Exciting news: Mozilla, Hacks/Hackers, Medill School at Northwestern University, and The Media Consortium are collaborating to run “Open Journalism & the Open Web,” a FREE, six-week interactive online course that will bring together journalists and programmers. Registration is now open. Limited space is available — there are spaces for twenty programmers and twenty journalists — and registration is first-come, first-served.

Register today at P2P:  http://p2pu.org/general/open-journalism-open-web

Course start date: September 15, 2010
Course end date:   October 27, 2010

This course is great opportunity to learn from peers and subject-matter experts about the ways that technology is changing news production, and how these changes can be integrated into your work. Here’s the tentative course outline:

+ The fundamentals of journalism and coding
+ Project management
+ Edit it. Fork it. The art of collaboration and journalism
+ Big Ugly Datasets For Thumb-Fingered Journalists
+ Maps. Maps. Everywhere
+ Data journalism and government

The course will focus on practical opportunities to put your skills as a professional journalist, or professional programmer, to work. You’ll also have the opportunity learn directly from other professionals through hands-on assignments and a weekly conference call with news innovation experts. (The course readings, online participation, and a seminar are expected to require roughly 4-6 hours per week.)

Register today at Peer2Peer University

Can adopting open educational resources make education more accessible to learners and empower educators to share?

This is the question that informs the Adopting Open Textbooks course at P2PU. The course is a 3-step process to adopting open textbooks for educators facilitated by the College Open Textbook Collaborative.   The 3 major steps are discovering open educational materials and selecting appropriate ones based on the various criteria; secondly following an adoption process where you work with other stakeholders on your campus including students to promote a best-use model, and finally the third step is sharing your knowledge of discovery and adotion of open educational materials with others in your discipline, campus, or learning community.  The course can also be useful to self-learners or home-schoolers who want to find high-quality open educational resources in their area of interest.

Sign up for this course is currently open until September 8th. Go to the course home page to sign up.

The Peer 2 Peer University announced its third round of free and open online courses today, opening sign-ups for a growing list of courses dealing in su bject areas ranging from Collaborative Lesson Planning to Manifestations of Human Trafficking.

P2PU is also excited to announce the launch of the P2PU School of Webcraft, run in conjunction with the Mozilla Foundation. The School of Webcraft is a powerful new way to learn open, standards based web development in a collaborative environment. School of Webcraft courses include Beginning Python Webservices and HTML5.

All classes are globally accessible, free, and powered entirely by learners, mentors and contributors with the goal of creating  a vibrant, peer-led system that helps people around the world easy access to build careers on open web technology.

The P2PU community is growing and excited to have these new courses and their organizers on board.

Since the last round of courses, a few changes have taken place at P2PU, most noticeably on the P2PU site which has seen a major overhaul, and is simpler and easier to use than ever before. However, the nature of the P2PU community remains the same, and all community generated content is open and shareable under CC BY-SA.

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://p2pu.org/course/list. Deadlines for sign-ups are 8th September 2010. The courses will run until October 27th. Each course application may require additional information.

Last week’s newsletter was painful. I needed a break. We all did. So let us return to the simple things, to bread, tomatoes and cheap red wine, to black and white. To suspenders. And to Google Translate, which turns out to be the perfect complement to Adriano Celentano, one of my dad’s favorite singers (yes, it has come to this).

In the most beautiful dream you’re only you > But how do you know it’s a dream, and how do you know it’s only you? Well, you need research to find that out. And thanks to Erin and Nathan from UC Berkeley, there will be a lot more research coming to P2PU, helping us to keep the dream beautiful.

You are like a shadow that will never return > But it appears that you are returning, to run your courses again. The list keep growing, but Delia is currently activating her global network of lawyers, Larry will once again offer to help people run election campaigns, and Laurian and Nadeem just stated they are bringing back the crowd favorite Cyberpunk course. Hooray. All courses: http://wiki.p2pu.org/New-Courses

Sad are the swallows in the sky as they go to sea > But sad are not the T-Shirts as they go out to the overseas. And we will only be sad if the t-shirts get lost on the way – which is very possible given the South African postal service. Fingers crossed. Photo: http://bit.ly/9XbsJ1

I will not go anymore, when we finally … > When we finally what? It remains unclear, at least in the English translation. But maybe he is saying that he will not go away from our website, because the course home page is finally starting to look AWESOME. Sneak preview here, but it’s all on one page now, it’s clean and sleek, and you can send the course description into the twitter sphere with one click (tempting, but please don’t click yet). http://bit.ly/bvoYfr

Now that I’m thinking my tomorrow > I don’t know what that means, but Alison is running a kick-ass orientation seminar not tomorrow, but today (right now in fact). We already had a tokbox session on Tuesday, and the new course organizers are great. Join the very lively discussion about new courses if you haven’t already: http://bit.ly/bvfGHX

But this song fly to the sky > Fly to the sky everyone. Have a great weekend!

See that there? See that sterling example of 100% made-in-South-Africa-t-shirty-P2PU goodness? Isn’t it just lovely?

We think so.

This is just an example of the new batch of P2Pu t-shirts that came back from the printers today. We know it’s been a while, and we’re sorry that some of you have ah to wait to long to get your shirts, but we’re glad to be able to announce that anyone who is owed a shirt will be recieving them very soon.

We have 3 different shirts this time round:

Special pioneer ones for people who took part in the first ever P2PU Pilot courses back in 2009
Class of 2010 ones for people who completed a course this year can now consider themselves P2PU alumni
Barcelona-themed shirts for those members of the community who will be attending the P2PU meeting later this year.

If you think you’re owed a shirt, or we promised you one and you’re still waiting, just let us know in the comments section, and we’ll sort it out as quickly as we can.

You wanted it. And you got it. Although it wasn’t an easy choice. At P2PU we know exactly what it means when you gotta be strong and you gotta be fast. But we went with something else, because we like white doves, black ninjas (why ninjas?) and are not afraid to show our vulnerability, because we know that we’ll never be wrong together.

Every now and then I get a little bit lonely and you’re never coming around > That’s how Physics 8.01 feels, because nobody wants to be its course organizer. The new courses are coming together nicely, but there are a few amazing proposals that need course organizers to make it happen. We want to do journalism course with Hacks/Hackers and Mozilla, and we would LOVE to finally offer the Physics 8.01 experience. If you know anyone who might be interested in either of these – please blow-dry them our way (email: thepeople at p2pu.org).

Every now and then I get a little bit restless and i dream of something wild > Everyone knows there is nothing as wild as thousands of geeks in Texas. In order for us to stop dreaming and experience the wildness ourselves, John submitted a panel to SXSW 2011. Vote for it to help us get wild! http://bit.ly/sxsw_webcraft

And I need you now tonight. And I need you more than ever > In fact it’s actually not me, but it’s Bekka who needs you more than ever to let her know if you are coming to Barcelona. If you got invited, now is the time to confirm if you are coming. No r-s-v-p, no p-a-r-ty (if you say it right, it does rhyme).

Forever’s gonna start tonight. Forever’s gonna start tonight > It actually started on Thursday, when Delia and Philipp had a call with Charles from One Click Orgs (http://www.oneclickor.gs/). These guys help communities like us to keep the goodness flowing – and the governance open – while becoming official incorporated organizations. It will take some time to get there, but the plan is that by late 2010/ early 2011 we can be P2PU (dot org) forever.

Join 11,942,203 other people who have great taste in music and watch this. We recommend you watch it once only, to avoid irreversible damage to your hair). You’ll need the weekend to recover.

We’ve proven that we can do smooth and we can do hip and hop – but this week we are taking it up a level. We are pulling out all — and I mean ALL — the stops. We literally burn our guitars on stage in golden underwear. Because P2PU is a wild thing!

Wild thing, you make my heart sing > Website, we’ve spent countless nights crying ourselves to sleep worried over you, but with the recent spate of updates our hearts are starting to sing. Charles and George built new Dashboards (both personal and one for each course) that are so powerful that you could land a 747 on a 4 lane highway in the middle of rush hour during a thunderstorm and nobody would get hurt. And even better: notification emails from the forum now contain full messages, so you don’t have to actually go to the site at all anymore, and you can just stay at home by yourself and practice the electric guitar. Other changes are already on the development server, but not yet on the live site – like a lot less clutter (fewer links on the course home pages). And finally, we are getting rid of the somewhat complicated course creation workflow, and you can just click on “create a course” in order to create a course, wow! (a draft course actually)

You make, ah, everything groovy > Sometimes people get into arguments over silly stuff. Like they didn’t know that you like to keep the toothpaste unscrewed over night – on purpose. But none of that happens at P2PU, because now you can read exactly what you are getting yourself into when you come here, to the wild things. In our new and improved Terms of use (http://p2pu.org/terms-of-use) and privacy guidelines (http://p2pu.org/privacy). Thank you Delia and other anonymous lawyers for keeping it groovy.

I think you move me, but I want to know for sure > Last week you were still wondering if we’d move you to Barcelona for our community workshop – but now you know for sure. The conference committee reviewed all applications and sent out invitation emails. Unfortunately this song contains no lyrics about hard work, but that’s what it’s going to be, you wild thing! Hard work.

Wild thing, I think I love you > I bet you never thought about it that way, but once you see our brand-new etherpad server (http://pad.p2pu.org) crashing every couple of hours, you’ll also call it a wild thing. And you’ll still love it, because collaborative note taking in color is kind of like painting by numbers, but better.

There are lots of other things to love this week, including our plans to totally revolutionize assessment, an awesome School of Webcraft call with the usual suspects, and our new stack overflow Q&A site. Speaking of which, if you really do feel the love, go ahead and show it – by posting an unrelated question. Yes, love has never been that
easy.
http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/16633/p2pu-questions-and-answers

And in case this blistering hot email still has you doubting, see the flames and find out about our golden underwear right here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPvehX2aWb8

Don’t do anything this weekend! Or do like Bekka and burn the midnight oil at OppiKoppi.

No, it’s not the wedding of the year, but P2PU might be your match made in heaven.
We’ve made some changes to our schedule for the proposal and launch of new courses, and we thought we should let you know:

• 16 Aug – 3 Sep: Course building time. This is also the time that we’ll be running the New Course Organiser Orientation.
• 30 Aug – 3 Sep: Peer review for all courses
• 25 Aug: Announcement of courses and sign-up
• 25 Aug – 8 Sep: Sign-up open
• 8 – 10 Sep: Review of sign-ups, preparations for course start
• 10 Sep: Participants are informed
• 15 Sep: Courses start
• 27 Oct: Courses close

24 – 30 July 2010

The week’s lyrical theme is admittedly a little harder, but us let us transport you back to the days when the neon dance floor was alight. And remember, the beat don’t stop till the break of dawn.

I don’t mean to brag. I don’t mean to boast. But we like hot butter on our breakfast toast >> We don’t mean to, but we’ll do it anyway, because we are big fans of Joi Ito’s wonderful journalism course. It finished last week, but we are doing some major scheming behind the scenes to make sure it comes back – pronto. If you want to help let us know! Until then, read Joi’s reflections about the experience on his blog http://joi.ito.com/ and check out the materials at http://p2pu.org/journalism

Then you throw your hands high in the air. Ya rockin’ to the rhythm, shake your derriere >> Cause that’s what you’ll all want to do when you read this next little item. Hidden in just another unassuming bullet are the news that everyone has been waiting for. Our new t-shirts went to the printers this week. Did Bekka ask them to mix some sparkly bits into the grey this time? Well, you’ll just have to wait and see. In the meantime, you can be the second person (after our friend Eze) to order a P2PU shirt at http://p2pu.spreadshirt.com. You know you want to!

Everybody go, “Ho-tel, mo-tel, Holiday Inn“ >> Even better than a hotel motel holiday inn, we started looking at shared apartment options for Barcelona, and it’s looking good. Bekka found a whole building full of apartments that sleep up to 4 people each. It’ll be like summer camp – except in winter. We also have confirmation from the Open University Catalunya that they will let us use some of their rooms to put sticky notes everywhere and workshop the place till the break of dawn. Thank you Eva!

Say up jump the boogie to the bang bang boogie >> Jumpin’ up at you is our new School of Webcraft slide image on the http://www.drumbeat.org home page. You might have to wait a little until it jumps up – right there in front of your eyes. Grey and beautiful. Thanks Ned!

And now people in the house, this is just for you. A little rap to make you boogaloo >> This week the people in the house talked about what to boogaloo-do with the P2PU lounge. The idea for the lounge was to provide an easy entry point to the community. Where new people could hang out, ask questions, and discuss answers. We admittedly hacked it together a bit and it never really took off and we are about to replace it with a mailing list and a wiki. If you’ve got an opinion on the lounge – now is the time to tell it to thepeople (at p2pu.org).

With that we’ll leave you to the weekend. Watch this on your way out of Friday http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=diiL9bqvalo (You know it’s got to be good if it’s ripped from VHS – filmed live at last year’s workshop in Berlin I believe).

PS: I said a hip hop, hippie to the hippie, the hip, hip a hop, and you don’t stop, a rock it to the bang bang boogie, say, up jump the boogie, to the rhythm of the boogie, the beat.

This week at P2PU // 17 July – 23 July 2010

INTRO > Stian had the excellent idea that we needed community updates – an informal stream of consciousness on what’s going on at P2PU. The answer is usually “lots is going on” which is why there never seems enough time to report on all of it. So, the idea is to crowdsource what’s happening at P2PU each week. If you are doing something you want in the update – make sure it’s on the community list, or let me know by email. I will compile everything into one manageable update email for Friday. You can then print it out and read it slowly over the weekend. We’ll also post it on the blog. The updates will be short, and with musical themes to guess. This week’s theme is easy to guess.

NEXT ROUND > We are working frantically on new courses. The timelines are written (pencil -> calendar = 15 September 2010), the watches are wound, and the shoelaces tied. We just sent out the call for new courses, but are also talking to people and organizations
individually. There is a chance we’ll have a first prototype course with the Hacks/Hackers community (an awesome group of computer geeks and journalists) and our fingers are crossed to have our very first art history course (with a big twist) as well. Call for courses: http://blogs.p2pu.org/

WEBCRAFT > The School of Webcraft continues to grow at amazing speed. Pippa, who is shaping the curriculum and leading on course development reported that 17 course proposals were submitted by the deadline, but deadline or not, people are still adding more. We are up to 20 course proposal as of today. Check them out and leave your comments at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Drumbeat/p2pu/courses

ORIENT YOURSELF > Alison came on board to design our all new orientation process and signed up an amazing group of experts to help
her. Discussions happen on the http://groups.google.com/group/p2pu-orientation mailing list, and people from UC Berkely, and University of Cape Town have already agreed to help with the seminars. The materials are on the wiki at http://wiki.p2pu.org/orientation and it would be great if the organizers of past courses could have a look and add their thoughts. We also redesigned the course proposal process, see here http://wiki.p2pu.org/Create-a-Course.

GANG > The gang is gone, long live the gang … ah … community. During the past year, a lot of the discussion about p2pu and its future has taken place on the gang list, which was for people with skin in the game. The gang stars (yes, it’s corny, but also crazy and cool – but in an insider joke kind of way) are an awesome group of people from all over the world who act as the stewards of P2PU. They will continue to do so, but we are throwing open the doors of perception and invite everyone to join the p2pu-community list. See for yourself at http://groups.google.com/group/p2pu-community.

MEETUP > John set up a bunch of meetups, so there is no excuse anymore to not come out and play. Join us for free Wifi (hopefully), cheap drinks (maybe), and stimulating conversations (ha ha). Lila even offered to host the San Francisco meetup at her house. Little does she know. http://www.meetup.com/p2pu/

PAPER > In case you forgot to pick up your local copy, P2PU was recently mentioned in the online edition of The Hindu, an English language newspaper with a circulation of 5,2 million readers. That’s a lot of people and pretty big news for us and we noticed a nice spike in sign-ups from India, which is wonderful. Get your fix at http://www.hindu.com/2010/07/11/stories/2010071160251400.htm

TUNES > Staying with this week’s musical theme: “You know we’ve got to find a way – to bring some lovin’ here today.” Have great weekends! Watch this -> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9KC7uhMY9s