P2PU Free School Convergence
A P2PU Ambassadors project
Mission - Use the global P2PU community, expertise, and resources to connect and support peer learning at the grassroots to find out what they need, what they can do together that they can't do on their own, and what P2PU can do to help them... a bit like Highlander was for the Civil Rights movement, but for Free Schools in Poland to connect with Flash Seminars in Charlottesville and Research Club in Portland... and everything in between.
Initial Tests
- Lucy Burnett of Knowledge Commons DC and Alan Webb plan a local convening of peer learning groups in Washington DC in May
- Amara Warren will be taking Flash Seminars (a UVA student initiative) and Citizen Circles into the Charlottesville community a bit more this summer, how could P2PU support her as she does this?
- Dany is doing awesome stuff in Bogota like Bogota Mesh ("they are implementing a mesh network for free sharing (and much more) in the city. We are doing a connection so that this group can use the p2pu plattform, to teach them how to create a new node and join the network, or start a new mesh network in other city. They will start this course in some days."). How can other groups around the world, like the DC Broadband Bridge Project, learn from what he's doing and vice versa?
Next Steps from there - possible Berlin projects?
- Map, reach out to, and survey local free schools, cooperative learning networks, and any other peer-learning programs at the local community scale around the world. Attempt to learn what they're doing, what they need, what they can do together they can't do alone.
- Find out about curriculum sharing and tech needs / how to better match the P2PU site to their needs
- Highlight awesome examples to share with each other
- Produce a short pamphlet on the outcome of the survey
- A P2PU Community Bridge conference to get these groups together (US South Fall 2012? Global 2013?)
- Jessy: "IMHO conferences is jumping the gun a bit. i like the focus on practical tools that will help people get involved, and conferences can reflect an existing community down the road?"
- ** Your ideas here! **
- I think this is an awesome idea - I wonder if the P2PU Radar project would fit in naturally here - of creating an open live index of open courses from all around the web (sorted by date etc, ie. I want to learn with others about Plato - there's a MOOC starting in two weeks, a P2PU course in 3 weeks, a U of Reddit course ongoing etc)... and maybe eventually an open data format for sharing these kinds of info - CourseRSS :) We'd still have to define what we mean by open courses... but it would be interesting to add local physical courses (I'm near Toronto) etc. Would we allow physical courses to charge a bit of money for them to be listed, what's the limit etc?
Questions / Ideas
- Alison can help with outreach of community learning projects - has encylopedic knowledge of USA groups doing cool stuff.