A session at Universities: Past & Future, 14-16 October 2011 (Photo: Andy Broomfield)

One of the seeds for the University Project was the invitation to use the new Hub Westminster collaboration space as a home for what I've described as "the spirit of enquiry and community of learning" which many of us have looked for and found too seldom within the universities we've experienced. Over the weekend, a hundred of us came together for the Universities: Past & Future event, the first chance to put this into practice. There's a full report coming up, and we'll be hosting more of these gatherings in the near future. Meanwhile, my long-time collaborator Vinay Gupta is picking up the baton, starting tonight...

I'm curating a new set of projects at Hub Westminster, with the objective of creating a broad and fulfilling cultural programme, broadening out the activities and inviting a wide range of people to participate and enjoy what we have to offer. I'm a long way out of my depth as a curator - I'm an engineer by trade - and I'm hoping to get the widest possible involvement from people in helping to plan and execute the events in the series.

There will be a website for organising events, and there may well be a Twitter account that I do most of the administrative work for, other than my main @leashless account.

The basic format of the events will be a regular cycle of talks and musical events every Tuesday and Thursday, called respectively TRUTH AND BEAUTY for the Tuesday discursive events, and BEAUTY AND TRUTH for the Thursday performative events. As a community builds around the events, we can expand and do more interesting and complex things with the time, build culture, and start exploring the possibility of our community to produce what is new, true and beautiful.

Starting time will typically be dinner at 6:45PM, with talks and performances starting at 8PM. We are looking for all the input we can get, so please come along, get in touch, and help me curate.

Link to set on Flickr

via Em Wilkinson ( @mindfulmaps )

Networking Alternative Spaces

Setting up Online Learning

This post is from Philippa Young (@_philippayoung_)

Last Sunday I made the decision to quit my Oxford Masters course and move to London to pursue other projects outside of the university system. I wrote a short blog post listing a few of the "tipping points" that pushed me to make the decision to move from the cloistered safety of a degree course at a prestigious university, and do something, well, else.

Important decisions aren't usually made solely on the back of annoying bureaucracy and double bookings (even if one of those was a clash between this weekend's 'Universities: Past & Future' conference and my matriculation). Rather, more formative to my choice were people, and their reactions to the powerful brand of Oxford. 

Most justified the hype with congratulations, and reactions that ranged from impressed to mildly intimidated. Yet there were a few souls who brought friction to the debate. These were the people who refused to be impressed with the name Oxford, who with just a moment of silence displaced my comfortable assumptions, .and who by playing devil's advocate, asked steel-tipped questions that derailed my plush, velvet-lined train right into the dropout ditch. 

None of these people are singularly responsible for my decision, although I thank them for their part in viewing the financial investment objectively, daring to disagree with conventional opinion, and being mean right to my face. They helped me crystallise doubts, forced self-reflection, and gave me the courage to reject the safety of a structured curriculum. 

But what is the structured curriculum I am rejecting? What is a university? A talk with my father yesterday made me realise the distance between two perceptions of one institution.  My father never went to university, but in a simple aside he mentioned what he believed university to be like. What he said made me sad. He described a place where people who have a passion for knowledge, come together to discuss, and to teach each other, in a space where they were free to let their minds wander. He imagined them as architects of the future, whose minds he trusted were being training to do good things in the world just through the abstraction of thinking. 

I felt that the space he was describing I had been a part of. But it hadn't been facilitated by university or education in general. Rather it had been within networks of people who had come together to satisfy their own curiosity about a subject; creating their own spaces, virtual and physical, and inviting like minds to join the conversation. They were not content with stopping at mere conversation, but brought in elements of forward movement and action. 

This weekend is about people. The people who turn up each day to participate, the people at university right now, and the people who are going to fill the new spaces we create, from seeds of ideas that come from us, right now. I am incredibly grateful to such networks for bringing reality to the imagined world my father described. 

Here at Hub Westminster, we're counting down to the start of the Universities: Past & Future weekend - and looking forward to seeing you all! Here are some last minute tips on what to bring. (Most of this is really more relevant to Saturday and Sunday - for tonight, the main thing is to bring yourself.)

Documentation tools

We're keen to document as much as possible of the conversation that happens this weekend. During sessions, we'll ask for a volunteer to take notes and post them straight on to the University Project wiki. We'll also be using the #UnivProj hashtag on Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and blog posts.

Please bring:

• Laptops & mobile devices
• Cameras, Flips, video cameras
• Spare batteries for your equipment!
• Any cables/chargers you need. (There are plenty of places to plug in.)

We'll have wifi available throughout the space - the login details will be at the Welcome desk.

Food & drink

Please bring:

• A packed lunch for Saturday & Sunday. (There's a supermarket 5mins away, if you forget.)
• Something nice to share.
• Your own mug, if possible! (We'll provide tea, coffee, sugar & milk - but there's a limited supply of drinking vessels here...)

Anything else...

Ways of sharing information, stories, ideas & fun:

• Information/leaflets/etc about any projects you're involved in
• Business cards or other ways to keep in touch
• Any books or other resources you'd like to show people. (We'll make a temporary library for the weekend.)
  
• Musical instruments!

Mostly, though, we just want you to bring your passions, stories, projects and plans. This is a chance to meet each other, learn together and be part of the kind of space for the cultivation of knowledge which we want to make room for in the world.

As the weekend is nearing, we thought it would be a good time to give you some idea of the format it will take. Doubtless things will shift due to the needs of the moment, but the shape of the event will be broadly as follows:

FRIDAY opening up the event at 7pm and welcoming the attendees. After a few practicalities and an activity or two to help us get to know each other, Dougald will introduce a frame for the weekend - the reasons that the event felt so needed. The rest of the evening will be devoted to group sessions exploring the question of what a makes a university, before we break for the pub sometime before 10pm!

SATURDAY 10am start and we anticipate a second influx of attendees, so there is some space for welcoming everyone, building a picture of who's here and then some structured activities to start make those connections. From this point, the shape of the weekend is substantially driven by attendees, who can fill in blank slots on the agenda in the 'unconference' tradition. 45 minute time slots with one before lunch and three after. Each time slot will have four agenda streams - more if needs be - in which people can discuss what animates them with a group for whom that topic resonates. Alongside the three afternoon slots will be a Pro Action Cafe for those interested in trying a different approach to developing solutions and actions (see previous blog post for more info).

We'll provide some necessary beats to keep things rolling along - activities after lunch to tweak people back into gear, and some on-the-hour reminders. And the day will close with us returning together as a group for some reflection, but in a way that more closely resembles cabaret than conference - after all, it is a Saturday night! We'll all be done by 7pm, with opportunities for dinner - we're not far from Chinatown...

SUNDAY 10am open with a check-in and welcome any final newcomers. It's currently a mix of unconference slots, some predetermined sessions and a pinch of play. We close with a plenary ending before 6pm.