P2PU Blog

Design fans, this one is for you.

Solve Anything, Building Ideas Through Design is a team-based creative lab, and will explore and experiment with two questions: what makes ideas successful? How does one develop an idea in response to a problem, and then nurture it into a product, service, or experience?In this six-week course, we turn to design thinking – here meaning a creative, user-centric but systemic approach to problem solving – to answer these questions.
We’ll cover some basics about new product development and look at case studies of successful and unsuccessful ideas to understand why they ended up with the fate they did. Most importantly, class participants will identify and submit community problems that can be tackled through design. As a group, we will select problems that are most addressable in the context of a six weeks. Then, we’ll learn and practice creative, user-centric, hands-on methods – think brainstorming, ethnographic user research, and prototyping – to quickly generate, validate, and ultimately build solutions to our chosen problems. Along the way, we’ll learn about framing problems for better solutions, managing the creative process, and innovating in teams remotely.

Interested? Of course you are. Check the course out at our new site, and sign up soon!

Hands up anyone who wants to be a celebrity chef. If you think you have it in you to be the next Heston Blumenthal or Ferran Adria, then the Kitchen Science course at P2PU is for you.

Today’s featured course is for all you West Wing fans, fledgling pundits and political beasts. Originally titled “How to Win An Election with $2.00 and a pint of Cooking Oil”, the course is now called Managing Election Campaigns, and it guarantees to be fascinating.

This course covers the mechanics of managing election campaigns, including campaign organization, campaign finance, analyzing and using voter data, using direct mail, scripting telephone contact, managing volunteers, and understanding the legal environment. The project for the course will be to work from a California template and map the similarities and differences for each course participant’s jurisdiction. The course is offered with two caveats: (1) many of the techniques will scale to larger election campaigns, but others will not; and (2) the legal environment around voter data is critical to any data-driven voter contact effort.

Sign up for courses closes on February 28th, so make sure you get to the new p2pu site, and make your mark.

We’ll be featuring one of the great new courses being offered at P2PU every day this week, and what better to start with than the Introduction to Cyberpunk Literature course. This was an incredibly popular course in the last cycle at P2PU, and promises to be just as fascinating this time round:

The Peer 2 Peer University announced its second round of free and open online courses today, opening sign-ups for 14 courses dealing in subject areas ranging from Physics to Transformational Art. Some of the courses were offered in the first phase of the pilot which launched last September, but seven are brand new, including “Urban Disaster Risk Management,” “Mashing Up the Open Web,” and “Solve Anything! Building Ideas through Design.” P2PU is also excited to announce its first Portuguese language courses organized by Brasil’s Casa de Cultura Digital, one of which is an introduction to the thinking of Paulo Freire (educational theorist who is author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed). The P2PU community has grown and is excited to have these new courses and their organizers on board.

One of P2PU’s new community members, Fulbright Scholar at the Vienna University of Technology, Vivek Rao, talks about what made him volunteer to design and run his own course,

“When I learned Calculus with a college library group or picked up the latest Photoshop tricks from my coworkers, it wasn’t about teaching, it was about sharing. That’s the most natural way I learn–sharing with peers out of curiosity. To me, P2PU is all about embracing this type of learning through sharing via a very accessible platform. Now I’m looking forward to share what I know as course organizer of “Solve Anything! Building Ideas through Design,” and keep pushing the P2PU platform ahead.”

Since last November’s workshop in Berlin, a few changes have taken place at P2PU. P2PU is still run and governed by volunteers, but the P2PU Council, with the support of the community, has elected Philipp Schmidt as its representing Director. Philipp is one of the co-founders of the project, as well as a Shuttleworth Foundation Fellow, which enables him to devote himself full time to P2PU. On becoming Director, Philipp says, “We have proven that the model works and are seeing tremendous interest from people all over the world to learn together. I am very excited to help guide the project through the next phase of growth and the opportunity to work with the inspiring and talented volunteers that make P2PU so special.”

When asked how P2PU will affect the education landscape, Council member Delia Browne says, “P2PU will revolutionize how people learn. It will help create a global open culture of learning for the 21st century.”

The P2PU community consists of a diverse group of people. They are writers, teachers, designers, doctoral and alternative grad students, artists, copyright specialists, scientists, and blues guitar players. Above all, they are learners–peers working together to learn from each other.

Sign-ups for all courses are available at http://www.p2pu.org/course/list. Deadlines for sign-ups are 28, Feb 2010. The second pilot phase will run for six weeks from 12 March to 23 April. Each course application may require additional information. See

Do you consider yourself a pretty dab hand at the poker table? Or do you have a particular interest in neuroethics and biolaw? If so, p2pu wants you!
We’re looking for people who might be interested in remixing, or reiterating the Poker and Strategic Thinking and Neuroethics and International Biolaw courses that were run in the pilot phase at p2pu. You don’t have to have taken the courses, although previous participants are welcome to submit proposals too. Proposals can be for the second round of courses (starting in mid-February 2010) or the third round (starting in March 2010).

If you’re interested in being involved in either of these courses, please take a look at the orientation page on the p2pu wiki, or drop us an email: thepeople [@] p2pu [dot]org.

Image: Remix Skewl by Gideon Burton on Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0

Things are hotting up at P2PU and the second round of courses are nearly ready to be made public. Course organisers and their mentors have been working feverishly to get courses designed and start gathering materials, and in the next few days, the community will be reviewing the proposals and helping shape them into some really special learning opportunities.

While we can’t quite let the cat out of the bag yet, we can let a couple of juicy details slip out:

• There will be 13 courses this cycle, ranging from favourites from last cycle, like Creative Non-Fiction and Cyberpunk Literature to exciting new options like Introduction to Economics & Finance to the intriguingly named Mashing Up The Open Web.
• Not all the courses are going to be in English… in fact, P2PU is proud to announce the first batch of Portuguese courses will be running in Cycle 2, organised by our friends at the Casa de Cultura Digital in Brazil.
• Anyone interested in taking a course will be able to sign up from the 12 February 2010.

Does that whet your appetite? We thought it might. Keep an eye on this blog, the p2pu website and Twitter  for more exciting announcements and updates.

The P2PU community has spoken, and we’ve chosen the top three tweets to round off the first P2PU Twitter competition. While everyone had great things to say, @MiNutrition, @jcoffis, and @gastorres took the cake (or pieces of it) for best tweets in response to, “Twitter competition! What does #P2PU mean to you, in 140 characters? 3 t-shirts and eternal fame as prize! http://bit.ly/6VhCcR.”

@MiNutrition: You teach I learn. I teach you learn. Peer to Peer. For
Learning. For Life.

@jcoffis: Connect, Learn,

@gastorres: #p2pu is knowledge unleashed!

The winners will be contacted and sent a P2PU t-shirt! You, too, can own one and support us by visiting this page. Or you can wait for the second P2PU Twitter competition.

Update: If you’re one of the winners, please drop us a mail, so we can send you your t-shirty goodness.

Are you a twitter poet? Are your tweets a picture of 140-character perfection? Can you say more, with less?

If so, we want your skills. On the 12 of January, we’ll be running the very first P2PU twitter competition – all you have to do to win one of the three t-shirts up for grabs is let us know, in 140 characters or less what the Peer 2 Peer University means to you. Add the #p2pu hashtag and prepare for t-shirt greatness. It really is that simple. Oh, and tell all your friends.

pic: tweet by Wonderferret on Flickr CC BY 2.0

Are you a future P2PU gang member who is interested in organizing an MIT OpenCourseWare Physics course for p2pu.org? Or do you have a friend who might be? Please get in touch (leave a comment below, or tweet @p2pu)!

For it’s next round of courses P2PU is experimenting with “traditional” OpenCourseWare materials. Since we all flunked out of Physics in high school (that was a joke!), we are looking for one or two physics geeks that might find it interesting to organize a P2PU course around the following materials:

Physics 1 (MIT OCW 8.01 – Classical Mechanics)

• MIT OpenCourseWare
• Wired article about the course

It’s an amazing course with great videos and lots of useful materials, but it would require some re-designing to make it fit into the P2PU model:

1. The course uses a (gasp!) closed textbook, which would have to be replaced by open materials.
2. It’s too long to fit into 6 weeks and the course organizer would have to change that – either by reducing scope, or stretching it over 12 (or 18 weeks).
3. Since this very much looks like a traditional course, participants are likely to expect a traditional course and not the self-motivated social learning that makes p2pu special. the organizer will have to manage those expectations. This also means, that a strong Physics background would be helpful.

It’s a big challenge, but the stakes are high. If we can make this work, there are hundreds more prospective courses and thousands of peers to learn with.