Community Call - 6 September 2012
Attendees (welcome to any newbies)
- Add your name (and twitter handle) here
- Vanessa (@mozzadrella)
- Philipp (@schmidtphi)
- Leah (@leahmacvie)
- Niels Cosman
- Jane @janedaily
- Dirk @riskycud
- Molly @mollyali
- Piet @bagabot
- Chris
- Alan
Standups What have you been up to? Short written notes (we'll discuss only if there are questions)
- Bekka
- In Amsterdam, having a great old time
- Finance hand-over
- Vanessa
- Course Creation Research
- Assessment plan revision w Philipp
- MOOC scripting w CE
- Next up: P2PU turns 3 timeline
- Begin to draft materials for Duke/DML mid-Sept
- Working with Bud Hunt on a "Making" version of the poetry course
- Hatching plans with Nate Mathias about peer learning projects
- Awesome feedback from Dirk and Chris
- Chris
- Continuing on CSS framework
- Targeting Sept 20 release
- Mooc grouping
- Philipp
- Finance processes (migrate to new finance admin person Ryan)
- Exit Shuttleworth fellowship
- Feedback on assessment plan
- Blog post about Media Lab collaboration (will go out tomorrow/Monday)
- Call about combining offline/online - P2PU in hackerspaces
- Dirk
- Badges, badges and badges
- Feedback to Vanessa :)
- Unified courses
- CSS
- some sysadmin - redirect, server access, etc.
- Jane
- 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
- Articles you read
- Initiatives you heard about
Key updates Super short updates about P2PU
Exciting new courses to check out- Development priorities (Dirk)
- CSS Framework moving forward - hoping to get changes out for everyone to test / review
- Release into production by end of the month
- Unify courses & challenges and simplify course creation
- Release into production by end of the month
- Looking for help to move to a new editor - considering to offer a "bounty" to fix the editor
- Not too far future (post CSS framework) Chris will start looking at how we support schools
State of the mustard (Philipp)
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).
- Niels Cosman: Art and Assessment and Project-based learning
- Start with this video: Ira Glass on taste and creative work: (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BI23U7U2aUY&feature=youtube_gdata_player)
- Teaches in glass department at Rhode Island School of Design
- Awesome video! How bad is that radio report on the food production issues in Mexico? +1
- Entry into conceptual art, understanding a difficult technical medium (glass)
- Main class (teaching this class for the 7th year) -> glass cold working
- Leads to a lot of technical understanding - what is the material? how is it worked? what are the machines and techniques? how do I stay safe?
- Interfaces with studio and conceptual practice they are working on
- Show lots of examples of contemporary art and design - that connect examples to ideas
- Three core concepts: Deconstruction (cutting into glass), Construction, Optics (manipulation of a glass surface)
- Helps students use methods of self-evaluation, so they can see where they are doing things "right" and where they are going "wrong"
- Q: Fascinating! How does this work? What are these methods?
- Embrace failure, focus on intermediary steps, break down the process from the technical understanding, what does every single step along the way look like?
- Help students to spend more time looking at their work in progress
- Sometimes the right approach and method doesn't necessarily lead to the right result
- Start with technical approach--a project that is almost too hard, encourages them to fail
- Weekly assignments -> product something to show (show to Niels or the whole group?)
- Q: As students are figuring out projects, do you encourage them to add constraints or do you add constraints to the project? I'm wondering how much of an impact constraints have on creativity (the more constraints, the more creative the outcomes?).
- There are always constraints - material & technical constraints, constraints of the tools, time constraints of the course
- Try to convey that students should understand the constraints and recognize them ahead of time (and also push against the boundaries)
- There are infinite possibilities - even with a technical constraint you still have an infinite number of options
- constraints are not limitations but boundaries to work within
- recognize constraints and match /set expectations accordingly
- Peer review / assessment practices
- Every week we look at projects together, not to shame people, but pick up common difficulties and talk about them - find solutions
- Also to hold people responsible for their work
- During the first semester students learn what is "technically" good work
- Then they define for their own work what they plan to build - and set up the expectations
- Q: Who gives most of the feedback / does the commenting? Niels, or the group members among themselves?
- The entire course is structured as an open discussion, students can chime in whenever they want
- When Niels critiques technical work, people often pitch in
- Final project assessment--students set their own project, their own limits, I gauge them on the own metrics that they define themselves
- Discuss the ideas the students are dealing with
- Being neutral & trying to respond to work
- A critique is a response to the work
- Success is how well does "the read" of the work correspond with the "intention of the work"?
- Design Research: Course Creation: http://www.slideshare.net/VanessaGennarelli/design-research-course-creation
- Discussion:
- Jane: Would like a tab "About this course" where course creators can provide more background, clarify expectations, describe learning goals
- Based on working together in Berlin with Piet and Molly
- Data on time for course creation, number of visits
- 2 weeks - 1 month?
- Many people use less than 10 hours - this is really surprising to me
- Jane: This question was a little tricky to answer. I think it's feasible to create a very basic challenge in <10hours, but for a full course that is facilitated, it would be a different story (=take longer)
- Course development is NOT happening on P2PU currently
- Is that a problem?
- How many people do collaborate?
- Median=2 is key (mean is driven by outlier)
- Important to understand "how" - as different types of collaboration will require differenet features (e.g. better commenting vs tracking edits)
- Design suggestions
- Driven by usertesting or interviews?
- Some points seem UX, others functionality
- Community review
- How about making that part of the basic course information? Make it open and public