A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post on Apple’s move into the textbook world. It got quite a lot of attention and I wrote a slightly longer version for publication in the Times Higher Ed. I managed to add a little context from other initiatives in the field, including MITx. The full THE piece is here and a brief excerpt below:

Apple’s vision is a walled garden that offers a carefully curated experience to those willing to lock themselves into it. It will be shiny and beautiful, but education will be a commodity and Apple the company through which we will consume it.

MIT’s vision is bolder. It sets us on the course to an educational future in which anyone, regardless of background, budget or location, has access to a high-quality education – even those who don’t own iPads.

The P2PU School of Ed is happy to announce a new round of free, open-licensed professional learning groups for educators that will start March 5. These courses are available for sign-up now:

Student Grant Writing – A group for high school teachers and students interested in writing a grant to fund a local school project

Empower Your Personal Learning — Taking control of your personal learning is an important 21st century skill — for students and for educators. In this group, we’ll explore new ways to empower your own professional learning and how to get started.

Writing and Inquiry in the Digital Age — Join a National Writing Project study group seminar as we explore these questions together and share our work and inquiries with the NWP Digital Is community.

Effective Use of Multimedia and Graphics — Participants will explore and apply techniques and strategies to foster deeper learning using multimedia and graphics.

Global Classroom Collaborations – Elementary — Elementary teachers from around the world will discuss, design, and establish collaborations between their classrooms.

Global Classroom Collaborations – Secondary — Secondary teachers from around the world will discuss, design, and establish collaborations between their classrooms.

Connected Learning with Youth Voices — A study group that supports teachers who are beginning to or who would like to use Youth Voices as a place for their students to post work, comment on their peers’ posts, and participate in connected learning on the site. Youth Voices is a school-based social network that was started in 2003 by a group of National Writing Project teachers.

What a week. On Wednesday the Interwebs shut down. On Thursday Apple revolutionized textbooks. What will Friday bring?

But after the hype has settled down (and yes, it was hard not to get a little swept away by all the great sounding announcements) we wake up with a slight hang-over this morning. Audrey Waters went so far as to call the revolution off and slammed Apple for this “slap in the face to educators and students.”

She is spot on, but leaves out one key point. This really is a revolution. It’s just not ours (I am still trying to decide if it wasn’t even intended for us, or if it just fell short.)

• Yes, digital textbooks change little about the format and model of instruction that involves a textbook. Digital textbooks do not bring truly richer and more engaging ways to learning.
• Yes, the cost at K-12 level are too high. In fact, if you add in the cost of the device (discounted over let’s say 4 years) using this to supply a school with textbooks is likely to be more expensive.

Those are two good reasons why  it is not the revolution we know was possible, but those things aren’t enough to discourage the majority of Apple’s vast iOS empire and the many who will join it as a result. And that is the revolution here.

What Apple did to the textbook is combining App Store and iTunes. And in the same way those innovations changed the software and music industries, will this change the textbook industry. It creates an infrastructure that let’s individual producers market their products to the end-user. That infrastructure is locked down physically as well as wrapped in multiple lawyers of legal barbed wire, but it is convenient enough for people to use it. And the content collection is seeded with books from the big players.

That all sounds familiar from previous Apple revolutions. Just as familiar will be what happens next. Prices will come down (just as they did in iTunes where we have more variable pricing now and the App Store that made software something you can buy for a few bucks), quality will go up (just as it did in iTunes which originally only offered low-quality MP3 files) and there will be an army of textbook authors submitting their works (just as the App Store mobilized a huge army of software developers). And all of those things are good for education.

But there will be a format scuffle and it remains to be seen if Apple supports an open or at least universally supported standard, or establishes its own. There will be examples of innovative textbooks and products that Apple locks out of their system to prevent competition. And other more promising approaches and companies are going to be overshadowed by the sheer media muscle of Apple’s initiative. All of those things are bad for education.

This is not a radical innovation because Apple doesn’t do radical innovation. MITx is a bold promise, this isn’t. But Apple’s strength is bold marketing not innovation. Apple innovations remain carefully close enough to the status quo to make immediate sense to a mainstream market. Yes, the experts will always point out the flaws and shortcomings (and they are usually right) but the easiest way to sell something new is to make it look and feel like something that customers are familiar with and understand. iBooks2 and iTunesU are close enough to what we have now that they may get the kind of traction that is harder to get with more innovative approaches. And while iOS devices may not be widespread among a general student population yet (and certainly not in developing countries), Apple’s distribution funnel that let’s them push content to these devices may get them the early uptake they need to pull more users in.

What this does is change another existing industry by making its products more elegant, more convenient, and reducing inter-mediation necessary to connected users and producers. And that is huge. But it’s not as huge as kicking off an education revolution. So let’s get back to work and make that part happen ourselves. To be honest, I am almost relieved that Apple did not manage to build the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer: a Propædeutic Enchiridion even if that had felt more like our revolution. But I want our revolution to be free and open and not part of something called an ecosystem that is really a distribution system.

One of the many cool things about being a Shuttleworth Foundation fellow is that I get to give away a “Flash” grant each year to people who are doing cool stuff. It’s a no strings (almost) attached 5000 USD and could be a first step towards a full fellowship application.

I decided to give my Flash grant to David Albert who started something called Hackerschool in New York City. I liked that Hackerschool shares a lot of similar spirit with P2PU and yet it is completely different at the same time.

Read the FAQ for all the details, but in a nutshell – David (and his collaborators) run an intensive face-to-face immersion course for web developers, he compares it to a writers workshop, with an interesting sustainability model. The school itself is free for participants, but companies desperate to hire developer talent pay Hackerschool for recommendations and referrals. Brilliant idea and since they are about to launch round 3 it seems to be working.

Speaking of round 3, applications are open! (And if you have a space in Manhattan or Brooklyn that they could use, send them an email! They were at NYU and Spotify in the past. You’ll be in good company.)

Congratulations to David for his success, and a shout out for the Shuttleworth Fellowship. The Flash grants are a nice addition to an already terrific model.

The pilot phase of the P2PU School of Ed was completed in December, and we are now on to 2012! For more information, you can sign up here for periodic updates.

What We’re Planning for 2012

We are planning two new launches of courses for 2012:

• Spring courses beginning March 5 (to coincide with Open Ed week)
• Summer courses beginning in June

Stay tuned to the site for more details. We are currently planning spring courses on empowering your personal learning, digital literacy, global classroom collaborations, creating great multimedia, and finding grants for arts education (a collaboration with high school teachers and students).

If you are interested in participating or facilitating a course, let us know.

What We Learned in the Pilot

We like to think of the P2PU platform as a kind of a laboratory where you can try different things in online peer learning and see how they work. We learned a lot at the School of Ed last year! Here are some of the highlights and lessons learned from our pilot phase.

• What we did
  • Developed and ran seven great courses between Sept. and Nov., 2011
  • Had a total of 163 participants and 233 followers in these courses
    We greatly appreciate the support of the Hewlett Foundation in this work.
• What we learned
  • Interest in these courses was very high, and we had a diverse group of participants, including international and non-educators, all of whom helped enrich the conversations.
  • Great facilitators help make great courses.
  • Asynchronous discussion among the groups (through posts on P2PU) was the favored method of participation. Participation level in online posts was much higher than other activity options (webinars, projects, etc.).
  • Participation peaked in the first couple weeks of the courses and fell off after week 3.
  • Time for teachers is limited, and this sometimes limited participation. [We are considering doing some much shorter, discussion-focused groups this year to engage more people with limited time.]
  • Some participants did not understand or were not prepared for online peer learning. [We are excite about a new "Empower Your Own Personal Learning" course for this year.]
  • Some topics are well-suited for online learning but do not lend themselves as well to peer collaboration. (Fortunately, on P2PU, there is room for both.)
  • There are pros and cons to pursuing formal credit for courses like these. (We didn’t offer credit for our pilot courses and are still gnawing on these issues.)

Community is so important to peer learning, and we need you as we move into our next phase. If you are interested in being involved, please let us know!

This is a guest post from Harry Brake, an Assistant Librarian and Media Specialist at the American School Foundation in Mexico City. Harry participated in two P2PU courses this year. He is also a NaNoWriMo winner for 2011.

Spending more time with students out of the classroom in Delaware as an educator was an investment not many teachers are willing to make. However, here I am, six years later, after teaching in Delaware for those six, and seeing the very first student I had in those six years getting married, being successful, and being able to use some of the time I provided to help her achieve success. It is true you do not hear the successes, or sometimes see the successes until years later. I remember clearly the teachers that were out the door at the bell. Funny, I remember the students I spent those long hours with after the bell putting together the yearbook, creating a community garden, helping fill out scholarship applications, writing grants for projects we would attend, and that was just a few projects that began the – teaching student how to write grants.

Moving to Mexico started out as a rebellion against all the things I disagree with in education. I sacrificed the very students that helped motivate me to go into the classroom day after day, for the opportunity to be free from state testing, administration rigor that added to the course load, and be more free to help struggling students. When I came across P2PU, I did not think this would be something students could be a part of, let alone would be. However, as I sat there, now an Assistant Librarian in the Upper School Library at the American School Foundation in Mexico City, I was surrounded by student aides (cadets as they are called in Mexico), asking me what I needed them to do. They watched me respond to various articles on line, and often experimenting with programs such as Todaysmeet.com, wikis and other ventures into 2.0 tools I was unsure of, yet they knew. As we collaborated on the “Using Web 2.0 and Social Media to Encourage Deeper Learning” class together, since several members had to drop out, the new students in Mexico became my support group, and became interested in helping me answer from a teacher’s perspective, as well as from a student’s.

One specific example became the Nano site. I found that students in my school were doing Nano too, and when they found out I posted in an area on P2PU encouraging others, they all of a sudden thought I was a “cool” teacher for doing Nano too! On a deeper level, creating a toolkit as a final project for the P2PU course on 2.0 tools, I had the idea of students creating videos out of the library, representing the library, as a project using tools under 2.0 that would instruct others. All of a sudden, students were looking over my shoulders in P2PU encouraged that I was involving them in a project, an “adult project” that they could also help advise and be a part of. When I gave them credit in the toolkit part of the wiki, you would have thought they won Publisher’s Clearing House. It was empowering students to empower the educator. Students created a video on how to check out laptops from a portable cart, for teachers and students, in three days, and it is top notch quality made. The motivation? To be represented in my Wiki project and to receive credit from individuals on a larger plane. It was easy to see I was getting more out of my free P2PU course than similar teachers that were enrolled in Master’s courses. They often questioned what I was working on that involved the students. Was I getting paid? Let me say this, the best internships, jobs, and educational resources I have received have been free, providing priceless relationships with educators from all over the world, communication with some of the most creative students that reminded me why I wanted to be involved in education, while opening my mind to possibilities that existed beyond the initial course or activity I was involved in.

P2PU does not rely on the value of credit, monetary awards, or lauding your efforts in front of a stadium.Finding a way to provide information that YOU can give others in the form of conventions, presentations, and involvement for other educators makes P2PU NOT a one stop educational fix. One course in P2PU allows you to create other ideas, other plans, other projects that build on the first. This is worth so much more when students can be a part of the process. Never in P2PU has it stated or implied students could not help active educators out in thought, planning, or projects. In doing so, I found I had the strongest motivation to participate in more classes, create more classes, and work with students in their medium, technology, in forming classes in P2PU that strengthen education with the very students that are needy for something different. P2PU is certainly about peers among other peers, just don’t be surprised if some of those peers represent a younger generation than yourself. :)

Two weeks ago P2PU held its third workshop. This year’s focus was on “getting stuff done” and bringing together people who are working on concrete projects. And we did get a lot done. Check out the etherpad with our notes and visit our new projects board on trello for the details. But we also spent time as a community engaging with the reasons why we got started with P2PU and what it is that holds us together.

Returning to Berlin brought with it a good dose of nostalgia. We held our first ever workshop there in 2009 and we wanted to reconnect to the spirit and excitement of that event. At the time many of us had never met face to face and we weren’t sure what would happen. It turned out that we were not just a group of individuals interested in similar things, but a community with a shared purpose.

P2PU in 2009

Despite all of our different backgrounds, interests, and characters, we connected deeply – both at a personal level and with the idea of P2PU. We became friends and collaborators. And we couldn’t wait to get started. At the time we didn’t want to get bogged down by a long process of defining our vision. We knew what that vision felt like and that was good enough. In order to have a compass to guide our decisions we agreed on three core values of openness, community, and peer-learning and then we set out on the journey.

Barcelona 2010

The three values turned out to be good guides for our original community, but they didn’t convey the excitement and sense of purpose that we felt. They didn’t help new people connect to the idea of P2PU in the same deep way that we had connected with it. There is a certain magic that happens when a great group of people spends four days in a room and that is hard to convey digitally. But we also never clearly articulated what it was that drew us together and that made us so committed to the idea. As we grew it became clear that we needed more than three core values. We needed something that would not only guide our future path, but that we could share with others, and that would express what we stand for. We needed to write down our vision.

Berlin 2011

That is why at this year’s workshop we spent two long sessions trying to get to the bottom of some of the fundamental questions about P2PU. We asked ourselves what problem P2PU is solving, what unique approach or ability we bring to solving it, and what it is about P2PU that we feel so passionate about. In the coming weeks, Bekka, Jane, Nadeem and I will take a stab at turning our notes into a draft vision for P2PU, but I wanted to share some of my own take-aways for those who couldn’t be in Berlin this year:

• P2PU is a diverse community of individuals who are passionate about learning. We stand for human-centered education. We are not a product or a service, but a community that creates products and services. We thrive on experimentation.
• P2PU is a way to build the world we want to live in. We foster a culture of reciprocity, of helping each other out, of giving a leg up. The education system is in trouble and we want to help rather than point fingers or complain.
• P2PU is for passion-based learning. Everyone is passionate about learning something. P2PU is a place to identify that passion and we celebrate the long tail of learning and education.
• P2PU can scale. The traditional model works well for small numbers of learners, but quality goes down when numbers go up. As a result many people don’t have access to quality learning opportunities. P2PU’s open source model can scale.
• P2PU preserves the core ideas of the university. We are not against the traditional university, but want to help preserve some of its original values such as freedom of ideas, and a culture of learning through open sharing.

In the spirit of the old musically-themed P2PU newsletters I’m asking Joe Cocker to lend a hand in closing this post.

With a little help from our friends we are able to block out the noise and listen to the voice of our hearts. It’s a little help from our friends that dares us to follow our intuition. And it’s with a little help from our friends that we can become who we truly want to be. P2PU is learning with a little help from your friends.

The Global Education Conference is a fantastic free, online event going on all this week.

On Thursday, Nov. 17 at 11:00am Eastern Standard Time, Anna and Chris Batchelder and I will be presenting a session on the P2PU School of Ed.

You can tune in to our session here on Thurs. Hope to see you online!

I’ve mostly been too consumed with the pilot of the P2PU School of Ed to think much about what comes next, but here are two interesting things that have bubbled to the surface.

First, the idea to remix an open math textbook into an interactive Moodle course (and perhaps more) has been spun off into a whole new P2PU seminar group. This will start Dec. 1 so if you are interested, please join us.

Secondly, we’ve been bouncing around some ideas for different course (learning group?) formats. One idea has been to do some shorter courses that are largely driven by conversation. These groups could have the potential to have a greater number of participants and then might lead to some longer, deeper learning experiences. Possibly project- or challenge-based?

In a conversation with Bud the Teacher the other day, we brainstormed this a bit. Bud suggested the idea of having some smaller groups actually design these projects or challenges — perhaps a sort of online maker faires for teachers.

So how exactly do you assemble a course/group to build something of their own design without first knowing what that thing they are building is?

Perhaps this grows out of one of those shorter, discussion-driven groups, perhaps even a “massive” one (100+ people). So say, as an example, you have a two week group to explore the question — What could a classroom based on something other than a textbook or a canned curriculum look like?

Spend two weeks discussing and exploring and see what grows out of it. Perhaps some small groups coalesce around some ideas or projects, and they spin off into more in-depth attempts to build something together.

What do you think? Sound interesting? Have ideas for other good questions to explore? Want to play along?

Credit: Choo Yut Shing

Here’s a short presentation on some of the best sources for open-licensed clip art, photos, sound effects, music, and video that I did for our P2PU course on OER in the classroom.