Sharing Nicely

What a week. On Wednesday the Interwebs shut down. On Thursday Apple revolutionized textbooks. What will Friday bring?

But after the hype has settled down (and yes, it was hard not to get a little swept away by all the great sounding announcements) we wake up with a slight hang-over this morning. Audrey Waters went so far as to call the revolution off and slammed Apple for this “slap in the face to educators and students.”

She is spot on, but leaves out one key point. This really is a revolution. It’s just not ours (I am still trying to decide if it wasn’t even intended for us, or if it just fell short.)

• Yes, digital textbooks change little about the format and model of instruction that involves a textbook. Digital textbooks do not bring truly richer and more engaging ways to learning.
• Yes, the cost at K-12 level are too high. In fact, if you add in the cost of the device (discounted over let’s say 4 years) using this to supply a school with textbooks is likely to be more expensive.

Those are two good reasons why  it is not the revolution we know was possible, but those things aren’t enough to discourage the majority of Apple’s vast iOS empire and the many who will join it as a result. And that is the revolution here.

What Apple did to the textbook is combining App Store and iTunes. And in the same way those innovations changed the software and music industries, will this change the textbook industry. It creates an infrastructure that let’s individual producers market their products to the end-user. That infrastructure is locked down physically as well as wrapped in multiple lawyers of legal barbed wire, but it is convenient enough for people to use it. And the content collection is seeded with books from the big players.

That all sounds familiar from previous Apple revolutions. Just as familiar will be what happens next. Prices will come down (just as they did in iTunes where we have more variable pricing now and the App Store that made software something you can buy for a few bucks), quality will go up (just as it did in iTunes which originally only offered low-quality MP3 files) and there will be an army of textbook authors submitting their works (just as the App Store mobilized a huge army of software developers). And all of those things are good for education.

But there will be a format scuffle and it remains to be seen if Apple supports an open or at least universally supported standard, or establishes its own. There will be examples of innovative textbooks and products that Apple locks out of their system to prevent competition. And other more promising approaches and companies are going to be overshadowed by the sheer media muscle of Apple’s initiative. All of those things are bad for education.

This is not a radical innovation because Apple doesn’t do radical innovation. MITx is a bold promise, this isn’t. But Apple’s strength is bold marketing not innovation. Apple innovations remain carefully close enough to the status quo to make immediate sense to a mainstream market. Yes, the experts will always point out the flaws and shortcomings (and they are usually right) but the easiest way to sell something new is to make it look and feel like something that customers are familiar with and understand. iBooks2 and iTunesU are close enough to what we have now that they may get the kind of traction that is harder to get with more innovative approaches. And while iOS devices may not be widespread among a general student population yet (and certainly not in developing countries), Apple’s distribution funnel that let’s them push content to these devices may get them the early uptake they need to pull more users in.

What this does is change another existing industry by making its products more elegant, more convenient, and reducing inter-mediation necessary to connected users and producers. And that is huge. But it’s not as huge as kicking off an education revolution. So let’s get back to work and make that part happen ourselves. To be honest, I am almost relieved that Apple did not manage to build the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer: a Propædeutic Enchiridion even if that had felt more like our revolution. But I want our revolution to be free and open and not part of something called an ecosystem that is really a distribution system.

One of the many cool things about being a Shuttleworth Foundation fellow is that I get to give away a “Flash” grant each year to people who are doing cool stuff. It’s a no strings (almost) attached 5000 USD and could be a first step towards a full fellowship application.

I decided to give my Flash grant to David Albert who started something called Hackerschool in New York City. I liked that Hackerschool shares a lot of similar spirit with P2PU and yet it is completely different at the same time.

Read the FAQ for all the details, but in a nutshell – David (and his collaborators) run an intensive face-to-face immersion course for web developers, he compares it to a writers workshop, with an interesting sustainability model. The school itself is free for participants, but companies desperate to hire developer talent pay Hackerschool for recommendations and referrals. Brilliant idea and since they are about to launch round 3 it seems to be working.

Speaking of round 3, applications are open! (And if you have a space in Manhattan or Brooklyn that they could use, send them an email! They were at NYU and Spotify in the past. You’ll be in good company.)

Congratulations to David for his success, and a shout out for the Shuttleworth Fellowship. The Flash grants are a nice addition to an already terrific model.

Two weeks ago P2PU held its third workshop. This year’s focus was on “getting stuff done” and bringing together people who are working on concrete projects. And we did get a lot done. Check out the etherpad with our notes and visit our new projects board on trello for the details. But we also spent time as a community engaging with the reasons why we got started with P2PU and what it is that holds us together.

Returning to Berlin brought with it a good dose of nostalgia. We held our first ever workshop there in 2009 and we wanted to reconnect to the spirit and excitement of that event. At the time many of us had never met face to face and we weren’t sure what would happen. It turned out that we were not just a group of individuals interested in similar things, but a community with a shared purpose.

P2PU in 2009

Despite all of our different backgrounds, interests, and characters, we connected deeply – both at a personal level and with the idea of P2PU. We became friends and collaborators. And we couldn’t wait to get started. At the time we didn’t want to get bogged down by a long process of defining our vision. We knew what that vision felt like and that was good enough. In order to have a compass to guide our decisions we agreed on three core values of openness, community, and peer-learning and then we set out on the journey.

Barcelona 2010

The three values turned out to be good guides for our original community, but they didn’t convey the excitement and sense of purpose that we felt. They didn’t help new people connect to the idea of P2PU in the same deep way that we had connected with it. There is a certain magic that happens when a great group of people spends four days in a room and that is hard to convey digitally. But we also never clearly articulated what it was that drew us together and that made us so committed to the idea. As we grew it became clear that we needed more than three core values. We needed something that would not only guide our future path, but that we could share with others, and that would express what we stand for. We needed to write down our vision.

Berlin 2011

That is why at this year’s workshop we spent two long sessions trying to get to the bottom of some of the fundamental questions about P2PU. We asked ourselves what problem P2PU is solving, what unique approach or ability we bring to solving it, and what it is about P2PU that we feel so passionate about. In the coming weeks, Bekka, Jane, Nadeem and I will take a stab at turning our notes into a draft vision for P2PU, but I wanted to share some of my own take-aways for those who couldn’t be in Berlin this year:

• P2PU is a diverse community of individuals who are passionate about learning. We stand for human-centered education. We are not a product or a service, but a community that creates products and services. We thrive on experimentation.
• P2PU is a way to build the world we want to live in. We foster a culture of reciprocity, of helping each other out, of giving a leg up. The education system is in trouble and we want to help rather than point fingers or complain.
• P2PU is for passion-based learning. Everyone is passionate about learning something. P2PU is a place to identify that passion and we celebrate the long tail of learning and education.
• P2PU can scale. The traditional model works well for small numbers of learners, but quality goes down when numbers go up. As a result many people don’t have access to quality learning opportunities. P2PU’s open source model can scale.
• P2PU preserves the core ideas of the university. We are not against the traditional university, but want to help preserve some of its original values such as freedom of ideas, and a culture of learning through open sharing.

In the spirit of the old musically-themed P2PU newsletters I’m asking Joe Cocker to lend a hand in closing this post.

With a little help from our friends we are able to block out the noise and listen to the voice of our hearts. It’s a little help from our friends that dares us to follow our intuition. And it’s with a little help from our friends that we can become who we truly want to be. P2PU is learning with a little help from your friends.

This announcement about Harvard receiving a US$ 40M gift to support teaching and learning innovation made me think more about the platform conversation we’ve been having (here and on the mailing list). Besides giving an elite university a lot of cash, how can we foster more innovation in learning and teaching in ways that will affect more people?

It struck me that there isn’t really an open lab for learning innovation – and that P2PU could be it. During Monday night’s board meeting we discussed sustainability, and Neeru riffed on the platform idea a bit. She wondered if we could model ourselves as a research institute. There would be heaps of experimentation and research, some of it driven by us and some driven by partners who want to work with us, and each year we would publish a string of short reports about what we are learning. Cathy added that we could connect it to an annual conference with great speakers from the P2PU community who share the results of their work, and suggested that corporations would be willing to pay substantive amounts of money for this knowledge.

Which brings me to the term “lab”. Speaking to more people about the idea of a “platform” made me realize that it’s a term that means different things to different people. And when I explained that it was a mechanism to support experimentation and research, they would ask if it was “kind of like a lab.” And that’s exactly what it would it be like.

The idea of an open lab for social learning sounds exciting and it feels in line with our original spirit of experimentation. What would it look like?

Supported by a platform that is extendable, hackable, malleable and customizable – We need a sandbox, so that we have a place to experiment, and track the results of these experiments. But the sandbox is not the important piece here, it’s a means to an end (or a journey rather).

Run by a community that is passionate about peer learning and openness, and thrives on experimentation – In her comment earlier, Karen pointed out that talking about “platform” wasn’t enough and asked “how do content, community, and methods tie into this?” She is absolutely right. What happens on the platform is directly connected to the values and principles we hold as a community. I think we need to spend more time talking about what they mean to us – but our three original values of open, community, and peer-learning have stood the test of time quite well so far.

Turning experiments into great learning experiences for lots of people - This third bullet is new and still a bit wonky (and needs word-smithing). But it’s an important stake to put in the ground if we want to make sure our work has a broader benefit. Many research labs have to rely on industry to turn their work into products and services that affect “normal” people. As a result success is often measured through proxies for innovation (like scientific articles, or patents, etc.) because the research work is at least one layer removed from the “end-user”. Luckily that’s not the case for us, because the end-user is part of the P2PU community. Why not be bold and try to measure impact through our ability to turn experimentation into great social learning experiences that work for many people?

While Harvard can focus on innovating teaching and learning within the institution – we could be the open learning lab for everyone. Thoughts?

I’ve been looking for solutions to two problems that must be quite common for people working in virtual teams

• Managing sprawling lists of todos across many projects
• Keeping track of where all my time goes to make sure I’m spending it on things that are important

You’d think there must be a plethora of great simple tools that make this easier. I’ve looked (and have been looking) but the tools are either too complex (insert name of any task management app of your choice) or too simple (teuxdeux).

Please someone build this. I’ll beta-test and help spread the word. Here is the minimum Viable Product

A task has the following fields

• Short description (this covers name, title, etc.)
• Time to complete (how long I think it will take, or how long it ended up taking me)
• Completed (checkbox to show what’s done and what still needs doing)
• Tags (for everything else: grouping by project, types of tasks, priority, deadlines, etc.)

I’ve had a lot on my mind with regards to P2PU recently. Bear with me for a bit of a meander …

As Executive Director, one of my responsibilities is to figure out a way to make this thing sustainable, and I’m working on a sustainability plan for discussion with the board. Lots of people have been suggesting opportunities for earned income (charging for something) and I am excited by some of them. But when users pay for services they become customers, and customers are different from community members. Nadeem deserves credit for really pushing on the importance of tying sustainability to the value we create for our community and I think he is right.

I’ve also been wondering about the applicability of the “challenges” model to other areas besides the Mozilla School of Webcraft. I think it’s a really awesome model to scale social learning for some users and communities. But Jessy’s post about looking at learning as heterogenous vs. homogeneous systems reminded me of the passion I’ve always felt for the diversity and serendipity of stuff at P2PU, and how we need to balance the desire to create an amazing polished experience with the possibility for experimental, messy, and unexpected things to evolve.

We are in the middle of planning our third P2PU workshop and I’ve been thinking a lot about the first P2PU workshop two years ago. Berlin 09/09/09 forged an amazing spirit of possibility and community that has carried us a long way. Berlin 11/11/11 will be much more focused on concrete work, but the important questions remain the same. What role should P2PU play (in an open education world that looks very different from two years ago)? What makes us different? One of Jessica’s emails to the development list reminded me. She described P2PU as a friendly place for learning and ended her message with “I love P2PU” – Reading those word stopped me in my tracks. Because there is simply nothing nicer or more important someone could say about us.

So, reading an article about products vs platforms today (link) brought a lot of this stuff together for me. If we look at P2PU as a platform, we can have all of our cakes and eat them too (something worth trying): We can have polished experiences and foster experimentation, we can build opportunities for earned income and continue to care more about community than customers, and we can be a friendly place for learning. The platform idea is not completely new (both Karen and John deserve credit for pushing the concept of an API) but I hadn’t realized that there is a really important connection between platform and community before.

Here are four bold suggestions that feel in line with the spirit of Berlin 09 and provide some direction for Berlin 11. What do you think?

1. P2PU is a platform – There is no right product for “everyone”, the right product for everyone simply doesn’t exist. That’s particularly true for learning and that’s why shouldn’t try to build one right product, but rather build a platform that many people can turn into many right products for many different users.
2. A platform with at least one great product – In order to make P2PU work as a platform, we need at least one amazing product that lots of users love. That amazing product could be one model for learning that appeals to a large group of users, or it could be a clever way for developing reputations within the community, or it could be a great way to keep track of all the cool things that are happening in P2PU …
3. Everyone can help build P2PU – We should encourage and support experimentation, so that the whole community can innovate (yes Dan, I’m thinking of you). We need to make sure that the UX is clean and simple, but that there is room for experimentation. Maybe we move experiments into a LAB space, but P2PU needs to be extendable, hackable, malleable …
4. We eat our own dogfood – Why are we having insightful / engaged conversations on this mailing list, but very seldom on the site? We should feel frustrated by UX details that are frustrating. And we should be happy about features that are beautiful and clever.

Cheerio – have a great day!

As part of my Shuttleworth Foundation fellowship, I am asked to reflect once a year on progress I have made, and think about challenges I may have encountered (and overcome hopefully.) It always seems difficult to find the time to write these reports, but turns out to be an incredibly useful exercise in taking a longer-term view. It helps me to notice trends and developments that are easy to miss in the day-to-day excitement.

This is not an overview of all the things that have happened at P2PU in the last year, but rather it’s a reflection on along three broad themes: (1) building a social learning platform and community, (2) laying the groundwork, and building the partnerships necessary for hacking certification, (3) and making P2PU run like a well-oiled machine, that is fast and nimble, but remains committed to openness and transparency.

It’s long. You were warned. Photos thrown in for entertainment.

Building a Social Learning Platform and Community

• We ran two rounds of courses, and continued to double the number of courses and size of our community each time (as we have done in every round so far). More than 3300 users signed up for 54 courses and the community has grown to almost 20,000 registered users by June 2011. A significant part of this growth has been driven by School of Webcraft, and together with partners we are developing a number of other schools (including schools for social innovation, maths education, and we are currently preparing the first courses of a planned school of education / teacher training).
• A major milestone was the complete re-design and migration to our new web site which we just launched on June 17th (old site: archive.p2pu.org). The development work was led by Zuzel Vera, our fantastic technology lead who came onboard full-time earlier this year. She rolls out updates to the site every 2 weeks, which means things are getting better all the time and we are super excited to see a small, but active open source community starting to contribute code. The idea has always been to get people who are using P2PU involved in the process of improving the platform – and we are now offering a P2PU course for developers to help them get started (one for for UX designers is coming soon.) If you want to geek out on the technical details (Python/Django mainly) check out our github page and development task tracker.
• As part of the redesign, we decided to make some adjustments to our model and added support for more flexible courses and study groups. Requiring all courses to be more or less the same length, and setting a coordinated start date, didn’t work for everyone. And in between the course cycles, there were no courses new users could sign-up for. That’s why the new site adds support for self-organized study groups that can run perpetually and encourage users to start courses and study groups at any point, and not confined to a small number of cycles each year.

Hacking Certification

One of my main interests has always been the idea of “hacking certification” and how we can recognize or certify achievements that take place in informal communities like P2PU.

• We worked hard to establish the concept of badges as part of an alternative accreditation system. P2PU co-hosted the “Badge Lab” (agenda, blog post from a participant) which ended up growing into one of the most influential streams of the event, and has since evolved into its own project, hosted by Mozilla, to create an open badges infrastructure. We are also building more support around the idea of badges, by organizing a badges working group for the MacArthur Foundation (second workshop coming up).
• Since some of these ideas are fairly new (and controversial) and I also spent a fair amount of time thinking out loud and spreading the word. Vijay Kumar invited me to speak about “hacking certification” in his “open education” course at the Harvard Extension School and I wrote a longer blog post about it afterwards (has links to recording). I presented similar ideas as part of a joint session on certification in open education with Sir John Daniel (ex Commonwealth of Learning) at the OpenCourseWare Global Conference at MIT (slides at slideshare), and discussed the implications of all this for the “Future of the University” at the University of California Humanities Research Institute. And I was recently invited to give a keynote on the topic at Open Ed 2011, which will take place later this year.
• Another focus has been to build partnerships with organizations and people that have a shared interest in providing certification for open learning. We continue to work with Mozilla on badges, and the School of Webcraft. The University of California Irvine has been a great supporter and partners since the early days, and we hope to issue professional development unites through UCI Extension very soon. And we are strengthening our relationship with MIT. Steve Carson from the OpenCourseWare project has been an advisor to P2PU, and Joi Ito whom I consider a mentor and who ran the Digital Journalism course at P2PU last year recently took over as director of the MIT Media Lab. Lots of opportunities there! Another great source of inspiration has come from Hal Plotkin, the senior policy advisor to the under-secretary of education, who has helped us think through a lot of these issues with a view on connecting them into the formal education system in the US.

The Machine that runs P2PU

• Made lots of progress, building an organization to support P2PU. I wrote this summary blog post that gives a lot more detail, but in a nutshell: We incorporated as a 501(c) non profit organization in the US, and obtained our tax exempt status. We appointed a really fantastic board of directors that consists of the founders, community members, and two long term strategic partners (Cathy Casserly, Creative Commons; and Mark Surman, Mozilla). For more detail on the board see this post. We are also revamping our advisory group and are specifically looking to add more business expertise and experience. And we started hiring a few great people to add to the team. P2PU is still entirely grant funded today, which is something we intend to change (see below) but we received a Hewlett grant which allows us to diversify our core funding (and we are waiting to hear back about two other large proposals.)
• While building an organization that can accept funds and provides a legal structure is important, the open P2PU community continues to be our foundation and greatest success. We ran another great community workshop in Barcelona, October 2010 to set the strategy for 2011. We are navigating how to be open and transparent to allow a wide variety of opinions and encourage participation, while at the same time being able to move fast like a start-up company (and fulfill the legal obligations of a non-profit organization). It’s a balance act, but it’s fun. For example, as we are increasing the number of paid staff, we are designing processes that involve the community – by sharing job descriptions for review and feedback, asking for nominations from the community, involving community members in the interviews, and discussing our compensation principles publicly. While we are nowhere done, we are getting better at keeping people in the loop, through our weekly community calls that are open to anyone, a shared P2PU calendar, and regular email and blog announcements about new developments and courses.

What’s next?

This post is intended as reflection of the past, but our trajectory over the last 12 months, says something about where we are going in the next year. At least two big goals: build out certification opportunities for our users, and start generating revenue. We have been successful obtaining grants, and there continues to be donor interest in supporting open learning projects, but I am particularly excited to work on opportunities for revenue generation in order to make us independently sustainable in the future.

Enough already. Thanks for reading all the way through. If any of this resonates, feel free to drop me a line, mention @sharingnicely on twitter, or leave a comment below.

I’ll be speaking on a panel at the “Innovation in Higher Education” conference at Harvard Business School. I was asked to comment on the “disruptive innovation” potential of P2PU and the work we do outside of traditional institutions.

Innovation in Higher Education

Wednesday July 6^th, 2011
On HBS Campus: Cumnock 230

Disruptive innovation is a framework based on Clayton Christensen’s work on disruptive technologies. It is useful for analysis of surprising changes in seemingly stable industries, and why market leaders are sometimes unable to defend themselves against new entrants. It argues that the incumbents are sometimes seemingly unable to respond to new opportunities because they focus innovation on the needs of their existing customers, and that start-up competitors are well advised to move into areas that are not well served by incumbents yet (often because they are seemingly less attractive).

Christensen recently published Disrupting Class (together with Michael B. Horn and Curtis W. Johnson) which applies the framework to education. I find his analysis of the problem and challenge insightful, but don’t agree with the solution suggested in his book. I find the idea of personalized education trajectories that are largely curated and mediated through technology, much less appealing (and less feasible) than an open collaborative ecosystem in which peers learn with each other, constructing their learning trajectories as they go along.

I look forward to discussing these and other ideas with Christensen and Horn at the conference. I am not sure, but assume it’s open to the public so if you are in the area please drop by.

Just submitted my “Testing Our Assumptions” proposal for the upcoming Open Ed Conference (Oct 25-27 2011). I am interested in hacking certification – and was happy to accept David’s invitation to act as a Strand Champion for “Open credentialing, open competency certification, and open degrees” at the conference.

Rather than submit a more formal presentation or poster session, I thought I’d try to get some people to help me think through a fundamental question related to certification, “do we really need certification?” The format for “Testing Our Assumptions” is brilliant for these kinds of questions. And besides, traveling half-way around the world to give a presentation and speak at the smartest people in the open education space, rather than speaking with them, seems like a wasted opportunity.

Here is my proposal. Feedback welcome, and I hope to see you at the conference.

One of the most interesting topics in the open education movement focuses on certification and credentialing of learning achievements by participants in open learning environments. The underlying assumption is that we need some form of certification, to validate what we have learned. In this session, I would like to to suggest (slightly tongue-in-cheek) that if we can re-imagine learning as a process that is authentic, social, and open – we might not require a separate certification process. Achievements can be evident in the learning itself.

Does learning require certification?

Certification is a signal or currency, that lets us transfer achievements to those outside of our learning community. As a student, I don’t need grades to signal my skills to those I studied with – but to those who don’t know me, my abilities, or my achievements.

If I beat you in chess, you know that I can play

Jim Gee calls testing “primitive” and the result of poor learning design, and compares students to game players. There is no need for testing in games, because each stage of the game requires some form of mastery and achievement before the player can enter.

Does good learning create evidence, which can replace credentials?

If we follow Gee, we must ask if the problem with credentials is not rooted in the design of learning environments and experience. Can we borrow lessons from game design to make learning so authentic, engaging, and social that it produces all necessary evidence of achievements as a byproduct of the learning? (Or the other way around, does the learning become a byproduct of achievements?)

I should add that I am a terrible chess player – with or without a certificate.