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Welcome to Our Universal Free School of Healing Arts(OUFSHA), an evolving experimental, collaborative learning game that can produce many positive benefits for all participants.

OUFSHA is owned and operated by its students. At this school, everyone is considered a student, although some more experienced students often teach less experienced students. Even individuals playing service roles as administrators and directors of the school are considered students, because the school itself is just one big organic learning experiment. Participation is the only requirement for membership. A student participates through giving their personal time, money, effort, knowledge, attention, or feedback toward the school's central social experiment or related endeavors.

The unifying purpose that holds this diverse, transforming community together is the common principle that nurturing optimal health in ourselves and others is the first thing everyone on Earth should be concerned with attending to, and that an opportunity to learn how to do so should be available to all who want it. Everyone that wants to participate towards actualizing this common principle should have the opportunity to attempt to do so, regardless of their current station in life. While OUFSHA does not align itself with any religion, business enterprise, government, university, or other institution, it is willing to experimentally collaborate with and inside these entities in order to further actualize it's primary purpose.

There are no required dues or fees to attend this school. A main component of the school's experimental social aspect is the altruistic challenge posed to potential students. This challenge intentionally flies in the face of what we consider a short-sighted capitalist's strategy - commonize cost, privatize profit. Instead, the very existence of the school depends entirely on the inverse altruistic strategy - privatize cost, commonize profit. One of the main hypotheses of the school's central experiment is that the golden rule, social contribution, and sharing provides many potential health benefits to practitioners. This hypothesis assumes cooperation out-performs competition towards nurturing optimal health for the greatest number of the players over the long run. Also, the joy of giving just feels good.

OUFSHA is a virtual campus. It exists tangibly in cyberspace as an evolving, free, integrated educational software system and content. One of the central learning experiences offered by the school is the opportunity to help develop, maintain, deploy, use, or give feedback on this software system and content. The continuous evolution of this software system is driven by the desire to leverage current technology advances in the service of optimal accelerated learning. The educational content authored and transmitted by this software system is organized as portable lessons around the central topic of nurturing optimal health. The virtual classroom is concretely manifest in local space-time when a group of content users get together at regular intervals to study the content, and to participate with each other in suggested hands-on labs and discussions. The school also publishes courses on how to start and effectively run these study groups. Study group participants are asked to give feedback on their classroom experiences. This feedback is taken into account in the evolution of future releases of both the content and the transmission technology. All of the school's software and content published in cyberspace complies with the Free Software Foundation's Copyleft, insuring that it can always be freely copied by anyone, anywhere. ExtremeMeme is the umbrella name given to content authoring and playback technology.

The curriculum delivered by OUFSHA covers roughly the same core topics taught at most massage therapy schools. The educational path offered to the end consumer (student) of the content is, in essence, the same as that of a traditional massage school student. We currently call this curriculum TouchClub. While both a credentialed massage school and OUFSHA's TouchClub share the common agenda of teaching students the healing art of massage therapy, there are some key differences between these two forums . A credentialed massage school is concerned with preparing its students to practice massage professionally (for money). Oufsha's TouchClub never intends its students to practice massage therapy professionally (unless, of course, they also happen to be professionally trained and licensed massage therapists). Instead, TouchClub offers the path of the massage student as both the means and the end for the student to explore nurturing optimal health in themselves and others. This also means that all business-related courses taught at a credentialed school are not to be found as part of the TouchClub curriculum. Furthermore, because TouchClub is only concerned with teaching massage therapy and not with selling credentials, TouchClub is not burdened by the essential record keeping that forms the core administrative activity of the credentialed massage school. Lastly, there is no bricks and mortar property owned or leased by TouchClub - it is just a suggested curriculum and using it is the responsibility of the students.

-- EdwardZimmerman