[p2pu-dev] Notes from this week's community call

[Rebecca Kahn]

This week's call was small, but perfectly formed. Good people, good
conversations, and for some reason, the South Africans kept getting bounced
off the call. Weird.

Anyway, all notes are below. As always, full notes and transcripts can be
found on the etherpad: http://pad.p2pu.org/p/community-20120531


*
NOTES*

*Attendees (welcome to any newbies)*


   - Add your name (and twitter handle) here


   - Vanessa @mozzadrella (stuck in a meeting, but following the pad)


   - Piet (@bagabot)


   - Dirk


   - Bekka


   - @jessykate


   - Molly (@mollyali, but hardly on anymore)



*Standups **What have you been up to? Short **written** notes (we'll
discuss only if there are questions)*


   - Alison


   - Help desk use is up


   - "Test course" tick box may be working. Big decline in course
   notifications this week.


   - Bekka


   - Berlinplannigthisismylifeitisverydullbutkindaexcitingtoo


   - John


   - Philipp (at Shuttleworth meeting)


   - Dirk


   - Multi course creation - part of
   https://gomockingbird.com/mockingbird/#m5ase18/wJabLR


   - New badge - https://p2pu.org/en/badges/mit-app-inventor-explorer/


   - Task ordering bug should be sorted now


   - Visa, flights, travel insurance, visa, visa


   - Vanessa: frolicking with John in Cambridge, interview with Luka next
   week, *lots* of other things.


   - Piet


   - working with Molly and the Open.Michigan team to get a handle on
   challenges and how to convert our existing open training to the School of
   Open


   - spent a lot of time this month researching learning theories and how
   "traditional" ePortfolios don't seem to work in non-pedagogical environments


   - jessy


   - prep/scheming for CERN/p2pu internship.


   - really cool paper in researchers' homestead about facilitating
   participation in online "social production communities"


   - Add your name (optional)



*News of the week **Written** notes on what's going on in our world (bring
up special announcements on the call)*


   - Blog posts you wrote


   - http://disfunksioneel.blogspot.com/2012/05/learning-lernanta.html


   - Articles you read


   - Initiatives you heard about



*Key updates*  *Super short updates about P2PU*


   - Exciting new courses to check out (Alison)


   - Last week's implementation of a tick-box of whether a course is a "test
   " or not has resulted in a major reduction in the number of test courses
   which have come through.


   - https://p2pu.org/en/groups/mit-app-inventor-explorer/


   - now with badge and gone live


   - Development priorities (Dirk)


   - Course creation process


   - multi task edit -


   - go play with http://dev.p2pu.org:4456/en/groups/flying-101/edit/tasks/ -
   username = user1, password = password1


   - https://gomockingbird.com/mockingbird/#m5ase18/wJabLR


   - not everything we want on this is ready yet, but please play with it,
   and send Dirk feedback!


   - Cleanup of codebase


   - Task ordering should work now - fixed problem when a course have
   deleted tasks


   - next release


   - Server seems stable


   - Notification working again - sorry for the full inboxes today :)


   - we sent out something like 38430 emails today!!


   - State of the mustard (Philipp)



*Agenda **Core of the call. Focused on four types of conversations (invited
guests, challenges you need help with, proposals you want feedback on,
ideas you need collaborators for). *


   - Add your agenda items here. Provide a link to background materials you
   want the community to review prior to the call.


   - p2pu labs redux (from jessy):


   - how can we let more people use p2pu as an experimental platform?


   - p2pu is a place where people come to reinvent and hack their learning,
   but we don't yet provide easy ways for them to hack the tools they use for
   that learning


   - obvious tension with reliability, familiarity and ease of use/access
   for those less technically inclined/savvy.


   - it would be great if there was a way to empower, technically as much
   as culturally, people to tweak and customize elements of the platform, and
   be experimental with their learning environments.


   - luka's observation that independent learners in her experience are
   more often creators as much as consumers


   - UMD collaboration - would be great if they were less dependent on us
   for testing hypotheses


   - researchers' homestead reading group wanting to test out theories we
   are reading about


   - etc.


   - do others feel a need for this too? what might it look like? more
   about a design brainstorm than anything else at the moment.


   - plugin system, parallel "labs"/"beta" version of p2pu software?
   hybrid? other?


   - offering a suite of tools, not just p2pu.org?


   - has been discussed before but feeling a resurgence of need. perhaps
   totally biased given my increased involvement in the research side, but
   this is not just (or even mostly) about academics, it's about reinforcing
   the notion of independent learning


   - http://www.sophia.org/flipped-classroom


   - could use an approach like this to make p2pu more attractive to
   teachers (or anybody, really)


   - more of a marketing approach, image redefining/expansion


   - Sophia.org: they defined a niche they could fill and marketed it as a
   solution space to teachers


   - P2PU can strongly define our site as a learning lab and target those
   groups seeking a laboratory


   - hoping to launch some mini-grants for potential researchers to appeal
   to them?


   - pieter created a project space using google sites -- why didn't I
   build the project site within P2PU? maybe I can still do this


   - when people have more project-y/research-y/experimental work where
   there's lots of learning going on, how can P2PU's platform support or
   facilitate that?


   - maybe start a space (research/projects.p2pu.org?) where we can gather
   tools for people who are interested in conducting these types of experiments


   - not only might the P2PU platform be useful, but the community is
   helpful to anybody's "learning" project


   - *Next steps:* Jessy to write to the list, and we'll continue the
   discussion online and during next week's call.


   - I can try and convert my project site to P2PU next week and report on
   the experience ... (https://sites.google.com/site/umichghd/home)



   - Jessy -> might we start thinking about P2PU notification? +1


   - Right now it's really, really easy to forget about a course,
   especially if nobody posts


   - I know there are are some dev ideas around replying to messages and lots
   of competition for what the dev priorities are


   - But if we had a regular message saying "here's where you are in your
   challenge and here are the top 5 posts in it" it would be a very good way
   to bring people back who may drift off


   - Something like a newsletter?


   - more like a personalized updater/eminder of where you are


   - Dirk -> it would be interesting to see how many people respond to
   something like this


   - We need to set dev priorities (probably best when John is back) and
   then we can start thinking about this.


   - Talk to John about historical ideas for a drip campaign /re-engagement
   mechanisms


   - It's been on the radar, but never given priority.



   - Dirk -> We had a conversation on the dev list about the way that tasks
   are created and edited - does anyone on the call have any ideas/thoughts
   about how the creation process takes place?


   - At the moment there is no interface to create badges (in the short
   term) and you can't associate your course with a badge


   - Jessy -> the process of ordering tasks is very slow, especially as
   more tasks get added, and you have to reload the page every time to move
   the tasks up


   - the "add new task" button seems to be in an unintuitive place (upper
   right corner) - I was looking for it to be front and center


   - also, the "admin challenge" button language doesn't make sense --
   "admin" doesn't have enough meaning for most users +1


   - i think if it's a course the button reads "edit", but in a different
   place
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