Allied Association Overview

We are actively exploring the power of blended learning. This involves multi-modal communication largely through the internet (often called 'distance learning') mixed with close-contact face-to-face gather-ins, conferences, teach-ins, actions and workshops. Gaia University is developing significant skills in working via the internet and this is the primary route for Gaia U directed content and mentoring for degree programs. Meanwhile we are partnering with existing and as yet to be organized associations that work face-to-face at the local level and provide both informal courses and Diplomas.

There are many reasons for this mix. One is that local associations are relieved of the onerous task of developing the comprehensive systems that are required to operate a University, even one as small and unconventional as Gaia University. This is especially true of the critical quality assurance systems. In return Gaia University gets to experience the refreshing innovations generated by local associations as they are now free to focus on creatively meeting the needs of local learners. These innovations enter the pattern language of the larger Gaia U - Associations learning community, and are harvested by other associations for mash-ups and remixes suited to their needs. These continual refreshments, arising from the creativity of local communities, are an essential and welcome challenge to the tendency towards the crippling sclerosis that affects so many of the current institutions of mainstream society.

Another reason is that the learning community can, through active local associations, uncover, document and share an extraordinary web of action-oriented talent and wisdom across a vast geographical zone using a common e-portfolio system. This identification and articulation of a collective wisdom and intelligence is an essential part of regenerating nature and society and it goes a long way to contradicting the historic reliance on the compromised 'experts' that the current culture uses to justify its largely irrational behaviors.

There are already hundreds of associations, formal and informal, active in organizing civil society around the themes of transition from dependence on oil, local resilience to withstand the coming waves of economic collapse and climate change, global justice focused on redistribution of wealth and land, ecological regeneration, local scale carbon sequestration, restoration of indigenous rights and more.