Why is the word "education" often synonymous with the word "school"? Aren't we always learning while living life? How can we make the most out of opportunities to learn from the world around us? And how can we show others that they can do the same? These are some of the questions we've asked as we dreamed up The Wise Routes Project and the impetus for this group.

This is a unique study/working group as it is linked with a project that we (Claire and Brandon) created, called The Wise Routes Project, which is attempting to collaboratively build a framework for self-designed exploratory learning journeys. To run the pilot project, we will be cycling down the west coast this summer to create our own dynamic/traveling curriculum and explore the tools, resources, ideas, questions, activities, etc. that others might need to do something similar. We then intend to turn the framework into a book that we can share widely.

While traveling together will be fun, it's important to us that the design of this project is collaborative and open-sourced, to include the insights of many wise people that are already working in this self-designed learning space. We hope to involve a community of P2PU-ers that can help us think through some of the tricky questions, share with us their insights, and help us do research on ideas or issues related to the project along the way.

So we want to be upfront that it will be kind of impossible to make this a completely 'horizontal' group. Two of us will be moving down the coast on bikes, and tapping into the interweb periodically, while others will be contributing online through the SoSI platform. Participants will be seen more as an advisory group that can help us think through our ideas and share their own experiences and thoughts. They'll also receive due recognition in the book.

While we'd love to have lots of people follow the group, we will be a little selective about who is a "participant", because we'd like this working group to have group calls every 2 weeks and think the conversations will get a bit tricky with too many people. We'd like to select a diverse set of participants for the working group each with different types of experiences and interests to contribute.

Participants will be able to contribute to the creation of tasks and assess each others' (including our) contributions. The group will begin in July and end in late September (exact dates TBD).