community-20120614

14 June 2012

Attendees (welcome to any newbies)

Add your name (and twitter handle) here
- Pieter
- Dirk
- Bekka
- Alison
- Jane
- Philipp
- Vanessa
- John

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

Alison
- New groups
- Help Desk
- Prepping July new courses
- Transitioning w/ Bekka & Vanessa
Bekka
- HR
- Contracting
- Transitioning with Ali & vanessa
- Onboarding
- Berlin planning
- Also got a Shengen visa!
John
- Notifications / Reply by email
- Cohorts
- Mechanical MOOC
- Communicating priorities with the list
Philipp
- Contracting
- HR
- Fun work with Vanessa and John on programme stuff (mechanical mooc project planning, etc.)
- School of Ed South Africa concept
Dirk
- Aquired a Shengen Visa!!! Congratulations!
- Finishing up course creation
- Started work on notifications
- Trying to find time to play with my pi
Jane (School of Open stuff below)
Vanessa
- There is a ghost in her keyboard (won't allow her to use "i" and presses enter at inconvenient times)
- Blog post about badges
- Made her first P2PU screencast for course organizers
- Research into cohorts & groupings for learning
- Working on a P2PU theory of learning
- Email notification re-write
Piet
- worked with Open.Michigan team to try building out a challenge (just to see how it works)
  - challenge: https://p2pu.org/en/groups/teach-someone-something-with-open-content/
  - commentary/discussion around challenge-building: https://docs.google.com/document/d/115ODGWeFRQY5vzA7qzno6pPdtD2J2rHEnJ0wacLQ-Y8/edit
- I've also started working on personal learning planning -- I'm doing the DIY U challenge, but more importantly, I'm researching this for a project at U-Michigan Medical School that overlaps nicely with this
Add your name (optional)

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
- All About Badges: How They Work and Their Future @P2PU: http://blogs.p2pu.org/blog/2012/06/13/all-about-badges-how-they-work-their-future-at-p2pu/
Articles you read
- Awesome design assignments via Dan Cohen: http://assignments.ds106.us/types/DesignAssignments/ (good tidbits for School of Open here)
- Doug Belshaws model for web literacies: http://dougbelshaw.com/blog/2012/06/14/web-literacies-v0-2-beta/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+dougbelshaw+%28dougbelshaw.com%2Fblog%29#.T9nl0vF5mSM
Initiatives you heard about
- http://degreed.com/about/what-is-degreed#<---Meta reputation management for learning, founded by David Wiley

Key updates Super short updates about P2PU

Exciting new courses to check out (Alison)
Programming:
- https://p2pu.org/en/groups/advanced-javascript-programmers/
  - https://p2pu.org/en/groups/introduction-to-programming-with-ruby/
- Ed:
  - https://p2pu.org/en/groups/curating-our-digital-lives/
- Cool courses that are running:
  - https://p2pu.org/en/groups/the-researchers-abode/ (Jessy)
  - https://p2pu.org/en/groups/mit-app-inventor-explorer/ (Jose)
  - https://p2pu.org/en/groups/global-dialog-international-comparative-perspectives-on-education/ (Anna)
  - Healthy courses seem to be those which are run by people who are plugged in to the communuty.
  - We should think about the kind of support that people are (or aren't getting) on the site, versus the community list.
Development priorities (Dirk)
- Release happening on the 18th of June (Monday)
- Improved course creation just about ready to roll!
  - http://dev.p2pu.org:4456/en/groups/create/
- Watch out for them notifications - reply by email
State of the mustard (Philipp)
- Users & comments on track for 5% growth / Not tracking test groups anymore (cuts out a lot of noise)
- Anna Batchelder's course most active -> https://p2pu.org/en/groups/global-dialog-international-comparative-perspectives-on-education/
- Top 3 all education / writing related (active = most number of comments)
- Nice UX difference in terms of "how active" a course feels:
  - https://p2pu.org/en/groups/mit-app-inventor-explorer/
  - https://p2pu.org/en/groups/the-researchers-abode/
  - Challenge layout is more enticing, surfaces activity better than the course layout does.

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).

School of Open (Jane)
- Berlin; Open Challenges Design-a-thon on 26 July early evening (https://donate.mozilla.org/page/event/detail/hackjam/w5c) as part of Mozilla's Summer of Code; building on this as optional for parents on subsequent Saturday; will send invite to CC affiliate list beforehand once details are finalized
- OKFestival; secured spot Wed afternoon for 3.5 hours, w/intro discussion co-led by researcher on open, peer learning environments (http://okfestival.okfnpad.org/OpenResearchAndEducation); if Jane doesn't attend, Jessica Coates or Timothy Vollmer will lead along with Laura Newman (count me in)
  - PS: Is this different from the School of Open proposal? JP: No, same thing.
- Creative Commons School of Open Think Tank Meeting (joint with Open Policy Institute) to take place Oct 4-5 in Palo Alto, CA with 25-30 key funders, advocates, reps from dif open sectors around the world
  - Hosted by CC - Philipp, Delia and Jane will be there
- CC Affiliate Regional Meetings; several upcoming w/main focus on 4.0; Jessica Coates to lead discussion on School of Open or workshop at each one (w/Jane's virtual help), depending on the region
  - Awesome! And JC is great. And she knows how to make puppets, which makes her even cooler. +1
- School of Data Kick-off; particpated with Molly K and started an open data challenge - plz help improve! http://schoolofdata.okfnpad.org/openchallenge https://p2pu.org/en/groups/what-can-you-do-with-the-data-you-find
  - This is great!
  - Question -> Is the etherpad in sync with the content in the course on P2PU? What's the best way to comment?
    - Challenge is up on P2PU, so hack on the challenge, and feel free to look at the etherpad for a bit more context.
- Other: timeline, etc. Jane still needs to do (still doing Communications stuff at CC :(.. )
- IN THE MEANTIME: Anyone interested in creating "open" challenges should add to http://pad.p2pu.org/p/Open_Challenges and get in touch with Jane, eg. thanks Vanessa!
- Jane to do: check out http://assignments.ds106.us/types/DesignAssignments/ from Dan Cohen as part of SoO

Support onsite versus on the mailing list (see new courses update from Ali, above)
- What is the community list "for"? What do we like about it (and want to maintain whenever we transition).
- Support is something that the staff keep an eye on and have opinions about, and we know a lot of work is going on at the moment to make the support easier and better.
- But right now, most of the energy of the most active, engaged community members goes on in the mailing list
  - there is an established culture on this list, which can be intimidating at times
  - And a lot of the conversations may be over newbies' heads.
  - How do we transfer some of this energy into the site?
- P -> Why don't we drive more people to the list, where the energy is, rather than try and transfer the energy elsewhere?
- Tweaks to the culture:
  - red yellow green +1 (that's already part of the norms/habits) -i'd disagree with this (with what part?) Only a few of us use this sometimes, it's not a norm, We have to make it a norm. ok, agree ;-) I've taken to it like a fish to water and assumed every has I've never understood the color key exactly (red=not working, orange=questions/discussion, green=dig it - blue=missing/etc.)
  - voting? can we embed things like googleforms or something list-like?
- Generation difference, many people prefer forums (the young - at heart - people like mailing lists?)
- Vanessa -> Agree that the community is supportive but also agree that the list can be intimidating
- Ali -> I would consider the community list approprate for the nitty-gritty, but for people who want to come to P2PU and get support, at the very least, I think we shouldn't expect them to come to the mailing list.
  - Philipp -> isn't help.p2pu.org the place for people to get this kind of support
  - It is and we're working to integrate more help content into the site, too.
  - Good things are under way for more help content within the site.
- What should first level of contact look like?
- First 30 days at P2PU (work on this in Berlin?) +1
- Interaction restricted to smaller audience - member reviewing courses?

Question to Piet about experience putting up a challenge (in his notes above)
- reflections
- it's hard to find a generic and applicable context for people to get excited about
  - this is where the model could break down - need to be able to relate the challenge to "what they care about"
  - zefrank and ds106 missions are succint and provide opportunity for creativity
  - LINKS?
    - http://ashow.zefrank.com/fun/question/?pid=17
    - http://assignments.ds106.us/types/DesignAssignments/
- should we start by each trying to do the challenge as stated and then compare how we did it to generate the actual tasks?
  - Should we write up tasks first? Or put things up as we go along?
- adding in tips and bonus tasks is a good way to make things more difficult and provide more guidance, if needed
  - (this is a great idea--like a better "for further reading :)
- good to point to other challenges for more in-depth topics
- 10 steps model for challenge-making is not always the right sequence
  - when did you feel like this was too cookie cutter/bumping up against a wall
  - are these steps in the right sequence?
  - https://p2pu.org/en/groups/make-a-challenge/
  - to me it feels like a big commitment (a loooot of tasks to work through to do what i really want to do -> make a course)
- hard to create challenges without goals around the school or other challenges that deal with some of the basics (hm, good to think about)
  - without an overall mission, how do you create challenges?
  - School of Data tried (is trying) to create an overall skills map to solve this exact problem - they use a data wrangler pipeline to attach skills / courses
- Ali -> in the creation prcess was there anything that was easy/felt "right"?
  - Piet -> I thought it was all quite challenging! Felt as though there weren't enough constraints, we need to feel more free about adding arbitrary constraints
- Philipp -> I agree it's hard!!! What would be a better way / process?
  - Create a challenge challenge feels too long/task heavy at some times. A lot of the content is spot on, but it feels like a mountain to climb, and sometimes people might want P2PU to be the one who holds their hand through the process.
  - Vanessa -> would annotated screenshots/interviews/example challenges be helpful?
  - Piet -> Example challenges would be helpful (+1)
  - constraints can relate to school, explore this in workshop mode
  - Bekka-> current content felt too abstract at times, maybe issues with sequence, even out of the *level* of the help content between concrete and abstract
- I don't like the single path model of challenges (+1)
  - challenges are a very simple construct - just a bunch of tasks that have something in them, which you can then mark as complete.
  - The create a challenge challenge has very specific tasks that you work thorugh
  - sometimes I don't want to create something that only has one option, and what if you make a challenge that doesn't know how to get from point A to point B?
  - Does this call into question that challenges are too granular?
- Ali -> We have the foundation, and I think there is room for improvemnt but the improvements will be simple.
  - A lot of the improvements miight be tied to the need for concrete terms, which we need to decide on
- Next step:
  - VMG accepts the challenge to review/edit make other recommendations on how to support course creation process
  - Let's make an explanation video when we are in Berlin (or a we challenge you to make a challenge! video. eg. loose cubes' coworking challenge video, something low key)
    - we could have a month of challenge to make a challenge...
    - We still have a few terms that are to be determined, but have reached consensus on many. We'll try plugging the various terms into some of the new writings that we're doing and try them out.

Quote of the week: We need to be more free to add arbitrary constraints!

(we need some hard limits) (and soft ones)
= Liberty for dictatorship in learning.

General discussion and questions

Anything else that just needs to be said out loud