Please add links to projects, organisations or experiments you're aware of...

Schoolofcommoning @tiacarr(London) 'Education to co create commons culture & social renewal through collaboration, engagement and co learning'.

[The page 'Radical Education Projects' on The Sociological Imagination blog has a partial list]

Hedgeschool21 (Northern Ireland) - "Learning without urgency, learning for life"

The Social Science Centre (Lincoln) - "We think this experiment in co-operative learning has the potential to transform the way in which higher education is designed and delivered."

Govan Folk University (Glasgow) - "We aspire to reclaim the meaning of education in ways that deepen the many forms that it can take in the community"

The University of Local Knowledge (Bristol) - "ULK aims to challenge perceptions of how knowledge is organized and valued: reinforcing the importance of the knowledge that is gained through life experience and the value of sharing it."

Communiversity - "Rethink the university as a commons" through visualising and mapping the collective actions and connections across Europe.

Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU) (US, Online) - At P2PU, people work together to learn a particular topic by completing tasks, assessing individual and group work, and providing constructive feedback.

The Society for Curious Thought (Online) - 'liberty of conscience, liberty of thought and feeling; absolute freedom of opinion and sentiment on all subjects, practical or speculative and scientific and moral, or theological'

The Ragged University (Glasgow/Edinburgh/Online) - 'The Ragged University provides free, entertaining education for everyone. The classrooms are pubs and cafés and the teachers are you and me.'

DIY Masters (Berlin/Linz) - 'My DIY Masters degree is focused on representations of friendship, the German language, media art techniques and open and increasingly upon the topic of self-organised education.' (@pipstar)

Glasgow Open School (Glasgow)- 'open setups for shared learnings'

KaosPilot (Denmark) -The KaosPilots was founded in 1991 in Århus, Denmark. It grew out of a youth organization called the Front Runners, a truly novel initiative, who worked with cultural and social projects. The KaosPilots is a self-governing institution comprised of two parts: the school and a consultancy.  The purpose of the KaosPilots is “positive social change through personal growth”. Everything starts with the individual and the individual passion and drive and then spreads with the knowledge of our interdependency. Students at the KaosPilots must explore what they consider to be positive societal change, and then adjust their actions to aid this development, while allowing and helping others to do the same.

Dadamac meetup group  - sessions looking at collaboration and change. First meeting on October 20th 6.30 for 6.45.  Title "Stronger together - exploring the changing world of work." You are welcome to join the group even if you are unlikely to be able to join face-to-face sessions. If there is sufficient interest we will experiment with online sessions too. This group is part of Collaboration Communities and the Dadamacadamy - tiny steps illustrating a big vision - welcoming collaboration because that's the way things emerge - see Dadamacadamy - dream or reality - an action research project.

Spring Project - based in Vauxhall in 10,000sq ft warehouse - training hearst and minds,  bridging the gap left by university education and the world of work

The Eduventurist Project - (US primarily, but also international): Profiles of both young and old people who have taken nontraditional, experiential, and/or self-intiated learning pathways. This will eventually culminate into a book wtih 30-45 profiles of "Eduventurists" who will inspire those looking for alternatives.

CROS Learning Model (please try google translate for text in english): CROS - the Resource Center for Student Organizations is the pilot phase of an initiative to build a university from the ground up in Romania, based on three principles: self directed learning, social learning in communities of practice andlearning in the real world. It’s been evolving as a continuous iteration of experiments over the past 4 years. All this we’ve come to reffer to as the “CROS Learning Model” and it’s meant to become the foundation of a new university sometime next year. (FRED - The Emergent Learning Model is based on these same three principles as CROS, and is also designed to anticipate EU i2015 targets linking Informal, non-formal and formal learning. WikiQuals is an interpretation of Emergent Learning)

The Glass Bead Game - A new project that aims to encourage exploration between the different verticals of cultural practice. Targeted at cultural practitioners, it aims to engage them with a core curriculum of material from different disciplines and cultures. This curriculum should provide a basis of material that can be expanded from using constantly evolving knowledge maps. The project is purely focused on broadening of epistemologies and metaphysics so that those who create ideas that others digest can expand the intellectual basis through which their work is generated. 

(Comment by FRED - great reference to Hesse's Glass Bead Game which is a favourite of mine! Ambient Learning City plans to be an expression of the Glass Bead Game in a place, in this case Manchester - see MOSI-Along) [Thanks for these links - the projects look fantastic! They are not actually similar to that listed above though just to clarify :) 2nd Comment by Fred; Thanks for the clarification! Actually ALC is a form of Hesse's Glass Bead Game, but in a physical place, unlike in the book, which was written in the 1930/40s. GBG was one of the new metaphors I was going to use as a framing reference but wasn't sure if people knew the book. The Digital Cabinets of Curiosities we have got people building in Manchester and Salford are a digital form of Hesse's idea of a Glass Bead Game (which were carried out in a community of "masters and scholars")]

Co-Creating Open Scholarship; Boyer's Model of Scholarship has been mentioned on this wiki as a framing device, and there has been some discussion recently on this. However I think it is part of the old hierarchical model of education that I hope we are moving away from. I have recently proposed a Co-creation Model of Open Scholarship and think we should be involved in developing a collaborative model of developing Open Processes of learning; not just open scholars, but "Open Students".

More info on Open Scholarship on my blog, full paper with references, in the ALT Open Access Archive. This paper was selected as the opening paper of the Proceedings of ALT-C, at which conference it was presented in September 2011.

Historical examples

(Past projects & organisations that still exist, but were founded in another era)

The University of Openness (Limehouse Town Hall/Online) - now dormant, this wiki was home to "a self-institution for independent research, collaboration and learning" which also hosted First Life events at Limehouse Town Hall.

Free University of Glasgow founded in 1987, now dormant. "A decentralised and loose network to bring together people of different ages and different classes who are completely outside orthodox educational establishments." "The activities and projects of the organisation will be based on the exploration of different forms of learning, not centred on a teacher/ pupil relationship but rather on group activity, the defence of ideas and the value of individual knowledge and skills. Projects will be largely determined by the interests of the membership and the space available." Organised two day event in Govan, Glasgow in 1990 featuring Noam Chomsky. 

Pollok Free State University (Glasgow) founded in 1994 at protest camp against the M77 motorway in Pollok Park, Glasgow. "I don’t think it was one person’s specific idea, it was just people picking up on how every time they came to they woods there was just so much happening. Colin was doing his carvings, people were gardening, people were doing art, there was talks, there was workshops ... What people visualised of what they see as happening in educational places ... but it was what people says what they would really like to learn when they were going back to their university that day or even to their school, you know? So the degree papers were drawn up and you qualified for a Pollok Free State University degree and if that was just them walking with the wheelbarrow to collect the water, so be it!... It was this extreme school that’s in your community where you walked from your scheme and straight into your school and it’s like: “Wow!” It’s in your face! Whereas when you walk into your ordinary school it’s in the desk or it’s in the book, whereas this education was just in your face. It was so easy for people to learn and it just gave so much people confidence." Now dormant, but work continued by the Galgael Trust which emerged from the Pollok Free State. 

CIDOC (Cuernavaca, Mexico: 1960-76?) - the Centre for Intercultural Documentation founded by Ivan Illich and others.