SoSI News

[Alan Webb]

Hi everyone!

A few quick updates on SoSI:

Current Round of Courses

This semester has been a great experiment in different ways of combining online and in-person learning.  Take a look at how different each of these examples have played out:

- Women as Social Innovators has seen citizen circles come together in four cities where each have created actually very different learning plans.  The group has used additional virtual check-ins as needed, but the emphasis has been on the face-to-face work.

- Conflict Resolution has formed both virtual study groups and in person groups.  They have found that the online groups are a good medium for understanding and discussing conflict management theories, while local groups are essential for actually practicing and improving skills.  The local citizen circle formed through that course, in Washington D.C., is planning to do that through simulations and volunteer consulting to local groups.   The organizer of that the course, Emily, tells me she hopes to organize a second round of the course.

- Local Open Government Innovation has more than 80 participants and has found ways to accomodate both in-person project teams as large as 12 people and also smaller groups through organizing google groups around specific roles people have taken in each group.  

- And the Sustainability Studio has had a really great run of guest dialogues with experts related to each of our individual projects.  We have even created some badges and are participating in the badge pilot.  We are planning a potluck in two cities next week to celebrate progress on our projects so far, invite others, and plan our next steps.

(Education Politics in America is on hold, but planning to go ahead in the next round.)

A few lessons:

- Local launch parties were a great way to get started.  We plan to keep doing these.

- Some people were really intimidated or confused by the technology.  We would be happy to share ideas and get more involved in the site redesign!

- We have had some interesting debates about how to handle conversations around hard topics which wish to be private (sexuality).  We are looking forward to testing our ideas for sharing the experiences of private group discussions in the form of field notes and through people who play the role of "community animators," who help pass on experiential knowledge from one group to the next. (see our research proposal below)

- We have only scratched the surface of ways to combine in person and online learning teams, but even so have been seeing a lot of anecdotal confirmation of the value and importance of those face to face interactions for this type of learning.  Some methods have not worked, some have, but we're building up some great collective wisdom about how to do this which will be hugely beneficial for all who come along next.

Research

We are proposing an open research to explore in detail the many different ways and methods through which peer to peer courses are design and created, and looking for you to join: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1keZ1RefAMVfLnnEU_4NDLmUH9CjQKeRywzRcBbta8i4/edit?hl=en&authkey=CITtmeEL.  Would there be any interest in helping organize a cross-listed "research studio" to coordinate research groups for this summer?

Microgrant

We are happy to have submitted a microgrant proposal to allow us some time to grow this work.  You can read the proposal here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JcGhYiWJ0-yaaYxQ8XQRqSEgMxnu52Rx88IC7QnkrpM/edit?hl=en&authkey=CPPRtMsH

Preparation for next round of courses

We are working on drafting some language for a SoSI email blast about next round of courses.  We are waiting on confirmation of the microgrant so that we can include in it an advertisements for a SoSI community animator position and a special prize!  

Question: Every one of the SoSI courses currently running, to my knowledge, is either considering or has already planned to run well into May.  Does anyone have a course they are eager to start in April, or do we want to hold off a month or two and build up a bigger offering for, say, June or later?

Seeds / Titles for potential courses

We have been collecting some really cool proposals for SoSI courses and citizen circles.  Do you want to help make any of these happen?  Do you have any others to add?

Research Studio (cross-listed working group for research?)

Facilitator Studio (ongoing community of practice?)

Competencies for Social Innovation (working group, informing future badge work and the design of the living transcript)

Grand Strategy Theory

Community Organizing

Developing Social Imagination through the People's History

Clean Energy for Margainalized Communities

Service Learning

Giving Voice to Values

Obstacle Course for Social Innovators

Asset Mapping and Time Banking

Impact Investing

Engineering in the Community Setting

Writing for Social Change

Public Speaking for Social Change

Creativitiy as a Vehicle for Changemaking

Sustainability in the Fashion Industry

Drive and Motivation

Best,

Alan

[Alison Jean Cole]

Awesome update Alan - thank you!!
The proposed list of courses sound rad.

We would be happy to share ideas and get more involved in the site redesign!

 

Let's set up a meeting late this week or next to talk about design-specific wishlist.
A major tech sprint for Lernanta is happening over the next few weeks and it's critical to collect this information.

@Math Futures, you may want to join since you wrangle a large cluster of organizers.

I propose talking next Monday or Tuesday. If a synchronous meeting is not possible, please take a look at this document for inspiration and add your ideas: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ci-m9ZryrLtdzdq61bp3U4IT7FcTPNqno3jZHXyl5e8/edit?authkey=COaAhNsD&hl=en#

ALISON
p2pu.org/users/alison

[Rebecca Kahn]

This all looks great - thanks Alan
I'll be sure to add some of this info to our weekly newsletter as well.

B

--
Rebecca Kahn
Skype: rebekahn

[Maria Droujkova]

We will try to collect ideas by then.

Cheers,
Maria Droujkova

Make math your own, to make your own math.

[Alison Jean Cole]

Awesome thanks.

I guess there's two types of casual comments I'd like to see:

1. What aspects the current platform prohibits collaboration?
2. What features have you seen in other platforms that you love (please add here):https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ci-m9ZryrLtdzdq61bp3U4IT7FcTPNqno3jZHXyl5e8/edit?authkey=COaAhNsD&hl=en#

Current organizers should know that we're working on a new platform (https://github.com/p2pu/lernanta/wiki) and taking these comments to heart. A lot's been said in the community newsletters, but not sure if everyone has signed up to receive them (p2pu-co...@googlegroups.com).

[Maria Droujkova]

Alison,

I added my favorite part of Scratch (the "share" button) to #2

As for #1, forums don't work well with rich media. Email notifications don't send pictures in any form, and you can't add pictures to comments without html (and first uploading them elsewhere). Also, you can't reply to forum from email notifications.

In April, I won't be using forums for my courses because of these issues.

I hope other people will contribute ideas.

[Alan Webb]

That sounds great Alison, thanks for suggesting!

Could all interested in participating (Maria, Laura, Alison, etc.) please let us know when you're available Monday or Tuesday?

http://www.doodle.com/mhta7w6z8u734nie

On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 3:13 PM, Alison Jean Cole <alisonj...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Pippa Buchanan]

I really like all of the course ideas and there are several I want to participate in!

Some  specific questions that I have are about  the different lesson plans being created across Womens As Social Innovators.
What was the specific process and time frame they used in developing their local plans? (at the beginning of the course and not regularly reviewed, reviewed and updated weekly etc?)
How much cross pollination of ideas were there across the groups?
At the end of the course was there a plan to harvest across the separate plans and make recommendations for subsequent iterations of the course?

P*

[Alan Webb]

Hi Pippa!

Sorry, I thought Laura might be better to pick this one up, but I'll jump in and let her add on if she likes!

1) *Planning process* - a few people first conceived of the idea for Women as Social Innovators back in November, and two people in particular, Laura White and Julie Bowes, took on the role of "researchers" for the course, which meant that they went about vacuuming up suggestions from others, resources, readings, TED talks, examples of similar courses, etc. for about two months.  They talked with some pretty awesome groups in the process, like FemEx, a gender sensitivity trainer, a group doing women's empowerment work in Tibet, etc.  Julie and Laura also participated in a multi-week orientation (meetings conducted by phone) run by citizen circles in November and December in which we heard from DeCal, an expert on study circles, and an expert on social entrepreneurship curriculum while refining our ideas.  

As Laura and Julie recruited additional people to the topic, they treated all of these great resources and ideas they collected as a menu of options, more than a set syllabus, though they did put up one example syllabus of how some of the best resources they found might fit together.  I think they did this more because the P2PU setup process seemed to call for it, which became a topic of discussion at the time.

Next, they encouraged the local groups to meet and develop their plans further.  I think they all followed a similar approach, which was to hold an informal get-together and start with the question of what their goals were for the course, then did some activities to try to refine those ideas into a common plan, a set of projects they could work on, etc.  For example, in the case of the group in D.C., they decided they would spend the first two weeks giving 30-uninterrupted-minutes to each participant to share their story with the group, then choose the most needed topics to help each other out based on that.

Each of these plans remains in flux even now.  I heard last week that the group in D.C. has decided to extend well beyond the original 8 weeks.

2) *Cross-Pollination of Ideas* - as you can see, there was a good amount of cross-pollination in the development process.  My impression is that there has been less-than-expected cross-pollination in the actual running of the courses.  They have a weekly scheduled catch up which is optional.  Everyone has participated in at least one of these, and those have been fruitfull, but they tend to be small conversations.  This is one of the areas where they would definitely welcome advice or creative ideas from others, especially as more WaSI groups emerge in the future... we've talked about, for example, inviting special guests to host dialogues for everyone to join (like the Sustainability Studio has done).

3) *Sharing and Future Iterations* - there will most definitely be additional WaSI groups and there will definitely be sharing.  I know that the groups are planning to share "field notes" about their experiences and are making themselves available to anyone who is interested in starting similar groups.  We will also do evaluations and synthesize some of the best accomplishments and process ideas into a blog post.  I know in D.C. there is already interest in another group starting and Julie is helping them think through the process.  That kind of human-to-human passing on of information is key, in my mind.  And the group in New Orleans is looking into a National Geographic Young Explorers Grant to try to spread the idea to a bunch of other places where it might be needed.

In summary, I think we view the topic of Women as Social Innovators as more of a "stream" than a course - building up and running progressively better plans in each of their local citizen circles, with a few mavens sharing and passing on knowledge, and setting up virtual events and running virtual "courses" as an add on to the really powerful and intimate work that is happening locally.

I've probably missed a whole bunch, and Laura, Julie, and the rest would probably have a lot to correct or add... but does that help answer your questions??

Best,

Alan

[Laura White]

Sorry for the slow response! Alan's summary covers WASI pretty well. I would like to highlight the need for help for cross-pollination of ideas. Since each WASI group is following a different course plan, it's been hard to get everyone to come to the weekly catch-up calls in addition to their own meetings. I think the platform could actually do a lot to foster cross-pollination if it could accomodate different groups in a course following and revising different plans. I submitted my availability for Monday and Tuesday to the doodle, I'm excited to discuss!

Laura  

[Alan Webb]

Hi everyone,

It looks Maria, Alison, Laura and I can all do 1-2 PM EST tomorrow.  Is anyone else interested in joining?

How about we use a conference line?  (605) 475-4875, access code 104418# 

Best,

Alan

[Alison Jean Cole]

Sounds good! Let's take notes on pad.p2pu.org/community for centrality.

ALISON
p2pu.org/users/alison

[Maria Droujkova]

Alan,

It has an error message saying "this is not a valid number".

Cheers,
Maria Droujkova

Make math your own, to make your own math.

 

[Alan Webb]

Hi Alison!  Maybe we missed you! (daylight savings time mixup?)

We all have other things at 2, so we could not reschedule.  Maybe we can do another time this week?  It would be great to find a time zuzel could join also to make sure we log ideas in lighthouse in the best way for her?  In the worst case, I can type up some notes and we can discuss by email.

Maria mostly just wanted to echo that forums are not working for them currently without the ability to share rich media, and was looking for ideas to work around this with the existing system, or to be sure it gets addressed in the new version.

Best,

Alan

On Mon, Mar 14, 2011 at 1:09 PM, Alan Webb <alan...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Alison!  Are you able to come?

[Alison Jean Cole]

Darn! I put it in my google calendar in the wrong time zone. Please forgive me. I'm pretty bummed as I was really excited to speak with you about this.
Let's definitely reschedule for as soon as possible, as Zuzel is currently working in Toronto with Philipp, Stian, etc and the sooner we can get them some feedback (about our drupal experience) to look at the better. Again - apologies!!

I can speak at the same time tomorrow and all days this week.

For the meantime, please look at the current version of lernanta in dev: http://lernanta.p2pu.org/en-US/
And Zuzels mapping of interactivity for lernanta: https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=explorer&chrome=true&srcid=1OvWCDGZt7bSQIbVqMRhZrrsK-O6I3KJwdIBXtlWaU99AGCC4qarWno8zIyb8&hl=en&authkey=CNu--04


ALISON
p2pu.org/users/alison

[Pippa Buchanan]

Thanks Alan, 

that was just detailed enough. :-) One thing that I've been pondering is how courses can report back week by week both to each other and to schools and the community.  Webcraft course leaders also played with sub groups and they were seen as part of one bigger course so their cross-pollination was a little easier.

Perhaps the orientation space can encourage these report backs in a meeting format, but I also think that its maybe something we can take from Open Space Technology - and try to instil the idea of a "report back" to the bigger community from each meeting / week's work?

Pippa

[Alan Webb]

That's a really interesting idea Pippa to try to use Open Space Technology approaches for putting together collaborations between small groups and a larger group.  I know that Stian mentioned some similar ideas in NYC.  

But that actually fits well in terms of the type of dynamic we're trying to create.  One immediate question that comes to mind is which of the ground rules carry over, e.g. "Rule of Two Feet."  I wonder how that plays out in this setting!  ("If this course isn't working for you, get up and go to another one!" doesn't quite translate... but maybe it should?)

Like you suggest, we're looking for ideas as much as possible about suggestions for online collaborations between in-person groups, which we plan to use to just get their wheel turning in the next orientation phase.  So keep them coming!  I created a page in the orientation handbook of the wiki where we could add ideas together, if you are interested: http://wiki.p2pu.org/w/newpage/create/

Best,

Alan

[Alan Webb]

Hi Alison,

So sorry we couldn't make the meeting work on Monday!  It would be better to talk through these ideas, but in the interest of time, I'll go ahead and put these out there as typed suggestions and we can find a time to talk if they're not clear!

Zuzel's Vision of the Future

- We love this.  The breakdown of "course" and "study group" is actually very similar to what we've been hoping and imagining too! We have been describing "study groups" as either "peer learning groups," "citizen circles" or "virtual study groups" (depending on the context) and "courses" as "themes," "topics," or, my favorite: "streams." (those of you at NYC Camp may remember talking about this, actually). 

- We like "study plan" instead of "syllabus" - that was going to be a big piece of feedback for us.

Stian and Dan's Vision of the Future

- Love the idea of iframes and limitless embeddable tools.  That'd be great for our purposes!

Pain Points from our experimental semester (in truth, I hope they'll all be experimental semesters, in some way)

- Course communication - it was cumbersome and not intuitive how to communicate within the group and the forums were clunky.  This seems to be well covered in other conversations and existing tickets already though, so I won't belabour it.

- The dichotomy of "organiser" and "member" was not good for our purposes.  Ideally, we'd like to see a variety of roles taken in a course and for members to tag themselves as taking those roles within any active "study group" or "course."  Maybe the creation process for a study group includes asking if you would like to volunteer for a particular role from pre-populated the list with a few tags designed by us, but with user generated ones acceptable as well (some one's we have been using are: researcher, organiser, host, facilitator, listener, navigator, reporter, etc.).  In an ideal world a "study group" is active when 3 or more people are involved and when important roles are being covered, as determined in that group have been committed to by members, such as organizing a community and researching resources... rather than right now, in which one person is an "organiser" and everyone else just joins "their" course.  (Also, fulfilling these roles well in the eyes of peers could lead to badges, yea?... would need to think about what that integration means...)

Some other ideas

- Geotagging or mapping of participants.

- A button for internal blogs or wiki, or for external sites, to push things being used or created by participants to pages of "study group" and "courses" and curated to the P2PU homepage from there.  These might have some smart tagging... e.g. when it is pushed, the user should be asked "what is this?  A suggested activity?  A reading?  Some student work?  Some field notes?" so that other users could then find all readings, all project work, etc. under any given "course."  This could also make it possible to have a pretty slick "pulse" by study group, course, and P2PU homepage. (Another element which could play into classifying types of things to share back... we have been encouraging groups when they are planning activities and discussion topics to classify them as "ideal for a virtual discussion" "for a face to face group" or "for individual work."  maybe not priority for all groups besides us though)

- When proposing that a study group or new course be formed, we think the person creating that new entity should be asked what kind of interaction it is they are wanting to run.  One question that might be helpful from our perspective is "is this new thing primarily going to be a virtual course, an in-person peer learning group, or hybrid of the two?"  In our experience so far, we have found that some people would use this platform, if it enabled them to do this, to just organize a local in-person group where they live, and don't necessarily want to run an online course, but are still willing to share resources and are willing to help others learn from their experience.  Some people explicitly want to organize many in-person groups at once with some virtual collaboration.  And some want to focus on running an online course.  And if they want to run an online course, they might want to support subgroups forming within  the virtual course, or they may not.  We're thinking it would be great for people to be able to tell the world what kind of group it is they're forming when they do, so they don't get bothered with virtual participants if they don't want that kind of interaction, or they don't get bothered with local in-person groups if they don't want to manage them.

One Big Idea

A new crowdsourced funding site, StartSomeGood, was launched recently by someone who used to work at Ashoka, and they are eager for a project from us so they could get up an AshokaU page.  We wanted to propose this idea to you to see if there might be interest in putting this out there as a campaign to run with and for P2PU, for funding, on their platform.  Here's the idea, in really raw, work-in-progress form...

We are interested in creating a customizable network mapping tool (a survey) that could live anywhere on the web, based on 3-4 common core survey questions for organisations or friends to identify topics they could collaborate to learn together with other people in their peer network... and then help them find the best place to get started with creating a peer to peer course with those people, on that topic.  For example, a site such as brooklyn brainery, research group, or P2PU could embed the survey in their site and if the survey reveals that three of your friends or colleagues at your organisation are interested in an open, volunteer-run, online course on geography, it would direct you to start to build a new course at P2PU, or join the existing geography one.  If it reveals you are interested in a face-to-face one-time workshop on woodworking in Brooklyn, it directs you to propose a course at Brooklyn Brainery.  Alison, this could be a tool we could create and then offer to groups you have wanted to engage, who are organizing face-to-face groups primarily (Research Club, Brooklyn Brainery, etc.), as well as organizations (Ashoka has told us they would find such a tool incredibly useful).

First, what do you think of this idea?  We'd love to create it with you all, or not.  I've been wanting to learn RoR and this might be a good project to do that; I would be willing to work with some people other people to do this together, with funding, to make it possible.  

Second, we are not sure where this could live.  Suppose the survey can live anywhere as we originally imagined... then do the results live in a database hosted by P2PU, and by default create P2PU "courses" and "study groups?"  Do we make it bigger than P2PU, and have it live in a new, independent and distributed network of databases, with an original instance hosted somewhere like OSU or by Mozilla, but made to be useful to all kinds of groups, like Research Club, Udemy, Edufire, and P2PU?  If the P2PU community wants to be involved in creating it, is it a new core feature of the new site, a P2PU lab project, or a separately-named, independent entity?  I don't know, and I'd love to explore.  Just know that we're willing to set up a campaign to get it funded, and I'm willing to roll up my sleeves to work on it, if I can work on it with a team.

Use Cases

- User takes a survey to discover what they are interested in learning about and who in their social network they might be able to learn about those things with.  If a site embeds it (P2PU, Research Club), the "what topics" list is prepopulated by topics that have already been created by others through that site, so you are always asked first if you want to join an existing topic rather than create a new one.

- We may populate some default suggestions to direct users who are interested in forming certain types of peer learning groups- interested in asynchronous study groups for self-directed learning online? open study. Interested in volunteer-led, open, online courses? P2PU. Interested in forming a one-time face to face peer learning group and live in Brooklyn? brooklyn brainery (or, for that matter, meetup.com, facebook, etc.).

- User is asked whether they want to share the results of their survey with the friends which they identify through the survey, with the admin of the site hosting the survey, and/or with the public.

- If we opt for the distributed model, the user is able to see on a map or in a list all topics originating from other visitors of that site and publicly posted.  The admin who sets up that instance of the survey is able to see mapped results.

Does that make any sense?  Obviously, still working on the details, but would love to have some reactions and conversations to this idea!

Best,

Alan, Laura, and Jeff

[Dan Diebolt]

>- Love the idea of iframes and limitless embeddable tools.

The <iframe> capability may introduce some much need bling into a course page and appear to aggregate content into the P2PU platform but it has big limitations. You basically have an "iron curtain" between the P2PU platfrom and the content include via the <iframe> and you have the traditional "trapped in frame" issue if you click on a hyperlink within the <iframe>. For example, you can't communicate the currently logged in user to the <iframe> or any other state or piece of information. The trapped in frame issue can be completely solved if the <iframe> uses ajax or explicitly retarget its hyperlinks to parent or _blank.

You can do some interesting things like this where the <iframe> lists the roster of a course:

http://p2pu.org/webcraft/node/27443/document/27744

But this is achieved by proxying through Yahoo Pipes (actually YQL). 

What is really needed is underlying support in the platform to support the inclusion of rich content and APIs to plug in external content using some type of lightweight data exchange standard (could be dirt simple and still yield useful results).

[Stian Håklev]

What is really needed is underlying support in the platform to support the inclusion of rich content and APIs to plug in external content using some type of lightweight data exchange standard (could be dirt simple and still yield useful results).

That's exactly what we are planning to do with the new platform. It will be lightweight for the first iteration (mainly supporting RSS feeds), but we are ambitious about building it out. In this case, we really benefit on building on Mozilla's Batucada, because Mozilla wants to turn that into a showcase of "open social" technologies and standards.

Stian

 

-- 

http://reganmian.net/blog -- Random Stuff that Matters

[Dan Diebolt]

I read all about the syndicating activity streams which appears to be a core feature of Lernata:

http://activitystrea.ms/

But what I don't understand what the native activities themselves are within the Lernata platform. I looked in on demo of Canvas LMS  http://www.instructure.com/ arranged by Droujkova the other night. That platform had support for all of these abstractions:

Announcements, Discussions, Grades, Chat, Pages, Files, Syllabus, Outcomes, Quizzes, Modules, Conferences, Collaborations, Settings ... long list ...

What I would like to understand is the feature set of "activities" in the Lernata platform irrespective of how those activities would be streamed all over the place.

From the Activity Stream Syndication Spec: an activity stream has four parts, namely (1) actor, (2) verb, (3) object and (4) target.

In its simplest form, an activity consists of an actor, a verb, an an object, and a target. It tells the story of a person performing an action on or with an object -- "Geraldine posted a photo to her album" or "John shared a video".

So setting aside the matter of syndication for the time being, what are the base activities or features within the Lernata platform? Are there concepts such as (a) syllabus, (b) learning module, (c) lesson,  (d)  submitting an assignment, (e) posting a question etc representing "activities" within the platform?

For contrast, the current Drupal platform has a vague concepts for (a) a signup task and (b) syllabus, but there is no structural way to interact with these entities. They are essentially just documents with a fixed name and url. No way to tell where you are in the syllabus or determine the ratio of approved signup tasks to total signup tasks. No verbs so to speak.

So what I am asking is: What are the core feature, objects, activities within Lernata that can be manipulated without considering the activity stream aggregation capabilities.

[Pippa Buchanan]

Adding my responses inline:

Zuzel's Vision of the Future

- We love this.  The breakdown of "course" and "study group" is actually very similar to what we've been hoping and imagining too!..

Some terminology I've been thinking of that covers all of these activities is "Learning Project" and it allows for a variety of interactions including traditional expert facilitated courses, peer led study groups and citizen circles, short term workshops and long term discussion groups etc  We could prepopulate a list with these options that link to particular information about how to facilitate them (eg - how to organise a one weekend workshop) but also allow options for as yet undefined formats.

- We like "study plan" instead of "syllabus" - that was going to be a big piece of feedback for us.

I think this is a very important piece of terminology. A plan feels that it can be more adaptable and changeable - for a non-expert to either create or curate a plan that can be interpreted and improved is a much easier concept than defining a syllabus.
 

Stian and Dan's Vision of the Future

- Love the idea of iframes and limitless embeddable tools.  That'd be great for our purposes!

Very cool. But it's also very important that we make this clear and well documented for non-tech people engaging with the platform.
 

Pain Points from our experimental semester (in truth, I hope they'll all be experimental semesters, in some way) +1 :-)

- The dichotomy of "organiser" and "member" was not good for our purposes.  Ideally, we'd like to see a variety of roles taken in a course and for members to tag themselves as taking those roles within any active "study group" or "course."  Maybe the creation

process for a study group includes asking if you would like to volunteer for a particular role from pre-populated lists

I think this is an important discussion. The idea of roles beyond that of facilitator has come up in the community list before and I thought there was a related wiki page somewhere. At a very practical discussion of roles - there should be notetakers per session so that we can encourage report backs into the community / across groups. Perhaps a non-tech way we can do this is to encourage the initial facilitator to identify additional roles that may be required in a project and to invite participants to nominate themselves to take that responsibility as part of sign-up? Responsibilities might be for the extent of a project or for a week /module at a time.  We could identify potential roles for courses though and document them in a page of this section of the handbook.

I think that there's a very strong overlap here with the idea of social contracts. Did SoSI projects do more with this idea in the last round?

Some other ideas

- Geotagging or mapping of participants.

Yes.

- A button for internal blogs or wiki, or for external sites, to push things being used or created by participants to pages of "study group" and "courses" and curated to the P2PU homepage from there.  These might have some smart tagging

I think tagging is a VERY important feature to get right in the new platform. It ties in with some of Dan's comments around the different types of activities too. I also like the idea of items being pushed to the more showcase areas of P2PU's main site.

 

- When proposing that a study group or new course be formed, we think the person creating that new entity should be asked what kind of interaction it is they are wanting to run.  One question that might be helpful from our perspective is "is this new thing primarily going to be a virtual course, an in-person peer learning group, or hybrid of the two?"

Yes. BUT...
My biggest current peeve is how we get even online courses to report back into the site and the community - face to face interactions are going to be even harder. We have to make it easy and a recognised part of the process that report backs are made regularly and course plans are refined to reflect how a course flows. 

 

One Big Idea

A new crowdsourced funding site, StartSomeGood, was launched recently by someone who used to work at Ashoka, and they are eager for a project from us so they could get up an AshokaU page.  We wanted to propose this idea to you to see if there might be interest in putting this out there as a campaign to run with and for P2PU, for funding, on their platform.  Here's the idea, in really raw, work-in-progress form...

We are interested in creating a customizable network mapping tool (a survey) that could live anywhere on the web, based on 3-4 common core survey questions for organisations or friends to identify topics they could collaborate to learn together with other people in their peer network... and then help them find the best place to get started with creating a peer to peer course with those people, on that topic.  For example, a site such as brooklyn brainery, research group, or P2PU could embed the survey in their site and if the survey reveals that three of your friends or colleagues at your organisation are interested in an open, volunteer-run, online course on geography, it would direct you to start to build a new course at P2PU, or join the existing geography one.

I would love to see a sketched out wireframe / flow diagram for this. I think tying P2PU in with existing venues (Brooklyn Brainery, an awesome local library, a supportive bar or coffee shop etc) would be an important part of making the above format work better.


Phew!  That was awesome food for thought. Now to get some real food.

Pippa
 

[Stian Håklev]

Pain Points from our experimental semester (in truth, I hope they'll all be experimental semesters, in some way) +1 :-)

- The dichotomy of "organiser" and "member" was not good for our purposes.  Ideally, we'd like to see a variety of roles taken in a course and for members to tag themselves as taking those roles within any active "study group" or "course."  Maybe the creation

process for a study group includes asking if you would like to volunteer for a particular role from pre-populated lists

Great to see these discussions. I am planning to run a course in April with a friend, and I have given the design a lot of thought, based on all the experiences of previous courses. One of the things I think will bring organizer and student closer is that the two organizers will also have to oomplete all the tasks that students have to complete, in order to "complete" the course (we'll probably use badges for this purpose). I am basically organizing this course, because it's a course I would have loved to take at my own uni, but it's not offered. So I am by no means an expert, and also really want to learn -- "do the work", not just sit back and see others learn :)

I'll post more about our syllabus later, hopefully to get some useful feedback from the group.

Stian 

[Stian Håklev]

The basic unit of the first iteration of the new site will be that you can post "something" (call it a discussion entry, call it a resource, a task etc). This "thing" is rich text (embed pictures, videos etc), and has threaded discussions below. The person creating it can also choose to allow anyone to edit, in which case it gains wiki-like functionality (history etc). 

We're thinking about using this for course applications too - the sign-up task would be a post, and people apply by replying to the post. When the course organizer views the thread, she sees each post, together with the person's intro from the profile page. Each post has two buttons "accept" and "reject", as well as threaded comments. Initially only course organizers and individual students can see these discussions (we know the fact that students couldn't see comments on course applications was a big annoyance in the Drupal site and aim to change that). Once a person is accepted, their answer to the question and alll the back and forth becomes public to all the members of the course. 

What I would like - but I'm not sure if we'll get it done by the first iteration or not, is also that you could tag a node as "task", something that has to be completed. Students could then "submit" either by posting in the threaded comment, or by linking to their contribution. There could be a feature for the course organizer - or other students - to mark the answer as "accepted", and a function to keep a tally of how many of the tasks a student has completed, etc. 

This is some of the stuff we discussed in Toronto, we'll see if what the San Fran team thinks, and then we'll post it online for more community feedback.

Stian

[Alison Jean Cole]

+1 for the wiki-functionality design in posts with threads and doing applications that way.

+1 for Pippas comments on SoSI's comments.

Zuzel: There's A LOT of good feedback here, but still slightly disorganized. How can I help curate this feedback meaningfully? Rather than preemptively create tickets for all these requests, we'll have to have more discussion. Some of these things may be in your vision already, others may not be doable/necessary, etc.  Let me know how I can best capture all this for you.

ALISON
p2pu.org/users/alison

[zuzel.vp]

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ci-m9ZryrLtdzdq61bp3U4IT7FcTPNqno3jZHXyl5e8/edit?authkey=COaAhNsD&hl=en#

Really nice compilation.

--
Thanks,
Zuzel

[zuzel.vp]

Hi,

I added the "ideas" file to lighthouse. --
http://p2pu.lighthouseapp.com/projects/71002-lernanta/tickets/55-learn-from-others

> Maria mostly just wanted to echo that forums are not working for them
> currently without the ability to share rich media, and was looking for ideas
> to work around this with the existing system,

One of the latests changes to p2pu.org allowed the inclusion of rich
media. I am not sure what kind of rich media Maria needed to include
but the following is an example of how to include a youtube video:

* http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BESbnMJg9M
* I copied the embed code (button to display it is bellow the video)

<iframe title="YouTube video player" width="480" height="390"
src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/2BESbnMJg9M" frameborder="0"
allowfullscreen></iframe>

changed the witdh to "100%"

and add it in a post: http://p2pu.org/general/node/25764/forums/28213
using the "Source" view of the forum rich text editor or the plain
text editor.

In general any iframes can be embed in the forums.

Alison: The use of iframes could probably be included in the orientation.

> or to be sure it gets
> addressed in the new version.

The new site has also ways to include rich media
(http://new.p2pu.org/en-US/courses/lernanta-dev/content/release-02/)
and more support for this is also in the todo list
(http://p2pu.lighthouseapp.com/projects/71002/tickets/9-kind-of-content-that-we-can-display
+ http://p2pu.lighthouseapp.com/projects/71002/tickets/44-oembed-for-comments)

--
Thanks,
Zuzel

[Dan Diebolt]

I could not embed any <iframe>s. See:

http://new.p2pu.org/en-US/courses/activity-streams-for-fun-and-profit/content/jsfiddle/

[Maria Droujkova]

Hello,

Thank you for the example. I could include html before - images and videos were all I needed. However, when people receive email notification of the new forum post, the media is (was?) simply skipped, so people did not know it was there.

The second issue is the lack of media in COMMENTS - or rather, the lack of WYSIWYG editor in comments. So, I could not ask people to send pictures of their kids' math creations in comments to the thread with that assignment, because only one other person in the course knew html, to the best of my knowledge.

I plan to use Posterous for asynchronous communication this April.

Cheers,
Maria Droujkova

Make math your own, to make your own math.

 

[Dan Diebolt]

FWIW, I can embed an <iframe> in Canvas LMS:

http://canvas.instructure.com/courses/31847/modules/items/80278

as well as in the Drupal platform:

http://p2pu.org/webcraft/node/27443/document

[zuzel.vp]

I went through this whole thread and pulled things into lighthouse so
I can read them carefully when I am implementing a related
functionality.

--
Thanks,
Zuzel

[zuzel.vp]

Hi,

In the new site the approach for now is to identify which elements
users need to embed, and provide support for them. Allowing <iframe>s
for the old site was a measure taken to facilitate running courses
this round, but in <iframes> are to general to be allowed as rich
text. By relaying on iframes the new site could become a collage of
web pages. I hope that by allowing to embed specific kinds of content
and supporting other kinds of interactions with external tools
(through RSS, activity streams, ...) we will be able to balance
between what peers use inside and outside of new.p2pu.org.

The two elements that can be embed right now are youtube videos and
slideshare presentations and the syntax is:

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BESbnMJg9M]

[slideshare:http://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=creative-commons-spectrum-of-rights-1192738788152957-2]

This are replaced by the corresponding html fragments needed to embed them.

The todo list related to embeding things contains:

* http://p2pu.lighthouseapp.com/projects/71002/tickets/9-kind-of-content-that-we-can-display
* http://p2pu.lighthouseapp.com/projects/71002/tickets/44-oembed-for-comments
* http://p2pu.lighthouseapp.com/projects/71002/tickets/5-aggregating-activity

--
Thanks,
Zuzel

[zuzel.vp]

On Tue, Mar 29, 2011 at 9:23 PM, Dan Diebolt <dandi...@gmail.com> wrote:
> FWIW, I can embed an <iframe> in Canvas LMS:
> http://canvas.instructure.com/courses/31847/modules/items/80278

I am not able to see this link: "Access to this page is limited to
authorized users. You will need to log in before you can view the
content on this page."

--
Thanks,
Zuzel

[Dan Diebolt]

I set the permission public but forgot to publish the course! Try again:

http://canvas.instructure.com/courses/31847/modules/items/80278

I have an ingenious solution to the <iframe> concern:

[jsfiddle:http://jsfiddle.net/dandiebolt/ZRBVD/embedded/result,js,html,css,resources/]

[Dan Diebolt]

This needs to be reconsidered. The rationale for allowing <iframe>s (however crudely) in the Druapl site is no different than for the new site.

This statement:

"Allowing <iframe>s for the old site was a measure taken to facilitate running courses this round"

is equally valid beyond the April session.

Canvas LMS allows <iframe>s and external URLs and they make special provision for including Google Docs (with pass through credentialing) and etherpads as essential elements of collaborations:

http://canvas.instructure.com/courses/31847/collaborations

[Dan Diebolt]

Let's exclude HTML5 <video> as well - too risky

http://new.p2pu.org/en-US/courses/activity-streams-for-fun-and-profit/content/video/

[zuzel.vp]

Thanks. I will use that course as an example of a canvas course at
http://p2pu.lighthouseapp.com/projects/71002/tickets/55-learn-from-others

--
Thanks,
Zuzel

[zuzel.vp]

I agree that external websites (google docs, etherpads) are essential
elements for doing anything (not only running courses). I use many
everyday. The part that I am not sure is why it is better to have them
embedded all in the same website instead of having a link I can open
in another tab of my browser.

For things like video, presentations, graphs, images ... that
constitute small pieces of content, having them as part of a page that
has other elements is handy, because it allow to create content formed
by pieces from different sources. On the other side, embedding
websites that provide functionality (such as tools that allow
collaboration like etherpad, or google docs) does not give you more
than adding a link to those pages.

--
Thanks,
Zuzel

[zuzel.vp]

Hi,

The problem with html5 videos is that there is not agreement about the
native video format support (Ogg Theora, H.264, VP8) between the mayor
browsers. This mean that you will have to embed different versions of
the same video if you want to guarantee that everyone can see them.
That is probably the reason why Adobe Flash Player is still the most
widely used way to display video.

--
Thanks,
Zuzel

[Dan Diebolt]

While the big shots fight the video format battle we should definitely create our own barriers by not allowing HTML5 <video> elements to be composed in the rich text editor. This would be in line with our extant <iframe> policy. Definitely no <object>s, <applet>s, <script>s, <embed>'s or svg. Just ban anything that could take a src attribute. Why not just remove the Source button from the rich text editor altogether? May as well ban JavaScript from the site as well as it can be the source of a lot of mischief.

[Dan Diebolt]

It is a bit of a canard to say there is no obvious consensus and make no effort to reach consensus or gather further opinions by declaring a default action that effectively scuttles the issue.

Moreover, it is not much of a technology decision to turn on a standard feature controlled by a configuration file of the CKEditor which is already installed:

http://docs.cksource.com/CKEditor_3.x/Users_Guide/Rich_Text/IFrame

Look at this from a WebCraft user or course organizer's perspective: The only real tool you are providing these people is a simple rich text editor and a stream of page creations. For anything else you have to go outside the platform to external tools and resources and you are preventing the ability to bring any of these these tools and resources closer to the platform for a more convenient and richer user experience. Within the platform a user can't upload any HTML, CSS, of JavaScript file, has no source code sharing or syntax hightligting capability, no collaborative editor or pad, no real-time communication services (chat, IM, IRC), no ability to aggregate URLs representing assignmnets or work products. These are bedrock requirements for WebCraft and other schools would have their set of core tools and resources.

So what is the purpose of registering through P2PU when you have to go off-platform to get to the core tools and resources of any course? You are going to turn the P2PU platform into a ghetto if you don't integrate these core tools and resources into the platform.