I have more questions than answers. Some of these are things I wish I’d done better at P2PU. Some of this applies to tech projects more than other types of projects.

Change is good – It’s also frustrating, it’s hard, it drains your motivation and enthusiasm, and people don’t like it. But if you are building something new, dealing with change really is the one thing you need to be good at. Very few things will work they way you thought they would. When the ground under your feet moves – don’t panic, enjoy the ride!

What is the problem you are solving? – Never forget to ask this question. Never forget your answer. And make sure it’s a problem you care about.

Outsource the “plumbing” – Find people who will do your accounting, legal, HR for free (pro bono support is easier for non-profits) or pay for it. It’s a gigantic distraction.

Learn how to prototype and test – No matter how smart you are, or how well you understand your users, try out a new idea before you dedicate huge resources. And embrace the fact that you will always throw away the first version (unless you are ridiculously lucky, in which case you don’t need good advice anyway).

Be smart about your tech – Unless technology is the core of your business, use existing off-the-shelf platforms and solutions. Do NOT build anything yourself. You will regret it.

Update (thanks to the excellent Helen Turvey, and Steve Song). Added one more:

Bring a friend (or more) – Starting something new is stressful. Rarely do things go according to plan. Having someone who is in it with you is key. Not just for the days when you need a kind word, a kick in the butt, or someone to make a joke – but also for the days when you’re on top of the world. Cause it’s more fun to share! (hint -> sharing nicely!)

Update 2:

Chris has turned all the feedback she received into a collection of 64 Tips to Blossom and Thrive.

The path is more important than the destination. If learners are told that getting it right is the only outcome that counts, they won’t experiment. And they won’t learn. It is worth redefining the destination of learning and trying to explain what we hope learners will take away from a course. But it is more important to create the space for creativity, exploration, and collaboration that allows them to do things we didn’t expect.

What would a fail-safe learning environment look like?

Stakes are high, but not too high. Learners need to have a stake in their learning. Having a stake means getting frustrated when things go wrong. But the stakes should never be too high, failure in learning should never be catastrophic. It’s important to know when something didn’t work. Having to face mistakes can be frustrating. But it’s not frustrating if each mistake is seen as a small step towards success.

Tinkering encouraged. There are no “no U turn” signs. Good problems don’t have one right answer, but multiple solutions. Fail-safe environments celebrate experimentation as long as it is reflective. Getting it right is secondary. Understanding what went wrong is key.

Fast useful feedback. Feedback needs to be fast, so that we know when things are going wrong while we are doing them. And it needs to be useful so that we can identify different, more successful strategies for the next experiment. How do learners know if they are making progress if there is no feedback and opportunity to revise, improve, iterate?

And here is the crux with MOOCs. MOOCs are too big to support individual constructive failures. The moments that my colleague Natalie refers to as “flopportunities”. MOOCs require a focus on “right” answers, because dealing with ambiguity is hard at the 10,000 user level (let alone the 100,000 user level). This is why in our Mechanical MOOC experiment we added small groups and hope that they provide a safer space to ask questions and get things wrong. And who celebrate effort and experiments over final results.

And the same is true at the institutional level. Many of the early stage MOOC projects build sophisticated platforms, invest large amounts of money in content development, and are basically trying to take over the world. That approach doesn’t leave much space for experimentation, for failing constructively, and for letting more people participate in finding lots of different good models.

In a culture obsessed with “winning” and “success” it can be hard to accept that failure is what drives learning. But as Shimon Schocken said in his TED talk, “grading takes away all of the fun from failing … and a huge part of education is failing”.

Here is my nutshell summary of the panel:

Research suggests that introducing an extrinsic reward (in the form of a badge) will decrease existing intrinsic motivation. We also know and understand that many other factors can provide intrinsic motivation for learning. In order to avoid lowering participants’ desire to learn, we should therefor focus on understanding and increasing the development of the intrinsic motivation and refrain from introducing extrinsic rewards.

I am glad to see people like Mitch and his panelists add their thoughtful voices to the conversation. He is right that there is a risk that we get badges wrong. And he is right that the hype around badges may lead to the development of poorly designed badge systems that will at best not improve learning, and at worst hinder it.

But I believe that there is more to badges than their role in motivating learning. And that through careful design choices we can try to avoid the negative impacts he describes. After all that’s what his team at Scratch is already doing – experimenting with aspects of rewards that are not that different from badges, such as showing points for discussion forum participation and counting remixes.

The issue is not, “badges or no badges” The issue is how we can design badge systems that foster great learning practices. We will learn a lot more about how these systems work in the next year as the DML badge competition projects kick into implementation, but for now I would suggest two simple design principles to get us started in the right direction:

1 – Use badges to define roles rather than as rewards. In many learning communities users take different roles. Mitch actually mentions the importance of taking roles within a community like Scratch, but he sees roles as separate from badges. I believe that by recognizing roles – for example a mentor role – through a badge will signal to a new members of the community that mentorship is a valued practice within the community, and helps  them identify those who can help with problems and questions. And finally it may encourage users to strive to become mentors themselves. So rather than give badges as rewards they can help diffuse awareness of roles within a community.

2 – Anchor badges within community. The relationship between issuer and recipients will influence perceptions and expectations around badges. Badges that are woven into the fabric of a community of learning will be perceived less as extrinsic motivators, but as representation of core practices within the community. When the badge recipient feels ownership of the design of the badge, because she fully considers herself a member of the community that defines and issues the badge, the badge can provide an effective marker of learning pathways that help the learner to orientate herself within the landscape, and can act as a marker and pointer for new members of the community following in her steps.

It lists some of the pro-business (e.g. more private & less public, let the market solve our problems) arguments and those of us who don’t agree (including me) need to be prepared to argue the other side. The post also has a good thread of comments that cover some of the shortcomings of the pro-market positions (see one example below). I would add that other countries with strong public education systems (Northern Europe for example) do not exhibit similar cost increase in education. And the US health care system, which is highly market driven, is running up costs even faster than education. Both points suggest that this is not an economics problem, it’s a US problem.

OER is in an interesting space in this debate. I have seen “open” come under attack from both sides -> one side called it a right-wing effort to undermine the public education system by letting non-experts participate, others label it a socialist conspiracy that is out to destroy the publishing business.

You know you’re doing something right when you irritate all of the incumbents.

Example comments:

George Mitchell says:

“Parry says ‘I think the whole premise of this post is disingenuous. If it were the “public” in public education that was holding back this imagined productivity growth curve, one would expect to see private schools figuring out how to make the productivity happen.’”

Wow. Where to begin? In Milwaukee, independent research documents that private schools do as well or better with low-income students, and those students graduate at higher rates, than their peers in public schools. Yet private schools operate at a fraction — I estimate 2/3 — of the cost of public schools. Those are clear productivity gains that would soar if there were a true open market.

Reply >> michael mazenko says

George, the private school market has numerous advantages in cost – the primary one being they have no responsibility to provide additional, extremely costly services under the Americans with Disabilities Act. They have a right of refusal on their applicant base, and are dealing with no consumers who did not choose them. They don’t have to compete with Title IX requirements, nor do they have the same security concerns. The tit-for-tat cost between public private is a gross overgeneralization.

Thanks to Carolina Rossini for pointing me to the article.

Apple’s vision is a walled garden that offers a carefully curated experience to those willing to lock themselves into it. It will be shiny and beautiful, but education will be a commodity and Apple the company through which we will consume it.

MIT’s vision is bolder. It sets us on the course to an educational future in which anyone, regardless of background, budget or location, has access to a high-quality education – even those who don’t own iPads.

But after the hype has settled down (and yes, it was hard not to get a little swept away by all the great sounding announcements) we wake up with a slight hang-over this morning. Audrey Waters went so far as to call the revolution off and slammed Apple for this “slap in the face to educators and students.”

She is spot on, but leaves out one key point. This really is a revolution. It’s just not ours (I am still trying to decide if it wasn’t even intended for us, or if it just fell short.)

• Yes, digital textbooks change little about the format and model of instruction that involves a textbook. Digital textbooks do not bring truly richer and more engaging ways to learning.
• Yes, the cost at K-12 level are too high. In fact, if you add in the cost of the device (discounted over let’s say 4 years) using this to supply a school with textbooks is likely to be more expensive.

Those are two good reasons why  it is not the revolution we know was possible, but those things aren’t enough to discourage the majority of Apple’s vast iOS empire and the many who will join it as a result. And that is the revolution here.

What Apple did to the textbook is combining App Store and iTunes. And in the same way those innovations changed the software and music industries, will this change the textbook industry. It creates an infrastructure that let’s individual producers market their products to the end-user. That infrastructure is locked down physically as well as wrapped in multiple lawyers of legal barbed wire, but it is convenient enough for people to use it. And the content collection is seeded with books from the big players.

That all sounds familiar from previous Apple revolutions. Just as familiar will be what happens next. Prices will come down (just as they did in iTunes where we have more variable pricing now and the App Store that made software something you can buy for a few bucks), quality will go up (just as it did in iTunes which originally only offered low-quality MP3 files) and there will be an army of textbook authors submitting their works (just as the App Store mobilized a huge army of software developers). And all of those things are good for education.

But there will be a format scuffle and it remains to be seen if Apple supports an open or at least universally supported standard, or establishes its own. There will be examples of innovative textbooks and products that Apple locks out of their system to prevent competition. And other more promising approaches and companies are going to be overshadowed by the sheer media muscle of Apple’s initiative. All of those things are bad for education.

This is not a radical innovation because Apple doesn’t do radical innovation. MITx is a bold promise, this isn’t. But Apple’s strength is bold marketing not innovation. Apple innovations remain carefully close enough to the status quo to make immediate sense to a mainstream market. Yes, the experts will always point out the flaws and shortcomings (and they are usually right) but the easiest way to sell something new is to make it look and feel like something that customers are familiar with and understand. iBooks2 and iTunesU are close enough to what we have now that they may get the kind of traction that is harder to get with more innovative approaches. And while iOS devices may not be widespread among a general student population yet (and certainly not in developing countries), Apple’s distribution funnel that let’s them push content to these devices may get them the early uptake they need to pull more users in.

What this does is change another existing industry by making its products more elegant, more convenient, and reducing inter-mediation necessary to connected users and producers. And that is huge. But it’s not as huge as kicking off an education revolution. So let’s get back to work and make that part happen ourselves. To be honest, I am almost relieved that Apple did not manage to build the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer: a Propædeutic Enchiridion even if that had felt more like our revolution. But I want our revolution to be free and open and not part of something called an ecosystem that is really a distribution system.

I decided to give my Flash grant to David Albert who started something called Hackerschool in New York City. I liked that Hackerschool shares a lot of similar spirit with P2PU and yet it is completely different at the same time.

Read the FAQ for all the details, but in a nutshell – David (and his collaborators) run an intensive face-to-face immersion course for web developers, he compares it to a writers workshop, with an interesting sustainability model. The school itself is free for participants, but companies desperate to hire developer talent pay Hackerschool for recommendations and referrals. Brilliant idea and since they are about to launch round 3 it seems to be working.

Speaking of round 3, applications are open! (And if you have a space in Manhattan or Brooklyn that they could use, send them an email! They were at NYU and Spotify in the past. You’ll be in good company.)

Congratulations to David for his success, and a shout out for the Shuttleworth Fellowship. The Flash grants are a nice addition to an already terrific model.

Returning to Berlin brought with it a good dose of nostalgia. We held our first ever workshop there in 2009 and we wanted to reconnect to the spirit and excitement of that event. At the time many of us had never met face to face and we weren’t sure what would happen. It turned out that we were not just a group of individuals interested in similar things, but a community with a shared purpose.

P2PU in 2009

Despite all of our different backgrounds, interests, and characters, we connected deeply – both at a personal level and with the idea of P2PU. We became friends and collaborators. And we couldn’t wait to get started. At the time we didn’t want to get bogged down by a long process of defining our vision. We knew what that vision felt like and that was good enough. In order to have a compass to guide our decisions we agreed on three core values of openness, community, and peer-learning and then we set out on the journey.

Barcelona 2010

The three values turned out to be good guides for our original community, but they didn’t convey the excitement and sense of purpose that we felt. They didn’t help new people connect to the idea of P2PU in the same deep way that we had connected with it. There is a certain magic that happens when a great group of people spends four days in a room and that is hard to convey digitally. But we also never clearly articulated what it was that drew us together and that made us so committed to the idea. As we grew it became clear that we needed more than three core values. We needed something that would not only guide our future path, but that we could share with others, and that would express what we stand for. We needed to write down our vision.

Berlin 2011

That is why at this year’s workshop we spent two long sessions trying to get to the bottom of some of the fundamental questions about P2PU. We asked ourselves what problem P2PU is solving, what unique approach or ability we bring to solving it, and what it is about P2PU that we feel so passionate about. In the coming weeks, Bekka, Jane, Nadeem and I will take a stab at turning our notes into a draft vision for P2PU, but I wanted to share some of my own take-aways for those who couldn’t be in Berlin this year:

• P2PU is a diverse community of individuals who are passionate about learning. We stand for human-centered education. We are not a product or a service, but a community that creates products and services. We thrive on experimentation.
• P2PU is a way to build the world we want to live in. We foster a culture of reciprocity, of helping each other out, of giving a leg up. The education system is in trouble and we want to help rather than point fingers or complain.
• P2PU is for passion-based learning. Everyone is passionate about learning something. P2PU is a place to identify that passion and we celebrate the long tail of learning and education.
• P2PU can scale. The traditional model works well for small numbers of learners, but quality goes down when numbers go up. As a result many people don’t have access to quality learning opportunities. P2PU’s open source model can scale.
• P2PU preserves the core ideas of the university. We are not against the traditional university, but want to help preserve some of its original values such as freedom of ideas, and a culture of learning through open sharing.

In the spirit of the old musically-themed P2PU newsletters I’m asking Joe Cocker to lend a hand in closing this post.

With a little help from our friends we are able to block out the noise and listen to the voice of our hearts. It’s a little help from our friends that dares us to follow our intuition. And it’s with a little help from our friends that we can become who we truly want to be. P2PU is learning with a little help from your friends.

It struck me that there isn’t really an open lab for learning innovation – and that P2PU could be it. During Monday night’s board meeting we discussed sustainability, and Neeru riffed on the platform idea a bit. She wondered if we could model ourselves as a research institute. There would be heaps of experimentation and research, some of it driven by us and some driven by partners who want to work with us, and each year we would publish a string of short reports about what we are learning. Cathy added that we could connect it to an annual conference with great speakers from the P2PU community who share the results of their work, and suggested that corporations would be willing to pay substantive amounts of money for this knowledge.

Which brings me to the term “lab”. Speaking to more people about the idea of a “platform” made me realize that it’s a term that means different things to different people. And when I explained that it was a mechanism to support experimentation and research, they would ask if it was “kind of like a lab.” And that’s exactly what it would it be like.

The idea of an open lab for social learning sounds exciting and it feels in line with our original spirit of experimentation. What would it look like?

Supported by a platform that is extendable, hackable, malleable and customizable – We need a sandbox, so that we have a place to experiment, and track the results of these experiments. But the sandbox is not the important piece here, it’s a means to an end (or a journey rather).

Run by a community that is passionate about peer learning and openness, and thrives on experimentation – In her comment earlier, Karen pointed out that talking about “platform” wasn’t enough and asked “how do content, community, and methods tie into this?” She is absolutely right. What happens on the platform is directly connected to the values and principles we hold as a community. I think we need to spend more time talking about what they mean to us – but our three original values of open, community, and peer-learning have stood the test of time quite well so far.

Turning experiments into great learning experiences for lots of people - This third bullet is new and still a bit wonky (and needs word-smithing). But it’s an important stake to put in the ground if we want to make sure our work has a broader benefit. Many research labs have to rely on industry to turn their work into products and services that affect “normal” people. As a result success is often measured through proxies for innovation (like scientific articles, or patents, etc.) because the research work is at least one layer removed from the “end-user”. Luckily that’s not the case for us, because the end-user is part of the P2PU community. Why not be bold and try to measure impact through our ability to turn experimentation into great social learning experiences that work for many people?

While Harvard can focus on innovating teaching and learning within the institution – we could be the open learning lab for everyone. Thoughts?

As Executive Director, one of my responsibilities is to figure out a way to make this thing sustainable, and I’m working on a sustainability plan for discussion with the board. Lots of people have been suggesting opportunities for earned income (charging for something) and I am excited by some of them. But when users pay for services they become customers, and customers are different from community members. Nadeem deserves credit for really pushing on the importance of tying sustainability to the value we create for our community and I think he is right.

I’ve also been wondering about the applicability of the “challenges” model to other areas besides the Mozilla School of Webcraft. I think it’s a really awesome model to scale social learning for some users and communities. But Jessy’s post about looking at learning as heterogenous vs. homogeneous systems reminded me of the passion I’ve always felt for the diversity and serendipity of stuff at P2PU, and how we need to balance the desire to create an amazing polished experience with the possibility for experimental, messy, and unexpected things to evolve.

We are in the middle of planning our third P2PU workshop and I’ve been thinking a lot about the first P2PU workshop two years ago. Berlin 09/09/09 forged an amazing spirit of possibility and community that has carried us a long way. Berlin 11/11/11 will be much more focused on concrete work, but the important questions remain the same. What role should P2PU play (in an open education world that looks very different from two years ago)? What makes us different? One of Jessica’s emails to the development list reminded me. She described P2PU as a friendly place for learning and ended her message with “I love P2PU” – Reading those word stopped me in my tracks. Because there is simply nothing nicer or more important someone could say about us.

So, reading an article about products vs platforms today (link) brought a lot of this stuff together for me. If we look at P2PU as a platform, we can have all of our cakes and eat them too (something worth trying): We can have polished experiences and foster experimentation, we can build opportunities for earned income and continue to care more about community than customers, and we can be a friendly place for learning. The platform idea is not completely new (both Karen and John deserve credit for pushing the concept of an API) but I hadn’t realized that there is a really important connection between platform and community before.

Here are four bold suggestions that feel in line with the spirit of Berlin 09 and provide some direction for Berlin 11. What do you think?

1. P2PU is a platform – There is no right product for “everyone”, the right product for everyone simply doesn’t exist. That’s particularly true for learning and that’s why shouldn’t try to build one right product, but rather build a platform that many people can turn into many right products for many different users.
2. A platform with at least one great product – In order to make P2PU work as a platform, we need at least one amazing product that lots of users love. That amazing product could be one model for learning that appeals to a large group of users, or it could be a clever way for developing reputations within the community, or it could be a great way to keep track of all the cool things that are happening in P2PU …
3. Everyone can help build P2PU – We should encourage and support experimentation, so that the whole community can innovate (yes Dan, I’m thinking of you). We need to make sure that the UX is clean and simple, but that there is room for experimentation. Maybe we move experiments into a LAB space, but P2PU needs to be extendable, hackable, malleable …
4. We eat our own dogfood – Why are we having insightful / engaged conversations on this mailing list, but very seldom on the site? We should feel frustrated by UX details that are frustrating. And we should be happy about features that are beautiful and clever.

Cheerio – have a great day!