Comments on: Eureka. It’s a lab – not (just) a platform.

By: The P2PU Review of 2011 | P2PU Blog

Thu, 29 Dec 2011 16:54:48 +0000

[...] all of this suggests is that P2PU is a lab, which is an idea I first shared in October and which has received a lot of positive feedback since then. As a lab P2PU can foster a culture of [...]

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By: Philipp

Thu, 20 Oct 2011 16:22:46 +0000

Thanks for your comments. I’ve also received lots of useful input from the discussion on the P2PU community mailing list and some of the people in our network that I sent this to separately. Main take aways with quick shooting-from-the-hip answers so far (but will turn into another post):

Make sure to spell out what we mean by “research” -> My feeling is that small and fast experimentation (try something new, make changes as you learn, and make sure you know early on if it doesn’t work) will produce better results than long-term carefully designed studies. Those are needed as well – but I could see a tension between needing to “hold still” for so long.

Make sure there is a user friendly version of the platform that is stable -> We need to absolutely make sure that there is a high-quality P2PU.org experience for those users who are coming primarily to learn with others, rather than experiment about learning with others. Great stuff from the lab needs to bubble up into the production site regularly.

Just as two quick responses for now. I’m really enjoying the process of thinking this through with everyone.

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By: Jessica Ledbetter

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 17:17:11 +0000

“Turning experiments into great learning experiences for lots of people” — Great idea. I remember science labs in college and how much I learned there versus watching someone write a bunch of formulas on a board. The same thing can be said for experimentation in this area as well. I know we want to open up some of our metrics and see what can be learned from it. Maybe there are more things we can add to the the code itself to help researchers.

I think P2PU is a great lab for learning for web developers. Not only can we learn by creating a study group or completing the recently added challenges, but we can learn via contributing to the platform itself. It’s open source and open for pull requests

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By: Alison Jean Cole

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 17:05:02 +0000

I really like how P2PU board members ignite innovative ideas like this. As a long time community member and staffer, this strikes the right chord with me.

I believe that one of our greater challenges ahead will be creating clear expectations for new users about our assumed state of experimentation and the freedom that comes with it. Often this freedom has been disconcerting for some learners used to more formally structured environments.

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