New member to schools working group
Jay Cassano
I just joined this list and working group and wanted to take the
opportunity to briefly introduce myself.
I haven't really plugged into the p2pu community in any significant way
yet, though I've been a long-time admirer and supporter of the project.
I'm interested in thinking about ways for p2pu to strategically grow and
I'm also interested in developing organic infrastructures for
organizations. So that's why I thought that this working group would be
a good place for me to contribute.
I finished undergrad last spring and I studied European/continental
philosophy (things like critical theory, political philosophy, and
philosophy of history - not so much the analytical philosophy of mind
and language that a lot of people associate with contemporary
philosophy). One of the things I'm interested in is bringing the open
access/open educational model to the humanities & social sciences. The
"hard" sciences have been much quicker to adopt and adapt to these
models, while the humanities (which view themselves as progressive) have
stayed stuck to very hierarchical and tradition-based methods of
learning and validation. In my senior year I worked with an open access
humanities publishing collective, Open Humanities Press
(http://openhumanitiespress.org/), whose goal is to try to overcome the
"credibility gap" of open access in the humanities. Now I'm becoming
more interested in approaching the problem from the other end and
working with already-existing open education communities to bring more
humanities into them.
p2pu has the goal of "learning...about almost anything" yet I'm worried
that it could become a haven just for math, science, and computers - the
already converted, so to speak. So, although I know it's outside the
focus of this working group specifically, I'm also interested in maybe
starting up some philosophy courses or perhaps laying the groundwork for
a philosophy school at p2pu.
Thanks for reading. I know everyone is busy with other things so I
appreciate your time to read this. I've been going over some of the
archives of this email group and I'm looking forward to pitching in on
conversations.
Thanks for having me,
Jay Cassano
Niels Sprong
Great intro! I think you're absolutely right when you say that ideas of openness for a large part reside in a few branches of 'hard science' people (def not all branches though, there are some pretty dusty fields in the hard sciences) and still effectively need to spill over to the humanities and social sciences. Its a slow but sure process.
If you have any ideas on how to draw a diverse crowd of people in (don't be mistaken though, the p2pu crowd is actually pretty diverse) or how to attract a more diverse crowd of people to join schools/courses just look for ways to get those ideas implemented. Im sure people on this or other lists will support you along the way!
nice to meet you ,
Niels
Stian Håklev
welcome to P2PU, and thanks for your enthusiasm.
If you look back at our first set of courses, they were actually very
diverse, including creative non-fiction writing and intro to cyberpunk
literature, as well as economics, environmental science, etc.
Currently, the School of Webcraft is growing at an amazing pace, which
makes the course listing a bit slanted. We are very happy about the
exciting success of SoW, and the collaboration with Mozilla is also
enabling us to develop our platform and other resources to the benefit
of all courses. However, we are still very much committed to a broad
range of courses and disciplines!
I think courses on philosophy, history, literature etc would fit
perfectly in the model of P2PU. The only concern is with primary
materials from the last century, which might be copyrighted. If we
cannot find a good economics textbook that is open access, we can
write one ourselves, but if we want to discuss Heidegger, and cannot
read his original books, we are in trouble. Although the open access
movement is gathering steam (I am also very active in this field), it
tends to focus on journal articles, with much less focus on the
monographs that are more common in the humanities.
As for schools, I would recommend beginning to design/run a few
courses in the general P2PU space first. We try to make sure that
schools already have a strong community support / background in P2PU,
etc.
Stian
--
http://reganmian.net/blog -- Random Stuff that Matters
lila bailey
Maria Droujkova
p2pu has the goal of "learning...about almost anything" yet I'm worried that it could become a haven just for math, science, and computers - the already converted, so to speak. So, although I know it's outside the focus of this working group specifically, I'm also interested in maybe starting up some philosophy courses or perhaps laying the groundwork for a philosophy school at p2pu.
Jay,
Philosophy sounds great! I would like to mention that many math and science people also have a keen interest in philosophy, and may want to join courses or to help with them.
Cheers,
Maria Droujkova
Make math your own, to make your own math.