Community Call 2 August 2012 Notes
Attendees (welcome to any newbies)
- Bekka
- Vanessa
- Dirk
- Ariel
- Piet
- (Molly has been listening in today) Hi MOLLY!!!
Standups What have you been up to? Short written notes (we'll discuss only if there are questions)
- Bekka
- Recovering
- Getting into the swing of Community management
- Vanessa
- Philipp
- P2PU direction email
- Tech planning with Dirk
- ABC Continuity proposal submitted
- Getting ready for the holidays ... hooray!
- Dirk
- Google analytics for info.p2pu.org
- Fixed blogs.p2pu and blog.p2pu redirect
- Google adwords conversion tracking
- I'm struggling, anyone that can help?
- Discussion with Philipp and others about technology roadmap
- API for sending user notifications
- Nurturing a club mate addiction
- Chris
- Ariel
News of the week Written notes on what's going on in our world (bring up special announcements on the call)
- Blog posts you wrote
- Articles you read
- Initiatives you heard about
- Quote:
- "We want our learners to be able to both see nails and use hammers. Often when tools afford new ways, we get obsessed with the design of the hammers. We have a duty to help our students see the nails and to grow the mastery that enables them to hammer the bastards down without bending too many of them over." Vanessa's favorite user Tellio: https://p2pu.org/en/tellio/
- Started a scoop.it for this course. Could we get more of this onto the community list? VMG already reaching out to him to invite to call.
Key updates Super short updates about P2PU
- Exciting new courses to check out (Bekka)
- Development priorities (Dirk)
- API launch comming up!
- CSS framework
- Unification of courses/challenges/groups
- Probably the next big thing to get Dirk's attention
- Infrastructure - need to move old services from the production server to some other server/hosting
- Metrics
- Nadeem and Dirk working on this
- Course creation process
- Vanessa would like to do interviews with users about the process, this should take about a week or so, does it fit in with the timline/roadmap?
- Dirk -> yup, that would work. It was interesting to hear from Chloe about the course creating process, and it would be interesting to see what people think about it now.
- Next steps: Bekka & VAnessa to MOVE FORWARD (yay!)
- State of the mustard (Philipp)
- Not much to say as beginning of the month (last month was pretty good, 1800 new users)
- Can we add blog traffic to the State of the Mustard?
- In the process of changing metrics to (currently being defined between Dirk and Nadeem)
- Engaged users
- Active courses
- Courses in the pipeline
Agenda
Ariel & Tara: Citizen Science on P2PU
- http://scienceland.wikispaces.com/PEER
- Safecast -> http://blog.safecast.org/
- Ariel works as a highschool teacher in LA, and has students working on various projects with existing reaserch groups (CalTech) or their own groups that he mentors
- Many of the projects are environmental monitoring focussed (lots of interest in that in the citizen science community)
- Idea is to run a courseflow on P2PU to formalise the process
- how to generate a question
- what metrics can you measure?
- what metrics can you calculate based on that?
- example -> turbidity in water
- And how do you analyse the data that you might have
- how do you visualise data
- temporal analysis
- correlations between variables
- We have a couple of more terrestrial projects (water quality mapping, measuring Fukishima fall-out with safecast project, air-quality mapping)
- General framework for these courses on P2PU would be the same, but the questions would be more specific
- Question: Would it make sense to break this into a series of subcourses? Or have one general one?
- P -> Do you envision students getting involved and conceptualising hardware tools, or just using a range of tools already
- A -> Actually some of the students are already creating and prototyping hardware. Not all students can, but there are enough to make it worthwhile
- There should be a course on sensor design and development (but pretty high end course) WOW!!!
- Questions from P2PU:
- Building your own hardware--how could we imagine formulating for a digital audience?
- would direction be given about how to find this, or updates from the students? Or asking for feedback online?
- A -> code gets posted on Github and we're using Arduino, which will make it much more accessible.
- Hoping to have sensors ready for readings by August 15th
- Specs for gas sensors and calibration techniques posted
- Maybe connect with School of Data (for visualization content)? http://schoolofdata.org (partnership between P2PU and OKFN)
- How would you structure the course - multiple courses addressing separate topics or different kinds of projects?
- Use peer review to help with validity?
- Possible topics for courses/tasks? scientific method, statistics, sensor design, validation, ?
- Questions by Ariel:
- The past 2 years when I've been doing this project, I haven't really used a curriculum (it's been pretty ad-hoc, beyond "just keep a lab notebook")
- I just have a bunch of plates spinning at the same time (and should sit down to write down what the hell I am doing) ;-)
- With a lot of these projects there are a lot of common elements, and it would be useful to create a kind of "users manual" for how to do this
- Next steps:
- Ariel to put together a brief outline (with Tara)
- Then get Vanessa involved in helping frame it as an online learning experience aka P2PU course
- Then think about assessment (if wanted)
- Another project is a hacker space in LA for highschool students to meet and work on Citizen Science projects.
- At a point, teachers doing this in schools run into the issue of "I don't have enough room to keep my shit" and you become a bad roommate
- So it would be good to have space to keep the toys
- Recently got an NSF grant to buy equipment, and now looking for space for woodshop, metalshop, 3d printing etc
- If we could create digital clubhouse for nerds online at P2PU, then it might help with getting funding for the real space
Vanessa: GIZ course
Philipp: Communication tools
DML research competition (letter of intent due August 27th)
- http://dmlcompetition.net/Competition/4/research-development.php
- is P2PU engaging with anyone about this? Not yet :-) We are one of the badges projects they funded, but nobody has approached us yet
- Piet was asked to take a look at DML, and he thinks P2PU would be the only people he would want to work with... (awwww)
- Indeed I am interested! But just saw it right now, so need to give it some thought....
- @Piet: What research question interests you?
- Looking at the questions, it's really hard to know how to focus
- Considering that P2PU got funding for platform development, would we need to think about improving the system itself?