Education as a humane, unfinished, shared experiment — from coffee shops to virtual worlds.
Malcolm McAfee (1925–2021) never treated learning as a finished system. Across seven decades, he followed curiosity wherever it led — from early mainframe computers to online communities, from “schools without walls” to one of the world’s first virtual universities.
This site accompanies the book and podcast series Malcolm McAfee and the Long Experiment in Learning. Together they explore not only one life, but a continuing question: how do humans learn together when the walls dissolve?
A narrative biography told through key moments in educational history — from the 1950s to Zoom.
Read the chapters →Voices, stories, humour, and memory — colleagues, friends, and fellow travellers.
Listen to episodes →Paideia University, School Without Walls, AussieMOO, and the Virtual Graduation.
Enter the virtual campus →Timelines, technologies, documents, and learning artefacts from the long experiment.
Browse the archive →
“As a boy, he once read an entire encyclopedia by the shore of a lake — not as a feat, but as a pleasure.”
Lake Memphremagog, where curiosity became a lifelong habit.