Event: Learning, Freedom and the Web, part 3
When: Thursday Sept 16, 2010. 1200-1700 PST
Where: Carnegie Foundation, Stanford, CA

Attendees

[AC] An-Me Chung - MacArthur
[AL] Akili Lee - Chicago digital youth networks
[BM] Bill Moses - Kresge Foundation
[CC] Cathy Casserly, Carnegie 
[CW] Craig Wacker, MacArthur
[Gr] Grant Graves, PADI, Joi's dive instructor
[HC] Heidi Chen, Carnegie
[JG] Joshua Gay, Mozilla
[JI] Joi Ito, Stealth Disco, Creative Commons
[MH] Mike Hanson - Mozilla R&D
[MI] Mimi Ito, DML & UC Irvine
[MS] Mark Surman, Mozilla
[MT] Michelle Thorne, CC
[Mg] Miguel Socias, Carnegie
[NJ] Nathan James, Mozilla Drumbeat
[OG] Obie Greenberg, Google
[PS] Philipp Schmidt, P2PU 
[RC] Robert Chang, Remix Learning
[RH] Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn, Moz
[SJ] Sam Klein, Wikimedia
[SW] Suzanne Walsh, Gates Foundation 
[RM] Richard Molaski, Mozilla

Welcome

A recap from June: that first meeting had little in the way of a theory of change, but a confluence of ideas from related people.

Cathy [CC] - I do work with community colleges on alternative pathways of developmental mathematics for students (?). Also OER work with engagement from Carnegie, MacArthur and Hewlett to develop [related] infrastructure.

Open Questions today

How do we develop a program of work to focus on openness in the future?
How do we discover what is available, and what synergies can come out in Barcelona?   [NB on Bar: the pope will be there at the end. NB: and he has a 'wiki'.]
At the end: why are we here, what are we doing? What outcomes do we want to achieve, how do we get there?

Let's try to drive somewhere. I'm happy to help orchestrate that [focus]. Other quick introductions from Craig and Mark, and then we can open a round of public intros.

Craig Wacker [CW]: My interest is related to the Carnegie grant to convene meetings on this, and Mozilla's work to think about how the web architecture can influence the architecture of learning and vice-versa. We have put out demo projects from our DML portfolio, which is about assessing how young people learn, play, and participate in public. Is new media changing participation over time? After doing this research for a while we're now trying to build lairing environs, places where the young can learn; informal environments as a back door into the more formal education system.

Our interest in Mozilla's work is whether a distributed maker community, tinkers who create things, networks as well as things, can inform some demonstrations we have supported. Two of those are: inter organizational learning networks in New York and Chicago, doing learning oriented work in the past. Museums libraries, schooling systems. Institutions with preexisting programs for youth. can new media synthesize those programmatic offerings? Or offer them in a way that is integrated with a low barrier to entry, and a high degree of portability for users?

Ex: if you go play a game online, it would be informed by content or expertise from a variety of institutions; a curriculum from the schooling system, after school programs from a lib or museum. That's an intuitive matchup with the kinds of organic matchups you see on the web. can Mozilla create things of utility for that type of project?

Also: youmedia?, an afterschool program at the Chicago public library, instantiating media lit programming, and creating opportunities for kids to experience/develop, through new media, informal and deeply geeked out interests. For learning nets and youmedia, we are trying to work with Mozilla on creating a series of utilities that will be helpful there:

1. A digital backpack for young people's badges - representative of some sort of quasi-accreditation for their skills or participation.

2. More generally, the idea of badges is something we want. Our interest in cohering this net is to figure out if there are architectural elements to the Web representing an opportunity to expand, diffuse, reimagine, reunderstand and demo projects we've invested in, and if there are more informal nets that can exist outside of the formal things already defined.

Mark Surman [MS] - Let me say a bit about this context [for the room], let you ask questions, and come back to the architecture of this meeting. I want to hear what people are here for before laying out the agenda.

In one of my jobs, I get to be the ED of Mozilla and keep all these pieces together. The funner job I have, to borrow Craig's phrase: is to figure out how Mozilla uses the architecture of the web to influence the architecture of society and vice-versa. Learning, cinema, and art are all places where the web is infused by and infusing now.

One thing Moz. wants to do now is not just having technologists participating in shaping the Web, but have the shapers of those parts of the web, learning or media or other [creators], be co-innovators in taking the web into what it should be for the next 100 or 200 years. That's the fun part of my job, and Moz is supporting it under Drumbeat's banner. We are investing in bringing new partners into what we are doing and shaping what the web goes.

What attracted me here is to get with people I haven't met yet who are doing very different things than us, but have some common cause. In the short time I've been there, we have an interest in that audacious goal being something we build in tinkery ways.

An exciting thing about the group forming here, which I would love to grow: it is a group who share: some ambitious and audacious goals for where learning goes, how that impacts the shape of society, how the web/openness is infused in that; but who are practical. Choosing to start with libraries/ museums/ others is obvious. But changing how they think about their role in learning is radical. That's what this group is to me, that combination of audacious goals and practical experiments.

We will play with how that conversation started and where it has gone.

Questions? (then intros)

INTRODUCTIONS

[Welcoming on the phone: Akili Lee [AL] from Chicago. Part of the Library network and digital youth network.]

We have 17 people around the table. Please introduce yourself briefly, and state your goal for the day.

Robert Chang [RC] - I'm from Remix Learning. IT's good for AL to be on the phone. Remix emerged out of work Dr Pinckard? and AL did at DYN - a social network behind both youmedia and the other networks in Chicago interested in the digital backpack and badges.

My goal today: to ensure we all collaborate effectively, define future work so that everyone can use/build on the same ideas and standards

Mimi Ito [MI] - an anthropologist and part of the digital media hub; our charter is to link together the different pieces of the initiative, to promote field building and disseminate outcomes of research. My own research focuses on kids' interest-driven activities, and how the connected or augmented world makes it more accessible to become 'good geeks'. What does it take for kids to start caring about something, how can he networked world facilitate more kids entering that space.

goals: find out what’s happening with the evolution of this group, and what connections we can make to this research space.

Obie Greenberg [OG] I am @ Google. working on Google apps for education. We make Gmail, calendar, docs, spreadsheets &c available for k-12 and higher education. I've been in this role for 6months, before that at youtube.edu putting lectures and academic works online. • goals: to hear about what you're working on; open ed/content passions. To find out how Google's work can fit into some of these goals.

Heidi Chen [HC] - Working with Carnegie on OER initiatives and development. Interested in finding out what's happened since June, and how to make things smooth in Barcelona.

Philipp Schmidt [PS] - I run p2pu, a social wrapper around OERs. It could become a place to learn anything about anything with anyone. I just made that up... I've done a lot of deep diving into assessment... connected to a workshop we're having this coming Mon/Tue.

Goal: I want to know how I can connect to the big picture after drilling down. How do big ideas in the assessment work scaled up to lead to changes in the world, not just to p2pu..

Bill Moses [BM] - I am a program director at the Kresge Foundation. We traditionally build buildings. For the last year we've been changing; one of our goals is to promote productivity and innovation in (secondary school?). We started in South Africa... over the last year we've funded Carnegie-Mellon University, Arizona State to have e-counseling? state wide, CAEL doing a [virtual] learning center. I feel like the fraud in the room; I'm the least technical person within a 50m radius. [not quite - see below :) -sj]

Goal - I hope to learn what it is you people do.

Miguel Socias [Mig] - I am @ Carnegie, working on the Statway Math project, a community college network (starting with 19 colleges, hoping to expand\ to\ 100)

Goal - I'm here to learn and make sure my designs are in line with the philosophy of the Open Ed space -- our content as well as digital platform will be openly available and I want to take advantage of tools that are out there.

Richard Molaski [RM] I'm at Mozilla, raising tech awareness for the non-tech geeks at Moz. Way too much of what we do is by and for geeks, and we need to pay attention to those who don't know where the browser stops and the Internet begins. This represents most of the world... I have also worked in K-12 classrooms for a decade, giving me a deep fondness for the wisdom involved in going after libraries and museums to bring about this change... as opposed to schools.

Goal: to learn what everyone's doing.

Sam Klein [SJ] - I am a free knowledge advocate -- director of content and outreach @ OLPC, and a Trustee of the Wikimedia Foundation. I find that the lowest hanging fruit in sharing knowledge is connected people who don't know what they have access to. We can make fast progress there. At WP we are working on a Public Policy Initiative [PPI], and wikiversity/wikisource projects to expand education. I want to let everyone know about what PPI is doing with its 10-50 universities, and discuss how we could improve that. Also about current Wikiversity + Wikisource projects to let anyone contribute directly to education on the open web, and how they can work better with p2pu, wikieducator.and the ecosystem of related projects.

Goal: to identify the 20 orgs we should invite to a future discussion, to make sure it feels open and not closed to engagement..

Mike Hanson [MH] - I am from Mozilla labs, r&d arm. I'm a software engineer and architect, with a particular research interest in learning and identity systems. I spend a lot of time thinking about how we represent who we are online; how notions of the 'self' are communicated between and among websites. That's where my original interest comes from. I'm a software builder, working with a team of them.

Goal: I want to make sure the architecture we build reflects the architecture of the world we want. Since software can be hard to change once its out there, but fluid in conception.

Suzanne Walsh [SW] from the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation. The focus [of my team] is on developmental and remedial education- the intersection of K-12 and higher ed. What I love about this conversation is that I get to speak to both worlds -- a lot of times when in the higher ed space you can only talk to people in higher ed. What's nice about this is: we need to include folks who are often left behind - those with remedial needs. They don't get included in tech conversations.

Goal: I'd like to spend some time on this today. in the broader picture, we have interest at the foundation in tech.

An-Me Chung [AC] - I am with MacArthur. This is my third week at MacArthur... working with Connie and Craig in the digital media space. I have a lot to learn, so I feel privileged to be among this group of experts. Looking forward to really learning more about this area and figuring out what I can do. I was at the Mott? Foundation, working in the 'out of school time' space. Using that [space?] to be creative and innovative is something I believe in.

Goal: looking forward to learning something new; I am behind Bill in being tech savvy -- but my husband is very savvy. As long as he gets it ready and hands something to me, I'll use it.

Joshua Gay [JG] - just started working with p2pu and Moz. My background is community activism in FOSS and OE work. I spent the last few years at CK12. I also urn Textbook Revolution. I'm here today partly to see this discussion through the lens of assessment work (as per p2pu) and to discuss the work we're doing on badges

goals: figure what we need to do over the next few months to ensure we're communicating effectively with the broader community. figure out hooks and audiences we can reach.

Nathan James [NJ] - the organizer/producer of the drumbeat festival. with Mozilla, working on community. we're trying to provide an enabling space and environment so it’s great for me to pull my head out of planning and connect to your purpose and what you need there, and for you to know how to reach me.

[CC] - I am a VP at Carnegie and sr partner. One thing I wanted to add is: we are working to develop an R&D infrastructure around education... with an open data element, to find out how we use these colleges to get common data from them and share back; we will have more of a research enterprise (we should connect more with Mimi here).

[AL] - Work with digital youth networks in Chicago, working on digital literacy. we have an in school and out of school component, and a recent initiative with the chi pl (youmedia?) with a 5k sq ft space in the main branch library where any teenage youth from around the city can come engage in tech workshops, hang out, work on tech for their own projects, or with peers in open/free space just for teens. We are expanding that into 5 new neighborhoods this year, with news and media(?). It's exciting to think about, and makes this conversation more relevant to us as well. We're now using a social networking space for students to keep connecting to peers and mentors once they leave the workshop.

Goals: learning more about what everyone is doing.

Introduction

Mark - first an overview. Then 3 specific things we want to get done.

Overview

Is there a frame for this big group in the way SJ described, to have some staying power? We saw that by going around -- this group feels some affinity and wants to be connected, perhaps well beyond the next 3 hours. What connects us, what do we want out of it? Take what we did now (goals), and come back at the end to ask it again.

Let's do a landscaping exercise; what is the essence of this group? who do we bring in to welcome to the group? Who else to get?

Specifics

1) Let's look at some concrete things started at the first meeting (June). The charter there was: are there practical things at this intersection of LFW that show what we're talking about? Some of those have taken shape over the last couple of months. We want to report out and discuss questions to help those things advance.

2) What might this group do after this? We've mentioned Barcelona. We imagined in June we were starting a conversation arc. 2 upcoming events in BAR: Open Ed conference [traditionally higher ed, OER] and Mozilla's Drumbeat [LFW event, this idea of technologists and educators coming together] The latter is lead by Mozilla, with input from CC and others.

It was both chaotic and productive last time, so I expect it to be that way again.

(NB: add Creators to "technologists and educators!" -sj)

Lightning talks : 90m

Let's do quick overviews of specific projects.

1. Wikipedia PPI and other WP pieces
2. Backpack
3. Assessment (Backpack and P2PU)
4. Google Apps

Instructions: give a thumbnail as quickly as possible. Then we'll take 20 min for each one to talk in more detail on progress, come with a question for the group, help us move along in articulating what they're doing. We discussed badging and Reid's linkedin work; that could be a good focus to save for their arrival.

Let's go around with 1 minute for each project, then start with the first one in detail.

Thumbnails

Wikipedia Public Policy Initiative

http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Public_Policy_Initiative

SJ - This is a focused effort to see if we can coordinate formal academia to support development of free knowledge in one language, one topic area -- as something to build on. We started with public policy thanks to interest from a specific grantor, and because it was an area where WP material was weak.

 Q: What can other projects here learn from PPI?  From observing the development of the program online?   Are there things that P2PU and other groups could contribute directly to PPI's goals?  Can we start expanding the PPI model to other subject areas or fields?

Also, Wikiversity and Wikisource allow you to publish classroom materials directly (PPI is more about making the /outcomes/ of classes useful to the world via WP),

 Q: How can we make this ecosystem stronger, including P2PU, Wikieducator and others?

P2PU

PS - Part of this is related to the assessment piece.

The web has developed ways of assessing and contributing information. No one calls them 'learning assessment'. And there are people in learning research who know all about "learning assessment", but they don't scale online or aren't very good at assessing soft skills that are important today.

We want to put these two together, with people from those 2 worlds -- we hope they will have conversations to figure out how to bridge their work online in open learning communities: with scale and meaningful assessments.

We're piloting this with the "School of Webcraft" - this is why Josh is here. We want to develop this through Barcelona; and want to apply this to other fields, not just web dev (which is school of w.'s focus).

 Q: What other topics can we use to focus on this idea?  How can we bridge these communities?

Badges and backpacks

MS - We want to develop a way to let kids attach badges to digital identities. This is related to two things:

that the social web emerging is built on a set of identity protocols that allow you to control your id (yr social graph, &c)
that we want people to improve the way education actually works; combine our identity work with existing badging work (see assessment above) to give you a way to put those credentials in your digital pocket and take them from site to site.

If I started with badges from S. of Webcraft or Stackoverflow or LinkedIn [LI], I could take them to a job interview and present them there. We have some specific design questions to ask this group.

Google Apps

[OG] - [I'm so excited about the badge stuff.]

Google Apps have apis that let people build on top of them. people often ask how to integrate with Google... we have the G!apps marketplace, (with a certain focus on educational apps) -- we require single signon, but beyond that apps can choose what product they want to build on. It's been mainly used for productivity software.

Ex: Allowing an accounting app to appear in context in an email. The education team has focused on ed devs to draw them into the marketplace. 1-2 days ago, grokit launched: our first [ed app]! http://tweaklearning.wordpress.com/2008/09/11/grokit-social-learning-game/

Rather than G! responding to requests to do [xyz] we want to support an ecosystem that does that .

1. Wikipedia Public Policy Initiative

SJ - <brief overview, as above> Note: content in public policy isn't great, but there are models in chemistry and string theory where groups of grad students became great contributors to and reviewers of whole categories of articles.

Questions

Suz? - Are some classes saying "we will just publish things online" or are they editing directly in existing WP articles?

SJ - the final impact is in edits to WP articles. They may start by publishing things online in a chunk.

CW? - Have you thought about spinning this off, since ppi is the focus, where the student/teacher work is a mechanism for [say] purposeful legislation, such as the sunlight foundation and similar collaborations, as a mechanism for creating dialog concerning some issues?

SJ - Not specifically. Some classes considered that, but most of them are undergrads, and that's more of a grad level question. The Kennedy School is running one of the classes and may do a bit of that level of analysis.

Suzanne - it's interesting that you did this working with faculty, rather than students.

SJ - One of the ideas was to empower institutions to contribute to open education online through WP.

CC - how do you build a bridge b/t the assessments standard at higher ed institutions that expand into these new ways? It would be useful to have a rubric for assessment that the community creates - something that faculty buy into. It's squishy and the faculty buy into it. Something to learn from and to iterate on, for the next content domain or outcome.

One question is always the bridge b/t closed and open assessments(?) we tried to jump quickly to open texts and it didn't look like those texts that existed in the classroom. So a big initiative will be open and polished textbooks, so faculty members have no reason to say no. we haven't always built that bridge.

Suzanne - It's a step back in some ways, understanding why the students were so passionate (in chem and string theory) about their domain? For whatever reason the pub. policy types weren't that psyched.

One thing Hewlett talked about was how well math categories are covered in Wikipedia.

Mimi - they're geeks in part (the science / STEM editors), they know the wiki world. It's often the technical facility and geek identity that differentiates. So... what was the motivation for going to a formal classroom structure to build these communities?

SJ - Mainly demand. There was demand for years from classrooms trying to work with WP in the class. A project page on this has been well-honed; but it wasn't as specific or precise as PPI's direction and goals. Knowing there was that level of interest and success in a few cases -- for instance, a Murder, Madness and Mayhem course was quite successful and managed to get a number of Featured Articles written -- was a reason to think in terms of formal class structure again [and see whether a consortium of interested classes could be put together].

Mark - we've got some similar experience in throwing people into Mozilla (evaluations?) in the classroom. What is the relation to the stuff published on WP and the classroom work? Is the work parallel, or papers on subjects we'd like to have better [for reference]?

SJ - it's the real material of wikipedia.

Mark - do the profs have special background or cred in the wp community? (sj - no) We've had lots of experience with comm colleges that cathy works with. Every year they put a crop of students into Firefox development. The prof involved basically surrenders teaching, does a boot camp on working in Mozilla, and throws students at a bug for a semester. They get marked on soft skills of contributing and work on real bugs.

But he's a really experienced, respected FF contributor. His ability/understanding... we did something / I did / where we tried to scale this up. we tried to take it to other unis, with some modest success. But mostly b/c the profs didn't start out there -- and when we offered to help them understand how to do this, they weren't willing to... there was nothing in it for them to take that cultural journey. especially if they were university professors.

So: would you get a different result with profs who are respected WP contributors? combining the incentive of credit with the community? infrastructure:: having super motivated students in capstone projects/. We threw our students into the IRC channel, so they both had support from college profs and were self directed. Maybe there's a way to give [the PPI students] a different support system than the formal classroom that could be more interest driven.

Suzanne - the other challenge you have is taking pedagogy that isn't great to begin with, and trying to put that online... we often see that when people say 'online isn't great'.. if you take a poor class and throw it online, [its not great]. You don't know whether it was a fabulous instructor to begin with. So there's much more that has to go into engaging the students... If they aren't already super excited to work on this project. Look for where the next bubble-up of interest from students might be. Maybe build off of the Murder Madness and Mayhem work.

Mimi - Can you develop the ecosystem of credit and achievement within the ecosystem of editing wp? You've done well on the ecosystem for interest-driven participation. A gap elsewhere from lack of tech literacy, or certain support mechanisms... if you start introducing -- experimenting with a new incentive mechanism, say hybrids of financial and other...

<discussion about ways this could backfire>

It's not like financial incentives make Open Source [communities] fail. You diversify the structure for participation. That's the variable you are tinkering with here. Play with and get specific about the variable you are playing with. It's new... if you get course credit for WP edits, what does that do to the ecosystem? I think that's interesting from an ed. perspective. Does that incentivize production of new forms of knowledge?

Then you can consider other things... that could get at broader systemic issues Wikimedia is struggling with: different points of entry for editors, diversifying the community. Then you could imagine that, if you find it works, implementing it in multiple ways within classrooms. And within certain forms of quasi-formal systems... you could imagine it happening in a commercial context... A company might have an investment in a certain content area. Part of your contribution as an employee (could be this) as well.

Wikimedia has been fantastic with intrinsic motivation, and has avoid that extrinsic motivation structure to some extent.

Miguel - I would be careful about crowding out intrinsic with extrinsic ones. you don't want people to expect contributing to be tied to getting a grade. Mimi - thats an empirical question. in studying these stems, crowding out only applies in specific forms of participation. (note that motivation is sometimes less afterwards) in open incentive structure we haven't seen this yet.

SJ - note that we don't consider this [PPI] to be primarily focused on extrinsic motivation.

Mike - right, but for a sophomore who just signed up and has to edit an article to get a good grade, their motivation might be different.

Mike - Wikipedians came up with barnstars. for people within that reputation community, that's important. I think that some of the chem students were brought into that in a way that PPI students are not.. As we talk about badging and reputation tokens, the experience of the WP community with barnstars (icons, tokens, achievement badges) is an interesting grassroots reputation system to consider. So are user boxes, as self-identified badges...

(sj - note that some WPans are 'anti-barnstar'. and there was a big userbox war where some people really pressed to prevent anyone from using user boxes -- since we weren't supposed to be involved in the project for that sort of [self-decoration] )

Nathan - I'm very surprised that Public Policy was the focus of this. Science articles have facts. [PP is analysis and debate.] It will be interesting to see how the outcome fit into the value set of what makes a good wp article.

Suzanne - A timing question. Is there any issue about how long it take for articles to be published? does that have an effect on this group? when the chem groups got together was it immediately published or did they have to wait?

SJ - It was immediately published for the chemistry editors, as it will be for PPI (though some classes may develop material offline as well? different from class to class)

Philipp - I taught a class about wikis and as part of it students had to edit WP articles. I didn't want them to vandalize WP... (thanks...) I wanted to teach them quality control mechanisms. Vandalism is actually great to see that in action. They all tried to make improvements. It was interesting to see that this worked as an incentive for almost everyone and they could choose their own topics. they were completely different - not just the geeks in traditional areas. there is something around the structure in which you make the edit that is like a game...

P2PU

Philipp

This will be more free-flowing. A lot of the stuff directly connects into the assessment question. how do communities assess things that its members do to achieve some agreed upon goal.

Robert may speak more about badge infra, I know a lot of that feeds into assessment. I'm thinking about the immediate feedback, success/failure - you can see immediately if people kept or changed edits (in my class example above editing WP). Only a few edits made it over the long term. And the students did find and correct errors, which was awesome. The feeling that I've contributed to this [lasting thing]...

I'll throw out a few questions and areas we will think about Mon/Tue (on assessment).

Mon/Tue assessment meeting

This will be 20 people, a # growing as we come closer, from learning assessment or geek world, working on:

WP article quality (how do you calculate trust in part of a wp article) -- highlighting parts you can trust more, because it’s been there longer, people who looked at it and didn't edit have a reputation. a complicated/beautiful system -- those people are coming (WikiTrust).
people who have studied OS dev communities, looking at source code repos as a place you can asses. (using Mondrian, a G! project?).
Mechanical Turk groups, intermediating a question from the crowd sourcing and collecting responses.

we'll discuss what tools/techniques people are using already. ideally we will build out prototypes in those 2 days.

Questions on traditional roles & P2PU

1) The community was defined by the academy. you entered the academy, were allowed to join the community. now we're seeing in many areas you can do that without an academy. What are some of those areas? The processes of helping people enter those communities? the assessment communities there?

2) The system today: rubrics, who defines them? The community above, or the academy (which is otherwise part of the community)? there's sometimes now a disconnect b/t the two. web dev education is a good example. Unis are bad at teaching it. Better to join an open web or a public project like Stackoverflow, ask questions of Open Source projects.

3) what's the right unit of assessment? We have courses... we have 'hours on seats'.... There's some value for the 'course' idea but also in breaking things down into challenges. Someone has a vision that all learning would be problem based. You as an instructor would phrase the problem and help people work on it.

I talked to Joi about his diving obsession. He whipped out all of his cards. "I can get them in one day!" He's studying to be a dive instructor in the car. I'd like to hear riffing on this if it resonates with anyone's work.

CW - does openness run into tension with the extrinsic/intrinsic issue? Using Patty as an example: using a Joi comment. if you get a certain level of skill in diving, you get an immediate profitability from that if you want to market that skill. Is this mainly extrinsic, or is it both?

PS - you can't distinguish, in general. You could get a badge for the goal, and that might have extrinsic value, but you're really trying to solve a problem [or complete a set! --sj.]

There seem to be two kinds of skills. One is, how does a regulator work? The other is, you're 20 meters down and your regulator starts to fail. How do you deal with that? That's a soft skill. There's immediate extrinsic value in that you'll survive if you learn it... for me the two are very linked (when it's a skill set you need). The most interesting cases are ones where you combine the two.

The things we're trying to badge need to have an extrinsic component so that you can get a job.

MS - when you talk about assessment it's interesting that the word 'psychometrics' did not come up. when you build an assessment, they are generally expensive in education to test whether the test is measuring what it's supposed to measure, and to have a sense of the quality of each question. You want a small # of question items while measuring important skills. What about that piece that ETS and other companies work around?

PS - I hope a lot of that will go away. Turning that around... one of the problems with assessment is it is really hard to do [that] if you look at assessment. separately from the activity that is the starting point. Someone has to learn something, and you want to assess it through a test [in a blank room]. Ex: You learn French and then do a multiple choice test... little to do with learning or competency.

MI - I think the point of this model is to kill the psychometric model.

MS - It seems a risky bet.

MH - it's certainly a gamble that will make you a target. There were games in the 90s doing language arts and math with assessment. built into the game. Kids would play and you'd get a report out saying where he is and what he needs help with. It was how they progressed through the learning process, not an encapsulated ass by a psychometrician after the fact.

JG - One thing that's exciting about exploring the granularity level of where assessment. is done is it lets us think in other ed terms such as redirecting the learner. "Here's a set of badges"... if you are failing down one path but not another, being able to redirect energy somewhere that has another badge and come back later, can be helpful.

CC - It's also about differentiating assessment for each learner. If you don't fit one teacher's repertoire of skills (with 'bored' on the high end and 'lost' on the other and a cluster in the middle that is called 'on target'...) -- You lose a lot of people. We're providing an alternate pathway or timescale, which you can accelerate or decelerate for a fit (with your life).

Mimi - some of the more interesting empirical work coming out is that learner choice and autonomy is one of the fundamental drivers for efficacy that sticks with a learner over a long period of time. An ecology of lairing choice improves learning and attention and the ability to progress to other tests. [as opposed to a 'coercive and standardized' environment)

In terms of ecosystems and open principles, one is the P. of Choice. Another is meta-assessment: how do you verify that an assessment is valuable? you can't? replicate the traditional model, but you have a community. How do the assessments reflect what the community needs? you need to be open to constantly revisiting what they look like. The skills baseline changes rapidly in something like web dev. There has to be some ongoing work.

With PADI for instance -- it's a stable set of skills that has been developed over a long period of time. If you can say there's an advanced instructor who knows nothing and has killed 2 students.. there is a problem that has been? can be? identified by the students. there has to be some mechanism of evaluating the ass in practice.

MS - Is that in the design of the 2 days, discussing assessment?

PS - the idea I have in mind is not technological, it is the guilds. they know what competencies you need to be a member of a guild. you need some structure that is steady over time, since you can't change everything, but you have to change many things. One of the aspects of community assessments is this change.

CC - Is the employer an? the? assessor?

(NB - I didn't really hear this question answered -sj )

PS - At first we used Mike's brilliant idea of looking at LI for what some web devs say about other web devs. I would say what are the most important things for a friend of mine for things that count in my community of web devs.

We compared this to job posting. For web devs we found high levels of overlap. The good employers are asking for the right skills... but going back to formal ed: what they are asking for are not reflected in the degrees. Degrees don't say about your ability to participate in an open source environment.

MS - Are the job postings asking for formal degrees? Yes, but as a rough proxy for other things.

Robert - one model we're encouraging on the iRemix platform is: some metrics we gather are feedback - youth critiquing others work. as they graduate and get badges and learn, part of the role to move up is mentoring and critiquing their peers, people trailing [or exceeding?] them and looking to them as future role models and mentors. Particularly in portfolio/media artifact creation, those things are changing over time.

PS - Also some are me watching a colleague work, not assessing but watching that process - much of that (process) is locked away in most education.

SJ - It may be good to differentiate b/t crisp and subjective assessments. (Crisp assessments are quantitative, such as 'has eaten 50 hotdogs in half an hour'. Subjective ones may change over time, such as "Master hotdog eater" (by this year's standards). for crisp assessments, you don't care so much about the ability of the assessors to synthesize a meaningful assessment)

RC - AL can speak to some of what you're saying. For instance one of the badges is you have to create two 4-star videos. you have some explicit measure (from others)... there is guidance around what some of the rubrics are.

Suz - I'd put a challenge out there. Another thing employers ask (from my former life on a workforce investment board) is: that a person can synthesize information. not only making things but synth'ing information... that isn't always a tangible making-things quality. how do you capture and assess for critical thinking. [or showing up on time] [or knowing how to dress] It didn't matter, whether in manufacturing or engineering.

Figuring out how you assess collaboration also -- knowing to work on a team - those basic things you are presumed to get in a liberal arts institution are important things. We talk about them in k-12 and higher ed.

( showing up on time every day is a crisp measure! -sj )

PS - critical thinking I’d love help with. teamwork you can see a bit in s. of webcraft.

RC - Not only rubrics, but also roles for projects -- in some cases, Mike (e.g.) serves all roles, but when collabing with others you post who had a specific role, with some measures around collaboration and the various roles you've played. [again, 'roles played' is fairly crisp - though what a role title means changed from project to project]

Other skills related to communication are interesting; of course you have to create something to communicate about it.

DEEP DIVE BREAK

Others join: Joi (Stealth Disco) and Grant (Joi's dive instructor) and Michelle (CC) and Reid (LinkedIn) join.

[ [ Lightning Round 2, next steps ] ]

3. Backpacking

MS - Here's the sheet we wrote up... we may not call it a backpack -- but a place to put badges you (receive) [a bandoleer! -sj]

We decided after the last meeting in June, that here are ways to take Moz id technology, what iRemix is doing with badges, P2PU needs, and build a user-controlled system for this. We've brought Joshua on to herd cats and develop a framework for this.

CC - Process q. we have reid and joi; for how long? an hour / :30

Prepared poster of notes

Backpack

Idea: A way to attach your badges/credits to your digital id

--> Portable, user control, any badge, many places

Success:

 6 mos - vision, api, alpha
 18 mos - everyone on p2pu and iremix and at least 5 other partners use badges
 People get why this matters
 Learners value this, getting jobs, using in mainstream commerce?

Progress: whiteboard --> concept, staff, snowball?

Question today: learners and educators --->

Barcelona: demo and test.

(JG reviews the poster below, under LIGHTNING OVERVIEW)

General comments

Joi - This ties to this morning's conversation with PS about P2PU and a conversation we had yesterday related to gaming as well. There are a bunch of reasons I'm doing PADI. instruction is fun. getting a badge is fun. displaying it is interesting. but also what do badges give you access to? PADI has a relation with the Am. Heart Assoc;, so when AHA upgrades a protocol that changes a PADI instruction. so I can go get prescription 100% O2 b/c I have this accreditation.

PADI interoperates with a lot o f institutions that can give out access to various things; PADI is a hub for distributing that and providing keys into other groups; also with crossfeeding.

National Geo. is doing a PADI event, trying to make more diver explorers. Grant calls it 'handoff'.

For instance, at P2PU: once you know (c) and license issues, are they a p2pu student, a cc? student... the point of a uni is often to graduate from a uni. f or an informal learning environment its' about gathering what you need.

Tying this to Reid: one of the main objectives is for informal learners to get enough to get a job. If LI allows you to search by badge for people cert'ed by Mozilla to be HTML level 2 and cert Dive instructors...

Reid- that part we don't have; the other part we mostly do

Joi - the pieces are institutional interoperability, and the component of testing. As a user I might want to associate with p2pu, another user might be a CC user but need to get the O2 [access] to teach in a hospital. That feel and interoperability ties to tech interop issues a bit. Letting it go into LI to have enough security that LI knows (to some degree of precision) that a certain PI provides a certain level of [guarantee.]

MS - one design goal of our experiment is: nobody [controls]? the user. At Mozilla, we want to let you hold lots of your own data, and decide what to open to twitter of or facebook. we want to see how to add learning into that concept frame. Can I acquire that piece from cc or p2pu, then display it on various sites?

Mike - right now if you engage in informal learning that leads to accreditation, there's no way to move that around the internet. There are some projects that provide recognition, but there's no standard way to share it to another site and say 'heres how I verify [this badge]'.

It would be good to get far enough to identify how these badges are associated with a digital id. We don't want to assert what that ID is, everyone has a different notion. Professionals often care about the LI page. [Others: open id, facebook page, wp page] LI lets you associate a dozen email addresses with one id. It's hip to that fact. Not a great system for K-12 students today, legally tricky for a kid under 13 to represent anything about id online at all.

Ex: QUORA encourages a certain kind of identity. When I post in one topic I identify as a Mozilla engineer with 10 yrs experience with X protocols. When I post in the cooking topic I identify as someone who cares about cooking and has lots of cookbooks

Reid - thinking: where is proof important, where not [where is self-id important?]

Mike: ex: verification of where people went to school... if p2pu grants badges tomorrow to put on your profile, there's no way to verify that.

Mimi - and warcraft achievements you may or may not want on your page. [why ever not? :) -sj]

MS - I may want warcraft badges on both facebook and linkedin identity, or not.

Mike - having one 'true' id that holds all assertions leads to some problems in practice.

Reid - basically, where verification matters is where something important rides on it. professionally, there's economics. can I give you a job, will I interview you, etc. one thing is: I don't think --- Mike may be trying to solve this but I would fear this prob -- the universal validation of this. difficult to make it work [everywhere]. simplifying it tho where provability is important may be helpful.

I'm not sure that outside of game context provability is important. don't mean that to fight... just conceptually.

MS - rolled up in this is how do we make this easy to distribute and share, more than easy to prove.

Mike - examples are companies or unis that go out of business... another is boy/girlscouts badges. If you get such a badge it is generally understood that you had an assessment, though what that means is only assumed. [or even the fact that a troop leader gave it to you rather than the badge being bought or found]

Suz - in ed we refer to the 'worth' of a degree as the quality of the ed. the diff between the name of a degree and what it really represents.

Lightning overview

I want to raise this to a higher abstraction, rather than a specific tech discussion. Let's focus for a bit on:

Use cases: What are the situations where the fact that you have a badge is really important.

How do we think of these cases -- are they 'degrees' or things we generally post publicly? since we started this find grained discussion, is this also for the grade you get in a class? If you have a math degree from a recognized institution, an d you start collecting lots of low-level math badges... that leaves q's in people's minds. do we want to expose everything? [do they?] how do we want to let people frame their badges, make them searchable? There are tech and practical social components to this.

[recaps the 6 mo and 18 mo goals, above]

For p2pu this will form the heart of assessment. The heart of a learning and assessment model. can we find other examples in and outside of the heart of [traditional] education - where the community becomes meaningful, with economic and social / other extrinsic motivation?

One thing that really matters: making sure that people, projects, and the broad web understand why this is important (as a standard).
At the level of the [multiple] id issue, badging and assessment and accred : how is this a disruptive technology? We want this on their radar.
Another thing: how do we get buyin from users? It needs to be important to them.

I'd like to hear for the broad populace that could use badges, and you as individual learners: what are the broad hooks that excite you, and the internal and extrinsic motivations - what they could be, what some barriers are [naming it a 'backpack', &c]

Joi - I have 371 WOW badges. Also, I'm getting a PADI card for Oxygen expert. And there's a meta achievement once I have all related certs.

If you look at my WOW page if you hit 'exploration' it shows you the tree structure. XBOX live and other things lets you stream badges to friends - - Rupture guys and others work on this: what lvl of granularity is important for what? You want immediate rewards; getting things in the first 5 minutes to unlock little things. looking at a 370-badge profile you want to see high level ones first.

See _The Art of Game Design_ on the thy and practice of getting people engaged to want to do these badges, and engaged to look at them.

JG - in Martial Arts you have colored belts and stripes. In the military you have major rank and pips. One thing SJ brought up the other day is -- you want people to say "there's a badge for that". the ability to give out badges, to [instantiate?] a group... some are badges placed on top of badges -- visual analogies as well as real ex's. That's part of what we want to explore, to find out not just if things are meaningful, but how you can use them as a communication tool.

RC - what's in place now is: you can earn a badge at the Am Mus of Nat History and the At Institute, combining into an overall meta-badge. And a concept of learning trajectories: you can earn these, you see them and others see the end of the arc, the skill/concept you've learned.

Grant - practically I do some legal things. The validation model is a big issue. If I want a neurovascular surgeon, I want 100% validity. If it's a crocheting badge... less important unless I'm a crochet geek. [Hey! ravelry has 300k users... - mike]

And you don't want people impersonating or lying. some cool things: talking about a central receptacle where this would play across all platforms. that's not user dependent... validated independently... gets into a bucket or backpack. from a medical model, you have some med things that are HIPA? and privacy related: very important to make sure people have to click and dictate what others get to see. It can't accidentally end up on another site somehow.

Reid - I don't know if this will be helpful, but: I see this as app/platform: the problem with just plat is, without a killer app it won't work. Design forever and it's gone. Get that app... hence the context discussion of what people use this for matters. [get the engagement at the app level] Even in the military/kungfu contexts, humans are [navigating] the badge process themselves. So if you build the platform you also need to know how the app will happen.

JG - that's why the 5-7 [initial] real using communities are going to be important

Reid - if you're doing an application discussion, focus on the parts that make them work or not: q's about how to build successful consumer internet companies -- a hard and limited skillset.

MS - one thing we're doing at this baby stage: moz is doing some platform work, from the identity side= you'll know, connecting to two nascent off-radar platforms (p2pu, iremix) would you play with some more mainstream apps from the beginning, or stay with off-radar instances, real apps that aren't in the shining light, while figuring out design q's.

Question: if you do something bigger, does something at a nascent platform level even attractive to a mature network?

Reid - from my zone of pro expertise, which may not be applicable here, always go to the killer app, the biggest platform. Relevancy is only there. I could see all kinds of way to misdesign without doing that. The key issue is that ecosystem of adoption. that's always where I steer.

A key Q is then: which apps will actually adopt, and why will there be an interchange b/t them? how does that work?

I'm still trying to digest how to be helpful [here]. happy to share anything not confidential from LI's perspective. Our default path is to solve the professional case, the whole stack down, creating APIs to interact with us. we've done it with SAP cert. that's where we prototype. it was easy to start... if we were presented with a platform, for us the q is how does that make our life easier?

( Q for Reid, unasked: why start with SAP? )

MS - in that case, if I have my SAP cert on LI: can I take that directly from LI to share it on my blog? or take it to facebook?

Reid - no objection to building being the intermediate cert, but don't have it yet. Our commercial goal is to manage the info here, but for the same reason we enable public profiles, the fact that you want to share this elsewhere is something we want to facilitate. The work order to make that happen everywhere is high.

Bill - We're approaching this from another angle. CAEL- the adult and experiential learning group. It helps you collect credits from many sources to get a degree. to get a virtual assessment program to create [synthetic] credentials.

This is somewhere in the middle of crocheting badges and neuroscience. If I have a BA I can make a lot of money; if I have the same # f credits but no BA I might not. So we see the positive side there. The negative side: things like 'Race to the Top' - you have databases that will be created following a child from the start of school to when they finish. pre-k to 20. there are all sorts of privacy issues here.

I have a 6th grader, and did not do well in math last year. she's sure it is on her permanent record and she will have... we know that it was not on their record when we grew up. this goes back to what you can present. In Higher Ed... When people assess quality they want to know that someone flunked all courses in med school but calls himself a doctor. You can see the concerns.

What is the right of the consumer to know what you've done or not? know that they've had a foreclosure? or were used or broke the law?

( That's two different sets of issues... -sj )

CC - one thing you said was getting back to the learner. we want to create parallel paths. we don't want to solve for a student who'se collected from lots of colleges per se - that might be hard to win right now. Demos that are important are those close enough to the edge but not caught yet in the [barriers?] of current structure. The path that so many people walk... people who sit on that boundary... R1s go to elite colleges (only 10%) and 47% go to community colleges, many have partial degrees and work experience.

How do we prove their proficiencies?

If that's the target, then you have a quick tail: early adopters; people sitting around this table. That's not going to hit the populace. When you talk about how you inform the community, who we engage -- there;s' a bubble that isn't being served well at all..

Suz - I agree with cathy: that's one idea. Another thing to think about: there's a place in NYS called Excelsior College. It started out for returning military folks 50 yrs ago. The idea was they had lots of life experience, have many different transcripts. they are the kind of people you are looking for. They need something that travels with them. Right now I have to pay every time I need my transcript.

( you can't just copy it once you get it? is it paying for a P2P 'certification' by phone? -sj )

Suz - I want to own my learnings and bring it with me. Look also at charter schools that understand students are mobile, learning from multiple places. I have a question about what isn't being covered now - not harvard or sap, but things that are more on the current fringe; things the current system can't prove.

Joi - You find people in the military and the language of site design to teach people what to do next. Not an absolute psych? but building to a cultural norm that exists in a certain group of people.

Grant - you asked about 'carrots' -- diving may have a dilution of titles; some areas have too many, five where you only need one. Some titles have no meaning to others, but early achievement in the gaming side helps. Achievement for its own sake will be important. also for lifetime learning, a generalist that has experience all over - they have no way to gain a phd.

I'm one of those people btw.w I would love this - there's a lot of us out there who are the Google-hunting types who can pull literature... not just net savvy people who pick up the phone an talk to researchers... not to diminish a phd! but it would be a long time to get to where we're already at through the formal phd process.

It's mainly getting the word out to those potential users -- you'd get a lot of users who have you no clue about [today]. Tying to a legitimate validated degree, to be able to do research and get published, is huge. I know a whole bunch of people like that in my life.

Mimi - to get back to MS's question about the sweet spot for the market opps : I think it's really interesting to get a range of what diff market gaps are in the formal and innovative space. there are a lot of orgs who can really [cover] some domains - PADI and gaming have robust existing systems. You don't need to deliver on that, you can learn from those instead. What's the difference between systems you're learning from and systems you're trying to deliver for? Separate why you are bringing people to the table.

LI is highly successful for certain forms of professional credit that are visible. you're not competing with them, you're learning from them [and collaborating with them! if they use these standards] You don't want to build a killer app on the LI model, but find the key piece of interoperability to drive behavioral engagement.

What achievement does this unlock? The carrot question: what gates do you unlock? You need the assessment piece and the goodies piece . The latter are partners you are going to work with rather than learn from.

Joi - [on achievements unlocked] It's called "root"

Grant - if you're going to do 'human performance' you have to create a [credible] degree. How do you create that?

Mimi - you don't want to compete with the phd-granting institutions. you're not trying to create your own neurosurgeon. What is amenable to a more open space of accreditation? what's a rapidly evolving set of things?

MS - there are two questions: can we help you gather up your current 'loot' of badges, and then can we help you get new ones?

Mike - LI will always be a curated channel for this... I'm not sure that LI would make the shift to go open.

( Joi exits stage right, after sharing two orgs to potentially rope into the discussion )

Reid - Well, quasi open at least. we think about natural governance: the challenge would be a person who wants to put Bugs Bunny U. If that shows the individual is someone you should stay away from, we'd be good with it. If it cast doubt on the overall brand of the system we'd block it. So inclination is towards openness. Only curated blocking if it casts doubt on the system.

Mike - second, once you reach the end of the process you want to convince someone of a fact. But there is also in-process value : to contextualize learning, to guide people as they navigate: If there's a way for the string theory page to know that you completed 7th grade math... then it's not impossible for the system to guide you towards a different page (when you want to edit).

Michelle - back to 'what does this unlock?' - is a Q about why people use LI. it's not just that they want another social media platform, they want to get a job. You may want to find an employer / target group interested in playing with this idea for their own use. [Reid - sometimes getting 'just one' isn't the right solution]

RC? - sometimes you want to get George Lucas to look at your work to bring you to the next level, but you need other badges to get you to the level [where they'd spend time doing that?]

There's also the Homago?? model -- the messing around, geeking out session. You don't always use badges to 'get to the end' but also to help people reflect on where they are spending their time.

JG - how much time do we want to focus on projects that assign badges to things? Here I am, someone who goes around to work with lifelong learners, check that they took a course, and give them badges?

That would shift the model a bit. We're talking about people who create their own badge-giving processes... do we want to reach out to workshop/institute places? or have a separate project that gives out badges? can we create these other sources of badges?

RM - and is it possible to let people create their own badges from public information databases?

CC - are we trying to reinforce the current higher ed system by stitching together what is broken? for now: no. And yet, the higher ed system is dying as it is now, and the q is what will happen. the q is also: how do we help transition? improve? create parallel tracks? not lose people involved? invest in the current system b/c you have to.

Mimi - I feel we're disaggregating where the learning is happening from the institution. don't have the [badges] pwned by current degree-granting institutions. that's not what you want to come out of the gate with. be agnostic about /where/ people get learning. you may still need orgs to run assessment, but you don't want this to be whether or not you finished a course at uni X, but whether you can do X.

MS - specifically to Joshua's question, we're working in market apps where we can demonstrate both the market and the app. these will come with app.s it's not our job to figure out what those are. maybe there's a gap in skill around motorcycle maintenance. I do know that employers are confused about web dev skills, and there are no real 'credits' or quick ways looking through 500 resumes to find out (as a clueless hr person ) to filter on any accreditation. we're going after a specific thing we see in the market (as a demo).

[cf Dmail network??]

If Mozilla is successful in identity plays and other experiments, that could snowball. we have to be realistic about how tiny and small our current work is ... but there's potential in our questions.

Reid - one project that's funded within linkedin is: a global skills ontology. we're generating a whole skills thing. come over and I'll show it to you. I'm happy to show it to you - it's universal.

MS - you'd be willing to share that for design work? Reid - we'll launch it as a product soon, it will be out there. public taxonomy. This is where we care more about contribution than ownership. so maybe not IP. I have a lot of influence on the decision.

SJ - what would it take for LI to share badge-like information with a fledgling spec for us to use in terms of loot gathering?

Reid - write me an email. I'll have to think about it, and think through strategic considerations my staff might have, but want to consider the reasons.

Obie - this was fascinating. from my Youtube days, we had people ask, I've watched this full course, but where does it fit into my resume... can I get credit for this? So this is fascinating. There are obvious interesting problems in verification, but I love it. Along the way people asked what sorts of employers might be interested.

I saw a talk by the CEO of Zoho, who intentionally doesn't look for college gads and trains people on the job. think I have his job somewhere. (Reid - you can find him on linked in too)

Check out the marketplace -- and how it could integrate with the apps we have . I'll hook you p with or dev advocate with ed partners. This could be a good place to connect. [8M k-12 and higher ed 'customers'] (could this person or someone else come to a future event?)

It might be interest ing to diffuse some of the elements of the meeting today inc luding in granular detail to partners we don't know / don't have today.

Craig - something that Mimi said struck me too - do we need to crystallize our aspiration now / on the frontend? traditionally we've done this through the things we're supporting, including iremix and P2PU's webcraft. would that be useful to define a bit more of what we think this system would look like, and have a theory of diffusion for parts of webcraft to have a happy home in other ecologies quickly? Strategically we think about this: we're suporting this and [want to see them reused?] I have a lot of questions about Barcelona, but will have to follow up.

Reid - Bing Gordon, an EA founder and a Kleiner partner, has a presentation he gives of "The videofication of education" which I recommend.

( Reid exits stage right )

MS - We'll take a quick break. For the last session, think of three words that would represent what is in common about this group; to find others to engage. Who else out there fits with that gestalt? • On one piece of paper, please write down your words • On another write down the organizations [that we should engage], and throw them up against this wall.

CC - also the gaps? people who don't look like us? [sj - yes]

Orgs and people to engage

Mimi - Differentiate the constituents/users, partners doing pieces of the work, strategic partnerships with folks who don't share the vision.

CC - focus on pods for size: 20 person limit for being effective. [today it was a great conversation; adding new people changes that]

--> how many pods can we facilitate at once?

Identify why people are here / would be in Barcelona.

NJ - there's local organization in Barcelona as well

MS - if we're lucky the day after, there would be something with kids in that neighborhood... perhaps work with local groups, and people from Macarthur's network, to do some programming taking these ideas from the event with local orgs [on the Saturday]. Note that the person leading this quit to take a new job, so it may not happen this way.

Discussion split up a bit

General outreach needed (countering current biases):

+ Younger people.  
   = Ideas - TakingIT Global, National WP chapters.  International school networks:  UWC? (Masstricht, Nordic, Adriatic)
+ Focus on countries other than US/Spain
   = Ideas - any specific groups from Asia & Africa?

Lists of orgs and people

Gaming, "Achievement" makers

 Sean Fanning
 Game design... people working on that space, on product design.  
 Rupture (Joi's comment)
 Valve
 XBox Live Arcade
 Kongregate

Identity

 BC Provisional Government.    
 Joseph Smarr - Plaxo, G! OpenID
 LinkedIn rep? (who else like this?)

Young makers:

 Newgrounds users  
 Blippy users 
 YouTube Makeup Girls

Events and contests

 National Novel Writing Month

Makers, writers, publishers:

 Sal Khan
 Benjamin Crowell 
 Tim O'Reilly

Assessors / accreditors:

 ETS (Ric hRoberts)
 Interim accreditation authorities?  [ones that work with JC's &c to improve]
 PADI -- Drew Ridge (exec and has a degree in ed).   
 Deborah Meier - Small School movement & assessment : disrupting v. working through ed movement

Global South motivation:

 Grameen Dev group,

Educator communities

 Elena Silva 
 Excelsior College, Western Governor
 Ed Ministry futurists?  (diff countries.  names needed.)
 Institute of Competitive Workforce (Karen ? and member)
 Katie Salen (IOP)
 Milton Chen (Edutopia)
 Thomas Sergio - building community in schools.  Houston Principal Center

Libraries, A2K

 Heather Weiss (Harvard Eqity? Research Project)
 Sunlight Foundation: ?
 IFLA representative

Gov't certificaion

 FAA
 FCC

Design for youth & education

  Walter Bender (Sugarlabs)
  Leslie Hawthorn - GHOP

Peter McWalters (State gov't in RI) Ariel Hauter -- Hollywood Hill Michael Horn?

Other regions:

 Representatives from: Africa, SE Asia (problem: expense)
 By country in Europe --

Descriptors / words

Educators.  Curation.  Informal learning. 
Engaging/Motivation.  Youth-driven.  Interest-driven
Audacious.  Disruptive.
Boundary dwellers.  Connectors.  Movers & Shakers.
Tinkers.  Collaboration/Facilitation.
Transferable.

Wrapup session

Question: Would you come back? What do you want us to talk about if we were to meet again in jan/feb?

Mimi: I would. I want clarity on what we're discussing. Do we have a set of shred principles we're talking about? Early on you need to be more random about it, but we want to have that conversation.

Mark: I would come to a conversation about what is the "It".

Heidi: I would surely, I love learning everything [about this] thanks to Cathy. I would like a clear [list of] next discussion items. To help things move along, that would be very helpful.

Philipp: I would come back of course - but a lot of people on this table I work with directly on projects that feeds into the bigger conversation. I wonder if instead of /on it/ having these meetings s things develop, we could have a whole day.

CC - the next one could be a day and a half, less frequently.

(Mimi - or a meta-meeting that is more diverse, with smaller working meetings.)

Bill - I have to justify my engagement, but today was great - I learned a lot about what this [type of] group is doing.

Miguel - for me this was not so well defined. A big thing was the badge system. If that's the 'it' a smaller group may make sense. I'm interested in what we can get for education for free - we didn't touch on this here today. I'd like to see that be a working group, and for us to focus on higher order things.

RM - I’d love to come back. I get a perverse / admirable! joy in fixing ed systems.

SJ : right now we're focusing on specific projects to get something practical out there for discussion. I am sometimes wary of meetings that exclude. I'd love to see or immediate follow up being defining next steps that each project would take based on our discussion today, so that we can reflect in a month or two whether this matches what we personally want to support @ a future meeting. And I'd like to meet for a meta meeting about "what an ideal environment for learning on the web" is, something we can all support (the 5-second, 30-second, and 5 minute definition)

Mike - my brain has shifted into its concertizing mode - my engineer brain. I have more questions than I did this morning. How do we /produce/ this? the web encodes a series of constraints as well as possibilities. we haven't gotten to the point of saying 'this set of constraints is holding us back and needs to be changed' rather than describing how we could work within the constraints we know to get what we want. I'm thinking of the practical constraints of building a digital backpack in a scalable, way, all the frictional costs associated with running the server, getting a cert, etc. Some of these things cost a lot of money... I would come back, but am having a baby on Oct 24 and won't be in Barcelona!

Suz - I would, but would like the intro part of the meeting to be an update on where everyone is. Then: let's solve one problem for the day. Maybe it would use one of the projects we're working on. Maybe throw out a current problem and say we'll use the backpack to solve it and spend a whole day doing that. [sj - sounds like a great smaller-group task?] we didn't put a specific problem out to solve and cam eat them from many angles. any one of these ideas could help us solve any number of problems... exciting and would get a lot of us to come back.

Also getting an update... I don't want to let that (interest) go. This continues to be relevant to our next-gen learning challenge work (at BMGF); I would come back scouting for new ideas.

[NJ - you should come to the festival for ideas! one of the values of that is we're asking people to come with specific problems and have the attendees work on them, solve them, with their unique perspective. Suz - <checks cal> speaking on Nov 4, alas...]

Michelle - I think, maybe a hybrid of suz/mimi/sj ideas: have everyone fine tune their question set, use Bar to solve those questions, have another meeting for the meta discussion a lot of people would value.

An-Me - I feel you all held this meeting just for me. It gave me a great sense of what everyone is good at, and can do. To echo what a lot of people are saying: whatever comes out of this in terms of various projects, I am thinking about the theory of change we talked about. What does this mean? To help us reach Macarthur's theory of change: how are we going to reach the lives of these kids? I don't know that we got there [today] but this is the Macarthur frame.

Secondly I want us to talk about limitations. We didn't talk about it much - like what Mike alluded to - what can we actually do with this, what realistic outcomes can we expect... what are some limitations and opportunities to scale? Part of what I'll be doing is thinking about that aspect. I'd like more of "what does it mean to do this or that project?" and what is the reality of what will happen b/c of [X,Y,Z] and what can't we do regardless of interest/technology in the room?

Josh - I would come even if it was mainly like this again. With the same format, people, a diff set of things to discuss. My role right now is built around applied ethnography. Get stories and know how to follow up on that: whether this is building tech and creating new discussions and so forth. That is of great value to me! On the other hand, the format of conversation today, even just simply categorizing things -- every time I had a follow up. I'd love to have an intranet/wiki where we're going to put these categories as they are forming. And when we want to jot down a note to reply/share an idea with a person, or follow up with a question, it's more conducive to how we're organizing note taking, so that we can follow right up.

I'm going to go work another 8 hours today. [when I come out here I'm all energized!] and want a place to put those notes.

[Q: do we have a place for that? A: use the Mozilla wiki page where we posted notes last time!]

Nathan - If you can't come to events in Bar, you have colleagues who can; anyone form BMG education, we'll have Mozilla Labs folks. someone in your network who can report back would be great.

CC - My takeaway is we might want a "theory of change and meta" conversation. And there's also a place for the individual strands. We can be a bit more effective in pulling out a lot of these ideas. I think I might come back :-)

Robert - I would come back. I want to hear a report out, stories like SJ's talk about public policy: in-depth case studies. I don't always get that exposure. One thing I'd like to see: we had perhaps 15 projects from the last meeting. I'm not clear on why many weren't brought up now. I want time to think about that, discuss [where? see josh's note] and discuss rapid prototyping for pursuing other ideas of innovation and change.

Not to help them 'fail faster' [but just more clearly]? and to think about operationalizing that - what is the 'business model' for each project, how could it be sustained meaningfully, by cc or by another nonprofit, where would it sit and how would it work? (here referring to specific projects, including some small ones conceived of but not 'owned' yet.)

MS - It does sound like there is a meta-conversation. Not clear whether we change the frame of the invite... what I hear is everyone wants to come to that conv. we're clearer about what sorts of convs happen, spend more time and prior up front to define what happens on what day for how long, let people self select into that. That may be more the right model than one conv for everyone!

Open education/September 2010

Contents

Welcome

INTRODUCTIONS

Introduction

Overview

Specifics

Lightning talks : 90m

Thumbnails

Wikipedia Public Policy Initiative

P2PU

Badges and backpacks

Google Apps

Other questions

1. Wikipedia Public Policy Initiative

P2PU

Mon/Tue assessment meeting

Questions on traditional roles & P2PU

3. Backpacking

Prepared poster of notes

General comments

Lightning overview

Orgs and people to engage

Discussion split up a bit

Lists of orgs and people

Descriptors / words

Wrapup session

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