19 April 2012

Notes

Attendees (welcome to any newbies)

• Vanessa (@mozzadrella)
• Bekka
• Nadeem @kiyanwang
• John
• Chloe (@varelidi)
• Alison
• Pieter
• Larry
• Dirk (@riskycud)
• @jessykate
• Kae @kzenovka
• Charlie (@danoff)
• Add your name (and twitter handle) here

Standups
What have you been up to? Short written notes (we'll discuss only if there are questions)

• Alison
  • Apr 18th promotions
  • Tidying up new courses
  • Linking challenges into sets
• Bekka
  • Berlin planning
  • OCW conference in Cambridge
  • general admin
  • P2PU meetup in London
• Chloe 
  • London meetup :)
• John
  • LONDON!
• Philipp
  • Boston - Hewlett Meeting and Hack Day
  • Maybe repreise of Charlie Nesson Pok(o)er course
  • Visited college unbound (Providence, RI) and exploring collaboration on writing program with their students
  • Hewlett report
  • Board meeting prep
• Zuzel
• Nadeem:
  • P2PU Strategy / Berlin Applications etc
  • P2PU Meetup London
• Dirk
  • Designing badges for Contributing to Lernanta challenge 
    • http://pad.p2pu.org/p/contributing_to_lernanta
    • 
      
  • Working on badge creation when creating and editing challenges on site
    • for now only badges that will be awarded upon completion
• Vanessa
  • Philipp-rich week in Cambridge, MA
  • Writing for the Web course--greeting new users--one just started a blog on cross-stitching! http://p2pu.org/en/groups/writing-for-the-web/content/find-your-web-voice/?pagination_page_number=1#15173
  • Revised a Challenge based on feedback and talks with Audrey (changed the title of task, but URL stays the same) http://p2pu.org/en/groups/writing-for-the-web/content/writing-for-the-web-is-a-different-animal/
  • Working on a Black Feminism & History course to be co-taught at UVA
  • Adwords w John
  • Made a story of P2PU terms & Jessy & I shared
  • Wishes she were frolicking in London with rest of team P2PU!+1
• Pieter
  • University of Michigan is joining the Coursera charge: http://www.ur.umich.edu/update/archives/120418/coursera - a win for open learning? not sure yet.
    • how is P2PU engaging with Coursera?
• Jane
  • School of Open update: Help flesh out http://pad.p2pu.org/p/Open_Challenges ! 
    • what is the plan for School of Open over the next few months?
  • We are also applying to run a workshop session with School of Data at OKFestival in September in Helsinki: http://okfestival.org/

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
  • http://blogs.p2pu.org/blog/2012/04/17/announcing-exciting-new-courses-at-p2pu/
  • Assessment and the Web > Illustration http://chloeatplay.tumblr.com/post/20781882446/assessment-and-the-web-an-illustration
• Articles you read
  • http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/04/18/online-education-startup-p2pu-expands-with-5-languages-and-15-new-courses/
  • http://blog.openstudy.com/2012/04/17/redefining-%E2%80%9Csmart%E2%80%9D-openstudy-beyond-badges-and-points/
• Initiatives you heard about
  • gets lots of media attention on apr 18 https://www.coursera.org/
  • P2PU community member Zac Chase is Hacking the Dissertation event tomorrow: https://www.facebook.com/events/259629194127319/

Key updates 
Super short updates about P2PU

• Exciting new courses to check out (Alison)
  • http://blogs.p2pu.org/blog/2012/04/17/announcing-exciting-new-courses-at-p2pu/
  • http://p2pu.org/en/groups/openfiction/
  • Not too late to pass this information on - plese keep reblogging and retweeting!
  • Ali has been working on linking challenges together - 
  • been working on getting challenges into schools as well (school of open and school of data in the main)
• Development priorities (Zuzel)
  • Many demo's and screenshots on http://pad.p2pu.org/tech
    • start of the implementation for the new challenge creation process -- http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5321/7090209511_883b4dc258_b.jpg
    • next step we are working on is the creation of a tool for editing/creating/ordering tasks in the same page which is based on the steps 2 and 3 for the creation mockups
      • interaction in terms of showing and hidding the forms for individual tasks and sorting them is similar to this demo http://jqueryui.com/demos/accordion/sortable.html
    • the mockups are at https://gomockingbird.com/mockingbird/#m5ase18/wJabLR  (take a look at them to refresh where we are moving towards)
  • At the same time we will be starting another project: Badge creation
    •  Dirk will be working on this, people will be able to create skill badges within their own challenges
    • the idea is include a form for challenge organizers to create badges in their challenges by entering the information described at: http://pad.p2pu.org/p/new-badges
    • this project will not follow the mockups -- community input -- implementation workflow
    • dirk will be working directly in implementing a simple starting UI for this and we will gather feedback for next iteration afterwards
• State of the mustard (Philipp)
  • Back in the green for the month growth (comments still a little lower)
  • 30% jump in traffic yesterday (announcement)
  • Still too many test courses
  • 50 new users this month with more than one interaction on the site since they've joined

Agenda
Core of the call. Focused on four types of conversations (invited guests, challenges you need help with, proposals you want feedback on, ideas you need collaborators for). 

• Research Playground: 
  • Vanessa is going to present (semi-weekly) research that she is reading / seeing at school which is relevant to P2PU. 
  • Video http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=TTXrV0_3UjY
  • Article Mueller, C. and Dweck, C. (1998) Praise for Intelligence Can Undermine Children's Motivation and Performance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 1998, Vol. 75, No. 1,  3 3 - 52 https://www.stanford.edu/dept/psychology/cgi-bin/drupalm/system/files/Intelligence%20Praise%20Can%20Undermine%20Motivation%20and%20Performance.pdf
  • She calls the kids she studies "Mastery... Learners (?)" 
  • Some praised for effort, some praised for ability, some not praised at all. 
  • Kids praised for being smart didn't want to take on hard problems, because they wanted to keep looking smart. (helpless, gave up easily)
  • Kids praised for effort took on harder tasks - didn't act as if failure represented who they were, in fact some of them revelled in the failure. 
  • 2 approaches to intelligence - 
    • either it's a fixed entity, a zero-sum game
    • Intelligence is malleable, can be shaped, 
  • What does this mean for P2PU? 
    • In terms of course design - what does this mean in terms of designing courses that are deemed to be "really hard"
    • Alison -> this relates to a discussion about breaking challenges down to the smallest possible set of tasks, which allows all users to feel a sense of or measure their own success as they go along, this could reinforce and keep the motivation of those users up.
    • But this research complicates things, because master learners seem to enjoy failure (is that what you meant?) yup
    • Maybe we can set the tone by initially praising people for being hard workers
    • Chloe -> reminds me of the idea of flow used in game design, visual > http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ls54ccalfa1qzuh0x.png which moves from early, easy praise, to very hard challenges, which actually requre failure
    • Reminds me of computer games where you can't fail - you just crash out and try again and that's part of the game / it's not failure
      • McGonigal calls this "postive failure feedback" in games
      • Failure is what makes stuff fun, and makes people feel better about what they're doing
      • Feedback loops is also relevant to this conversation 
      • Drew Davidson talks about Fun & Frustration >> http://vimeo.com/groups/transmedia/videos/27312149
    • Philipp -> In Open ed world, people worry about retention rates and keeping people engaged
      • The idea that things are "hard" is not very popular in online education, how do we get over that bump?
      • Think of everything as a draft - you can't fail if you are sharing a draft / iteration
      • Vanessa -> we can set the bar as facilitators, and when I ran hack this poem, we were too nice and we should have given more critical feedback
  • The first rule of Jessy's course is that you don't learn anything LOL thanks > you re DOOMED to fail (but you have to try really hard to fail)
  • Philipp -> watching the video was really useful, and I enjoyed it and I'd like to do more of it. 
  • If possible, it would be great to access more of that kind of research, and then figure out how we can use this and associate some action items with this for the future.

• Virtual Worlds Course
  • https://p2pu.org/en/groups/a-virtual-worlds-games-and-education-tour/
  • accomplished: a-virtual-worlds-games-and-education-tour is the top on comments posted on our scoreboard right now. kudos!
  • Gruop of people touring through virtual worlds on the web
  • 124 comments posted during April (most comments this month of all P2PU courses)
  • Kae:
  • we knew about P2PU before we started the course
  • There is an annual conference called "virtual Worlds, best practices in education": http://vw.unsymposium.org/ and this group of educators who are interested in virtual worlds and video games  come together once a year, but we wanted to continue beyone this!
  • The course has a problem dying ;-)
  • This reminds me of Alan's idea for connecting courses and conferences
  • Had started on wordpress, but David Gibson suggested p2pu.org (yay! thanks David)
  • Interested in attracting people to the course and to P2PU as a whole
  • Experience:
    • Facilitators are used to commercial LMS (Blackboard, Moodle)
    • At first - p2pu felt limited because it lacks many of the features
    • After week 2 we really started to like the interface because it doesn't have a lot of the complications and problems
    • The features don't drive how you teach as much (because there are very few features)
    • No way to communicate directly with the course through the home page (hacking the activity stream to do that)
    • Would have loved badges or achievements to be included / status / leaderboards <- very curious about
    • Very used to commercial LMSs, we'd like a simpler chat, becuase we're used to IM
    • We used Google+ as well
    • Some way of doing synchronous audio
• Questions:
  • How did you manage to sustain such vibrant and active discussion over the span of the course?
    • Honestly, this was (Jim Gee's affinity group) good example of a passion group
    • We met 5 nights every week, and we thought that actually we weren't that vibrant and active discussion!
      • A lot of people really like synchronous (and did a lot of that / felt we were doing well)
      • Some users have taken MOOCs - and if you were going by their benchmarks, it didn't feel like we were hitting that mark
      • We had some specific things planned, but also had some open areas, 
    • A couple of really active users ended up becoming facilitators of the course
  • Are you going to run the course again?
    • July - awesome!!
    • Educators may have time over summer to participate that could not participate during the school year
    • Spin off courses: 
      • Machinima Open Online Course: https://p2pu.org/en/groups/a-virtual-worlds-games-and-education-tour-2/
      • ARG Academy - Alternate Reality Games: https://p2pu.org/en/groups/arg-academy/
      • ISTIE (http://www.iste.org/welcome.aspx?)
  • How did you introduce folks to the platforms involved in the course? Is there help content? Do people ask questions?
    • Most of the users have experience in 2nd Life and used these skills in World of Warcraft and Minecraft we went into with some middle school pupils who are using the platform for learning
  • Did you primarily use G+ for synchronous chat or voice/video hangouts?
    • Many virtual worlds have audio chat included
    • We used the Google+ screenshare feature to see where people were in the virtual worlds
    • Found Google hangout robust 
    • Ventrillo
  • Do you think tying courses to conferences is a good model? To find an audience? To carry on the activity from the conference after everyone returns home?
    • It could be - it depends on the conference, some conferences feel kind of flat, and if there is no energy then it will be hard to replicate. But if it's a good conference, it will be easier to spark things off in a course
  • No more question - but super happy about the conversation / THANK YOU for joining!
    • We'd love to see you around on the community mailing list: groups.google.com/groups/p2pu-community

General discussion and questions

• Closing shout outs
  • Rounds
    • A huge plate of virtual cookies to Alison for getting everything together for the new courses announcement yesterday!
  • Platform
    • Awesome to hear Kae say that they really liked the simplicity of the site, and so loads of love to Zuzel, John, Chloe and Dirk for the work they've done on the site
  • Research
    • Vanessa and Jessy - how can we thank you enough for making us feel smarter despite any failings we may have?
    • You can work on a Challenging Challenge :)
  • Kae
    • How great to have Kae, thank you for joining us and let's have mor new people joining us soon