Very cool! It’s great to see so many people from around the globe!
Sounds interesting (your work). I work closely with CC, OER, and OEC but would love to add badges this next year.
I know it’s rather a pain to have to create new accounts for things. There is a discussion area on the P2PU course itself, and we used that last year, but Discourse (this page) is much more powerful. You can more easily track what you haven’t read yet, you can click on someone’s name to see their profile, which has all their posts, we can have all the discussions for all the p2pu courses in one place but organized by course, and more. We and another course are right now testing what it’s like to use this platform for P2PU courses. I don’t know if it’s even possible to integrate it more into the P2PU platform so there doesn’t have to be an extra signon. I it would be great if P2PU had a platform where multiple things can easily be in one place, like this discussion area, collaborative documents, etc., so people don’t have to have multiple accounts. But it’s a long process to get there I think.
I would also like to bolster my arguments, which is one of the reasons why I’m so excited to be helping with this course. I am going to set up a collaborative document soon for the course, on which people can write their ideas about “why open”–what arguments can we use to support it? What downsides might there be and how could we address them? I hope this can be a useful resource for many of us after the course is finished.
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I agree. It was a little off-putting in the beginning to be asked to create another account (given that these are both P2PU and there should be some integration), but I do agree, discourse is much more powerful than disq.us (the software used in the other part of P2PU). Now if only it had the ability to view things as threaded discussions 
Discourse does have this ability, in a way, but you have to click on the grey button that indicates how many replies there are to the message, on the bottom left of the message. You can also click on the area on the top right of the message that says who it’s a reply to, and you can see the earlier message(s) that are being replied to. But you have to force the issue by clicking, and the replies still show up in the long post stream. I’m not enamoured of that, as I pointed out here! How replies work on Discourse
Late as per usual. I’m Sylvia Riessner and I wanted to participate in this course to test out the P2PU environment, to see if I can keep up with the participatory aspects of this course (I tend to get disconnected from big open courses too easily - maybe having to do something each week will help keep me connected?) and because I’ve been a supporter of openness for a long time. I signed up for the first open online course that David Wiley opened to the world in 2007 (?) and then participated in the first couple of Canadian collaborative MOOCs facilitated by Stephen Downes, George Siemens, Alec Couros, etc.
I’ve always been curious at how the idea of openness in higher education has persisted despite the perceived threats and despite the often undiscussed costs of producing and sharing open materials, teaching openly, learning openly.
Looking forward to hearing how others are engaging in openness and what it means in different contexts.
Hopefully I can catch up and stay on course …
Hello, I am Ania, from Poland. I have been teaching English to university students for about 7 years. Since the beginning of this year I have also been involved in the European project LangOER that deals with Open Educational Resources in less spoken languages. Before that I was not very much aware of the OER as such and the notion of ‘openness’ was somehow beyond me, but now I am very much interested in the topic.
Hello everyone! I’m Leah, the director of an open educational resources project in the higher education public affairs field called The Hubert Project. We’re based out of the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota, but have partners at Hong Kong University and at a consortium of Universities across Africa.
We’re building a growing repository of openly-licensed multimedia case studies, policy issue curations and short animated videos on policy concepts. We’ve also been doing advocacy around open ed and training around creating openly-licensed multimedia content for public affairs instructors. Exciting stuff and we’re happy to be learning more through this open course!
I’m Nate Angell from Portland OR USA. I currently work evangelizing for open education with Lumen Learning, the organization founded by David Wiley and Kim Thanos to help educational institutions scale OER use.
I have been a longtime participant in open source educational technology work, collaborating mostly in the Sakai Project and Apereo Foundation.
You can learn more about me as @xolotl on Twitter—my preferred social media network—and on my blog, which has links to my LinkedIn, resume, and previous work/thinking.
I’m looking forward to conversation with this global community!
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Hi P2P Peeps,
Lovely to be here.
I am passionate about many things, but most relevant for this webpage is my passion to help family and friends gain better support for life’s tougher moments: when they lose a sibling son or daughter, when one of their family members swings through depression, eating disorders or any mental health issue, when a family member is diagnosed with a life threatening disease.
I haven’t started a project around this idea, but I have a few ideas bubbling away. I look forward to refining my ideas through this wonderful course.
I am living in Toronto, recently moving from Melbourne Australia. I have so much gratitude for this city’s abundance of social innovation projects and great non-profit work. I am loving Toronto and looking forward to having my first white winter.
Someone I really respect in the field of Mental Health is Jeff Kennett, a former Australian politician who went on to become Chairman of Australia’s mental health organisation Beyond Blue.
@SylviaR I know how difficult it can be to keep connected in large courses; I think this one is not super large, judging from the intros and the first posts on our own views of openness. Sometimes if it’s a bit smaller it can be easier to connect with a few people and feel more engaged that way. And yes, we do have a couple of things to do each week that might keep you engaged, though ultimately I think it’s all about connecting to other people that keeps one going in a course like this! And sometimes that works, sometimes, not, depending on what people are posting and what one is interested in. Hope you do continue on, though! I’d like to hear what you have to say about the costs of producing and sharing open materials and engaging in open ed.
@AniaSkowron I didn’t know about the LangOER project, but it sounds like a great thing. Thanks for introducing me to it!
@LeahL Also nice to hear about the Hubert project! So many interesting things going on in the world in relation to open ed that I am not aware of, and it’s great to become aware of them.
If you would like to know some more about the project, here is the site: http://langoer.eun.org/. We have just publish the state-of-the-art report about the current situation of the OER market in the countries involved in the project. BTW: this was my daughter crying during the Hangout with David Wiley. I would like to apologize for that, I thought I could handle both things but apparently I didn’t manage…
Hello, better late than never. Penny from Melbourne, Australia here.
At the moment I’m half way through my first year of a PhD at The Australian Digital Futures Institute. I’ve been a secondary science teacher for many years, escaped classroom teaching to explore alternative professional learning opportunities for science teachers. Yes, I love “Open” and all the fabulous learning opportunities it enables…particularly in science 
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waving back…is there an icon or an ascii for this? (checking http://1lineart.kulaone.com/ for something) ٩(̾●̮̮̃̾•̃̾)۶
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so that’s what these things are! I’ve been seeing people use them over the years, and I never to why… The things you learn in an open course…
Hello all! I’m Shannon, the second Hubert Project team member. As Leah explained, we are growing a repository of openly-licensed multimedia materials for the Public Affairs field. In addition to this work, I am also part of a team at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs that is ramping up a social welfare re-design pilot program. Personally, I am interested in how higher education will continue to embrace OER and how higher ed will evolve in the future. Looking forward to learning more from all of you!
Hi all!
A little late on this thread
I’m Simeon Oriko and one of the facilitators of this course! I co-founded a co-creation community called Jamlab that’s based in Nairobi, Kenya and we’re mostly responsible for School of Open activities in Kenya: http://creativecommons.org/tag/cc-kenya
I also work at the Open Institute - a think/do tank in the Open Governance and Open Data space in Africa. I play the role of Community Lead there.
Thanks, Ania! No worries about your daughter crying during the hangout. Such things happen with my son all the time!