tash wong

Code name: Internet School

About a month ago, it was suggested to Tom, Tony, and I that we put together a class similar to the Entrepreneurial Design course we took in our second semester (which inspired this blog, pandaCatAttack, and Coastermatic). I found the notion of us creating a course that people would find value in intriguing, and thought it posed an interesting challenge. After a good chat between the 3 of us about our goals and motivations for the summer, a new project - code named ‘Internet School’ - was born.

Last week we began working on the project in earnest. We’re all working full time, Tony at Betaworks, Tom and I on Coastermatic, so one of our requirements for the project is taking a very disciplined approach with the time invested into it. Considering this, we met for intensive sessions each evening and began to hack together answers to questions like: what is Internet School? what isn’t it? who is it aimed at? how will we fund it? what is the course structure? what’s the schedule? and so on. 

For me, the work on Internet School has been an excellent process for reflecting on the lessons of the last year and actively using skills I’ve learned through our courses and from my peers. The hours of brainstorming, writing, and iterating with Tom and Tony have lead me to think about how inspiring working with an active and capable team is. It’s incredible the way few minds can come together to coax a project out of the dark. It feels as if we’re putting a few stakes in the ground, and excavating around them. Sometimes we dig up something useful, and others we pull up and try again. 

So far, Internet School has gone through a series of transformations -  beginning as a few scribbles on a giant post it note, growing to a 7 week course filled with guest speakers and funded by an ambitious Kickstarter campaign, to our latest iteration: a weekend series of workshops and seminars focusing primarily on content created by the 3 of us. 

In the week ahead, we’ll be pulling together the final points of our syllabus, creating a visual identity, finalizing the story we’re trying to tell, and launching a website where you’ll be able to find out more and sign up for the course. 

To give you a taster, here’s where we are so far:

The best way to predict the future is to make it, and the internet offers more ways of making than ever before. No matter what the endeavour, a high level view of a world changed by new tools and networks, and a framework for how to craft and create is essential in this new era. Internet School is a weekend series of seminars and workshops designed to expose students to a inspiring collection of ideas, give them a language to articulate their own, and arm them with a practical tool-set to make those ideas tangible.