Update: New Eduventurist WEBSITE!

I have finally managed to create a website for this project! Thanks to help from my friend Ryan Villanueva who took time off from his spring break to teach me the art of domain hosting, Wordpress, and other important things associated with website creation!

I will therefore be posting from www.eduventurist.org, and you can continue to follow me by clicking on my RSS feed at the top of the website (I didn't know what RSS was myself before now, what a useful tool!)

I also just added a new post, so check it out! And I would appreciate any comments, questions, or feedback on my posts so far :)

Brock leMieux: My First Profilee!

I recently had a skype conversation with Brock leMieux, a “global nomad” who is only a year older then me and has already fit in a plethora of experiences during his 20 years of life. Our skype conversation spanned from San Francisco, where I am, to Oslo, Norway, where he is currently based. However, Brock grew up for most of his life in a small rural town in Northern Minnesota (where he described himself as "a big fish in a small pond"), and a lot has happened in between his time there and his current location in Scandinavia. His path truly represents a self-designed, liberal arts, interdisciplinary education. A whole novel would have to be written in order to capture everything he has done in the past few years of his exciting, unconventional path, so for now I'm just going to include a few thought-provoking selections of what came out of our conversation. 

Brock really began his eduventure in high school, when he studied abroad during his sophomore year in the south of Spain through Rotary Youth Exchange, and then attended an innovative, public performing arts boarding school in Minneapolis where he studied theater. After reading two inspiring books that lead him to think more about his path (Taking Time Off and A Whole New Mind), Brock decided to take a year off before deciding whether or not to attend university. In our conversation, Brock talked about his own process of discovering what he wanted to do in life:

"I thought 'I am seeking and I will find.' If you don’t know what you’re seeking, it will come, because I’ve always said, trust your gut, trust your instinct, your intuition, because the right opportunities come along and they’ll bring you to the right places.

It’s also a lot about self observation and self inquiry. That was really big learning for me, why was I traveling around and why was I stopping? So, people need to ask, for example, “Why am I going to university? Is it because my parents told me to? Is it because that’s what everybody else does? Is it because I don’t know what else to do?” I mean, all those are fine answers but you must accept them before you do something. You can’t just go to university or do something, you have to ask yourself why."

·      So, Brock took his life savings ("that wasn't much," he says, as he describes himself as a hard working self-starter who grew up working in various jobs), and in the next few years he traveled, worked, and lived in various places around the world. He eventually decided not to attend university after that initial first year "off," although has not entirely ruled it out for his future. A few of his various eduventures include volunteering in India for two months, teaching english and working in a bookstore in France, participating in a famous walking pilgrimage in Spain, squatting with circus performers in Montreal, attending conferences around the world, volunteering for an interesting NGO in Morocco, and being a student in Amsterdam at Knowmads, a creative and well-regarded year-long learning program that educates changemakers for the future. 

At the end of our conversation, I asked Brock in his opinion, what were key components for learning in the future. He responded with three points:

• Entrepreneurship. "The entrepreneurial spirit should be taught no matter whether or not you want to get into this business or not. It’s not about business, its just having the entrepreneurial mindset in whatever you do."
• Personal Development. Like he mentioned above, an important component of learning is self inquiry and reflection, and finding out what you are truly passionate about and capable of. 
• A project-based, small group setting. "The classroom would be like a living room, people would be coming and going, and it would have 18-98 year olds. It would bring in a lot more wisdom from older people and projects with people in the 'real world.' It would be a learning community almost like a family."

Although there is a lot more to include on his story and reflections, I am going to save that for the larger book/project. If you want to follow more of Brock's path, follow him on twitter (brocklemieux) or his blog.

One step at a time: Twitter

The first time I heard about Twitter, I couldn't quite understand why people would be interested in writing quick "microblogs" about their life, or read other people's for that matter. Facebook status' served that purpose well enough. Most of what I've heard about Twitter in the media is associated with celebrities tweeting things either about their newest splurge, a party they attended, or or information on their personal life. So, I never thought it was important for me to join.

However, since I've realized how much of a role social media and networking sites play in the new world of work and even social change (which is what I'm trying to further study during this time off), I decided to take the plunge and sign up!

And..... how is it? Is it as superficial and trivial as I had always suspected?

NOT AT ALL.

Of course, people will tweet random things like "I just ate a big bowl of strawberry yogurt" (I just made that one up as an example, but seriously, things like that are apparently important enough to be shared). But the people I have chosen to follow or even view are tweeting amazingly interesting links, facts, and reflections. It's an amazing way to also quickly view the web of connections, and who has influenced who. I've already learned about several websites, conferences, and people that fit into what I am pursuing in this project, and who knows if I would have ever found out about them without Twitter!

It's a little confusing to figure out the "rules" of the twitter game. There seems to be a whole sort of language used to write a tweet, where you are only allowed to use a certain amount of characters and therefore things need to be abbreviated (see the above picture for an example. I'm totally the bird on the far right). However, my dad, who also happens to be increasingly interested in this "new" world, bought a book on twitter that I am hoping to read to get the hang of things more easily.

One of the best things about Twitter is that it seems to be this filter of a lot of the junk that is on the internet, and the stuff that shows up is hand-picked and curated by people who I know or admire, and so of course I find it worthy to spend time on.

If you're interested in following me, please do!

Some thoughts after a great convo yesterday

Yesterday I met with two other friends of mine who were taking time off from school. They had both reached that "breaking point" that I and many other eduventurists are familiar with, and have taken this time off to learn "the art of being" and are taking some much-needed time to do some reflection and self discovery. It seems that a common problem is that all too often, taking time to work on one's self is seen as selfish and unproductive. Yet, this is something I am increasingly beginning to realize is most needed in our systems of learning.

I co-facilitated a youth retreat for a high school social change/philanthropy club that I had been a co-founder for back when I was in high school (which I hope to blog about in near future!). My co-facilitator and I decided to structure the retreat into 3 sections:

• Who are we as individuals?
• Who are we as a generation?
• Who are we as a club working on social change in our community?

A lot of our inspiration for the design of this workshop came from the "Wake Ups" organized by an initiative called Generation Waking Up, which I definitely recommend checking out if you haven't before. Some of the exercises included finding a partner and staring them in the eye for two minutes in silence, telling each our life stories and things that had impacted us to see the world differently, and standing on a spectrum of agreeing or disagreeing on a given statement (such as "Everyone needs to pick what they want to do in life, and stick to that plan").

Although I had participated in retreats like this before, the realization once again hit me that this self-discovery and reflection within a group or individually is so fundamental to the positive development of our society and our world, and yet it is left out of the education system, especially beginning after elementary school.

The conversation that ensued between my friends and I yesterday reinforced these feelings, and we ended up all agreeing that this time off, although difficult to make initially, was such a beneficial decision in the long run. I hope that more students begin to have the confidence to take that same leap if they are feeling the need for a change, or simply deeper reflection before continuing on their life path. 

P.S. I'm still working on writing up some of highlights from the amazing, insightful interviews I have collected to date. Stay tuned :)