First post of 2011! What better way to ring in the New Year than a post about the 3rd (and final) piece of the badge system - the open badge infrastructure. I have already (briefly) talked about the assessments and badges, but there is a bigger piece that extends beyond our pilot and even our own definition of badges (hint: the badge infrastructure). As I have discussed before here and here, an alternative form of assessment and certification are necessary because learning is happening all around us, all across the Web and other experiences and yet none of that learning ‘counts’ or is transferable to other contexts. Assessments and associated badges can help us with this by providing a mechanism to demonstrate and capture the learning wherever it happens and then carry the evidence with us back to recruiters, formal institutions or our peer community.

Yeah yeah yeah, I have said all of this before, but the key part that I have not yet addressed is the ‘wherever it happens’ piece (hint: that’s where the open badge infrastructure comes in)… A lot of my day-to-day work lately has been mapping out an assessment/badge plan for the School of Webcraft, a set of P2PU courses on web development. And that’s really cool and important because it is a free, accessible and open path to learning and its also a peer learning environment - all of which are relatively unchartered territories as far as assessment and certification goes. And through these focused efforts we will learn a bunch, potentially (hopefully) provide more incentives for P2PU learners and even provide a model for other people to work from. All good and critical things, but they are still isolated. If we only build our system, we are not supporting learners much better than any individual institution does.  If someone chooses another perfectly legitimate path, it won’t ‘count’ because they can’t get the proof or evidence (degree, badges, etc).

So what are the options?  Well, we could work to design/vet/support badges that cover everyone for every type of learning and every skill/topic and manage all of the badges centrally… Hopefully that concept seems as ridiculous to you as it does to me. Who are we to try to do that? The beauty of the world we live in now is that again, learning is happening everywhere and that everywhere changes and grows constantly. So a truly valuable badge system is one that supports badges from that everywhere. It should support badges from any issuer, collect those badges to a persistent identity (for each individual) and allow the badges to be shared out back into the everywhere. It must be open so that every need and path can be captured and demonstrated and the learner remains in control. This is the open badge infrastructure. And Mozilla is building it.

The open badge infrastructure will support badges issued by anyone across the Web, and allow an individual learner to collect these badges (from those anyone), store them to a single identity and then carry them with them and share them across contexts. Said in plain(er) English, if I am taking a few courses at P2PU and I am also using a series of OER materials in another context that is issuing associated badges, I can collect badges from these independent issuers, have all of the earned badges connected with my open identity, and then I can take those badges with me to interviews, back to my formal institution or post on this blog or LinkedIn profile to demonstrate my learning and skills for various audiences.  This infrastructure is critical to truly support learning across the Web.

Now obviously this is idealized somewhat. In order for ‘every need and path’ to be supported, there would need to be badge issuers at every step. We can’t control who issues badges but we can provide the infrastructure to support anyone who wants to. So we are. And eventually, if and when the value is apparent, sites/providers/communities will want to have badges. And if it is truly open, learners could even create or suggest badges along the way.

Open scares a lot of people. I have heard a colleague say (paraphrasing): “Everyone loves open education until they consider education being truly open.”  Wait, ANYONE can issue badges? It could get messy! There might be a lot of badges?! There might be ‘bad’ badges! And people might game the system! True. All things to watch closely. But a centralized or closed system WILL NOT solve our problems, and in fact will simply recreate the ones we already have by only supporting a small subset of the learning that is occuring, putting the power to decide what ‘counts’ in a small number of hands, created prescribed learning paths, demotivating learners…and so on and so on.

Besides, I seem to remember a similar case in the early days of the Web. Wait, ANYONE can create a website? It could get messy! There might be a lot of websites?! There might be ‘bad’ websites! Then we had Google and various services that help us find, rate and share websites that are credible and/or are valuable/relevant/interesting to us.  Maybe we will need something like that for badges, we don’t know yet.  But just as a closed and controlled Web would have never resulted in the explosion of creativity, expression, transparency and access that we value and depend on today, a closed badge system will never reach full potential. Open badge infrastructure FTW!

It goes without saying that Mozilla, ambassador of the open web, is the right entity to be building this open badge infrastructure. There is a team already cranking away to open up badges and take this thing the the next level. They built a prototype in Barcelona and haven’t looked back. More to come over the next few months!

-E

Building off the last post, badges are nothing more than .png files unless they are backed by some assessment and value.  I have been working on defining what assessment looks like in these peer learning, open education environments and it has really been a mind-blowing journey so far. When I first started trying to grasp the task at hand, I realized very quickly that ‘assessment’ mean a lot of different things - it can be the thing that you do to prove that you have learned something (like taking the exam), the design of that thing (question type/writing), the delivery of that thing (paper or online, ‘assessment engines’), the act of comparing the work/answers to some rubric (grading the exam), or the end product itself (the grade).  So needless to say, there are a lot of moving parts to think about when approaching the concept of assessment in general.  But then when thinking about it for these participatory, peer learning environments, there is much further to go.

These environments are intentionally atypical, and with that comes benefits and limitations (in general, but that’s another post, for this one +/- for assessment):

They are open and accessible to anyone with network access.  

What this means for assessment: There will be more people across many different levels and proficiencies that view and/or participate in these courses. The assessments should provide options for these levels and help learners build on their existing skills and develop new ones.  Further, because these courses are open, there is the likelihood that people will float in and out and assessments should allow them to do so, and ‘check’ their knowledge without forcing them to complete the course (if the topic or skills are redundant their existing capacities), but at the same time, assessments should provide milestones to motivate learners to stay engaged in the course as well. 

They are decentralized, meaning that there are not “core” courses or particular paths/sets of courses that people are forced to take.

What this means for assessment: The concept of prescribed degrees does not work here because learners will have unique learning paths across various courses, and even various websites or platforms. Further, the set of courses is not predefined and there may be overlaps, meaning different learners may learn the same skill in different places in different ways.  So the assessments need to be granular enough to capture the learning wherever it occurs, and flexible enough to allow learners to demonstrate the skill in contextual and relevant ways.  Assessments should also be relevant outside of the assessment context itself, and allow people to submit existing work or challenge them to create something meaningful to them to demonstrate competency.

They are peer-driven, and the person organizing the course is not necessarily an expert, but simply guide or facilitator.  Their main goals are to foster a community of learning and provide some scaffolding to guide that community through collaborative learning of a particular topic.  Therefore, there is not the authority figure or typical concept of an instructor.  

What this means for assessment: Short answer, grades won’t work. The simple reason grades ‘work’* in formal environments is that we are preconditioned to expect/accept the instructor-student relationship. The instructor is the expert that pushes information on us and give us top-down ratings of our work and learning**.  But that doesn’t work here.  There are no authority figures - peers are learning from each other and from the interactions and activities. So the assessments need to reflect those relationships and should capitalize on peer assessment as much as possible.  Also, output of the assessment should be more than a flat grade or mark, but should be focused around feedback and guidance.  Also, because these are not expert-driven environments, the assessments need to build in or account for trial-and-error types of approaches.  Learners should be able to learn from the assessment and refine work if they have not met the requirements, etc.

They depend on community development and engagement to be successful. 

What this means for assessment: Again, peer assessment should be incorporated as much as possible.  But we should think about skills and behaviors that support community and build those into the assessment scheme as well.  Perhaps there are lightweight ‘assessments’ based on interactions with peers or automatic assessments and feedback/awards based on behavior through the online learning environment.

I am sure there is more.  And you have noticed that I have intentionally kept badges out of the conversation here.  That’s because badges and assessments are different things.  The badge is the signal of a skill or competency and the assessment is the way to demonstrate/validate those skills.  In our model, each assessment will be tied to a badge, but also in some cases multiple assessments will be tied to a single badge, giving people flexibility in how they demonstrate the skill and earn the badge.

So in summary, for our pilot, the key assessment considerations are:

• Incorporate peer assessment as much as possible
• Provide levels of assessments/badges to meet various needs, as well as help motivate people to build skills or continue participating in courses
• Provide multiple assessment options or paths to the badge
• Assessments should be relevant outside of the learning context - and should allow for submission of existing work, new interesting and relevant work, and/or peer recommendations or nominations. 
• Learners should be able to seek out assessments on their own - nothing forced.  (although there may be cases for automatically assessed and issued badges to promote community behaviors)
• The badge should link back to the work submitted for the assessment, and any feedback or endorsements from the assessors.
• …

I will share the plan over the next couple of weeks and we forge forward.

-E

*I actually started this post with a diatribe against grades and traditional forms of assessment but so many others have expressed it so much better.  I particularly love Cathy Davidson’s (of HASTAC) thoughts on the limitations and obsolescence of grades:

http://dmlcentral.net/blog/cathy-davidson/thought-experiment-why-grade-why-test-what-if

http://www.hastac.org/blogs/cathy-davidson/those-who-dont-grade-learn

http://www.hastac.org/blogs/cathy-davidson/my-response-ny-times-quest-explain-grading

**I have definitely drunk the student-centered kool-aid. From the existing literature and research (not cited here but I can definitely provide), we know that students learn more when they can construct their own understanding of ideas and connect them to their own lives.  We know that people learn MORE and when they can collaborate and interact.  We know that students are more engaged when they have more control within the learning environment. We know that deeper understanding comes from trying out various strategies, getting things wrong, revising, etc.  It’s not enough to have some one push information on us, we need room and flexibility to mash up that information, get our hand dirty, connect it to something that we care about, hear the interpretations of our peers, etc.  I have written and spoken a lot about this to date and I am sure it will make it into the blog over time. But this is one of the reasons I love P2PU and other social learning efforts that recognize and embrace this shift to student-centered, participatory learning.  It’s the future man. 

I am currently working with Peer-2-Peer University (P2PU) and Mozilla Drumbeat to integrate assessment and badges into the open and peer learning environments on P2PU, specifically the School of Webcraft. We’ve been doing a lot of thinking about this and I am finally getting around to capturing my thoughts here.  I should get a badge.

What are badges? 

Come on, you’ve seen them before.  Boy Scouts. World of Warcraft. Foursquare.  I do something, demonstrate some skill, defeat some monster, show up in some location, meet some predefined criteria or assessment…and I get a badge.  If I know about the badge, I might be motivated to do the necessary behaviors or meet the requirements to get the badge, or if the badge is a surprise, I might be motivated to keep exploring or trying out various things to earn or unlock more badges. Once I have the badge, I can display it so that others can see it and thus demonstrate my skills or achievements.

There are many crossovers here with learning - motivation, feedback, exploration, achievement.  

Why do we need badges?

Well, we need something.  Is it badges?  Maybe, maybe not.  But there is no question that we need an alternative form of assessment and certification (although I hate that word…it conjures up images big, mean Microsoft gorillas). Here are a few reasons why we need a change:

• In the current system, the institutions (schools, universities, etc.) have the all the control. They decide what types of learning are “official” and what “counts”.  But most learning doesn’t happen within those confines and constraints and there are lots of examples of people learning outside of the system: open education courses and materials, afterschool programs, peer discussions, books, Wikipedia, the Web in general, LIFE…learning happens everywhere.  But it only counts if it happens through an institution.  Why? Why shouldn’t the learner have control?
• Current models of assessment (grades, rankings, etc.) currently don’t work well for many kinds of learning - in fact, many argue that they don’t work well for most learning.  In peer learning environments, grades and rankings do not encourage participation and information sharing, and in fact, can constrain the interaction and learning.  In informal learning environments, these models make it feel like school, squashing the inherent value and engagement.  In many open education environments, there is not often a dedicated instructor or authority figure to issue the top-down grade. And so on.
• There are so many important skills and competencies, some age-old and some new(ish) in today’s world, that are not currently captured or acknowledged. Things like the often referenced 21st Century Skills, or New Media Literacies, which cover everything from information organization and evaluation, to negotiation and trial-and-error prototyping. Or the “soft” skills like critical thinking and teamwork.  None of these skills are captured in my credit, grade or degree.  And yet, these skills are critical to most careers and are often some of the key things that employers are looking for. As a learner, it is difficult, or impossible, to know to seek out or hone these types of skills because they aren’t acknowledged or encouraged…and yet they will be glaringly apparent the first time I fub up in a critical situation that involves one or more of these competencies. When I am applying for a job - my resume and education history tells potential employers nothing about my full set of skills and if I have any of these other competencies. And when I am looking to hire someone, I have to come up with clever questions to try to get a complete picture of someone (above and beyond the resume and education history which everyone knows is a limited resource) in 30 minutes. 

Badges?!

What if there were badges for various skills that you could collect across learning experiences, carry them with you and then share out to various audiences as needed?  You may earn badges that represent more traditionally recognized behaviors or skills like completing a course or mastering a mathematical model, but you could also earn badges for softer skills like critical thinking, teamwork and information analysis.  You could earn badges from authorities, like Mozilla, from course organizers where appropriate, from peers or even from yourself.  The badges would be associated with assessments that once successfully completed, earns you the badge.  There might be multiple assessment paths to a single badge, giving you the flexibility to have a unique and personalized learning path.  But you could also look at the badges of other people to discover things to learn or try for…or what skills to develop or hone for particular disciplines or jobs.  You could even (possibly) carry the badges back to the institutions with you to get credit or help them cater that experience to your interests and needs. 

So that’s what we are currently exploring.  Of course, there are many unanswered questions, some of which I am sure are springing to mind as you read this.  Questions like: What skills should we assess? Are there skills that are better left unassessed?  What do we want to encourage?  How do we avoid encouraging the “wrong” behavior? Who gets to decide which skills to assess? How much influence should outside stakeholders, such as employers, have on badges?  Should they be able to design assessments and badges that are relevant to them?  How can we let them have a say without creating an imbalance in the system or constraining the learning? How granular should badges be? For example, our HTML5.0 badge is at the level of the entire language mastery, but would we want HTML tag level badges?  What granularity is the right level?  Do badges aggregate into larger or higher level badges? Should badges expire?  How do we deal with skills that need to be refreshed or renewed?  How can the badge system grow with learners? How does the introduction of badges affect learner motivations?  If learners were initially intrinsically motivated, how do we avoid “crowding out” those motivations with an extrinsic badge system? How will people game the system?  How much will they do so? How can we discourage gaming or recognize when it happens? Will these badges translate to formal learning environments? And if so, how?  What would be required to make schools or institutions value or accept badges?  Can we meet those requirements without changing the nature of the learning environments?

There are a lot of questions and a lot of unknowns, but we need a change…we need to give the learners the control.  So this is one way we are hoping to accomplish that.  We are building a badge/assessment pilot in the January session of the School of Webcraft, which is a subset of P2PU courses focused around web development and endorsed by Mozilla.  We are hoping to have a core set of badges and assessments, as well as the initial infrastructure to support the issuing, collection and displaying of badges over the next month (or less).  We plan to learn a lot and start to answer the questions above.  But we can’t possibly answer all of these questions alone.  We hope to encourage more interest in badges and these new approaches, get more people researching them and issuing them (within the same open infrastructure ideally) and figure this out together.

I’ll keep you updated as much as possible here.  So buckle up!  Next up, thoughts on assessment and the open badge infrastructure…

-E

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.

I put together a proposal for our Mozilla Drumbeat project, P2PU School of Webcraft, to go to SXSW Interactive and we need your help.

1. Please register for an account on the panel picker website: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/users/register
2. Confirm your email address
3. Vote up our proposal: http://bit.ly/sxsw_webcraft
4. Leave comments and start a discussion

Please pass this along to as many people as you can. If you tweet, RT this: http://twitter.com/johndbritton/status/20906260210

Mozilla School of Webcraft @P2PU

P2PU School of Webcraft: Web developer training that’s free, open and globally accessible. Mozilla and Peer 2 Peer University are creating the P2PU School of Webcraft, a new way to teach and learn web developer skills. Our classes are globally accessible, 100% free, and powered by learners, mentors and contributors like you. Our goal is to provide a free pathway to skills and certification to help people build careers on open web technology. Existing developer training is expensive, out of touch, and out of reach. We leverage peer learning powered by mentors and learners like you and self-organized study groups. We use existing open and free learning materials In this sixty minute session we'll briefly cover the inception of the Peer 2 Peer University along with details and success stories from the first three cycles of courses. We'll then dive into more detail about our collaboration with Mozilla Drumbeat including Mozilla's mission to engage the next million Mozillians. We'll present the P2PU School of Webcraft, and a case study of courses offered so far, including the first course, 'Mashing Up the Open Web.' Additionally, we'll introduce our plans to separate learning from assessment and our community driven credentialing system. At the end of the session we will invite the audience, and all of SXSW, to join a course on open web skills to be offered during the week of the event. Read more: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Drumbeat/p2pu/one_pager

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

The Mozilla Summit far surpassed my expectations. The event was personal, technical, creative and inspiring all at once.

The Mozilla Summit is an invitation-only gathering of some of the most active contributors in the Mozilla community. This year's theme was "Be More Like the Web".

I was lucky enough to be among those who were invited, due to my involvement with the Drumbeat project. There were a total of around 600 Mozilla community members at the event: hackers, localizers, testers, marketers, and the individuals formerly known as 'users'.

Background

Mozilla is most well known for the open source browser, Firefox. In addition to Firefox, there are number of other software projects like Jetpack at Mozilla Labs. Although Mozilla has been incredibly successful with open source software, they're ambitious and ready for the next big challenge. As stewards of the open web, Mozillians around the world are banding together through Drumbeat: a collection of practical projects and local events that gather smart, creative people around big ideas that improve the open web. The Summit was our forum to share the project with the greater Mozilla community.

Day 0: Arrival & Reception

I flew in from Alaska, direct from my family vacation to Vancouver and then hopped on a bus to Whistler, BC. I arrived on Tuesday afternoon just in time to join the Mozilla Foundation meeting and presenter's workshop. I spent the better part of the afternoon working on a speed geek with my new partner in crime at P2PU, Pippa Buchanan. We rehearsed our talk a few times and got valuable feedback for the next day.

The rest of the attendees arrived in time for a reception, where we had a chance to get to know each other and kick off the event properly.

Day 1: Getting Started

The day started off early with a few inspiring keynote speakers and an extended lunch break to watch some of the World Cup. After lunch I headed to a session from Mozilla Messaging where they demoed experimental Thunderbird mail client features.

Photo CC-BY-NC-SA, Nathaniel James

The next session was "Drumbeat in 2100 Seconds," led by Mark Surman, Executive Director of the Mozilla Foundation. Mark took about four minutes to describe Drumbeat and why it is important to Mozilla before splitting the crowd into groups for the speed geek sessions. All three of the featured Drumbeat projects (P2PU School of Webcraft, Web Made Movies, &amp Universal Subtitles) were represented along with Drumbeat Events and a couple others. The speed geek session went really well; we got a few people to join the project.

Day 2: In the Groove

The second day was filled with more sessions, and some especially interesting HTML5 demos including WebGL and the <audio> and <video> tags. I had a chance to talk to Ben Moskowitz about open video and the upcoming Open Video Conference in New York City.

The Flight of the Navigator is a WebGL demo rendered in the browser that built by the Mozilla audio team. The demo pulls in live data and video from the web while rendering. Everyone in the crowd was awe-struck.

I spent the better part of the afternoon at the Summit Science Fair. There were around thirty individual booths showcasing all kinds of software. Everything from accessibility for the blind to a JavaScript framework for building Firefox extensions.

Photo CC-BY-NC-SA, Michael Morgan

We rounded out the day with the Summit World Expo and International Dinner, where representatives from the over forty countries in attendance showcased their local communities and cultures.

After dinner, there was a late night JetPack hackathon. I built a Firefox extension (more details in a later blog post) in just a few hours. The extension is called 'Clickable Phone Numbers' and it makes any number on the web into a click-to-call number using the Twilio API.

Day 3: Grand Finale

The final day of the conference was a bit more laid back, we talked about the Drumbeat event strategy and did a bit of planning for Drumbeat NYC (August 7th) and the Drumbeat Festival (November 3-5) which is going to be held in Barcelona. I attended a few more lightning talks and a session on the future of client-side debugging.

Pippa and I ran our session on the P2PU School of Webcraft. There was a 10 minute intro, and then we split the audience into four groups with tasks:

1. Design a course for P2PU School of Webcraft
2. Brainstorm a list of core web developer skills
3. Brainstorm a list of 'soft-skills' that employers look for in web developers
4. Come up with ways to legitimize P2PU School of Webcraft so that we have some 'street-cred'

The session went incredibly well, so well that we had a lineup of people to talk to for almost 30 minutes after it was over.

At the end of the day, we took a Gondola ride up to the peak for a farewell party of sorts. The views of Whistler were magnificent and the "Army of Awesome" was incredibly fun. We enjoyed a delicious dinner, cartoony mascots, toasts, and a dance party before calling it a night.

Day 4: Departure

We left Whistler by bus through the mountains, luckily unobstructed by rock slides. Now I'm on the ground in Seattle for the next week, followed by a trip to Portland for OSCON. Get in touch if you're nearby.

Crowd-sourced Coverage

• Flickr Photos
• Tweets
• Delicious Links

P2PU just got coverage in The Hindu, which, according to Wikipedia "is the second-largest circulated daily English newspaper in India." The author, Ajai Sreevatsan, quoted me and mentioned my course "Mashing Up the Open Web."

Video discussions

John Britton, course organiser of 'Mashing up the Open Web,' says time zones are a problem while attempting to simulate a "sit around the fire and learn by discussion" environment virtually. "But lively weekly video discussions (using a combination of Skype and IRC) to review materials and work through the questions presented by the peers still happen."

The 'class' is very diverse, he says. "We have peers from Korea, Japan, India, Spain, the U.S. and Canada. They're artists, technologists, environmentalists, and traditional students."

Aside: This blog post was posted while on a moving bus from Vancouver to Seattle. The wonders of modern technology.

The School of Webcraft is our first foray into building an entire “Department” for a discipline – courses, a community of course organizers and new assessment models and metrics. We are gearing up to launch the first round of courses in September and are looking for more people to get involved in democratizing web developer training.

Call for course organizers is below:

Mozilla and Peer 2 Peer University are creating the P2PU School of Webcraft, a great place to learn the craft of open and standards-based web development.

This coming September we’ll be launching our first cycle of six week courses including Introduction to HTML5 and Building Social with the Open Web. We still have space for a few more courses, so whether you can teach a class for novice web developers, or run a workshop for web developers managing thousands of user accounts, we’d love to have you involved.

Following on the delivery model developed by P2PU, course organizers volunteer to take existing open learning materials or develop their own content and lead a group of peers through 6 weeks of online classes. Courses focus on project based learning in a peer environment and are proposed, created and led by members of the web development community – so the content will always be up to date with the latest technologies.

Over the next 18 months we’ll be developing a new way of assessing and recognizing skills, hacker attitudes and knowledge that rewards project portfolios and realistic developer challenges, rather than hours spent cramming for a meaningless exam.

We’d love for you to become a part of this project and until July 18 we’re inviting course proposals for P2PU School of Webcraft. We’ve made it really easy to get started, just fill out the proposal form, it takes less than 5 minutes!

Propose a Course -> Fill out this short form.

If you’re unable to commit to organising a course this September, there are other great ways to become a part of the community whether as a curriculum adviser, web development guru and of course, as a student.

If you are interested in taking a course -> add your name.

Join the P2PU Webcraft community -> subscribe to our mailing list.

Mozilla and Peer 2 Peer University are creating the P2PU School of Webcraft, the ultimate environment in which to learn the craft of open and standards-based web development.

This coming September we'll be launching our first cycle of six week courses including Introduction to HTML5 and Building Social with the Open Web. We still have space for a few more courses, so whether you can teach a class for novice web developers, or run a workshop for web developers managing thousands of user accounts, we'd love to have you involved.

Following on the delivery model developed by P2PU, course organizers volunteer to take existing open learning materials or develop their own content and lead a group of peers through 6 weeks of online classes. Courses focus on project based learning in a peer environment and are proposed, created and led by members of the web development community — so the content will always be up to date with the latest technologies.

Over the next 18 months we'll be developing a new way of assessing and recognizing skills, hacker attitudes and knowledge that rewards project portfolios and realistic developer challenges, rather than hours spent cramming for a meaningless exam.

We'd love for you to become a part of this project and until July 18 we're inviting course proposals for P2PU School of Webcraft. We've made it really easy to get started, just fill out the proposal form, it takes less than 5 minutes!

Propose a Course

If you're unable to commit to organising a course this September, there are other great ways to become a part of the community whether as a curriculum adviser, web development guru and of course, as a student.

Participate in a Course

Join the P2PU Webcraft community

Find out more about P2PU School of Webcraft

Mozilla Drumbeat is a global community of people who use web technology in new ways that help them understand, participate, improve and take control of their online lives. The P2PU School of Webcraft is just one of many exciting projects that Drumbeat supports. Find out more here.

Mozilla Drumbeat: Innovation on the open web. Powered by everybody.