NathanielJames.org

On Sunday morning, I led a workshop on the Mozilla Drumbeat project Peer 2 Peer University School of Webcraft.  I was very pleased to have 20+ attendees show up to the AMC Media Lab bright and early on the last day of the conference.  Below are some highlights from the workshop, including questions and critiques, course suggestions and an early start on a new course called Open Web Toolkit.

After a round of introductions and ice breakers (“What’s your favorite thing that you can do with the web – your web super power?”), I started us off with a brief description Mozilla Drumbeat, and then we dug in to discuss the School of Webcraft and begin to brainstorm the kinds of courses and other support that the School will need to be successful.

For the uninitiated, Mozilla Drumbeat is supporting a new Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU) project, the School of Webcraft.  While anyone can use P2PU to organize a course on any topic, we are working with them to create their first comprehensive set of courses that will allow anyone (with the connection and bandwidth) to study web development and become proficient in open web technology.

After introducing the concept, I asked the participants to brainstorm potential challenges for this model.  Here are a few main questions that came up:

• Why should people trust the course content?  I think that once people get used to working through P2PU, they will see that the course content is transparent and open to review and improvement (a little like Wikipedia), and every course organizer(P2PU-speak for “teacher”) will be open to improvements as their courses develop.
• What about accessibility?  People wondered about issues like basic web access, disabilities, different learning styles, and the range of potential learners’ starting points (think prerequisites).  In that order, I suggested that P2PU won’t solve the web access problem, but that I hope in the long run that we can partner with community technology centers and libraries to provide the necessary connectivity.  I wasn’t aware of P2PU’s strategy for supporting people with disabilities, but would check into it (starting with this blog post, which is going to the P2PU team).  I believe that P2PU course organizers will get better over time at working with diverse learning styles; as a volunteer effort (course organizers are unpaid, co-learners with the other participants), we will probably struggle with this for a while.  Finally, I mentioned that P2PU course descriptions give a pretty clear indication of previous knowledge participants will need to be successful in a course.  Questions around language and culture differences came up, too.  I know that the P2PU team is working hard on these issues, and that we should see courses in Spanish and Portuguese pretty early on.
• Are P2PU courses focused on book learning or hands-on experience?  Definitely, the latter.  Participants should finish all School of Webcraft courses with at least one project they built for every course and leave the program with a portfolio, a key piece for moving from education to employment.
• Is the School of Webcraft accredited?  This is a big, big question in the open education movement – how do we compete with the traditional institutions that have a kind of monopoly on accreditation.  It’s also one of the main reasons that Mozilla Drumbeat is investing in Webcraft – we believe that we can organize all the big players in the open source space to create a peer-recognized certification that anyone should be proud to put on their resume.  Apparently, we aren’t without precedent in this area.  One workshop participant pointed out that CompTIA’s certification services began in a similar, peer-driven manner.  If you are interested in the accreditation question, please leave a comment or contact me, as that conversation is ongoing.

Then, with just a little time left, we got onto the really good stuff: brainstorming the kinds of things people wanted to see offered through the School of Webcraft.

We got a few suggestions, namely:

• Design for Developers: one participant said that a major trend in hiring for web development is that clients are expecting developers to have an eye for design and the ability to design something beautiful in addition to building something functional.
• Developer Lingo 101: A course to ease the pain we get when bombarded with techno-speak.  I mentioned that I think this will be covered in the Web 101 course, and someone else offered that the School could have an online glossary that everyone in all the courses could use and improve.
• Open Web Security: ’nuff said.  Good idea.
• Open Web Toolkit: this is the one where I thought there was the most potential for building out some course content…

Open Web Toolkit Brainstorm

This course suggestion came from one participant recalling the pain of acquiring a toolkit for web development without any clear recommendations.  Basic web development tools include: text editors (you just should NOT use a word processor to write code), version control systems (like Subversion and Mercurial), FTP clients, IRC clients, and Firefox plugins like Greasemonkey.  Clients, and plugins, and bears, oh my!  This could definitely make a new learner’s head spin.  I can really see the value of a course dedicate to a peer review of all these options, where the participants each leave with a toolkit of their choice.

The P2PU team agrees, so we will be following up with the participants and seeing who wants to get involved in shaping that course up for the September course cycle.

Thank you so much to those who participated.  We will be following up soon.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 30th, 2010 at 11:50 pm and is filed under Drumbeat, Events, Open, P2PU. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.