"The School of Walls & Space investigates contemporary notions of space, its production, privatization & the role of the artist as a critical and political agent within it, & uses both traditional & more experimental pedagogical methods.

The School is a multi-layered micro-institution that encourages the development of an inter-disciplinary research-based practice. It balances individual mentoring w/ collective group activities. The school uses traditional pedagogical methods: group & one-to-one crits, seminars and talks, in conjunction w/ the exploration of more experimental collaborative teaching models which the School researches and develops collectively as a group. These include brain storming techniques, games, charettes, group activities, actions & happenings. It also explores historical practices, such as psychogeography & the derive, & the experimental teaching methods of Paolo Freire, Roy Ascott, Paul Goodman, & Colin Ward…"

[See also: http://wallsandspace.wordpress.com/ ]

"Norman founded an experimental space called Poster Studio on Charing Cross Road, London. This space was a collaborative effort with Merlin Carpenter and Dan Mitchell. In 1998 in New York he set up Parasite, together with the artist Andrea Fraser, a collaborative artist led initiative that developed an archive for site-specific projects.

Norman now lives and works in London Copenhagen. He exhibits internationally in commercial galleries, museum, and in public and alternative spaces. He writes articles, designs book covers and posters, collaborates with other artists, teaches and lectures in European and the US. Norman completed a major design project: an 80m pedestrian bridge and two islands for Roskilde Commune in Denmark in 2005 and is now working together with Nicholas Hare Architects on a school playground project for the new Golden Lane Campus, East London. He has recently finished an artist residency at the University of Chicago, Chicago, USA."

"I think the artistic intent of these concepts could be enhanced with study of Joseph Beuys' work, particularly the Free International University, as well as Situationist International and their desire to create environments for discovering and appreciating the true value of things rather than their staged value.<br />
<br />
All of this makes for excellent examples to add to my essay in progress on Ubiquitous Learning - a critique, where I'm trying to argue that the words ubiquity and learning have nothing inherently to do with technology, and are instead words of ethical dimension, so the phrase ubiquitous learning should become one more to do with an ethical approach or framework to learning, and not one suggesting a technological determination of it."

"I then realized that the educational process happens not just inside the school walls, but in three different places: school, family and community.<br />
<br />
When I came back to São Paulo - a chaotic metropolitan area with 20 million people - I decided to do an experiment using this knowledge. The city was going through its worst period of violence and degradation. In my neighborhood, Vila Madalena, we developed the learning-neighborhood project in cooperation with a group of communicators, psychologists and educators. The core idea was to map the community's resources: theater, schools, cultural centers, companies, parks, etc. We created a network and trained the community to take advantage of all these assets, turning them into social capital. With this model, the school is trained to function as a hub, connecting itself to the neighborhood, and then, to the city."

"I often wonder how we reached situation when honorable words like ‘enterprise’, ‘initiative’ & ‘self-help’ are automatically associated w/ political right & defense of capitalism, while it is assumed that political left stands for big brother state w/ responsibility to provide pauper’s income for all & inflation-proof income for its own functionaries.<br />
<br />
90 years ago people’s mental image of a socialist was a radical self-employed cobbler, sitting in his shop w/ a copy of William Morris’ Useful Work vs Useless Toil on the workbench, his hammer in his hand & his lips full of brass tacks. His mind was full of notions of liberating his fellow workers from industrial serfdom in a dark satanic mill. No doubt the current mental picture is of a university lecturer w/ a copy of The Inevitable Crisis of Capitalism in one hand & a banner labelled ‘Fight the Cuts’ in the other, while his mind is full of strategies for unseating the sitting Labour candidate in the local pocket borough."

"late 60s…heady years for libertarian left…new generation of radicals had gone through rapid education that skipped orthodox Marxism & traditional anarchism, plunging straight into dialectics of liberation, Fanonism, International Situationism & more. Under this influence group of us…had begun to question assumptions & boundaries of our academic discipline…looked for links to anarchist tradition &…flirted w/ late 19th-century idea of criminal as crypto-revolutionary hero.<br />
<br />
What attracted us to anarchism?…3 obvious affinities:…distrust of all authority…undermining of professional power (Illich-style de-schooling, anti-psychiatry…critique of state, especially its power to criminalise & punish.<br />
<br />
These standard anarchist concerns always informed Colin’s agenda…had little time for “apocalyptic” or “insurrectionary” anarchism. His approach was pragmatic, gradualist, even reformist…His anarchism was not a glorification of chaos & disorder but encouragement of special form of order…"

"Sixteen portraits of anarchist luminaries—Godwin, Stirner, Proudhon, Goldman, Berkman, Herbert Read, Durruti, Bakunin, Louise Michel, Zapata, etc.—together with an essay on anarchism and stamps, by Colin Ward, and Clifford Harper's afterword on his own personal connections to the postal service. Another beautifully crafted vehicle for the incredible artwork of Harper."

"This is a remarkable text that shows the affinities between anarchy and the principles of organization of complex systems composed by many interconnected units. Perhaps, only when a mechanical worldview will be replaced by a cybernetic one, anarchy as organization will be finally recognized and accepted, probably under a different name."

"wrote an essay about how learning to use internet is like learning to live in city…for class where we read urban critics/philosophers/sociologists Walter Benjamin, Michel de Certeau, & Georg Simmel…lived in 19th & 20th centuries, talked about: what happens to people when they move to cities, how it feels to live in dense urban centers, & whether “the city” is imaginary place…Some of their concerns about experience of mass urbanization are similar to concerns…about experience of mass internet use: dealing w/ infooverload, wandering in non-linear fashion, learning unfamiliar interfaces, developing less sensitivity to shocking sights, finding connections w/in fragmented communities, encountering thousands of strangers every day, & acting badly when anonymous.<br />
<br />
…resemblance btwn physical & virtual worlds is not surprising…“city is an archetype of human imagination”…social aspects of web modeled on places where many of its developers, entrepreneurs & designers live: SF, LA, NY…"

"Children's street culture refers to the cumulative culture created by young children. Collectively, this body of knowledge is passed down from one generation of urban children to the next, and can also be passed between different groups of children (e.g. in the form of crazes, but also in intergenerational mixing). It is most common in children between the ages of seven and twelve. It is strongest in urban working class industrial districts where children are traditionally free to "play out" in the streets for long periods without supervision."

"describes in detail plans to redevelop the Top Room exhibition space into an experimental self-sustainable art institution based on a non-hierachical "Exploding School" model which utilises the "scattered resources" of city space as a means of context ba

Copenhagen based sister institution to the Exploding School: http://www.dismalgarden.org/pages/exploded_school_contents.html

"(born 1924) an editor of the British anarchist newspaper Freedom 1947-1960, the founder and editor of the monthly libertarian journal Anarchy from 1961-1970. Ward became an anarchist while serving in the British army during World War II."

"Designed to function outside of the traditional classroom space, the exploding school is nomadic. Taking its cue from Colin Ward and Anthony Fyson's book Streetwork it seeks to utilise the city as its classroom."

"The city offers an incredible variety of learning labs: art students study at the art museum, biology students at the zoo, business and vocational courses meet at on-the-job sites. The program pays for none of its facilities but instead looks for "wasted