The School of Webcraft is our first foray into building an entire “Department” for a discipline – courses, a community of course organizers and new assessment models and metrics. We are gearing up to launch the first round of courses in September and are looking for more people to get involved in democratizing web developer [...]
No, I am not speaking of the P2PU management and advisory boards, although some of us have taken rather unconventional academic trajectories including dropping out altogether. But I am writing about a different type of dropping out that is of great concern to P2PU: the number of people that start but don’t complete online courses, [...]
Dick Ngambi invited me to speak with Masters students at University of Cape Town as part of his course on “Educational ICTs for Developing Contexts”. I am chuffed to be invited back – last year we had a very lively discussion on creating an African version of Michael Wesch’s youtube sensation. This year I will [...]
Ethan Zuckerman recently wondered if it was “love or money” that drives amazing volunteer communities like the one over at global voices. Now, we are small fry compared to GV at the moment, but it’s a question that is becoming relevant to P2PU too as we continue to grow and expand globally. As I am sure [...]
As part of my new do-it-right-away-if-it-takes-only-a-minute-or-five strategy, here is a short quote from Glyn Moody’s article on how to become Linus Torvalds. It’s a concise description of the kind of leadership I would love to see engrained in the way P2PU grows up. Especially the highlighted (my highlight, not Glyn’s) sentence is worth repeating repeating [...]
I was happy to see Brandon Muramatsu at the OCWC Vietnam meeting and get some time to hang out, check out the latest gadges (geek!) and go to his presentation. He asked the audience – “what would you like to be able to do with MIT OCW?” Turns out he and Vijay Kumar (who is [...]
I recorded a short video with a few excerpts from “Disrupting Class” and “Leadership without easy answers” and my thoughts how these excellent books relate to our work at the Peer 2 Peer University. It’s a first attempt at video blogging. I am still a little uncertain which types of messages and comments video is [...]
At this point, I find the work on open accreditation to be the most innovative part of the open education space. It’s not just exiting because it cuts at the heart of how the education system supposedly validates learning, but also because it prompts us to ask big questions about the reasons for studying and [...]
So much has happened, that it made sense to jot down a few notes on my thinking on alternative accreditation (I should really say “our” as most of the thinking has been done in collaboration with others, including Christine Geith and Stian Haklev, but I can’t speak on their behalf). I am interested in this [...]
This is part II in an open ended series on useful lessons that P2PU can learn from open source software communities. I am looking specifically at issues around governance, and culture. Governance As open communities grow, governance becomes a (fascinating) challenge. If you want to scale, and P2PU does want to scale, you need more [...]
