There is so much exciting going on at P2PU, that if I hadn’t been moving tomorrow, and if my MA thesis was not due in a week, I could have written many long posts. For now, I wanted to make a quick list of all the new courses – there is an official course listing [...]

The untiring Stephen Downes has a new course coming up, “Personal Learning Environments Networks and Knowledge 2010″. This topic interests me a great deal, and is also something I will probably be visiting in my PhD program, which I will begin in a few weeks. If this were a traditional course, I would not be [...]

Recently there was a discussion on a P2PU mailing list about the basic model of P2PU, questioning why we didn’t embrace more open-ended networked learning where anyone could teach anything, and whether the word “university” was compatible with the concept of Peer2Peer. Since these two questions have come up frequently in other fora, I decided [...]

I wrote earlier about preparing to give a guest lecture in a class called KMD 1002: Knowledge Communities: Patterns and Practices, where I assigned three resources for class preparation: a CIDER talk by Terry Anderson about Three Generations of Distance Education Pedagogy. I also ended up assigning a paper by Marlene Scardamalia: Collective Cognitive Responsibility [...]

As I wrote earlier, I was invited by Jeff Lail, Jeff Jackson and Laura Pasquini from BreakDrink to participate in their weekly podcast, and discuss P2PU. It was a fun format, and I got some really nice questions. I had a feeling we could have continued chatting for a while, and they invited me back [...]

I am currently listening to the Introduction to Sociology course from the Virtual University of Pakistan, whose video lectures I described in a previous post. The course is taught by Dr. Muhammad Anwar, and curious to find some information about him, I googled his name. I came across this discussion about his course, where former [...]

I find distance universities very fascinating, and have learnt much from my time visiting the Open University of China and Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) in India. Distance universities have been in the forefront of researching alternative ways of delivering instruction and enabling learning, with radio and television, online classes etc. They are also [...]

Stephen Downes recently gave a talk in Argentina (at the same time as I hosted a group of wonderful Argentinians in my home). The talk is very good at outlining some basic ideas around connectivism, the difference between networks and groups, and how learning happens. Even though I have followed his writings for a while, [...]

There are lot’s of exciting open projects coming out of India, and I was very excited some time back to discover that the National Council of Education Research and Training had put hundreds of K12 books in several languages online. It was fun looking at a first grade textbook in Hindi, or a 12th grade [...]

One of the fun things about P2PU is that we really didn’t design it for one particular narrow demographic – it could be useful to anyone, whether it’s high school students who want more challenging classes (and in the future, maybe earn some AP credits and skip a year of university), retired people who want [...]