P2PU: free lessons in web development

12 Jan, 2011 Sam Web Resources

The School of Webcraft is the latest in a series of open learning initiatives organised by the P2PU (Peer to Peer University sharing the skills of a community, for free).

And registration opens today for a number of their classes. A few years ago, I undertook three seasons of study through the Open University – 3 x 3 month courses in Web Development. I found it fascinating, but since then, the more I get to know the web, the more I realise the learning resources are already out there.

For example, I regularly search You Tube for tutorials on how to do certain things with the websites, the coding or the hosting I’m involved with. (I mean everything’s there – I once saw a tutorial on how to shoot accurately from a moving vehicle. It’s uncertain whether I’ll ever have the opportunity to test my knowledge.)

I admire the values of the P2PU:

The Peer 2 Peer University is a grassroots open education project that organizes learning outside of institutional walls and gives learners recognition for their achievements. P2PU creates a model for lifelong learning alongside traditional formal higher education. Leveraging the internet and educational materials openly available online, P2PU enables learning for everyone, by everyone about almost anything.

The following values and principles are the foundation of P2PU: openness, community, peer learning. We are articulating these values in order to guide our actions, but P2P has always been about doing, and our actions will in turn help us probe and refine these values.

The School of Webcraft is what caught my eye, but there are many other courses available, including:

For me, this is the kind of development which the web is giving to humanity and the future of the planet. This is truly about democratising access to information. After all, access to unstructured information is a hinderance to effective learning and efficient use of data.

The organisers are taking steps to check the strength of learning structures and to issue learning achievement milestones. So long as people can get access to a computer with an internet connection, then they can potentially improve their lives, educate themselves and learn the skills for competing in the online world, and therefore the Planet Earth.