8 November 2012 - P2PU Community Call
Seminar Call

Attendees:

• Vanessa
• Bekka
• Chris
• Dirk
• Philipp

**** NOTE FROM JANE****
Hi all! Unfortunately, I'm having internet connectivity problems here, so won't be able to make this call after all. Please do feel free to carry on the call with out me and I can take a look at the notes later. Otherwise, we'll see some of you next week at the Course Creation 101 webinar! http://info.p2pu.org/2012/11/06/course-creation-101-with-p2pus-learning-lead/
If desired, we can try for a call next week as well."

Quick 4P& an i  report back

Progress (what we/p2pu worked on this week)

• School of Data Curriculum--analysis and feedback on 12 modules [VMG]
• Badge Landscape Analysis [VMG]
• Feedback Taxonomy--What is the right feedback to prompt and when? [VMG]
• School of Open Webinar on Course Creation [VMG]
• Community Call Seminar discussion [VMG]
• Preparing for School of Sound curriculum meeting friday with CE, Brendan Baker, Paul Osman [VMG][CE]
• Planning for new courses on beta with Dirk [BK][DU] (http://pad.p2pu.org/p/beta-course-trial)
  • Direct people to the powerpoint deck for how to create a course in "How to Create a Course" 
  • https://p2pu.org/en/groups/make-a-course/content/bonus-task-playstorm/
  • Make a screencast of of the new UX (like Ali's old one)
  • Use School of Open  courses as a template
  • Join Wedneday's webinar
• Lots of marketing/newsletters [BK]
• Some finance leftovers [BK]
• Planning trip to US for Google OER workshop at the start of December!!! [DU] YAYAYAYAY!!!!
• Shuttleworth Foundation Gathering
• Mech MOOC
  • Getting ready for next round of Python course
  • Fundraising for Mooc next phase

Priorities (next week's focus)

• Feedback Taxonomy [VMG]
• School of Open Webinar on Course Creation [VMG]
• Fiction Course with Sam Allingham creation [VMG}
• Contacting new organisers [BK][DU]
• Planning courses and managing communcation for beta testers [BK]

Problems (Walls I ran into on the way)

• East. Coast. (London. England) Weather. Sheesh. 

Process (org stuff)

• Community Updates
  • Goal: Keep everyone updated on things that are going on in the community
  • Suggestion [VMG]: can we use the results from the analytics and then curate them into something like "choice comments from P2Pu courses this week" or the like
  • PS: I'd rather we have fewer things, but with more detail about what is actually going on. (see notes in the transcript)
  • VMG will ask to see the soundclod memo so we can see what they do
  • Red Cross Community Management and course feedback--it's totally awesome the way they keep the larger community in the loop Ditto. A lot of it is automated, but it's still a brilliant model [BK]
  • SoundCloud & Twilio both send weekly summations of what happened in the community this week to the whole organization--highlights, points of tension, problems

Ideas (stuff that people should know about but isn't yet a priority)

• Philipp is offline next week

Agenda

Mentorship dicsussion:
Preparatory video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqQtsRPzXXI

I. Introductory Questions:

• When have you been a mentor?
  • Tutoring immigrant schoolchildren
  • Helping township youth into a career in food
  • Currently mentoring someone learning to code
  • I've been a teacher, which i suspect is very similar
  • in past work situations
  • Nephew
  • Some past jobs with programming instruction
  • music instruction to friends
  • What are mentors getting out of it?
  • Grooming the next generation (esp. in academia)
    • Paying it forward
    • Mentors choose to give up their time, so there needs to be an initial opt-in and rapport, which can't be manufactured
    • If it goes well, there is a real sense of shared success
    • Coffee from Bekka
    • Generally, you get to work with people who *want* to learn (in most mentorship relationship you choose to be a mentor)
• When have you been a mentee?
  • All my tertiary educational career
  • All the time
  • Throughout the P2PU experience, esp. starting up
    • I'm pretty good at it now, but feel I could have done more to find and work with mentors earlier in my life
  • Not formally (me neither, what does formally mean?
    • understanding that it's a mentor relationship and actively making time for it
    • is learning from someone being a mentee?
    • wait, currently, Paul Osman is mentoring me :) (Isn't he mentoring us all!)

II. Mentorship

• Good Work
  • Ethical
  • Engaging
  • Excellent
• When "good work" is accomplished all of these dimensions are aligned
  • For example: nursing (aims of the nurse and the patients are aligned -> get better)
  • Anti-example: US congress at the moment, goals not aligned
• How are the norms and practices of a community of practice (=fields) passed on to new joiners?
  • Studied three generations of workers in a number of fields
  • Found that mentors played an important role in helping them into the community/field
    • Set ethical standards
    • Engage and create interests/passion 
    • Challenge to push beyond pesonal goals towards excellence
• It's how to be an actor in a particular field, habits and norms, rather than just content knowledge
• This works well in established fields
• What about emerging, new fields, like most of our jobs? Geneticists (grounded in other communities)
  • I think there are very strong norms in the tech space
  • Each community of practice/field comes out of other fields and will retain some of the norms and practices from those fields

III. Role of a Mentor

• Purpose
• Results

IV. Implications for P2PU

• Expectations for Mentors
  • Expertise--knowing the questions that the mentee needs to ask
  • Humane-ness
  • Sustained relationship
• Matchmaking
  • both parties must opt-in
• Priorities for mentorship at P2PU
  • Sense of shared success
  • Impart confidence--someone who believes in you
  • Norms and practices of that field
  • Modeling a certain identity
  • 3 levels of P2PU-style mentorship
    • Staff, people who work on P2PU helping each other get their heads around stuff)
    • Community of course organisers - people who run courses now, how do they get help from people who have done it before.
    • Mentorship around communities of learning  - in schools, or the mechanical MOOC
  • How do we handle expertise in our community of learning? People want to learn from others who know more than them, but in a flat community of learning, how does this work?
    • One option is to think about inviting teams in to evaluate an aspect of the learning process and try to cultivate mentorship relationships out of that. 
    • PS: people assume that in peer-to-peer learning everyone is equal. This isn't necessarily the case, but we want to ensure that there is not any kind of unequal power relationship

Evolving, where both mentor and mentee adjust expecations, and the way they collaborate (incl. to decide that the need for mentorship was addressed)