Skillpedia.org: Get Skills

Learning empowering skills gives you the tools to put your beliefs into practice. Once you are motivated by empowering principles, the question becomes not why but how to do something useful. Training is the first step. 

How To Start Learning Skills

1. Learn how to learn with the learning skill.
2. When you want to learn a skill, open it and click the Add to my personal skills button
3. Explore the skills list and find more skills you like to add to your profile
4. Start doing missions that use the skill to gain experience

Empowerment Education

"Our education should be such as to improve our minds and fit us for increased usefulness; to make us of greater service to the human family."

—Brigham Young

Telling kids to learn without teaching them empowered learning explains a lot about the sorry state of our education system. Empowerment is a subject every child can grow up learning alongside mathematics and English that can enhance their whole learning and personal development process. It will be taught by teachers in some schools, shared by students in some schools clubs, and studied extracurricularly alongside others but one way or another, it will be made as available as possible to every young person growing up.

Every child should have the opportunity to take control of their life and future. Towards that end, Empowerment Education should be advanced as far as possible towards providing a coherent and comprehensive curriculum that spans multiple levels of education from elementary to high school to college to adult lifelong learning.

The Unexamined Upbringing

"There are no rules, only consequences."

—Michael Peake

At what point in your childhood are you told that you are shaping your character? When do they explain the far-reaching implications of seemingly trivial choices? If no one told you these things as a child, you aren’t alone.

(quotes from Scout manuals on the inquiring mind.)

Skillpedia Is A Stand-Alone Offering

"The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly - that is what each of us is here for."

—Oscar Wilde

Some people will arrive in search of skills or other single interests. Skillpedia provides ways to learn skills for their own sake. You need not subscribe to Empowerment ideas or participate in the wider Empowerment to use and enjoy Skillpedia.

Social Network Learning Model

Empowerment is pioneering an autonomous learning system that has implications beyond the new fields of activism. Social network learning is a process that can revolutionize how people learn.

Social network learning is a hybrid of two dominant models of learning: teaching by formal instruction and self-teaching by informal study.

In social learning, learners not only have unfettered access to the means to teach themselves, but also they have a network of socially supported learning opportunities such as peers to collaborate with, projects to gain experience, teachers to learn from, and opportunities for teaching others.

Social learners are supported in lifelong learning by the network and can just as easily engage in self-directed learning as they can tap into conventional educational opportunities. Formal education becomes not the be-all end-all of learning, but rather a vital component of a larger learning process that neither begins nor ends in the classroom.

Social learning is out-of-the-box learning.

The following quote is revealing:

"...many have split off from the mainstream holding that learning is a primarily self taught thing, and that the ideal learning situation is one that is self taught. According to this dogma, learning at its basic level is all self taught, and class rooms should be eliminated since they do not fit the perfect model of self learning. However, real world results indicate that isolated students fail. Social support seems crucial for sustained learning.

Informal learning theory also concerns itself with book vs real-world experience learning. Many consider most schools severely lacking in the second. Newly emerging hybrid instructional models combining traditional classroom and computer enhanced instruction promise the best of both worlds."

—Learning Theory, Wikipedia

Social Learning Role Models For Others

"Students often learn a great deal simply by observing other people."

—Social Learning

You may not realize it, but just by learning things on Empowerment you are role-modeling for others and insiring them to learn too. People can see what others are learning and think to themselves, "Hey, I can learn that too!"

"Virtually any element that we can scrutinize or experience can become node. Thoughts, feelings, interactions with others, and new data and information can be seen as nodes. The aggregation of these nodes results in a network. Networks can combine to form still larger networks (each node in a larger network can be a network of nodes itself). A community, for example is a rich learning network of individuals who in themselves are completed learning networks.

Nodes are characterized by a general sense of autonomy. A node may exist within a network, even if it is not strongly connected. Each node has the capacity to function in its own manner. The network itself is the aggregation of nodes, but can only exert limited influence on the nature of each node in the network."

—Connectivism: Learning As Network-Creation

Self-Directed Learning

"An autodidact, also known as an automath, is a mostly self-taught person — typically someone who has an enthusiasm for self-education and a high degree of self-motivation. Such an ability has led to the success of many famous and successful individuals."

—http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autodidacticism

Skillpedia is useful to self-directed learners who want to learn of their own interests at their own pace. 

Empowerment University Skill Certification

Empowerment University is a new educational system to train people in empowerment skills.

• Qualify in skill applications and knowledge areas.
• Take exams.
• Contribute questions to exams.
• Rate questions submitted.
• All using regional karma.
• Verify your ID to attach your certificates to yourself.
• You can begin Basic without any declared major or minor specializations.
• You can declare your intended specializations at any time before you begin Advanced Training.
• create any lesson plan, outcome,
• personalized educational goals or institutional requirements
• all roads lead to learning
• lessons are things you learn, not necessarily lectures by teachers in courses you take
• planning around academic institutional frameworks and rulesets
• financial planning

Its okay to oversimplify memetics to make it comprehensible and useful.

Skillpedia is not an academic exercise or thought experiment.

It is a field-expedient curriculum for the general public's usage.

personal missions

character building and structuring life around other goals

educational missions

like in Sims, doing your education is a useful step along your path

career missions

developing your career

activism missions

doing your impact

There are numerous skills to explore. You can learn skills a-la-carte however you like or pursue a guided training course.

Activist Training

Activist training is a major new area of learning.

Activist training is not necessarily based on conventional models of education.

Skills

Activist tech and skills are inextricably bound.

• Demilitarism
• Job Skills Relavent To Careers Army to civilian job certs, we should highlight how activist tours of duty will train you for careers and how careers can become activism.
• Skills and Challenges For Each Career highlights the kinds of skills and challenges for each career

The nonmenclature for seperating skills from ACTSPEC tech is not clearly established, and in many cases a blended skills and tech explanation is useful in the book layout, as instructions are often specific to a particular tool.

Global Learning

Global learning is about bringing advanced education to the entire world.

Low Cost Access

$100 computers are an emerging platform for global education $100 Computers

John Taylor Gatto in Wikipedia

"FETP OpenCourseWare is not a long distance learning project, rather it is a resource for people working or studying in policy-related fields to increase their knowledge and explore new approaches to learning and curriculum development. Instructors are encouraged to adopt FETP’s curricular materials for use in their own courses."

—FETP OpenCourseWare

Learning Planning

Figure out what you want to learn and how you want to get there. There are as many ways to learn as there are learners because everyone's learning goals and paths are different.

Training Courses

These training courses are designed to provide a guided experience to achieve a comprehensive skillset and learning outcome. You can learn these things seperately, but they make more sense when integrated into a unified learning process.

BASIC (Basic Activism Skills Instruction Course)
Basic Training prepares you to operate as a general activist.

AIT (Advanced Individual Training)
Advanced Individual Training prepares you with specialized skills in a particular area of expertise.

Schooling

There are all kinds of schools and programs out there providing useful courses and degree programs. Schooling is an essential requirement for many career paths, and there may be a school program that meets your needs and can fast-track your path towards success.