Sabine Steldinger
Travelling School of Life
www.tsolife.org
www.whopools.net


During the IDEC 2007 in São Paulo several people said that they would like to create more exchange between students of democratic education all over the world.

The Travelling School of Life - from institutional learning to free information

The "Travelling School of Life" was developed by some young people from Germany that where unsatisfied with regular school.
They created the idea of combining travelling, learning and living on a direct way without institutions.

During four years the concept of the project changed several times and got more and more open. Actually several regional groups work in Germany. That are mainly task-groups, that help to build the network (webpage, wiki, fundraising, advertisement) or learning goups where they support each other with learning.

The aim of the network is to create a global network of regional groups and individuals. All of them are connected on the global level via the webpage.

At the moment this webpage is a more provisorical wikisoftware (a webpage that everybody who is registered can change). We hope to finish a complex database with lots of communicationstools next year, that is easy to use and beautifull. On the webpage and in the lists of regional groups, the ressources of every kind of knowledge affecting every part of life are made visible and reachable for other people.

Knowledge and information means power. The power to understand the your situation and the power to change it. We want to spread this power with building bridges between people based in individual agreements. The networks connects every concept of learning that people invented. It gives the responsibility for learning back to the individuals: they have to find out why, what and how they want to learn. So they can agree to learn for example on a participative, frontal, authorical, funny, playing, informal, equal, short, long, boring or whatever way. All sharing is volontary and nobody is obliged to do something. The network is a convivial tool to use when they need it. They could use this network as an addition to their institutional way of learning and as a real alternative to it.

If people need a feedback or evaluation about a result of learning, it will be also possible to find people in this network that want to give it.

An institution usually costs a lot of money, the network tries to make visible ressources that are already existing and to use them more effectivly or to share them ("share/use-communities"). The only costs are for advertisment (regional), perhaps for the webpage (global) and for support with travelling and learning. Global solidarity to share money to support learning of people with less money seems to be necessary.

Networking in Brasil

After the IDEC in Brasil we started a promotion tour to visit different projects that are related with alternative education in order to initiate the regional groups as a basis to develope the network in Brasil. We created an Brasilian mailinglist, where the Brasilian people can speak about the network and have a country-wide exchange about projects, ideas etc... As a tool for the first connection of regional people, they created mailinglist in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, too. I am very curious if hey will go on with their group, some of them seems to be very enthusiastic with it.
Inside this network the people are visible as individuals that are involved in institutions or other groups and they can decide how much information they want to offer in their profile. So every democratic school participant could make a profil and create a global or regional group called "Democratic Schools" to get connected on this way with other people from a Democratic School. If they decide in their Democratic School-meeting to organise a course about something and they do not find people in their region to teach it, they could use the network to find them.

Houses of Learning

There is an idea that we talked about in the german regiogroup and that ocures again several times in brasilian projects. The idea is to make network of special houses or spaces for people to meet during travelling. There they stay temporally to share knowledge, learn and teach, doing projects with the community. The involvement in the environment and neighbourhood is a very important part. This houses are atached to another project, like a democratic education project or environmental education project. This part of the concept of a "Travelling School of Life" is very in the beginning, and I am looking forward to a inspiring developement how to create this network to be a tool for individual and collective learning everywhere.

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