P2PU Planet

Archive for the ‘couch surfing’ Category

United Arab Emirates & India

Thursday, February 11th, 2010

Today I'm taking off for a trip to the United Arab Emirates and India. I'm traveling with a good friend and we'll be Couch Surfing the whole time. Last year I took a similar trip to go to Education Without Borders in Dubai followed by a short trip to Mumbai. This year, there's no conference to attend and I'll be staying offline as much as possible. While I'm traveling I'll be thinking about things like the upcoming NYC Creative Commons Salon and TEDxNYED along with preparing to run my Peer 2 Peer University course 'Mashing Up the Open Web'.

You can keep up with my travels on Dopplr.

 

Posted by johndbritton, in couch surfing, p2pu, personal, travel Comments Off

Open Education 2008: Celebrating Ten Years of Open Content

Wednesday, February 4th, 2009

This post is long overdue (September 2008); I just found it sitting in my blog's queue. I had been trying to polish it off and must have forgotten about it, sorry for the delay.

Open Education Conference Sign

Thanks to the generous support of The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation I was able to travel from Hong Kong to Logan, UT for the Open Education 2008 conference.

Hewlett Logo

I started off the trip with a layover in Seoul that I extended for a couple of days. While I was there I saw a Korea vs. Japan football match, went to the Korea Traditional Performing Arts Festival, and ate a live octopus. Suffice it to say that South Korea was an adventure of it's own.

I flew into Salt Lake City, UT where I was met by my amazing Couch Surfing host Anthony. He chauffeured me from SLC airport to his place in Logan. For the next three days I sat in on a ton of sessions, met great people, and shared my ideas for what I was calling "uOpenEd".

If you read my application to OpenEd 2008 (linked below), you'll see my reasons for attending and my goals for "uOpenEd". Apparently, I wasn't the only one who had these kinds of thoughts and on the final day of the conference, I sat in on a session entitled "The Peer 2 Peer University: Moving Forward". This session was different from all the rest. Rather than someone delivering a lecture, we had a brief intro and broke off into groups to discuss and solve problems. That was the icing on the cake, it was exactly what I was looking for, a team to work with to turn the idea into a reality.

Session Photo

The P2PU session was lead by Philipp Schmidt & Stian Haklev. Coincidentally, I had been emailing back and fourth with Philipp about Open Everything before the conference, and had no idea that we'd bump into each other (and end up working on the P2PU project together).

As per Stian's suggestion, I've posted my OpenEd 2008 Scholarship Application along with the Conference Proceedings, 86MB (zip).

 

Posted by johndbritton, in couch surfing, event, meetup, open, open education, p2pu, recap, seoul, south korea, travel Comments Off