P2PU Blog

Notes from the Lab: Reshaping Professional Development for Educators

Alison Jean Cole — Wed, 09 May 2012 17:05:05 +0000

“How P2PU is Reshaping Professional Learning for K-12 Teachers” by Karen Fasimpaur was originally published on Getting Smart on 7 May 2012.

Professional learning for K-12 teachers is an exciting space with great demand and high payoff for successful models. However, much of the professional development currently done for in-service teachers reflects old, industrial-era models of learning: rows of desks, teachers standing front and center, seat time, and lecture. Current models of granting credit to teachers are similarly antiquated and are rarely designed to prompt innovation in the classroom.

The School of Ed on Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU) was started to foster new models of professional learning for K-12 teachers. It is focused on open, community-based peer learning. It’s about hands-on experiences driven by each educator’s particular needs and classroom situations. It’s about connecting, collaborating, and creating, not just reading or studying.

All courses and groups in the School of Ed are free, open-licensed (CC BY), and online. The content in them can be used by anyone for any purpose.

P2PU’s School of Ed is very much a “lab” environment where participants are encouraged to try different models to see what works. This has included groups that are online and hybrid, synchronous and asynchronous, leader-driven and participant-driven, highly facilitated and self-guided, domestic and international. Activities in courses can include asynchronous conversations, collaborative projects, readings and videos, web meetings, face-to-face gatherings, making things together, and more. The range of possibilities is limited only by the imagination of the participants.

Work To Date

This project was begun in the summer of 2011 with the launch of seven courses:

Teaching in Online and Blended Classrooms
Student Engagement
OER in the K-12 Classroom
Differentiating Instruction
Using Web 2.0 and Social Media to Encourage Deeper Learning
Writing & the Common Core: Deeper Learning for All, and
Multimedia and Graphics to Facilitate Deeper Learning.

Several key findings came out of this pilot. High quality facilitation is a key to success. Time for teachers is limited, and discussion among the groups was the favored method of participation. Some course topics lend themself better than others to peer learning, and overall teacher preparedness to engage in peer learning was lower than expected. The issuance of formal credit was explored, but it was not clear if the benefits would outweigh the associated challenges. Informal credit is of interest to some participants.

Building on this experience, the next round of seven courses was launched in March, 2012.

Institutional partnerships has helped to expand interest, participation, and quality for the School of Ed. In the pilot phase, partnerships with K12 Handhelds, the Education Development Center, and the National Writing Project have been a key to success.

Next Steps

Another round of groups will be launched in the summer of 2012. These will build on the experiences and lessons learned to date and will include more lab-type experiments to encourage groups to play with what learning experiences are most effective.

Additional partnerships are being forged. In particular, there is a good fit with educational groups that have a mandate to provide professional development and are looking for a way to do so more effectively and with greater reach. Several new partnerships are in the works, and existing ones are being expanded.

As the School of Ed grows, the issues related to incentives and credit for teachers will continue to be explored, doing things that will benefit teachers while not compromising the best parts of the program. Informal credit options such as badges and partnerships with credit-providers who are willing to be innovative are likely to be a part of this.

The School of Ed will also explore sustainability options. To date, the program has been small and funded by small donors and volunteer efforts. While the great interest we have attracted begs the question of scale, we are committed to maintaining an innovative lab environment and high quality offerings. In the shorter term, a small amount of funding is needed, which is likely to come through grants and partnerships. In the longer term, sustainability options such as income from customized services and pay for formal credit will be explored.

More Information

The School of Ed is located at www .p 2 pu .org /school -of -ed . We can also be reached at schoolofed @p 2 pu .org.

Notes from the Lab

Alison Jean Cole — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 18:24:42 +0000

Here’s a round-up of the latest ideas and experiments from P2PU community members as they hack their way through education.

Our Director, Philipp Schmidt joins Hack Education’s Audrey Watters on the latest episode of Higher Ed Live to discuss the growing popularity of MOOC’s, some alternatives and the future of education.

Mozzadrella (aka long time contributor Vanessa Gennarelli) talks about terms.

What we call ourselves matters. And the collection of terms we use has sparked a lively discussion about who we are. Are our learning experiences Challenges? Are they all Courses? Are we always learners? When are we mentors?

The community is exploring how we use language when we describe “this peer learning thing” that we’re doing. Join our community call this Thursday to hear Vanessa and everyone else weigh in on the right terms to use for the future of P2PU.

Community members Anne Witton and Doug Belshaw blog their way through the School of Webcraft Webmaking 101 challenges.

Anne has always been interested in web development, picking up bits of HTML along the way, ” but I’ve got to the point where I want to learn HTML and CSS properly. I enrolled at Peer 2 Peer University and set up this blog to track my progress and point people in the direction of helpful resources.”

Doug, who is using the challenge to brush up on the basics, “really values four things involved in the process.

The social element (you don’t seem to get this at, for example, Codecademy)
Filling in gaps in my knowledge (I didn’t learn any of this sequentially; sometimes I’m missing some building blocks)
Reviewing other people’s work (some people obviously do the bare minimum, others are super-dedicated)
The opportunity to become a mentor (once you’ve learned something, there’s the opportunity to then teach it)”

The New York Times discusses P2PU in it’s article discussing current trends to Building Schools out of Clicks, Not Bricks.

Rebecca Kahn from Peer2Peer University , which “organizes learning outside of institutional walls,” said her organization was “never going to have a school of medicine. We’re never going to have a school of engineering. But we can do some things better than a traditional university. We can adapt faster.”

We discuss current news, the latest research, and the experiences of our community members and learners every Thursday in our open Community Call. We welcome newcomers and the just-plain-curious. Join us!

Announcing Exciting New Courses at P2PU!

Alison Jean Cole — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 00:56:04 +0000

P2PU is excited to announce a treasure chest of new courses and challenges that cover our widest range of topics yet.

In addition to new offerings, we’ve been putting in the hours to make courses more social, scalable and easier to find. We’ve jazzed up learner profiles where you can add your P2PU badges to your Mozilla Backpack. You can visit P2PU.org in English, Spanish and help out with Swedish, Dutch, and Chinese translations. A P2PU ambassador program is under way. The School of Data and School of Open are soon to pilot their first courses..

Here’s highlights of some of the great courses you can expect to find from your peers at P2PU:

Entrepreneurial Marketing
In this challenge, you will craft a mission and vision statement for your enterprise. This will be the foundation for all the marketing for your enterprise, be it a business, a non-profit, an event, a hobby, a special project, or any pursuit that needs marketing.

Design Your First Big Game
Are you ready to get out on the streets and re-imagine your cityscape? Use a bench as your headquarters, play with projections on the walls, plan maps using chalk, jump over imaginary obstacles, defend a fountain, dance in front of changing traffic lights and hide a treasure under a bus stop!

Writing for the Web
Writing for the web requires a new set of skills. Wondering how to make the shift? Interested in writing for a digital audience? Not sure about expressing your ideas and opinions in a public forum? This challenge is for you. In this challenge, you’ll discover how to write for the web, engage others in a dialogue, get up to speed on netiquette, and share your ideas. You’ll acquire instincts about web writing that will guide you as mediums and formats change.

Curating Content
How many times have you tried to check a quick fact online and then lost an hour following links and checking unhelpful websites? The proliferation of paid search results and content mills makes it difficult to find what you want. Like traditional museum and gallery curators, digital curators acquire useful works and artifacts that fit into their collections. Get started organizing online content and explore curation tools in Curating Content.

Become a Citizen Scientist with BOINC
This challenge will show you how to download, install and run the software you need to enable you to join citizen science projects.

The Indie Researchers Homestead
Join the ranks of the curious – from Newton to Darwin. In this set of Open Science challenges you assert your right and intention to document and hone your curiosity by starting a research notebook for your ideas, curating a reading list and exploring research literature.

Hack the P2PU Code
This challenge will show you how to install and modify Lernanta, the software responsible for everything you see at http://p2pu.org.

Open Badges 101
Perhaps you’ve heard about Open Badges, but you’re not sure where to turn to find out more. The Open Badges 101 Challenge gives you a basic introduction to the topic and advice on how to get connected to the open badges community.

And here’s some of the offerings from your peers at School of Ed and School of Webcraft:

Global Classrooms Collaborations for Elementary & Secondary Schools
In these challenges, elementary & secondary teachers from around the world will discuss, design, and establish collaborations between their classrooms.

Certified Networked Teacher
The use of web tools in networked learning has become an important 21st century skills for teachers. The challenge ‘Certified Networked Teacher’ will give you the ability to envision a new future based on the use of web tools in a networked learning scenario. You will then be ready to take on syndicated education in distributed learning environments as an ‘Advanced Networked Teacher’. On expert level you will be a central node in networked learning and change how we understand education in the future.

Collaborative Lesson Planning
In this remix of two 2010/2011 P2PU courses teachers walk through the first steps of publishing their lesson plans online and collaborating with others on them! Its broken down into 4 easy tasks and by the end, teachers will have published a lesson plan online and collaborated on a peer’s plan.

Webmaking 101 Series
Embark on a set of Challenges that will help you understand how basic HTML elements work, and guide you through using the tools to create your first webpage from scratch.

Hackasaurus!
Mozilla is developing curriculum, badges, and software to help people learn webmaking skills through making. At the core of this initiative is a commitment towards supporting and encouraging others to reuse our learning offering to teach web literacy within their communities. These Hackasaurus Challenges are designed to support you in running events for an initial set of our learning content and tools.

Programming with the Twitter API
This challenge will guide you through tasks that involve searching for and reading documentation online, executing an API call to a dynamic data source, processing the results in a language of your choice, and printing them out to a terminal.

Head over to P2PU.org to see the full list of offerings from your peers. And while you’re at it, invite a friend! Here’s some information for you to share with friends and family about P2PU:

P2PU is a lab for the future of learning. Our community members design free courses, use open learning materials and collaboratively build our open platform. You can find a P2PU community member on every non-polar continent, and visit the site in 5 languages. Our community is open and volunteer driven. Involvement starts with participating in courses and moves deeper into designing courses, working on site development and framing governance choices for the organization.

About Courses & Challenges

There are no limitations to the subjects that can be learned at P2PU. You’ll find schools focused on the future of web development, mathematics, social innovation, and education. You’ll find a multitude of courses and challenges for subjects you didn’t even know you could master – like city-wide game design, creative activism, open mapping and poetic thinking. For learners, the P2PU experience is not like any other. Though self-direction is needed, collaboration is key. Work is peer assessed and credit is given in the form of badges – emblems of accomplishment that you can carry across the web. Badges are designed by the community and given by peers. Courses are improved by the peers who take them, and can be remixed and remastered by anyone.

Why Join

At P2PU we believe everyone has something to offer. Come learn from our amazing community, and in turn let us learn from you! We are not just a platform, we are a community driven to redefine and expand how we learn and who we learn with.

Check out our newest offerings at p2pu.org.

Meet Dirk – P2PU’s New Team Member

Alison Jean Cole — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 18:27:21 +0000

Welcome P2PU’s newest staff member Dirk Uys of South Africa. He’ll be joining our development whiz Zuzel Vera in making P2PU more awesome and more usable for all of us.

***

P2PU: Dirk, we’re so excited to have a new staffer. What are you going to be doing for P2PU?

Dirk: I’m also very excited! I am going to be involved in the technical side of things. Specifically, I’m going to help out Zuzel with the development of Lernanta (the open source application running the P2PU website). I will also try to participate as much as possible in the other parts of the community.

P2PU: How did you find us? Have you worked in a open community before?

Dirk: I’ve been following Philipp’s blog [Director of P2PU], sharing-nicely.net, for some time now. So I always knew about P2PU. Then at the beginning of this year I saw that P2PU were looking for a software developer, so I thought that it is a good opportunity for me to set my skills to good use.

Before this I was involved with a private company, a semi-state agency doing some defense contracting and the horse racing industry. This will be the first time that I form part of an open community. I think that I have a lot to learn and I’m looking forward to sharing and cooperating with everyone!

P2PU: Imagine: time has no limits and you can learn anything outside your profession. What would you pursue?

Dirk: When I was still at school I used to love a television show called “The Pretender”. The show is basically about a guy capable of doing any job! I would love to be like that (less the pretending).

But to give a list that is not simply everything, I’d say that I would really like to learn to write a novel. One day I plan on writing a novel, but maybe only when I have small kids that will think that my writing is cool!

Other areas that I would really like to dig into are economics and philosophy.

P2PU: You’re from South Africa, the birthplace of shangaan electro music. Can you boogie like Shangaan dancers?

Dirk: I don’t know if all my limbs will stay attached if I attempt that. I can however “langarm“, but I’m not a big fan of the “langarm” music.

P2PU: That’s still pretty cool. Perhaps you can teach us your moves at the next P2PU event. In case you don’t know, we love music, and we love to dance.

***

You can join forces Zuzel and Dirk on the development team by volunteering your time and django skills. Find them on Github and on the P2PU Development mailing list.

Audrey Watters: Reading and Writing for the Web

Alison Jean Cole — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 05:09:14 +0000

This is a post from the personal blog of Audrey Watters, a P2PU participant and mentor for a new P2PU challenge: Writing for the Web. Take this excellent challenge with Audrey and other writers of all levels and polish up your writing, blogging and internet influence.

***

I’m currently a mentor for a wonderful Peer to Peer University “class” called Writing for the Web. I have class in quotation marks there as it’s described as a “learning challenge” — a new type of offering from P2PU that focuses more on mentorship and social learning and less on a set curriculum or course of study.

The second challenge involves thinking about how writing for the Web differs from writing that was intended for a print audience. And even though I helped think through the design of these challenges, I admit: this one has had me a little stumped. That’s because, thanks to the work I do, I actually read very little that isn’t written for the Web.

Reading Then

It’s an interesting change in my reading habits, the patterns of which I’ve long monitored — with some of the credit going to my fourth grade teacher Mrs. Eudaley, who had the class build a bookworm based on our book reports. A construction paper circle for each segment of its body listed our names, the title and mini-book report. The bookworm grew the more we read. I read 101 books (and wrote 101 book reports) that year, proudly sending the class’s bookworm spiraling around the room and out the door.

I’ve been fixated on monitoring my reading consumption since then.

As such I couldn’t help but notice the way in which grad school and a PhD in literature, of all things, destroyed my interest in reading for pleasure. No time. No inclination. Oh sure, I read a lot in grad school, but I read what was assigned by my professors or demanded by my research.

Writing Now

And now? Now I write for a living, and — how perfect for this P2PU challenge — I write for the Web. But just as grad school altered my habits — what I consume, what I produce — so too does my work now.

This week’s challenge: find an article originally intended for a print audience. Summarize/synthesize for a blog post. Think about the following questions: what’s different? Length, tone? How is it different visually? How does the reading experience differ?

What struck me as I thought about how I’d complete this challenge is how very little reading I do that isn’t online. I mean, I spend my days and nights reading (and of course writing) — reading blog posts, reading social media status updates, reading newspaper stories online, reading magazine articles online. Now granted, the latter sometimes appear in print publications. But most of what I read is written for the Web.

Form and Content, On and Offline

How does that, in turn, shape the way I write? It’s certainly changed the length of what I write — no more 20 page papers as most posts I write range between 250 and 1500 words. It’s changed the frequency — I write daily and publish quickly. I try to think about “ledes” to engage the reader quickly (a style of opening that’s challenging for me to adopt, I admit, since I was long schooled in introductory paragraphs — a different beast). I think about headlines and sub-headers. I think about how to get people to click on a link to one of my stories, and I think about how to get them to read (or scan more likely) all the way to the end, and I think about doing the things that would motivate people to share it via Twitter, Facebook and the like.

There are plenty of writers and publishers who wring their hands over the move from paper to screen — okay, well, there’s Nicholas Carr for starters. And I do think it’s worth thinking about — as this week’s challenge has prompted me to do — what it means for readers and writers when we make this shift. I’m not talking about a value judgement necessarily. I’ll leave that to Carr et al. But I do think that there are issues with both form and content that any writer would want to consider.

For me, I want to pause and think about my craft as a writer. I do value long-form. I do value contemplation. I do value well-crafted prose. Some days, it doesn’t feel like there’s a lot of that on the Web. That’s not to say there couldn’t be. That’s not to say that I can’t be someone who writes thoughtfully and well and at length online. So, now I have to figure out if my reading habits — again, mostly devoted to the Web nowadays — are going to help me do that. Or if I need to carve out more time to read print.

***

Writing for the Web is a new challenge partly based on a long running P2PU study group led by Pippa Buchanan.

Finding Courses & Challenges Just Got Easier

Alison Jean Cole — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 18:14:09 +0000

Take a wander over to P2PU’s Learn page and you will some nice changes just rolled out by our team. Searching for courses and challenges just got a little easier, and a little cleaner. You can now search by school, tag, and language. The staff and community are making their efforts to highlight great courses and fun challenges for you to discover, as well.

Have an opinion about design and layout changes? Pitch us your ideas. P2PU brings all its drafts and proposals to our community mailing list first. No project bypasses the community at P2PU. So join the P2PU Community List! It’s where all the action happens.

P2PU Is Going Back to Berlin….

rebeccakahn — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 11:28:51 +0000

P2PU is going back to Berlin! Since we like this city so much, and seem to get good work done there, we’ve decided to set up a temporary office in Berlin in July 2012. Isn’t that just the most exciting thing you’ve heard all week? Thought so…

Why are we doing this?

When you put smart and committed people into a room with each other great things will happen

We are an extremely virtual organization – but some things are easier, faster, more fun in the real world

We can’t afford to hire dozens of people, but we can provide a space for the community to come together and build the future of education together

We have lots of projects, ideas, plans – we want to move faster

How will it work?

The core P2PU office time will be July 2012, in a location still to be confirmed. Core staff will be there during this time, some will be there for a few days on either side.

We have an open door policy – anyone can come and work on P2PU!

For those who need help getting to Berlin or a place to stay, we’re offering a limited number of Berlin Fellowships.

Berlin Fellowship

What is included?

A place to work and free meals.

Shared accommodation for free. If you can’t stay in shared accommodation, let’s figure something out that could work for you.

Help with (economy class) travel for those who need it.

In some cases, the fellowship may not cover 100% of your costs, but we’ll try to make it work on a case by case basis

Who can come?

Anyone committed to working on P2PU (but if we have too many applications – we may not be able to bring everyone)

Minimum time in Berlin to qualify for the fellowship is 2 weeks

For those who need travel support, a longer commitment will justify a larger fellowship grant

How can you apply?

Pick a project you want to work on!

There are some ideas on this etherpad, but you are totally free to come up with your own project: http://pad.p2pu.org/p/summer-projects

Discuss your project idea with a P2PU community member and ask them to write you a reference.

Send your application to Bekka (bekka (at) p2pu (dot)org) which includes:

Your name

What has been your involvement in P2PU in the past?

What is your project? What will you be working on in Berlin?

What will you achieve / complete during your time in Berlin?

What skills can you offer?

How long you will stay (dates)?

Will you stay in shared accommodation, or provide your own?

Where are you traveling from?

(Include the reference)

How do we choose who gets the fellowship?

A review group made up of 2 staff members and 2 volunteer members makes recommendations (and our Executive Director makes the final call) on the basis of the following:

Track record in the community

Quality of the proposal

Skills and expertise

Length of stay

What’s the deadline and general timeline?

1 April – application deadline (no joke!)

1 April – 15 April: Review applications

15 April – 1 May: Confirm attendance

1 May: All travel booked

There will be further discussion about this in this week’s Community Call, so if you have questions, feel free to add them to the call agenda.

You can also look at the Berlin planning etherpad, which has a discussion section near the bottom of the pad

Help Develop This: A read-only API for P2PU

Alison Jean Cole — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 20:15:48 +0000

Join community member Jose Flores in this volunteer effort to build a read-only API for P2PU.

Description: This project entails the creation of an Application Programming Interface (API) that will expose some of the information available in the P2PU platform to third party consumers. A web API can be described as a series of calls that a programmer can make from their own programs to fetch data from platforms such as Lernanta (the software on top of which P2PU runs) without having to access it through the main website. Some use cases have been discussed such as mobile phone apps or widgets that can be embedded in other websites in a ‘mash up’ style to show a list of courses, tasks and so on.

Skills required: A good understanding on how a Django application is laid out and a bit of research on tools to write APIs on top of Django. (I chose tastypie through recommendation from my local Python group).

Time commitment: A few weeks of spare time.

Goal: To have something up and running, at least in the alpha site, in the next couple of weeks. This would be the first step towards a full-blown API that allows not only reading but also writing. With a read-only API users could receive notifications of new comments or new courses in their phone, but to be able to reply to those messages or even create courses from a third party application we will need to develop a ‘read and write’ API.

Get started: https://github.com/p2pu/lernanta/wiki/API-development-process

Voice Your Opinion on Community Badges

Alison Jean Cole — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 17:31:43 +0000

If you have followed our blog posts or community calls you might already know that we have recently completed a pilot under the title “Webmaking 101” with the School of Webcraft. Amongst the new and exciting things we tried out in that pilot was a set of community badges, that highlighted skills such as giving helpful feedback, pushing work forward in the community and communicating clearly ideas to a variety of audiences.

You have asked us to extend the use of community badges across the entire site and we are working hard to make that happen. But in order to do so, we need your feedback and help

Help us understand what types of community badges you would like to see accross the site. Please take 5 minutes to complete our short survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/WWTCXV3

Your answers will be anonymous and any data published will be in aggregate only.

If you are not sure what’s with the Badges, you can find out more here and check out the existing badges for the School of Webcraft here

Thanks a bunch,

The P2PU team

Community Op-Ed: A Meshing of Mediums

Alison Jean Cole — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 18:30:10 +0000

This week’s guest post is from Leah McVie, educator, photographer, and open ed enthusiast. She is an active P2PU DIY U participant who is diving into the open badges community. She is currently exploring ways to mix the open education philosophy into institutional practices. She blogs on leahmacvie.com.

==============================

When I go to work I have access to a variety of food options, nice architecture, and some of the most interesting minds in my area. I get to hear stories from people who are from all over the world and the extraordinary projects they are working on. I love working on a campus.

My mind is a peculiar place to be at this point, though- straddling the line between my interests of open resources and do-it-yourself learning and the refined world of higher ed. But, I do believe both have their place in education and it’s up to a new round of innovators to sort out the options and find ways for the two worlds to work together.

The two do not have to be mutually exclusive and there is a lot they can do to help one another. We need to show colleges how to utilize and give back to open resources, allow people to learn from the course materials on their own time, and then set up a system for people to pay the college for credit, if they need it (MITx). Colleges can set up a program to help faculty cut student costs by using open textbooks, software, and resources to prep for classes. They can allow any member on campus, regardless of rank, to propose a course or degree. Lastly, they can create a learning community through gamification and badges (an alternative form of accreditation).

Colleges can also set up professional development opportunities for staff and faculty, and link the credit (badges) to professional rewards. Connecting with the surrounding community is a topic listed in most college strategic plans and by hosting a virtual community with a company like badgestack.com, colleges can provide personal development opportunities to people on campus, as well as in the community. Colleges can champion an effort that helps current students, alumni, staff, and the community engage in lifelong learning.

The problem with all of these suggestions is that there are a lot of hoops to jump through on any campus. This is why instructors, students, and community members are turning towards open platforms to pilot these initiatives. They can easily use places like Google Groups to form a class community, P2PU to form a study group, or Udemy to set up a class. However, at most colleges, the people who take part in learning opportunities do not receive college credit. (I say ‘most colleges’ because there actually are colleges out there that already are evaluating these alternative learning options and giving credit for participation.)If all of these alternative learning experiences tie into a new form of accreditation like the badge system, it will make it that much easier for colleges to be able to examine the work put in, which can save graduates time, money, and effort spent on coursework they may already be familiar with.

So what exactly could be done to mesh these world together? 1. Colleges can utilize and feed back into open resources, which will end up saving them time and money. 2. Colleges need to come up with a track that doesn’t charge for the ‘college lifestyle’ (clubs, sports, events) for those who simply want to learn. 3. Colleges should employ an alternative means of crediting learning within their own body of students, faculty, staff, and community through a system like open badges.

If you work on a campus like I do, I hope you’ll consider submitting a proposal addressing a few of these points.

Leah MacVie