My friend Chris Geith asked me for five points on how to build a new project. Here is what I sent back to her. 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. […]
Failure drives learning. Or rather, debugging drives learning. Not getting it right the first time, making strategic changes, and observing their outcome lets us learn. This is all second nature to engineers, artists, and poets, but it is the complete opposite of how most of education works. The path is more important than the destination. […]
There is a lot of noise about badges at the moment with opinions ranging from “we don’t need no stinkin’ badges” to “badges will lead to global peace.” I have been one of the original instigators (PDF) of the badges for learning movement (is it really a movement?), but my favorite session at the recent DML […]
Worth checking out Matthew Ladner’s guest post on Jay Greene’s blog in which he argues that we need to create more space within the education system for market forces to bring down cost and increase quality. It lists some of the pro-business (e.g. more private & less public, let the market solve our problems) arguments and those […]
A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post on Apple’s move into the textbook world. It got quite a lot of attention and I wrote a slightly longer version for publication in the Times Higher Ed. I managed to add a little context from other initiatives in the field, including MITx. The full THE […]
Two weeks ago P2PU held its third workshop. This year’s focus was on “getting stuff done” and bringing together people who are working on concrete projects. And we did get a lot done. Check out the etherpad with our notes and visit our new projects board on trello for the details. But we also spent […]
This announcement about Harvard receiving a US$ 40M gift to support teaching and learning innovation made me think more about the platform conversation we’ve been having (here and on the mailing list). Besides giving an elite university a lot of cash, how can we foster more innovation in learning and teaching in ways that will affect […]
As part of my Shuttleworth Foundation fellowship, I am asked to reflect once a year on progress I have made, and think about challenges I may have encountered (and overcome hopefully.) It always seems difficult to find the time to write these reports, but turns out to be an incredibly useful exercise in taking a longer-term view. […]
Just submitted my “Testing Our Assumptions” proposal for the upcoming Open Ed Conference (Oct 25-27 2011). I am interested in hacking certification – and was happy to accept David’s invitation to act as a Strand Champion for “Open credentialing, open competency certification, and open degrees” at the conference. Rather than submit a more formal presentation […]
I have been interested in certification (and assessment related to certification) for a while. I believe it will drive the next big step for P2PU.org as well as for the open education movement as a whole. Getting it right is important. Thanks to Brandon Muramatsu and Vijay Kumar I’ve spent some time this week trying […]
