The selected Jetpacks support a wide range of learning activities. They help users learn foreign languages, support the development of sophisticated web-skills or turn the web into a quiz engine. A list of finalists (and all Jetpack prototypes) can be found on the Mozilla Wiki:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Education/Projects/JetpackForLearning

The Design Camp in March will give the selected teams an opportunity to complete their prototypes with support from some of the world’s foremost Jetpack experts. The event is co-organized by Aspiration. An overall winner of the Jetpack 4 Learning Design Challenge will be selected during the camp and announced at the Mozilla SXSW event.(*)

The Jetpack 4 Learning Design Challenge uses an innovative combination of competition, training, and workshop to build skills in web development and drive innovation for learning on the open web. Online seminars provided participants with the necessary background on extension development and Jetpack technology. An active mailing list was used by participants to discuss and solve challenge they faced. All seminars and discussion are openly available for anyone to review and help them build their own Jetpacks.

The Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit organization that sponsors the Mozilla project and devotes its resources to promoting openness, innovation and opportunity on the Internet. We do this by supporting the community of Mozilla contributors and by assisting others who are building technologies that benefit users around the world. Through the Mozilla Education initiative we work with computer science, design and business schools around the world to create learning opportunities for a new generation of Mozilla community members and help to drive a new wave of participatory, student-led learning. By doing this we hope to move closer to Mozilla’s broader goal of making openness, participation and distributed decision-making more common experiences in Internet life. More information is available at education.mozilla.org.

The MacArthur Foundation supports creative people and effective institutions committed to building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world. In addition to selecting the MacArthur Fellows, the Foundation works to defend human rights, advance global conservation and security, make cities better places, and understand how technology is affecting children and society. In 2006 MacArthur launched its digital media and learning initiative to explore how young people are changing as a result of digital media use and what the implications are for libraries, museums and schools. More information is available at www.macfound.org/education.

(*) The Design Challenge is not connected to or affiliated with SXSW in any way.

The selected teams are eligible to participate in a set of online seminars covering Jetpack development and user interface design. They will also get support and mentorship from the Mozilla community to help them turn their ideas into Jetpack prototypes. At the end of phase II up to 10 participants will be invited to a hands-on Design Camp at SXSW Interactive 2010.

Have a look at our phase 2 projects:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Education/Projects/JetpackForLearning

The Jetpack for Learning Design Challenge invites software developers, designers, and educators to help turn the open Web into a rich learning environment. It is sponsored by the Mozilla Foundation with support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

I recently participated in the Berkman Center Free Culture Research workshop, which brought together an interesting group of free culture researchers and activists at the place where — one could argue — it all started. We were asked to prepare short essays on our key interests for free culture research, and I decided to focus on peer assessment and accreditation. Although my interest is education and not free culture per se, the mechanisms by which peers evaluate each others work, and collaboratively improve on it, lie at the heart of commons-based peer production, and are hence relevant to the broader free culture movement as well. You can download the essay from the Berkman wiki.

Together with Chris, Stian, and Joel Thierstein I wrote a longer piece on “Peer-To-Peer Recognition of Learning in Open Education“ for the International Review on Research of Open Distance Learning (IRRODL).

The two papers provide a first impression of our thinking on accreditation in the open social education world. With support from the Shuttleworth Foundation, we will be organizing a P2PU research sandpit (in the Boston area, possibly in May 2010) for a few people who want to design what this open accreditation world could look like - and then build it. If you are working on similar ideas, or know someone who is, we’d love to hear form you. The idea is to start talking in a slightly larger group now, and then meet in Boston with the ones that want to implement what we come up with.

I’d like to close by saying -> Q3DFN58YF93S <- yes, I only now signed up for Technorati.

Governance

As open communities grow, governance becomes a (fascinating) challenge. If you want to scale, and P2PU does want to scale, you need more people to feel ownership and take responsibility. That can be scary for the people who started the project, because how do you retain focus as more people with more (and different?) ideas arrive, and how do you preserve a sense of common values and culture?

I spent some time investigating how open source communities deal with issues of governance to see if we can learn from their experience. There is a great video on poisonous people in open source communities, which touches on a lot of issues that are relevant to governance of P2PU, although I think it’s better to frame the topic in a positive way. Rather than fighting against poisonous participants, it’s really about creating a healthy open source community. The video is long, but worth watching if you have an hour over lunch or so: http://sites.google.com/site/io/how-open-source-projects-survive-poisonous-people

The difference between decisions and discussion

It’s ok to have different levels of responsibilities, but communication has to be transparent and open. People often think the essence of open source is that anyone can do anything. That is far from true. Open source projects generally have clearly defined levels of quality control and responsibility, and processes how participants can gain such responsibility. Usually, only a small group of developers has the right to “commit” new code into the core application. Other developers can submit their proposals for new or improved code, but these suggestions are reviewed before they become part of the application. Usually the developers who already have commit rights can grant similar rights to more people, effectively promoting them based on their contributions to the project.

While the core group is trusted to make decisions on behalf of the community, all discussions and deliberations that these decisions are based on, happen in the open and anyone can in fact add their voice and opinion. This is fundamentally different from traditional organization, where typically the people who make the decisions discuss them amongst each other, and then announce certain developments to the wider community. In open source projects these discussions are open to all. This provides a constant check on the decisions of the code committers, because there is no room to hide bad decisions, and it turns the role of accountability on its head. In open source, the ones who have special responsibility become accountable to the community, rather than the other way around. The only discussion that remains private, is the one focused on promoting new people to higher levels of responsibility - in order to avoid embarrassment to the individuals.

There are some important differences between software and P2PU. We don’t have the focus on a single artifact (the software code) that everyone works on, and which has to function together. The closest thing we have to software code are courses, which are typically designed by one or a few individuals, and which don’t rely on each other to function as a whole. One way we could map the concept of a core group of “committers” would be in the form of course shepherds. Only trusted community members, who have earned this extra responsibility can “commit” a new course to P2PU. I can see lots of complications with an approach like that for P2PU, but it is an avenue worth exploring.

A lesson from open source that is easier to implement right now is the opening up of discussion and deliberation. Currently, P2PU has three tiers of conversations: the founders discuss organizational questions that are mostly focused on keeping the P2PU machine running so that the community can do what they would like to do. This includes things like organizing the next workshop, the need for a non-profit organization (or not), etc.. Increasingly the main conversations are migrating from that small group to what we call the P2PU gang mailing list, which brings together people who have made a significant contribution (organized a course, helped us with licensing issues, advised on technology, etc.). We currently rely on recommendations from this core group to add new people to the list. And finally there is the broader P2PU community that would include all of the above, but also participants in courses, and potentially outsiders. We don’t currently have a space for this wide open conversation, but it is something we are building into our new web-site.

General rough consensus works

Another misconception about decision-making in open source is that all decisions happen by voting. In fact, one quote from the video that really stood out, was “If you see a community that is voting all the time, something is very wrong”. During our Berlin workshop we adopted something called the “(emerging) general rough consensus”. In all group discussion we had one note keeper, who would at the end of the discussion, list all the points that the group seemed to have consensus on. Disagreement was encouraged and if one person flagged an issue as needing further discussion then we either discussed it more or noted that no general rough consensus could be found. It sounds complicated, but worked like a charm.

Unfortunately we weren’t the first ones who came up with it. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has been using a process that is sometimes referred to as rough consensus and running code to guide its deliberations on the technical foundations that keep the Internet running. If it’s good enough for the Internet, it’s good enough for us.

Culture counts

Culture is another important aspect in open source communities, and I took away two key lessons on culture form the video: One, the founders of a project create the initial culture, which ideally becomes self-selecting in the sense that people who share this culture will be attracted and feel welcome in the community, whereas people with different values and ideas will not. And second, it is important to articulate both a clearly defined (and narrow) focus and a few core values as boundaries around your culture, so that you can refer to them when needed.

At P2PU, I think we have been quite successful with the first one. It certainly felt that the community that worked together in Berlin shared a substantive common set of values and culture and was excited by similar ideas for the future of P2PU. There are always individual differences, and that is a good thing, as long as there is enough overall coherence on what we are trying to do.

With respect to the second point of articulating culture and values, I think there are some potential downsides, or rather pitfalls if it is not done carefully. I have experience discussions in the free culture movement, where attempts to define the “movement” led to fragmentation - as people tended to focus on differences, rather than commonalities. Once the conversation is framed in the context of differences, it becomes very difficult to remember that after all, we share most of the important ideas and values. Sometimes it is easier to manifest culture in action and implementation than it is to define it through a discussion. Given those reservations, I think we do need a set of shared values - broad values - that we articulate on our web-site, and Alison has started compiling a draft version of what that could look like.

The video also speak about paying attention to newcomers and that is something we decided to start doing more seriously, both in the form of someone from the community welcoming new members when they create an account. For people interested in organizing a new course, we will offer an orientation — a set of pointers on how to best structure a course for P2PU, and the possibility to speak to someone who has organized a course in the past and is available to answer any questions that might come up.

The last aspect about culture that I want to mention here is the friction between growing very fast and retaining a shared culture. Nadeem who is head of development at Talis explains that take a lot of time to get to know job applicants in order to understand if they fit in with the organizational culture. He argues that it is easier to help developers become more productive, than it is to integrate them into a culture they don’t click with. Which makes me wonder how Google does this. They seem be very good at establishing and retaining a strong corporate culture even during a period of rapid growth of their community.

What started out as a few ideas around governance, mushroomed into a monster blog post. If you read all the way down to here you deserve a special treat. Here is a video about culture that highlights two important lessons: one person is enough to make a difference, and people like to do stuff together.

What are the browser extensions that you want to use for your learning projects? No need to wait for someone to create them - here is your opportunity to roll up the sleeves and develop Jetpack extensions yourself. Jetpack is a new Mozilla Labs technology that makes it easier to build Firefox add-ons. We are looking for good ideas and will help you turn your ideas into prototypes. A little tech background is useful, but you don’t have to be a software developer to participate, and we would also like to see inter-disciplinary teams apply. Here is the official blurb:

We’re looking for designers, educators and software developers who want to turn their innovative ideas about learning online into working prototypes in the form of Firefox add-ons. We’ll help you refine your designs and teach you how to create Firefox add-ons using Jetpack and other Mozilla technologies. Participants creating the best prototypes will be invited to the Jetpack for Learning Design Camp and the SXSW Interactive conference in March 2010.

Head over to the official project page to read The Brief and fill out the submission form.

The Shuttleworth fellowship in three steps:

1 - Cover the basics Provide sufficient funds for fellows to cover their living expenses so they don’t need to worry about making money. Even it it isn’t a huge amount of money this takes away a big psychological weight and distraction. There is also flexibility to generate extra income if needed, because fellows are free to take on additional consulting work as long as it doesn’t distract from the objectives of the fellowship.

2 -  Give them some tools It’s obvious that there are lots of things one needs to work effectively, and many of them cost money. Computers, phones, communication and — a big one — travel just to name a few. It can be a real hassle to find the money for a new computer when the old one breaks or get funding to attend a workshop. The fellowship includes separate expense and travel budgets, which put an end to all that. There are also things that are difficult to do for individuals in start-up mode, like entering contracts with companies for services they provide to your project. The foundation can help with a few of these - it isn’t a one-stop support shop for fellows, but it makes some of the most difficult things a little easier, while you are busy setting up your own organisational infrastructure.

3 - Then strap a jetpack on their backs and hand them the match The way this works is that I can take a certain part of my fellowship grant (remember, this is my potential income) and re-invest into my own projects. The foundation then multiplies my investment by a factor of 10 or 15 (or 20, if it’s a collaboration with another fellow) making it a sizable amount of project funding. There is of course an approval process that project ideas have to go through, but it’s efficient and fast, because the overall goals of the fellowship are agreed already and the projects have to support them. For me this was the real killer - the incentive structure seemed to fit perfectly to what I was trying to do.

Benefits

Thinking about social entrepreneurship in this way has a few important benefits, both for the foundation and the fellow. For the foundation, it’s a good way to identify people who are so committed to their ideas, that they will invest their own money to build their dreams. As Steve Song — another fellow — says (at least I heard it from him first) it’s the difference between the chicken and the pig. When it comes to breakfast (eggs and bacon) the chicken is “invested”, but the pig is “committed”. The idea is to get the fellows to commit to their own projects. And for the fellows, it gives them access to seed/VC funding that would otherwise be hard to obtain. The reality of social entrepreneurship is that even the best ideas will typically not generate millions of dollars in profits, lead to lucrative IPOs or attract buy out offers from Google. In other words, they are not as attractive to a typical VC funder. There are some indications that this is slowly changing, but for now, one person with a powerful idea for social change and the passion to make it happen will typically have a hard time pitching for angel funds, which is exactly what’s needed to get going.

Photo by Marcus Ramberg (CC BY NC 2.0)

Challenges

So far so good. I think it’s obvious by now, that I am a big fan of this fellowship model, but of course there are things about it that I find challenging as well:

One year is short Once the fellowship starts, you have a year to submit your project proposals, get them approved, start implementing and — because your fellowship is reviewed for potential renewal after 9 months - even less time to show results. That’s not a lot of time, if you are (just an example) trying to change the tertiary education landscape. And while it’s good to have clear goals for the short and medium-term, it can be difficult to commit fully to the long-term if there is uncertainty about the foundation (pun intended) of your planning beyond the next 6-9 months. I am all for keeping people on their toes, but stretching the first year of the fellowship to 18 months, with a lead-in period, could be an option.

No more excuses You’re under pressure to deliver. Since most of the things that usually distract and slow you down are taken care of, there are no more excuses not to succeed. It’s up to you and with that comes some pressure to deliver something that makes a real difference. Especially for people transiting from academic posts into social entrepreneurship it can be daunting to stop thinking and writing, and start organising and doing. I wouldn’t want to change this, it’s a challenge that I am finding myself thrive on, but it is something that I hadn’t really anticipated and a bit of a culture shock. And yes, that was a huge generalisation about academia - forgive me!

Steve Vosloo, a fellow fellow, pointed me to this set of blog posts that compares different leadership development / fellowship programmes. It will be interesting to look in some detail how different initiatives do things differently - and what they find works best. And this is what a day at the office looks like!

Google’s open source blog has an interesting update on their Summer of Code project. In a nutshell, SoC is an online mentored internship programme for young software developers. Developers are paired up with experienced members of the open source community and work on real-world projects. It’s like having someon who is a bit older and has some experience to help with the potential pitfalls when joining an open source community (in addition to providing feedback on the technical work).

[Photo licensed under CC-BY-NC-ND by pixieclipx]

The organisers ran a midterm mentor survey to find out what makes some participants succeed more than others. The short summary:

1. The earlier a student begins interacting with the mentor/mentoring organization, the more likely the project is to be on or ahead of schedule.
2. The higher the frequency of interaction, the more likely the project is to be on or ahead of schedule.
3. Projects that are on or ahead of schedule are more likely to be interacting via real time methods of communication (such as IRC).
4. The amount of time spend during these interactions has a less clear relationship to the project status.

If we replace “project” with “learning”, these results are useful for the design of peer-learning communities. The first point is not such an issue for P2PU, because our courses will be run in a set timetable. Points 2 and 3 are interesting and suggest that there are clear advantages in synchronous communication, and frequent interaction. Many openly taught courses to date have relied on a distributed blog structure, where participants would work by themselves and post their thoughts on individual blogs. Others would read and comment, but there was always a risk that the discussion would disagregate — and that some posts might not get read. The Google survey indicates that having (at least) weekly chat conversations would increase the level of participation and keep learners focused. We are also experimenting with something called The Wire, which will make it easier to keep track of the disaggregated discussion - and combining the two approaches makes sense.

The Google folks are a little puzzled by the last point (as am I) and we’ll need more data to understand what exactly is going on here, but I suspect it has to do with different types and quality of interaction (and would very nicely support the P2PU model of self-learner communities). Rather than focus too much on the amount of interaction as the vehicle for learning, the timing and purpose interaction might be more important for online learning communities. The most successful Google interns seem to progress well on their own, and use the interaction with their mentors to address specific challenges and questions. A similar approach is possible for education as long as learners have access to a curated set of open educational resources and good pointers to help them navigate their own learning paths. The better prepared learners are individually, the more useful their interaction with each other then becomes. It’s kind of the opposite of the traditional lecture in which new knowledge is introduced to a group with relatively little opportunity to engage and discuss, since it takes time and thinking to develop good questions. The alternative model — which we like — would be to let students watch or listen to recorded lecture by themselves (when and wherever) and organise a meaningful and focused conversation about the content afterwards.

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I agree with most of his points (powerpoint lectures stink, presentation/podcastast/videos should be made available for students out-of-class, there is a lot of bad teaching, etc.), but have not experienced the same resistance by students to leave behind the “broadcast” model of lecturing. My impression is that the cause for student resistance is unrelated to technology or teaching styles. Too often, students don’t know why they are studying a particular topic, and how it relates to their degree and their lifes. In such a situation, where students don’t see the relevance and meaning of what they are supposed to learn, they rely on lecturers to break down the content in a way that — at least — let’s them succeed on the test. However, once the purpose is clear, students readily embrace opportunities to engage more actively. The resistance I have experienced comes mainly from lecturers, who are comfortable with a teaching style that is designed not to challenge their “expert” positions vis-a-vis the students. Admitting that there is something they don’t know is scary for many lecturers, but it’s the norm online - where every google search and visit to wikipedia is an acknowledgment that there is something we don’t know.

An important point that Jeff makes about half-way down the article (a little too late in my opinion) deals with Jose Bowen’s fundamental support for technology:

Mr. Bowen is part of a group of college leaders who haven’t given up on that dream of shaking up college instruction. Even though he is taking computers out of classrooms, he’s not anti-technology. He just thinks they should be used differently—upending the traditional lecture model in the process.

We know that when technology is used to alleviate bad teaching practices, it will often just compound the problems. The easy, and wrong, response is to blame the technology. Rather than point out examples where bad teaching was made worse, we should look at how the best use of technology is innovating learning. The problem is that these examples might be easy to overlook, because they take place outside of institutions, or because learning becomes a part of solving a problem or taking action, rather than exist as an activity per se. A friend recently pointed out the practices of knowledge sharing in the online poker communities, which seem perfectly in line with the ideals of academia. And it comes as no surprise that many smaller institutions, often colleges and technical universities or Art schools in the case of Professor Bowen, are able to move faster and innovate more rapidly than their larger more traditional (and sometimes more reputable) counterparts. Yet, unless we start looking at what’s happening outside of education institutions, we might miss a technology-enabled revolution in learning that takes place right in front of our eyes.

Apparently something similar is happening in cycling:

Licensed under a CC-BY 2.0 licensed by revolution_cycle

1. The open model questions the role of the traditional “expert”, but it is that “expert” who is typically responsible for assessment in education. For informal learning communities to work peers must be able to assess each others’ work.
2. Secondly, while assessment and accreditation are two distinct issues, you need good assessment to enable reliable accreditation.
3. And finally, online social networking communities are pioneering new ways of assessing information, even though they don’t call it that, and it’s exciting to think about their application to education. Things like aggregating group opinions (digg.com, slashdot.org), peer review and discussion (amazon.com reviews), reputation networks that automatically filter content (topsy.com) are perfectly suitable for assessment purposes in learning. 

Steve asks for literature suggestions. Some of the things I have been reading recently, or return to regularly include:

• Philip Greenspun’s recent rant about the state of higher education in the US is enjoyable and raises some important questions. For one, he suggests cutting the link between teaching and assessment, and argues they should be done by separate people/institutions. http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/universities-and-economic-growth
  
• Sir John Daniels (and co-authors) explore possibilities to increase access without jeopardising quality and argues that this separation would increase innovation and drives down cost. He writes in Change Magazine:
  

  “If the trend to delink testing from teaching continues, it will lead to more flexible and less expensive models of higher education, with the result that the aspiration of giving people access to high-quality higher education worldwide may not be an illusion.”

• Via the tomorrow’s professors mailing list from Stanford’s School of Education a short text by Bill Cerbin titled “Assessing How Students Learn” arrived timely this morning (It’s not on their website yet, but you’ll be able to find it here — search for article #956 — soon). While I suspect the author would take issue with the idea of separating teaching and assessment, it describes a fascinating study that investigated reasons for the disparity of Maths grades between African American students and others students. Performance was traced back to participation in informal study groups (or the lack of participation in such groups). It’s a brilliant response to those that still argue peer-learning or -assessment don’t work.
  

  “For example, Chinese students [who performed significantly better than African American students] formed study groups outside of class and devoted their time to the most difficult material rather than simply reviewing the mathematics they already knew. They compared solutions, tested one another, and talked through difficult concepts. The African American students also invested a lot of time studying calculus, but did it alone.”

• “Rethinking Classroom Assessment with Purpose in Mind. Assessment for Learning, Assessment as Learning, Assessment of Learning” provides a comprehensive discussion of the different roles assessment can have in learning and teaching. It’s especially useful if you are approaching open education from a non-education perspective (for example as an open source software researcher) and helps you relate your experience to the education context. It’s available for download: http://www.wncp.ca/media/40539/rethink.pdf 
• And Stephen Downes “Open Source Assessment” article, continues to provide insightful reflection, even though it’s written  almost exactly 2 years ago. He analyses how an “open source” approach can be applied at different levels of the assessment process, including the assessment questions. He writes
  

  “The proposition here is that, if the assessment of learning becomes an open, and community, enterprise, rather than closed and proprietary, then the cost of assessment would be reduced and the quality (and fairness) of assessment would be increased, thus making credentialing accessible.”

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