Meta-discussion about how this group is organized

Task Discussion

• 
  Jennifer Claro   May 26, 2011, 8:39 p.m.

   

  Here is our manifesto of May 14, 2011, just to bring it back into the public sphere again. All who were present contributed to it and Nate collected it. We all changed a few words here and there to make it acceptable to everyone. Of course it's still open to change.

  I’m proud of it.

  Our Manifesto - May 14, 2011

  Among many visions for the reform of education in a connected world, we have chosen to learn in a collaborative, peer-organized and free way. We believe that greatlearning can occur in groups in free, open, and self-organizing online spaces. We reject the notion that an education must be bought and sold. We believe that all may be teachers, and all may be learners, and we claim the right to accredit ourselves and each other on our own learning. We need no authority to decide what we should and shouldn't learn.

  We believe we can collaboratively learn from one another and the cultural commons and acknowledge each other's learning so that we do not need to pay thousands of dollars to get an education that should be respected professionally by our peers. We believe we can use the experiences, technologies and talents available to each of us to create valuable resources together that can be made openly available to the world.

  To this end, we jointly accredit one another's learning as documented through our participation in the Intro to Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning course on the Peer to Peer University in spring2011. We provide reference for one another to verify our collaborative learning and assert its value independent of any commercial or institutional authority. 

  We announce our intentions and methods so that others may follow and claim their own right to learning.

• 
  Jennifer Claro   May 26, 2011, 8:45 p.m.
  In Reply To:   Jennifer Claro   May 26, 2011, 8:39 p.m.

   

  Here is a list of proposed actions from that same meeting. I'm not sure who wrote this. We could check the PiratePad. I'm not sure if we all agreed on these. So let's discuss them.

  2.  Actions

  And so..(since this could be on our diplomas,... think about what we are doing by virtue of accrediting one another's learning)

  • We jointly accredit one another's learning as documented through our participation in the Intro to Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning course on the Peer to Peer University in 2011. 
  • We provide reference for one another to verify our collaborative learning and assert its value independent of any commercial or institutional authority.
  • We can look at where the discussions about CSCL are
  • We build an ongoing discussion about CSCL... 
  • either by starting a new online community
  • or building a sustainable place to have these discussions on P2PU
  • or by building a consortium of people who are already involved with the discussions
• 
  Jennifer Claro   May 14, 2011, 9:06 p.m.

  Notes about our collaboration so far

  1. Today’s chat was amazing. Last week’s chat was also invigorating and highly productive. It seems that chats (SCMC) are the environment in which we are a) most collaborative and b) most productive as a group. Therefore I propose that whatever environment we end up in after this course, we continue our weekly chats and make them a focus of our collaboration. PiratePad seems to be an amazing tool, combining chat with a whiteboard. I’d suggest we continue using PiratePad for our chats, unless something better comes along. We can use WhenIsGood to choose the best times for everyone. Saturday at 5:00 seems good for everyone now… is that right?
  2. In addition to chats, we need a threaded discussion area. Now we are doing our main posts on our blogs, which is okay, but we need a common space for the exchange of ideas. We use our space at P2PU mostly for organizing, not for dialogue. A space for dialogue (in the form of threaded discussion) is essential.
  3. We are not writing much about the articles. We seem to need more time to read and compose our thoughts. Therefore in our new environment I’d suggest free posting of articles and free replies, rather than the weekly-based way we are doing it now. I think we should try to stick to the weekly-based way for the rest of the course, to get us thru the great articles chosen for the course, but in the new space we could have no timelines. Post anytime!
  4. Online communities function best when there is a big enough group with enough committed members to keep it going. So we need more people to join, and we as founding members have to be committed to the upkeep of the space. Of course new members can take on upkeep and other organizational responsibilities, but if we want this to work, and carry on into the future, we need to be committed. How many of us are willing to put some time into this? Say a couple hours a week, at least at the beginning? We can look at who has what skills, what each of us is best at. Division of labour and all that… :)
  5. So while we are checking out what is already being done out there, I think we should check and see if chats and threaded discussions are features of those websites/communities. If not, I think we should make our own. If P2PU is set up for permanent learning communities, we should consider staying here. It’s home! :) But we’d need a better threaded discussion tool. Stian said somewhere he wasn’t sure how much threaded discussion could be done within the P2PU system as it is now. It’s great that P2PU is so dynamic and can change and improve constantly (did you see that we can edit our posts now? :) and it would also be very cool to have a permanent CSCL community at P2PU as P2PU is all about peer-learning (at least, that is how I understand it… I don’t know much about P2PU and its goals and plans…)

  What do you think? Let’s collaborate on our ideas for collaboration! Honestly, today’s chat was fantastic. I am loving this collaboration groove we are into. Let’s work together towards our common goal of free learning*!

  *“Free learning” could be a common term for CSCL, peer learning, open ed, and OER. Or maybe “open learning”? 

• 
  Marcy Murninghan   May 14, 2011, 9:22 p.m.
  In Reply To:   Jennifer Claro   May 14, 2011, 9:06 p.m.

   

  Following on Jennifer's energetic and inspired summary, I totally agree. I volunteer 2 hours / week to make this work, as it fits squarely within my learning goals and professional development needs.

   

  I know there are other platforms out there, but whether or not they're proprietary is an issue. Seems to me we can specify what works and what doesn't, in an iterative fashion, and then seek who can help build the functionality into the P2PU vehicle--a sort of reversal of the finding "If you build it, will they come?" phenonmenon my colleague Bill Baue and I encountered when we wrote The Accountability Web for the Kennedy School. In that instance, we learned that a common mistake is for whiz-bang technical virtuosity to trump user needs and abilities--that is, complex websites are built, and non one uses them. 

   

  In our case, we're muddling along in the virtual sphere, and getting to know each other. We've already abandoned the first threaded discussion thing in favor of PiratePad; we may find other mechanisms (or not) to suit our needs. The key thing is, we're in the drivers' seat, not the other way around.

   

  I agree, this was a great session--we went on for almost 2 hours! As for the readings, I think they're important, even though I've not had the time to read them. Yet I'm cataloging them, and intend to do so. My appetite for learning is endless, and I work best when I'm learning from those who've spent serious time and thinking on the things I think are worth knowing.

   

  So onward we go!

   

  Warmly,

   

  Marcy.

• 
  Joe Corneli   May 5, 2011, 9:33 p.m.

  Hi Stian: Thanks for mentioning the Shaping P2PU group.  One of the tasks proposed there is to review (and hopefully rewrite) a proposal I made about how workflow within P2PU could be made more clear.  Two points seem particularly relevant to this course:

  • Identifying both completion goals and success/failure criteria should be part of the course and project development process.

  • Identifying completion [success/failure] criteria should not only be a social norm, but something clearly identified within the technology.

  I think we've tried to do the first point but the discussion still seems fairly general (e.g. "make some kind of OER").  The idea of accumulating a certain number of badges to pass the course is good for making success/failure explicit within the technology, but my sense is that the choice of badges and a cut off point for passing is sort of arbitrary.

  Maybe we have to do a lot of the work without explicit technology support this time around, but that's OK: one reasonable concrete goal for the course would be to document our suggestions or wishes in a collection of tickets in lighthouse.  So, what does CSCL look like for this course, and what would we like it to look like?

• 
  Stian Haklev   April 26, 2011, 8:43 a.m.

  There are several places to discuss the development of the website. There is P2PU Lighthouse, which we use as a tracker. There you can see which features are planned for the next milestones (bi-weekly releases), add new bugs and feature requests, discuss existing ideas, etc. There is also the p2pu-dev mailing list for people interested in all of the technical aspects of running the site. And there are two study groups on this platform, one called Shaping P2PU to discuss the future of teaching and learning on P2PU (not just from a technical perspective), and Introduction to contributing to Lernanta, for those who want to get their feet wet with some coding. If you get lost, you can also ask a question at the P2PU help desk.

  You can see all the tickets for the platform that I've submitted here. The last one was a suggestion to split the activity stream updates from blogs away from the front page "wall", because our conversations there are kind of drowning in updates. 

  (If you ever see a reference to "Lernanta", that is just the "codename" for our new platform (the one you are on now). The old platform is at p2pu.org).