Submitted October 19th

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Future Everything 2011 Festival - Submission Date 24th October 2010

Title of Activity
Peer based education:  responsive ways to learn in the future (online and offline)

Name of entrant
Pippa Buchanan & Alison Jean Cole

Contact email address of entrant
pippa.buchanan@gmail.com
alisonjean.cole@gmail.com

Institution or Affiliation
Peer 2 Peer University

URL
http://p2pu.org/about

A 500 word abstract for presentation or session
Peer2PeerUniversity (P2PU.org) is a community that provides a social wrapper that gathers learners around open educational materials. It's volunteer driven and all P2PU courses are peer-led, offered on the web and available for free.. We've been running courses since 2009. Anyone can propose to lead a course at P2PU. The community collaborates with the new organizer through the design process: from creating a syllabus of openly-licensed resources, to generating social collaboration within the course, to inviting experts to share their wisdom.

P2PU courses range from the practical (Copyright for Educators, Land Restoration) to the creative (Open Creative Non-fiction), the experimental (DIY Maths) to the cerebral (Inteligencia Coletiva e Ava Portuguese, Queer Theory). There are also  curated courses with reputable career tracks such as the School of Webcraft run in partnership with Mozilla.

P2PU is based on the web but spans the world with participation from communities within South Africa, Brazil, Australia, the USA, Canada, India, Japan, UK, Germany, Spain and beyond. Our community offers courses in English, Spanish and Portuguese and we plan to support more languages in the near future, especially Mandarin Chinese. 
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In this session we will present an overview of P2PU paying particular attention to the course development and community approval process. We believe that as world structures continue to change, education and training will need to become dynamic and responsive enough to reach audiences when and where they need it. Educational systems which rely on approved experts to lead classes after slow-paced institutional approval are neither scalable nor fast enough to respond to deal with changing contexts.

A peer-to-peer model such as that being developed by P2PU provides the social elements that allow rapid collaboration. We'd like to explore the community process behind  P2PU course collaboration and work with the workshop audience to explore future scenarios which would benefit from a responsive peer led learning model.

We imagine that scenarios brought for discussion in the workshop might cover transformative learning that drives change (public health) and responsive learning that responds to change (resilient agriculture for changing climates).

The workshop leaders would also like to explore how to link and transition the peer-run learning process from its current online and globally context  to local and real world pods of learning.

Speaker biography (max. 150 words)

Alison Jean Cole   -  Portland, Oregon
Alison helps folks design awesome courses at P2PU. She is also a gardener and is currently working on a hardmade masters degree: http://www.grungefarmer.org/handmade-masters.html
Pippa Buchanan - Australian resident in Berlin, Germany
Pippa  coordinates the School of Webcraft project for Mozilla and P2PU. She also gardens, builds small boats and is slowly working on her own DIY masters exploring friendship theory and resilience.

The type of activity (talk, demo, workshop, experience, etc)
Workshop (2-3 hours)- Brainstorming future uses of peer-led, free, and open education communities

Will the talk/presentation be presented for the first time at FutureEverything?
Yes




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http://futureeverything.org/
http://award.futureeverything.org/conference2011

Conference / Festival Themes

There are 6 major festival strands. I think our best bet will be to focus on  Imagine Everything (i.e. a free, global, connected learning community), Global & Connected or 
FutureEverybody

ImagineEverything
Our most daring and wide-ranging conference strand, bringing you  insights into tomorrow’s society, digital creativity and free culture.  Taking all of our wildest dreams for the future and imagining what would  happen if they really came true is at the heart of this strand.
FutureMobilities
Exploring future scenarios for smart transport, and looking beyond the  transport of everything. How can real-time data systems lead to more  sustainable transport? How can travel-time become smarter and more  user-controlled? Where are we going and, more importantly, how will we  be getting there?
Global & Connected
Remote collaboration, telepresence, networked performance, local/global  connections, and group-to-group connectivity are a focus again,  following the success of the inaugural GloNet event at FutureEverything  2010.
OpenEverything 
The opening up of datasets by public bodies and private companies has  huge repercussions both socially and politically. What models are  emerging for the fair and creative use of such material and what are the  implications of an open society?
FutureEverybody
The future must be for everybody – this was the call to arms from the  last festival. A conference strand on citizen engagement will explore  how we can connect communities and how citizens can be co-producers in  decision making, intelligence gathering and building sustainable cities.
Handmade
Contemporary craft, digital hacking, interactivities and diy culture. A  new maker community is emerging, connecting the culture of traditional  skills and materials with modern-day digital production, distribution  and interaction techniques. FutureEverything invites makers to create  objects, installations and performances that explore the  cross-fertilisation of new and traditional media and materials.
    

Selection Process                                                          
                                                        
The Conference Programme Open Submission selection is made via the following process.
Submissions are assessed against the following criteria: