Join community member Jose Flores in this volunteer effort to build a read-only API for P2PU.

Description: This project entails the creation of an Application Programming Interface (API) that will expose some of the information available in the P2PU platform to third party consumers. A web API can be described as a series of calls that a programmer can make from their own programs to fetch data from platforms such as Lernanta (the software on top of which P2PU runs) without having to access it through the main website. Some use cases have been discussed such as mobile phone apps or widgets that can be embedded in other websites in a ‘mash up’ style to show a list of courses, tasks and so on.

Skills required: A good understanding on how a Django application is laid out and a bit of research on tools to write APIs on top of Django. (I chose tastypie through recommendation from my local Python group).

Time commitment: A few weeks of spare time.

Goal: To have something up and running, at least in the alpha site, in the next couple of weeks. This would be the first step towards a full-blown API that allows not only reading but also writing. With a read-only API users could receive notifications of new comments or new courses in their phone, but to be able to reply to those messages or even create courses from a third party application we will need to develop a ‘read and write’ API.

Get started: https://github.com/p2pu/lernanta/wiki/API-development-process

If you have followed our blog posts or community calls you might already know that we have recently completed a pilot under the title “Webmaking 101” with the School of Webcraft. Amongst the new and exciting things we tried out in that pilot was a set of community badges, that highlighted skills such as giving helpful feedback, pushing work forward in the community and communicating clearly ideas to a variety of audiences.

You have asked us to extend the use of community badges across the entire site and we are working hard to make that happen. But in order to do so, we need your feedback and help

Help us understand what types of community badges you would like to see accross the site. Please take 5 minutes to complete our short survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/WWTCXV3

Your answers will be anonymous and any data published will be in aggregate only.

If you are not sure what’s with the Badges, you can find out more here and check out the existing badges for the School of Webcraft here

Thanks a bunch,

The P2PU team

This week’s guest post is from Leah McVie, educator, photographer, and open ed enthusiast. She is an active P2PU DIY U participant who is diving into the open badges community. She is currently exploring ways to mix the open education philosophy into institutional practices. She blogs on leahmacvie.com.

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When I go to work I have access to a variety of food options, nice architecture, and some of the most interesting minds in my area. I get to hear stories from people who are from all over the world and the extraordinary projects they are working on. I love working on a campus.

My mind is a peculiar place to be at this point, though- straddling the line between my interests of open resources and do-it-yourself learning and the refined world of higher ed. But, I do believe both have their place in education and it’s up to a new round of innovators to sort out the options and find ways for the two worlds to work together.

The two do not have to be mutually exclusive and there is a lot they can do to help one another. We need to show colleges how to utilize and give back to open resources, allow people to learn from the course materials on their own time, and then set up a system for people to pay the college for credit, if they need it (MITx). Colleges can set up a program to help faculty cut student costs by using open textbooks, software, and resources to prep for classes. They can allow any member on campus, regardless of rank, to propose a course or degree. Lastly, they can create a learning community through gamification and badges (an alternative form of accreditation).

Colleges can also set up professional development opportunities for staff and faculty, and link the credit (badges) to professional rewards. Connecting with the surrounding community is a topic listed in most college strategic plans and by hosting a virtual community with a company like badgestack.com, colleges can provide personal development opportunities to people on campus, as well as in the community. Colleges can champion an effort that helps current students, alumni, staff, and the community engage in lifelong learning.

The problem with all of these suggestions is that there are a lot of hoops to jump through on any campus. This is why instructors, students, and community members are turning towards open platforms to pilot these initiatives. They can easily use places like Google Groups to form a class community, P2PU to form a study group, or Udemy to set up a class. However, at most colleges, the people who take part in learning opportunities do not receive college credit. (I say ‘most colleges’ because there actually are colleges out there that already are evaluating these alternative learning options and giving credit for participation.)If all of these alternative learning experiences tie into a new form of accreditation like the badge system, it will make it that much easier for colleges to be able to examine the work put in, which can save graduates time, money, and effort spent on coursework they may already be familiar with.

So what exactly could be done to mesh these world together? 1. Colleges can utilize and feed back into open resources, which will end up saving them time and money. 2. Colleges need to come up with a track that doesn’t charge for the ‘college lifestyle’ (clubs, sports, events) for those who simply want to learn. 3. Colleges should employ an alternative means of crediting learning within their own body of students, faculty, staff, and community through a system like open badges.

If you work on a campus like I do, I hope you’ll consider submitting a proposal addressing a few of these points.

We’re going local! As part of the global celebration of Open Education Week, P2PU community members in London are hosting a local learning party! Learn how to create Challenges on the p2pu.org platform, play some games and be part of 24 hours of free online education. We might even head to the pub at one point…

The event will take place at 2pm on March 9th, contact Bekka bekka <at>p2pu<dot>org for more information, or check out the event here

Hackasaurus spreads skills, attitudes, and ethics that help youth thrive in a remixable digital world. By making it easy for youth to tinker and mess around with the building blocks that make up the web, Hackasaurus helps tweens move from digital consumers to active producers, seeing the web as something they can actively shape, remix and make better.

As Hackasaurus + P2PU soft launch the first phase of the this project, we’d like to ask for your help by testing out the challenges we’ve created for running a Hackasaurus Hackjam and giving us some feedback and ideas on how we can make them better.

What’s a hackjam? An event that makes hacking and digital literacy accessible, social and fun. In partnership with libraries, learning centers and youth media centers, learners take part in a flexible DIY curriculum of hands-on projects and making.

The Hackjam challenges will make it easy for learners to understand the engagement and planning that goes in to running an event — and our goal is for them to lead to more webmaking events around the world.

Get started here: p2pu.org/en/groups/organize-a-hackasaurus-jam

And once you’re done, please offer us your feedback through this simple form:
www.surveymonkey.com/s/QSRDD6S

This week’s community call was something a little different. Under the expert guidance of Chloe-the-challenge-guru, we had a party. Literally. This week’s challenge party was the badge edition, and we focused on brainstorming badges to associate with new challenges that have been created on p2pu.org, and how to build rubrics and assessments for these challenges and badges.

You can see all the challenges and the badges that we came up with on this etherpad.  See which badges won the popular vote, who came up with the best soundtrack to their challenges and what the plans are for the next party…

The Test4Theory team is excited to announce their first P2PU challenge to help people to become a volunteer contributor to scientific projects at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). You might be more familiar with CERN’s giant particle accelerator, the famous Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

Participants in the Test4Theory/P2PU challenge  will be welcomed into to the world of volunteer science. Joining different research projects and solving easy tasks is facilitated through BOINC, an open source software built for volunteer computing.

In detail, Test4Theory is a project that demonstrates the use of their software systems (CernVM & BoincVM) to harness volunteer cloud computing power for full-fledged LHC event physics simulation on volunteer computers.

No longer distant are your dreams of crunching numbers from the Large Hadron Collider! The door to the world’s fastest particle accelerator is open. If you’re keen on seeing even more possibilities like this one, join the P2PU Test4Theory study group, and help them create more opportunities for open science.

This week’s call was great – good discussions, great feedback and some brilliant tools, ideas and suggestions from the community. This is just a summary of the main discussions, there was a lot more that went on, so have a look at the etherpad for the full notes.

This Week’s Main Discussions

The new “Learn” page
The mockup of the new “Learn” page was done during the dev call this week. It’s fab.  It’s not final, and feedback is welcome, but it does have some wicked features, like tag searches, autoloaded scrolling in the sidebar, and the ability to search by language and course status. If anyone is interested in helping with some of the manual tagging, and wants to give feedback, please get in touch with John.

The School of Webcraft Report
There were 3 purposes in writing this report (which Chloe knows off by heart, it would seem): to help us get better at writing reports, to figure out how well badges/challenges are working and examining specifically how Webmaking 101 worked in the context of our partnership with Mozilla. The proper report will be ready next week, but we got a sneak preview. Some fascinating stats, which you can find in the notes.

The State of the Mustard
Philipp is making mustard. It changes over time and needs constant monitoring. Who knew?
We’re wondering if it’s worth doing a similar thing with P2PU, and if so, what kind of information people would find useful. Metrics? Partnerships? Upcoming meetings/competitions? If you have any ideas, let us know.

Consolidating courses/study groups/challenges
This is an important discussion, which will impact the final “learn” page – we want to make things simple, but useful. Do we have different types of groups, that are distinct and can be filtered, or not?  It would be helpful if people create lists of their favourite features in courses, study groups and challenges so that we can make sure that when we consolidate, we don’t lose good features. John will review all the discussions and emails about this topic, and make recommendations to the community.

We love it when community members make videos about P2PU.

Karen Fasimpaur, we love you.