1. Where are you and where will you be traveling next?
March and April we'll be around southern Spain and Portugal, whereafter we will head north, passing through northern Spain and the Pyrenees as well as southern France – as our current plan is to be back in Germany in the beginning of June.
For more detailed information, check out our Route Map and look where our busses are at the moment!
2. How can I contact you?
You can write us an email to contact(at)skillsurfers.de or a text message to our mobile phone (the current number can be found on our homepage under the phone icon)
2. "Skill Surfers", Who, What and Why?
The word itself means ‘Anyone who exchanges skills and knowledge (Skill Sharing), either individually or organized (f.e. in workshops, learning groups etc.) - be it how to juggle, play music, make a website, build a house or investigate world history.’
The name was simply invented for an initial fundraising campaign (link) with the EU. It is not a formal organization.
Who we are is simply a group of people from changing 6 to 16 persons and 2-4 busses, including a stable group of 4 people who travel together since September for different reasons and intentions but ultimately think that some new ideas for our societies are necessary and would like to experiment with different ways of education and economy, learn about communities as well as ecological ways of life.
And it is not that easy to find definitions for this experiment, it must be experienced to be understood of course :-)
Along the way we visit various projects like eco villages and communities, social centers and some free schools, and discovered the need for better networking, especially if they share similar interests and could benefit from sharing knowledge or infrastructure, (( something about tsolife networking here))
3.What is Skill-Sharing
On the one hand, skill-sharing is a fancy word for a very day-to-day, natural happening. It can mean to pass on your knowledge and experience in a practical way. You are exchanging skills when you explain a difficult new maths lession to a school-mate, when your mother teaches you how to bake this yummi chocolate cake or when you meet a new person with whom you talk and exchange experiences.
Learning and teaching is an essential part of our lives and often we just do it without thinking about it, because learning is living and everyone does it all the time!
(backrounds: thinkers like Ivan Illich , "Deschooling society")
On the other hand, skill-sharing can be an organized way for learning and teaching together on an equal level. Which means that everyone is student and teacher at the same time. Organized skill-sharing can happen in workshops, in a learning group (people find together in order to learn about a special topic) or in seminaries -an example where you learn in a practical way-
Everyone has a lot of skills and knowledge to share, everyone has some materials or spaces he/she can share and moreover there is a lot of information available for free in libraries, in books, in peoples head, on internet or elsewhere.
And we want to inspire people to see that if we use and organize this vast amount of knowledge accessible to us these days, we are able to learn lots of nice stuff - independently or additional to schools and universities.
With this in mind we aim to promote and practice "skillsharing" - we regard ourselves as students and teachers, traveling in and with our selforganised "class", ‘experimentally’ learning and teaching how to organize learning and teaching together.
4. But: why skill sharing? If you want to learn something why don't you just to go to school like anybody else?
One basic thing we think should be learned is how to learn! It’s not so straight forward to become aware of and confident with ones own and other people's skills
and how to teach each other in an efficient but free way,
respecting each others individuality, needs and wishes, ideas and feelings...
That is one thing that school just didn't teach most of us:
How to help ourselves and each other!
How to learn together, and not isolated from each other or against each other,
We don't want to live this individualistic life with split families, small city flats
having to drive a big car to be accepted and therefore being afraid of losing our job...
What we need to learn is something that is hard to learn in within the regular school system:
How to live together and organize ourselves responsibly!
We learned in school that knowledge is power - so we decided to inspire people to take back power and improve this educational system we have! (we are no terrorists!)
(talk here about some basic (practical) Methouds )
5. Almost all travelers want to learn... what is the difference between you and a "normal" traveler?
Often there is less differences in between us and normal "alternative tourists" than we'd wish as it is really hard to organize more than your personal living while being on the road, with infrastructures and people always changing our heads rapidly filling with thousands of new impressions... So often we are really just hanging out cooking and cleaning or engaged in some creative activity we like.
In a certain film about Sudbury-schools (schools where children aren't forced to do anything
they do not want to do but just spend all day with what they want to do) , and they asked the students and teachers how people learn things in this kind of school
and the children just explained that they don't really know
how they learned how to read and write
and the teachers just told that the kids are just sitting and chatting
and every once in a while they are looking up something in a book or the internet…So it seems the concept of natural curiosity works!
It seems that most travelers, especially those who travel in a group, normally don't really try to organize their learning or consciously intend to teach others neither learn how to teach and do not promote the idea of skillsharing!
One of our main motivations is to create an exchange of skills, ideas, visions and inspirations within our group and with the people we meet. We are doing this in a very experimental way, as experiences with selforganised learning in groups that we could learn from are not that easy to find.
Another difference in between us and other travellers is that we want to network social projects with each other and create new infrastructures for a better learning and life for all of us.
One example for such a network is our main partner project, <a href="www.tsolife.org"> "The Travelling School of Life". </a> The tsolife is a project that is building up a (virtual and nonvirtual) network which aims to facilitate selforganised, peer-to-peer education and creating an infrastructure for learning by making visible what materials and tools, spaces and resources people have that they can share with each other. This project lives from the participation and effort of all people using this network.
We regard ourselves as one learning class of this travelling school and hope that there will be lots more in future!
Another example is the <a href="http://www. Brueckenschlaeger.de"> brueckenschlaeger project </a>, a communication and project agency organized as a collective in Berlin, Germany aiming to build a network of freelancers, enterprises, agencies and of social funds and projects aiming to "build bridges" in between economic interests and social issues.
For the full list of partner projects go to <a href="/partners"> the partners page </a>
PETERS EDIT ENDS HERE!
6.
What and how and where do you want to learn - and what can you teach?
What are you doing you all day? </b>
To get an overview about that, have a look at the <a href=" "> blog </a> and in our <a href=" "> topics list </a>
Basically we are visiting various alternative ecological, political, artistic, or cultural
projects, groups, organisations, communities, cooperations, movements...to learn from and with them.
So when we come to a place we are trying to figure out
what people there want to learn and what they can teach
and what infrastructures we can use or help to build up .
Then what happens can be a couple of workshops - or ...: nothing... ;-)
depending on people, infrastructure, motivations...
so, we don't really promise or guarantee anything :-)
It is also what you make out of it!
Our workshops are based on the idea of "Popular education" (Paulo Freire)
which means we won't be "teachers" in a classical sense
but just create a space and structure for an exchange of knowledge and skills
of all people who come to the workshops.
Basically everything that we want to learn and teach is the stuff that we will need to know
when we want to build up a life that is more based on living in communities and networks,
based on supporting each other and exchanging and sharing skills or goods among each other .
So what is interesting to us and what we try to exchange ideas about
is for example group dynamics and group processes
ways of organisation and communication
project management skills and mediation...
As well as from alternative ways of agriculture (e.g. permaculture) to natural medicine
and how to make a lot of different stuff that we need in daily life...
(spoons, flutes or bracelets, soap, stoves or carpets or a solar cooker...)
Actually we are open to meet anybody who has similar interests like us
and want to share some knowledge and ideas
And we are open to learn a lot of different things...
WARNING!!!WARNING!!!FOR REASONS OF LACK OF ORIENTATION AND CONFUSION WE CANCELLED THE SEVENTH QUESTION TEMPORARY!!!AND APPLY FOR THE SKILLSURFERS TO SHORTEN OR DELETE THEMSELVES!!!(THIS QUESTION NR 7)
b> 8.
So, do you think the way of learning that you are promoting
could work for everything that people want to learn?</b>
Well, not (yet) for everything, but for many things...
Our own experiences reach from making toothpaste, music instruments (flute, didgeridoo) and solar cookers over learning about webdesign, programming, photography and surviving in the nature up to how to sow big wounds, how to practice homoeopathy or how to build a sauna from canja-sticks.
But - up to now, it's at least very difficult to learn certain topics such as for example surgery or building skyscrapers, if not impossible, selforganized and legally... Also in our society there's often the need for certificates and special AUSBILDUNGen to be allowed to practice what you've learned – for example natural medicine, midwivery, lawyer...Although for some areas/topics it's possible to learn yourself and then pass an external test to get the certificate.
So in a long term view, it is important to build up an infrastructure and a way of communication with society which make it possible to widen up the laws and Vorschriften and to introduce new systems of providing a certain level of skills and knowledge of a person to be able to practice her profession without harming any being.
PETER PLEASE RESCUE POSITION OF PARTS OF THE SENTENCE OF THIS ABSATZ AND PUT ALL THE THOUGHTS LISTED UP ABOVE IN A PROPER ORDER OF WORDS AND SENTENCES :)
9.
And does it work for everybody? For children for example? </b>
I think, yes. Children need a more stable and safe infrastructure, for sure. As well as they need relieable BEZUGSPERSONEN to support them and BEGLEITEN them on their (learning) way.
But for example Sudbury schools are places where this kind of skillsharing actually does happen
and where the children really learn how to learn by themselves and from / with each other.
As you can read above under question 8, for people who want to learn something in order to make it their profession, it only works with EINSCHRAENKUNGEN.
10.
Are you travelling in an ecological way? </b>
Well, less ecological than we'd like to. But it depends on what you compare it with..
Compared to other people who are driving their huge BMW, sitting in there alone
having 4 seats empty but not wanting to take any hitchhikers- probably we are very ecological.
All of us were hitchhiking a lot before starting that trip with the busses,
which are actually our homes right now and providing us a quite high comfort
for others it wouldn't be a high living standart I guess but it is quite ok.
We don't have fixed homes anywhere at the moment,
- compared to if all of us had a flat with oil or gas heating in cold Germany, Sweden or Latvia
our busses eat comparably few oil and are quite ecological.
About electricity: we got some solar panels on our roofs to load batteries, laptops, etc.
Also we recycle a lot: we go dumpstering food, we get clothes from free shops.
And we take materials for making stuff ourselves from the nature if possible (spoons, rope...)
11.
How do you finance the trip? </b>
We try to use as few money as possible
you can recycle a lot of stuff, from clothes and food to lots of other things like folding chairs ;-)
We also got some fundings linkEU, the rest is private money, but we share all money dynamically...
We'll probably do some street actions or we'll have to work a bit to get the fuel paid
Donations welcome!
14.How long are you normally staying in one place?
How long we stay in a place depends very much on the place itself and varies
from a few hours to a few weeks .