate the social aspect of learning, with giant discussion forums that produce crowds, not learning communities.

If MOOC designers start taking a lesson or two from the way learners learn outside of school, they could drive genuinely useful reform in higher education. Right now they’re just putting vinegary old wine in giant new bottles. That’s not enough.

I gave a talk last week with a fascinating roster of speakers at Skillshare’s first Penny Conference, to an audience of enthusiastic independent learners. Everyone in the crowd considered themselves an independent learner, and more than half of them had dropped out of school at some point in their lives.

All the speakers gave fascinating presentations, and it was exciting to hear some of the themes I’ve been finding from my interviews turning up in other people’s research as well. Tony Wagner, who works on restructuring K-12 education to promote innovation, noted the same things my interviewees reported about what’s wrong with school: a lack of autonomy and control over their learning, being taught vs. active learning, the paucity of really engaging teachers, and having no room to fail. Among many other questions, I asked my interviewees how they figured out where to start, what path to follow, and where to get help. Zach Sims, founder of Code Academy, cited these questions as the dilemmas his site tries to solve for people who want to learn programming.

Aaron Dignan, CEO of Undercurrent, reframed the idea of gamification in an educational setting for me. I’ve been talking a lot with educators about taking the inherent gamification out of traditional education: grades, honors, achievements. These cater to extrinsic motivation, while intrinsic motivation is a much stronger driver of learning that people find satisfying and worthwhile. His talk revolved around the part of games that involves collaboration, narrative, and quests, which give learning a context, purpose, and interdisciplinary approach. I love having my mind changed, thank you Aaron!

And thanks to Skillshare for inviting me to speak!

Here’s a discount code for tickets!

And here’s a description of the conference and other speakers:
Skillshare will be hosting its first education conference, Penny Conference at The Times Center on April 20th (1-5PM). Penny is an intellectually-charged experience where people and ideas come together. A space where curiosity, discovery, and collaboration will challenge the status quo of institutions like education. Speakers include Adora Svitak (Child Prodigy Writer), Charles Best (CEO of DonorsChoose.org), Zach Sims (Co-founder of Codecademy), Kio Stark (author of Follow Me Down), Baratunde Thurston (Director of Digital for The Onion), Tony Wagner (Co-founder of Change Leadership Group), and Adam Braun (Founder of Pencil of Promise).

Molly is an incredibly hardworking artist who makes a living with her work in as many ways as she can. She’s an illustrator, she’s done book projects, she’s been hired to paint elaborate murals in swank restaurants, just for a few examples. Her work has a respectable following, and she’s the founder of “Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-Art School.”

Molly hasn’t yet been able to find a gallery to represent her and sell large works on her behalf. That means it’s a real challenge–and financial risk–to give up time from the work that supports her in order to make those paintings. So she found another way. She’s funding her gallery show, called Shell Game, on Kickstarter, without a gallery, and she’ll rent a storefront to display and sell the paintings (if they’re not all sold already) when they’re done. Backers of the project at various levels get things like ephemera, prints, access to the process of creation, and, at the highest levels, the paintings themselves.

The one thing you can’t exactly do DIY has to do with the reputation and recognition that being represented by a gallery confers. Writers have the same dilemma. For a lot of us, the idea of publishing our work Creative Commons is really appealing ideologically, and has the potential for wider circulation. It’s not the loss of potential revenue that stops people–that’s not what stopped me, anyway. As a first-time novelist, I wanted the stamp of approval and legitimacy points that being published by a ‘real’ publisher confers, and ended up getting it. Follow Me Down came out last summer.

A while back, Robin Sloan took a different path. He used Kickstarter to modestly fund the writing of a novella, which he produced in hardcopy for backers and released Creative Commons for the world. It’s a great piece of literary science fiction, and as it gained momentum, it also scored him a book deal, for an expanded version, with FSG, one of the most prestigious big publishers around. The book will be out in June. Of course, that’s helping Robin in the legitimacy department, but I think the lesson of his project, and of Molly’s Shell Game, is that legitimacy and reputation can increasingly be conferred by communities of what you might call informed fans. This isn’t just sheer, unadulterated page-view populism. This is the idea that when a discriminating community of consumers of a genre think something counts as ‘real,’ it does.

That’s a liberating sea-change for everyone.