Michael McCarthy

Michael McCarthy is a student at College Unbound. He has built his personal learning network in part through Peer 2 Peer University. P2PU has a website that allows people to form different kinds of study groups. Mike joined an online book group that is reading Ivan Illich’s classic of alternative education, Deschooling Society. Michael says: “All of the active participants are older, wiser, and involved professionally in education. Rather than having a broken-down, structured reading that would have turned me away, the participants threw out some amazing observations rather early, and that had me wanting to read through the text in a more deliberate and thoughtful way. However, some learning groups might develop a tendency to become ‘dead threads,’ as in online forums. I’ll see how this one follows through (or doesn’t.)” I met Michael when I visited College Unbound, where I saw him doing a midterm presentation on do-it-yourself education. He had created an incredible video, partly inspired by my book, DIY U. We have worked together on a series of videos for FastCompany.com, which allowed him to get paid for his work for the first time.