UPDATED:: Whady'a Know?! CommuniTeach Answers the Questions

UPDATE:::

Want to be part of something awesome?

Hello everyone,

Planning for Learnapalooza 2012 has begun. We are working on ways to make the event bigger and better this year, which means we have more opportunities for you to get involved with planning the event. Join us this Sunday for our volunteer orientation/info session to learn how you can be part of making the coolest event of the summer a reality.

Sunday, February 12 (this Sunday!)
5:00 pm
Next Door
659 W Diversey Pkwy
Chicago, IL 60614 

RSVP to Maggie@learnapaloozachi.com if you plan on stopping by.



Original piece:

Remember when I went to Lakes of Fire and skipped out on a bunch of stuff I was supposed to do? Well, attending Learnapalooza was one of those things.

Yes, LEARNapalooza (here's an article), not an over-produced rock concert, but a weekend festival of peer learning with nearly one hundred of sessions and over 500 participants, organized by CommuniTeach, a social enterprise that promotes collaborative learning amongst neighbors.

“People are open to helping each other, they just need clear opportunities,” says Sarah Press, co-founder of CommuniTeach. People can create or take advantage of these opportunities via the online platform that members (sign up is free and simple) use to learn or teach anything, connect with neighbors and likely make new friends.

The CommuniTeach website unlocks the potential of the wealth of our collective knowledge bank by helping people realize there is a wide range of skills they can share. With a simple and funny quiz, the website helps users identify skills we possess that we may not have realized would be valuable to others.
Since going online in 2010, CommuniTeach boasts over 2500 users, 238 Learn-Its, countless one-on-one skill swap sessions and a feature on CNN.

photo credit: Alisa Hauser, Pipeline www.chicago-pipleline.com

photo credit: Alisa Hauser, Pipeline www.chicago-pipleline.com

I created a bare bones CommuniTeach profile, just so I could register to attend a few of the amazing and varied Learnapalooza sessions (i.e. Gnocchi Making, Community Organizing, Land Value Taxes, Office 2010, Communication, Sandwich Making, Retirement Planning, Social Media Use for Small Businesses, Beer and Wine Tasting, How to Publish and Promote Your Book, Capoeira, Modern Dance, Public Speaking, Jump Rope, Knitting, Comic Drawing, Backgammon, Guitar Maintenance, Beekeeping, Worm Composting, Digital Photography, Chinese Philosophy, How to Get into Business School and How to Be a Lawyer and more). And since then, I’ve only received relevant emails to let me know when and where other Learn-Its (group learning sessions) within my interest and geographical areas would be held.

In preparation for this piece, I logged in and enhanced my profile to include more things I would like to learn about, things I’m willing to teach and a picture (so future learners or teachers would recognize me at meet ups). From there, I can register for upcoming Learn-Its or create one myself by simply suggesting a session topic, date, time and location for a Learn-It that I would either like to attend or lead. Those that get bookings run, those that don’t… don’t. And that’s how the CommuniTeach population self-organizes!


I met with Sarah Press, CommuniTeach co-founder, to discuss CommuniTeach, peer learning, collaborative consumption trends and quitting our jobs to pursue our passions.

Here’s the video of most of our conversation cause it was just so damn good (the conversation not the video – focus on the sound)/ Please forgive my incredibly long-winded introduction.

“CommuniTeach is powerful because it can provide a model for any, maybe even traditionally under-served or lower-income neighborhoods, where they can become empowered to share their skills and not have to spend capital, or go outside of their community, to meet their needs,” Sarah says. The organization seeks to, “show people that it’s easy and fun to share a skill and get to know your neighbor”.

Connecting citizens, and their inherent resources, makes the city “smarter, more connected and a better place to live”, says Sarah.  Whoa – are we looking at a devolved form of social planning here? This is what I love about this city and it's engaged citizens – people are just making it happen like crazy over here!

“Please Disturb” Your Neighbors

The CommuniTeach framework acts as a facilitator to connect people and skills. This simple introduction function of the model reminds of me of a Candy Chang project I recently read about.

For GOOD Magazine’s May 2010 Neighborhoods issue, Candy designed the Neighbor Doorknob Hanger. Similar to the door hangers we’re used to using in fancy hotels (ok, I don’t go to many hotels), the Neighbor Doorknob Hanger is a double-sided sign for people to hang over their door to communicate requests and offers with their neighbors.

The “Please Disturb” side provides space to list offerings and choose how and when you prefer to be contacted, and the “Can I borrow?” offers the same format for requests. “Think of it as an invitation, a validated request, or a low-tech status update for your door, so we can share more resources without interrupting each other at a bad time!”, says Candy (source).

Thinking of knowledge as another resource that we can share connects to environmental sustainability trends of various efforts to increase collaborative consumption of goods and services. (Wow, this really is a far-reaching trend!)


Transition Towns’ “Reskilling”

This reminds me of a core principle of the Transition Towns movement, a community resiliency-building approach to peak oil and climate change.

The principle of “reskilling” is key to this community-scaled effort to enhance self-sufficiency, resiliency and reduce dependence on fossil fuels. In Transition Towns, skill sharing tends to be skewed towards sustainability-related skills (on his blog, Life after Oil, Daniel Pargman lists courses he’s been a part of as food conservation, building a root cellar, building houses with timber and stone, foraging for edible plants and herbs, brewing beer, beekeeping, aquaculture and permaculture principles), but like CommuniTeach’s model, learning is not necessarily the end game.
 
Resiliency is the ability to recover readily from adversity, or withstand systematic shocks. As much as I hate to admit it, I can see how basic mainstream economic theory can be used to understand this: it’s best for a nation’s economy to be diverse to ensure the breakdown of one economic engine does not equal the collapse of the system. Similarly, a well-connected community with activated and diverse skills and assets is in a better position to withstand economic, social or resource pressures based upon its varied resource base. Of course this is based upon the assumption that people know and trust each other. Therefore, the learning, working and celebratory events of Transition Towns are really about creating opportunities for conversations and relationships to form. New skills, rehabilitated garden beds and full bellies are gravy.

Pargman goes on to say: “Hopkins' (the Transition Town movement’s initiator) guess is that these (reskilling) events will initially be short courses, and that the ambition and the length of the courses may increase over time. Of course, many people could participate in these events/courses without having any deeper thoughts about potential/future needs for the knowledge they acquire… Today, people participate in courses like these because they find them interesting and fun. Tomorrow, the kind of practical knowledge such courses provide may become a hard currency. As a bonus, you meet interesting people and extend you social network when you attend these courses!”

This link can also be made for placemaking (see my rant at 21:35 in the video).


Post Web 2.0 – back to basics?

So what’s behind this seemingly rampant trend towards deepening our local social networks amidst a hyper-connected technological world?

Sarah said something that linked it all for me:

“Web 2.0* was about connecting online. It helped people to realize there is excitement and value in talking to people outside of their immediate social network, and as this trend has gotten more mature… it’s not quite enough. You want to connect with people, but you realize that just connecting online is not quite that level of depth that people ultimately… are seeking. So that (online connection) evolves… to offline opportunities for connection… It’s the gateway drug of connections.”

Research demonstrates that our advanced communications technologies are not decreasing the need or desire to travel, but increasing it. We are not feeding our need to connect with our global networks with technology, but growing those networks instead. We’re not spending our time online Skyping with overseas friends and relatives instead of travelling to see them, but reading blogs, commenting on YouTube videos, facestalking friends of friends and meeting more people in more places (…and then booking tickets to travel and see them in person). This highlights that face to face interactions are more meaningful to us as social animals.

Plenty has been said about the way-more-than-just-‘interesting’ dichotomy of hyper-connectivity and extreme isolation associated with web 2.0 social networking, but CommuniTeach’s model answers all sides of this argument by using the web as a tool to create rich interactions off-line. 

Conclusion

CommuniTeach sees knowledge as a community resource that may be collaboratively consumed, a simplified evolution of web 2.0 applications combined with sustainability initiatives’ call for the conservation of resources.

CommuniTeach is strongly focused on providing opportunities for people who are relatively near one another to learn from each other. Though the education is valuable, it’s really the relationships that are formed between people who may have not otherwise met or shared a conversation that is the gold of this project.

CommuniTeach is based in Chicago and Pittsburgh but looking to expand where ever there is demand.

Is your community be ready for a special social framework for community development that crosses many disciplines and offers an abundance of benefits for individuals and communities?




* A Web 2.0 site allows users to interact and collaborate with each other in a social media dialogue as creators (prosumers) of user-generated content in a virtual community, in contrast to websites where users (consumers) are limited to the passive viewing of content that was created for them. Examples of Web 2.0 include social networking sites, blogs, wikis, video sharing sites, hosted services, web applications, mashups and folksonomies.

Completely Digressive Post Script:

Educational reform is always a hot social topic and is definitely within the brief of this blog.
A recent GOOD magazine article presents the new teaching reform manual, “Teaching 2030” for discussion. In my opinion, the 4 min RSA infomercial included in the article asks classroom teachers of the future to be everything (instructors, policy makers, peer educators, community organizers and professional advocates). I can’t help but ask why don’t we get people who are experts in these fields be teachers instead? CommuniTeach may be a part of the educational reform I’m suggesting.