www.johndbritton.com

We just opened signups for the third cycle of courses at P2PU which are starting in September. This is our third, and largest cycle yet. We had 6 courses in the first, 16 in the second, and 23 so far for the third cycle. I'm organizing a course called "Web 200: The Anatomy of a Request" as part of the School of Webcraft. Here's the story from the P2PU blog:

The Peer 2 Peer University announced its third round of free and open online courses today, opening sign-ups for a growing list of courses dealing in su bject areas ranging from Collaborative Lesson Planning to Manifestations of Human Trafficking.

P2PU is also excited to announce the launch of the P2PU School of Webcraft, run in conjunction with the Mozilla Foundation. The School of Webcraft is a powerful new way to learn open, standards based web development in a collaborative environment. School of Webcraft courses include Beginning Python Webservices and HTML5.

All classes are globally accessible, free, and powered entirely by learners, mentors and contributors with the goal of creating a vibrant, peer-led system that helps people around the world easy access to build careers on open web technology.

The P2PU community is growing and excited to have these new courses and their organizers on board.

Since the last round of courses, a few changes have taken place at P2PU, most noticeably on the P2PU site which has seen a major overhaul, and is simpler and easier to use than ever before. However, the nature of the P2PU community remains the same, and all community generated content is open and shareable under CC BY-SA.

The P2PU community consists of a diverse group of people. They are writers, teachers, designers, doctoral and alternative grad students, artists, copyright specialists, scientists, and blues guitar players. Above all, they are learners–peers working together to learn from each other.

Sign-ups for all courses are available at http://p2pu.org/course/list. Deadlines for sign-ups are 8th September 2010. The courses will run until October 27th. Each course application may require additional information.

I put together a proposal for our Mozilla Drumbeat project, P2PU School of Webcraft, to go to SXSW Interactive and we need your help.

1. Please register for an account on the panel picker website: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/users/register
2. Confirm your email address
3. Vote up our proposal: http://bit.ly/sxsw_webcraft
4. Leave comments and start a discussion

Please pass this along to as many people as you can. If you tweet, RT this: http://twitter.com/johndbritton/status/20906260210

Mozilla School of Webcraft @P2PU

P2PU School of Webcraft: Web developer training that’s free, open and globally accessible. Mozilla and Peer 2 Peer University are creating the P2PU School of Webcraft, a new way to teach and learn web developer skills. Our classes are globally accessible, 100% free, and powered by learners, mentors and contributors like you. Our goal is to provide a free pathway to skills and certification to help people build careers on open web technology. Existing developer training is expensive, out of touch, and out of reach. We leverage peer learning powered by mentors and learners like you and self-organized study groups. We use existing open and free learning materials In this sixty minute session we'll briefly cover the inception of the Peer 2 Peer University along with details and success stories from the first three cycles of courses. We'll then dive into more detail about our collaboration with Mozilla Drumbeat including Mozilla's mission to engage the next million Mozillians. We'll present the P2PU School of Webcraft, and a case study of courses offered so far, including the first course, 'Mashing Up the Open Web.' Additionally, we'll introduce our plans to separate learning from assessment and our community driven credentialing system. At the end of the session we will invite the audience, and all of SXSW, to join a course on open web skills to be offered during the week of the event. Read more: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Drumbeat/p2pu/one_pager

The Mozilla Summit far surpassed my expectations. The event was personal, technical, creative and inspiring all at once.

The Mozilla Summit is an invitation-only gathering of some of the most active contributors in the Mozilla community. This year's theme was "Be More Like the Web".

I was lucky enough to be among those who were invited, due to my involvement with the Drumbeat project. There were a total of around 600 Mozilla community members at the event: hackers, localizers, testers, marketers, and the individuals formerly known as 'users'.

Background

Mozilla is most well known for the open source browser, Firefox. In addition to Firefox, there are number of other software projects like Jetpack at Mozilla Labs. Although Mozilla has been incredibly successful with open source software, they're ambitious and ready for the next big challenge. As stewards of the open web, Mozillians around the world are banding together through Drumbeat: a collection of practical projects and local events that gather smart, creative people around big ideas that improve the open web. The Summit was our forum to share the project with the greater Mozilla community.

Day 0: Arrival & Reception

I flew in from Alaska, direct from my family vacation to Vancouver and then hopped on a bus to Whistler, BC. I arrived on Tuesday afternoon just in time to join the Mozilla Foundation meeting and presenter's workshop. I spent the better part of the afternoon working on a speed geek with my new partner in crime at P2PU, Pippa Buchanan. We rehearsed our talk a few times and got valuable feedback for the next day.

The rest of the attendees arrived in time for a reception, where we had a chance to get to know each other and kick off the event properly.

Day 1: Getting Started

The day started off early with a few inspiring keynote speakers and an extended lunch break to watch some of the World Cup. After lunch I headed to a session from Mozilla Messaging where they demoed experimental Thunderbird mail client features.

Photo CC-BY-NC-SA, Nathaniel James

The next session was "Drumbeat in 2100 Seconds," led by Mark Surman, Executive Director of the Mozilla Foundation. Mark took about four minutes to describe Drumbeat and why it is important to Mozilla before splitting the crowd into groups for the speed geek sessions. All three of the featured Drumbeat projects (P2PU School of Webcraft, Web Made Movies, &amp Universal Subtitles) were represented along with Drumbeat Events and a couple others. The speed geek session went really well; we got a few people to join the project.

Day 2: In the Groove

The second day was filled with more sessions, and some especially interesting HTML5 demos including WebGL and the <audio> and <video> tags. I had a chance to talk to Ben Moskowitz about open video and the upcoming Open Video Conference in New York City.

The Flight of the Navigator is a WebGL demo rendered in the browser that built by the Mozilla audio team. The demo pulls in live data and video from the web while rendering. Everyone in the crowd was awe-struck.

I spent the better part of the afternoon at the Summit Science Fair. There were around thirty individual booths showcasing all kinds of software. Everything from accessibility for the blind to a JavaScript framework for building Firefox extensions.

Photo CC-BY-NC-SA, Michael Morgan

We rounded out the day with the Summit World Expo and International Dinner, where representatives from the over forty countries in attendance showcased their local communities and cultures.

After dinner, there was a late night JetPack hackathon. I built a Firefox extension (more details in a later blog post) in just a few hours. The extension is called 'Clickable Phone Numbers' and it makes any number on the web into a click-to-call number using the Twilio API.

Day 3: Grand Finale

The final day of the conference was a bit more laid back, we talked about the Drumbeat event strategy and did a bit of planning for Drumbeat NYC (August 7th) and the Drumbeat Festival (November 3-5) which is going to be held in Barcelona. I attended a few more lightning talks and a session on the future of client-side debugging.

Pippa and I ran our session on the P2PU School of Webcraft. There was a 10 minute intro, and then we split the audience into four groups with tasks:

1. Design a course for P2PU School of Webcraft
2. Brainstorm a list of core web developer skills
3. Brainstorm a list of 'soft-skills' that employers look for in web developers
4. Come up with ways to legitimize P2PU School of Webcraft so that we have some 'street-cred'

The session went incredibly well, so well that we had a lineup of people to talk to for almost 30 minutes after it was over.

At the end of the day, we took a Gondola ride up to the peak for a farewell party of sorts. The views of Whistler were magnificent and the "Army of Awesome" was incredibly fun. We enjoyed a delicious dinner, cartoony mascots, toasts, and a dance party before calling it a night.

Day 4: Departure

We left Whistler by bus through the mountains, luckily unobstructed by rock slides. Now I'm on the ground in Seattle for the next week, followed by a trip to Portland for OSCON. Get in touch if you're nearby.

Crowd-sourced Coverage

• Flickr Photos
• Tweets
• Delicious Links

P2PU just got coverage in The Hindu, which, according to Wikipedia "is the second-largest circulated daily English newspaper in India." The author, Ajai Sreevatsan, quoted me and mentioned my course "Mashing Up the Open Web."

Video discussions

John Britton, course organiser of 'Mashing up the Open Web,' says time zones are a problem while attempting to simulate a "sit around the fire and learn by discussion" environment virtually. "But lively weekly video discussions (using a combination of Skype and IRC) to review materials and work through the questions presented by the peers still happen."

The 'class' is very diverse, he says. "We have peers from Korea, Japan, India, Spain, the U.S. and Canada. They're artists, technologists, environmentalists, and traditional students."

Aside: This blog post was posted while on a moving bus from Vancouver to Seattle. The wonders of modern technology.

Mozilla and Peer 2 Peer University are creating the P2PU School of Webcraft, the ultimate environment in which to learn the craft of open and standards-based web development.

This coming September we'll be launching our first cycle of six week courses including Introduction to HTML5 and Building Social with the Open Web. We still have space for a few more courses, so whether you can teach a class for novice web developers, or run a workshop for web developers managing thousands of user accounts, we'd love to have you involved.

Following on the delivery model developed by P2PU, course organizers volunteer to take existing open learning materials or develop their own content and lead a group of peers through 6 weeks of online classes. Courses focus on project based learning in a peer environment and are proposed, created and led by members of the web development community — so the content will always be up to date with the latest technologies.

Over the next 18 months we'll be developing a new way of assessing and recognizing skills, hacker attitudes and knowledge that rewards project portfolios and realistic developer challenges, rather than hours spent cramming for a meaningless exam.

We'd love for you to become a part of this project and until July 18 we're inviting course proposals for P2PU School of Webcraft. We've made it really easy to get started, just fill out the proposal form, it takes less than 5 minutes!

Propose a Course

If you're unable to commit to organising a course this September, there are other great ways to become a part of the community whether as a curriculum adviser, web development guru and of course, as a student.

Participate in a Course

Join the P2PU Webcraft community

Find out more about P2PU School of Webcraft

Mozilla Drumbeat is a global community of people who use web technology in new ways that help them understand, participate, improve and take control of their online lives. The P2PU School of Webcraft is just one of many exciting projects that Drumbeat supports. Find out more here.

Mozilla Drumbeat: Innovation on the open web. Powered by everybody.