P2PU Planet

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

There is so much exciting going on at P2PU, that if I hadn’t been moving tomorrow, and if my MA thesis was not due in a week, I could have written many long posts. For now, I wanted to make a quick list of all the new courses – there is an official course listing page, but it’s a bit unwieldy at the moment (we’re working on it). So far there are 30 amazing courses offered, more than twice of what we had during the last cycle. In addition to the 18 “normal” courses, we also have 12 courses that are part of the exciting new School of Webcraft initiative, in collaboration with Mozilla Foundation.

Below I have listed all the new courses, with the title, and a tweet-sized introduction.

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

Athletics: Our Food For Life
The course focuses on athletics as a platform for improved health, skill development, physiological & psychological athletic efficiency

Collaborative Lesson Planning
Can publishing and collaboratively building lesson plans online make them better?

Consciousness: Games and Apps
Hypothesis: Internet use changes consciousness. How can we develop games and apps that change consciousness faster, and enhance evolution?

Copyright 4 Educators AUS
A course for educators in Australia who want to learn about copyright, open content material and licensing.

Copyright 4 Educators US
A course for educators in the US who want to learn about copyright, open content material and licensing.

Copyright 4 Educators ZA
A course for educators in South Africa who want to learn about copyright, open content material and licensing.

Creative Programming 2010
Welcome to the fun side of computer programming, a powerful tool for creativity

DIY Math
This course is designed to build independent study and peer-support skills for mathematics learners at all levels.

Human Trafficking
Different manifestations of trafficking in human beings with a special emphasis on trafficked women and children through real life examples.

Inteligência Coletiva e AVA
Como potencializar a inteligência coletiva em ambientes virtuais de aprendizagem

Introduction To Finance
This course will cover basic finance and economic topics.

Managing Election Campaigns
How to Win An Election with $2.00 and a pint of Cooking Oil

Open Creative Nonfiction
To what extent is it possible to capture the self in narrative? How do physical spaces affect that story?

Open Governance
How can open communities of volunteers like P2PU make good decisions and get stuff done?

Open Journalism & the Open Web
Can hacks and hackers work together in the new online news world?

Social Innovation in Education
What are your innate “megaskills” for social innovation in education?

The Praxis of Queer Pedagogy
Looking to find ways to rethink your practice as an educator? Find out what “queer” and “pedagogy” have to offer you.

Webcraft courses

Beginning Python Webservices
Want to learn about the protocol that runs the web HTTP and how to make web services with Python?

Designers Tackling the Web
You’re a smokin’ designer… but web pages, how do they work? Tackle the Web. Learn basic HTML and CSS

Drupal Social Web Application
Learn to use Drupal to build a social web app that lets users collaborate on projects and ideas.

HTML5
Is HTML5 more than “just HTML” and can I actually use it to create a website today?

Programming Visual Media
Can you learn to code the same way you learned to paint? Intro to programming, studio-style.

Reading Code
Get comfortable reading other peoples’ code, from big open source projects to small standalone apps.

Scripting 101
Web Monkeys or command line junkies, join, learn to hack and make a better world!

UX: Design para a Educação
Queres aprender a desenvolver ambientes de experiência de usuário a serem aplicados a vários sistemas?

UX: Designing for Education
Are you motivated to develop user experience designs that can be applied to various systems?

Web 200: Anatomy of a Request
What happens when you click go in the browser? Find out in “Web 200: Anatomy of a Request”

Web Accessibility
Maximize your audience through inclusion and non-discrimination by using accessible design.

Web Development 101
How are webpages made and have you ever wondered how to create your own?

Stian

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.

We just opened signups for the third cycle of courses at P2PU which are starting in September. This is our third, and largest cycle yet. We had 6 courses in the first, 16 in the second, and 23 so far for the third cycle. I'm organizing a course called "Web 200: The Anatomy of a Request" as part of the School of Webcraft. Here's the story from the P2PU blog:

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.

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.

The New York Times recently published an article entitled, “Scholars Test Web Alternative to Peer Review.” The article describes how the mainstream journal, Shakespeare Quarterly, opened up the review process for a special edition to whomever was interested, and was even able to compare the results of that process to a more typical panel of appointed experts by way of understanding the risks and rewards for authors. The results were positive all around, and now other humanities journals are looking to experiment as well.

This is good news. The article does a good job of comparing a few of the key distinctions between traditional peer review and more open methods. To wit:

“The traditional method, in which independent experts evaluate a submission, often under a veil of anonymity, can take months, even years. Clubby exclusiveness, sloppy editing and fraud have all marred peer review on occasion. Anonymity can help prevent personal bias, but it can also make reviewers less accountable; exclusiveness can help ensure quality control but can also narrow the range of feedback and participants.”

At its heart, I think much of the question of peer review boils down to whether people fundamentally believe in the core precept of transparency and replicability for ideas and research. In science, anyway, one of the first things you learn is that you need to build a corpus of evidence before you can start to claim something as true. Obviously that applies for any given study, where you should perform the experiment in such a manner that you can show that it is statistically valid, but it also applies across studies, where people should be given sufficient information to determine for themselves whether the claims are valid, even to the point of replicating the work wholesale. We have not adhered to this core principle for a long time, most notably in our failure to publish all of the raw data associated with any given study.

In the end, we have to ask ourselves as scientists and researchers, what is it we fear from transparency?

Another misperception many academics have about open peer review is that there will be hordes of lay people with little understanding of the subject matter who will see fit to comment on or attack their work. While we can certainly expect that some non-experts may read and comment on an article, the fact is that most people don’t read things that are not interesting to them or that they cannot understand. These days, expertise in any given subject area is pretty broadly distributed…. there simply aren’t enough faculty jobs around to corral all of the experts into academia. And besides, most of us spend significant chunks of our time pursuing interests as amateurs rather than professionals. I love to cook, but I have only rarely harbored aspirations to be a professional chef. Examples abound of “citizen science” initiatives where surprisingly sophisticated research is performed by volunteer communities, usually via a distributed network. While some forms of research and scholarship are not likely to lend themselves so well to this approach, it nonetheless proves that interest in seemingly esoteric research questions and capacity to meaningfully engage abounds among the masses.

Fortunately, P2PU is being built from the ground up with transparency and open peer review as core operating principles. It is this fealty to these principles that is making it possible for us to explore tricky and long-standing questions around authentic assessment (especially for “soft skills”), alternative routes to accreditation, and new pedagogies for deep engagement with learning. If our goal is to actually facilitate learning, for everyone, then we need to know if learning is not happening. The relevant data should be available to anyone so that anyone can get in the business of improving the outcomes. It would not surprise me if the insights gained at P2PU ultimately inform educational practice generally, on and offline. Indeed, these insights, or at least insights gained through a similarly comprehensive commitment to open peer review and data-sharing, will probably be the only research outcomes worth paying any attention to.

The untiring Stephen Downes has a new course coming up, “Personal Learning Environments Networks and Knowledge 2010″. This topic interests me a great deal, and is also something I will probably be visiting in my PhD program, which I will begin in a few weeks. If this were a traditional course, I would not be able to commit to a specific schedule of readings, contributions etc. However, with a connectivist course, you take what you need, and give what you can (or feel like), and popping in and out of the course is not frowned upon. I did sign up for the EdFutures course, and although I was quite unable to follow all the discussions, I still got some very interesting insights (and made one important new contact) from the experience, so it was absolutely worth it. I have also signed up for this course, and look forward to the discussions that will happen.

Stian

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!

At Peer 2 Peer University, we pride ourselves in being an open education community. I have a fairly good idea what it means for content or software to be open, but I find the complex human dynamics that make up open communities much more intriguing than the arguments over which license is the right one. And so, over the past year, I have enjoyed exploring what it means to be an open community, by helping shape the developments at P2PU. What are the structural differences between open communities and closed ones? What is good leadership in open communities? How can groups of volunteers make decisions efficiently and get stuff done? In a nutshell, how does open governance work? I want to better understand these questions and find answers that help P2PU remain the healthy, vibrant and wonderful community it is today, and enable the next phase of expected growth.

In the last few weeks two things have happened that will go a long way towards achieving this goal. P2PU started talking to One Click Orgs and I decided to run a P2PU course on open governance, so that I could ask some of my questions more formally and find others who might be interested to explore them together.

One Click Orgs helps open communities to set up governance structures that allow them to become legal entities (with all the security and power that comes with that – actually little power, and a lot of hassle) while preserving their essential dynamic and participatory nature. They started working with UK community organizations, are currently applying their ideas, technology and model to a UK charity (a non profit organization), and are excited to look at doing the same with us for a US based 501(c)(3) (same thing, non profit organization, but different country and laws). I had been struggling with the idea of establishing all the traditional rules and structures that typical non-profit organizations have, because they felt so foreign to the way things worked at P2PU. And I was worried that by creating structures, we would invariably change the dynamics. It was wonderful to hear Charles Armstrong from One Click Orgs articulate exactly these kinds of issues – and even go one step further and explain how much of the paper-based procedures that are required by law, and which are highly annoying, can actually be virtualized using the open web.

Open Governance course. In this coming round of P2PU courses (sign-up opens next week 25 August – mark the date!) I will facilitate a course on open governance. If you are interested in working together on some of these questions, please consider signing up. If you have some thoughts or experiences to share, but are too busy to commit to the whole course, please do get in touch with me anyway – or leave comments and feedback on the evolving course outline. I am only starting to structure this study of open governance, but there are three concepts that seem like good vantage points from which to explore open governance: transparency, leadership, and participation.

Before going into these ideas in more detail, I thought I’d post a few notes on how P2pU makes decisions today. Looking at the structures that have evolved it is easy to see the tension between the underlying principles and values and the pragmatic realities of trying to move quickly and efficiently. Of course, the argument around efficiency is the most common, but possibly also the worst excuse to not be open. Anyways, P2PU currently has two spheres of governance. An open community mailing list that is open to all, but in practice the people who lead the discussion and work out the details of what P2PU is and does are a small group of committed volunteers (referred to informally as the gang-stars, because of the original mailing list that was titled “the gang”). And there is a second list for the five founders, that is closed and private, where we discuss things that are difficult to do in a public forum – questions about money, strategic partnerships that are just emerging, and ideas that could be fairly significant for P2PU and need a first reality check before one explores them further.

So what are some of the things we are rubbing up against (these are examples for the kinds of things I would like to discuss in more detail in the course)?

The gang list used to be private (but not really closed as anyone who made a significant contribution was invited to join) and a wonderful space for discussion. There was an awesome sense of community, camaraderie, and the conversations freely ranged from very high-level philosophical ideas about the future of education, to the color of the button on the home page. Amidst a lot of good natured joking the vibe was extremely respectful and tolerant. As P2PU grew we started rubbing up against the limitations of having a safe, but fairly small space that was reserved for people who had already made a contribution. Many of us would meet interesting people at conferences, who would have great perspectives and ideas to contribute, but there would be no way to easily bring them into the community discussion. We we were worried about loosing the vibe of the gang list, but decided together that opening it up was the only solution. Now p2pu-community has a new name and anyone can sign up. It is difficult to say what has changed – maybe it is a little bit less wacky, and maybe some of us are a little more guarded in our comments – but the “community” does feel a little different from the “gang”. But even if it is not just the illusion of my sentimental memory, I also see that the benefits of the open community list are much more obvious. It is now much easier for amazing people like Joe and Jessy to just sign-up, chime in and help us do more things better.

One thing that worked well on the council list (remember, closed and private for founders) was our ability to make decisions quickly and efficiently, and the trust that we had in each other’s vision and integrity. The problem is that the amount of decision making required started becoming overwhelming – and that for some of the questions we had originally discussed in the council list, it turned out we were maybe not the best ones to discuss or decide (or at least not without more people involved). We haven’t made any changes to the council list yet, but in the coming months, we will try to understand how it too can evolve – in the same way that the gang has. In the context of incorporation, we have to also clarify its role and responsibilities with respect to a board of directors, who are legally responsible for the organization (and required by law in the US). So … I think it’s clear that there are many more fascinating and challenging questions ahead and I hope some of you will be interested in joining me to explore them.

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.