Helsinki Class Group Shot / Timothy Vollmer / CC BY

A few weeks ago a group of CC staffers traveled to the Open Knowledge Festival in Helsinki, Finland to meet with our friends in the open knowledge and data community. There were many welcome outcomes from this – including our European regional meeting (expect a post on this soon) – not the least of which was our second School of Open workshop.

For those who haven’t heard of it yet, the School of Open is a collaboration between Creative Commons and P2PU (Peer 2 Peer University). Its aim is to provide easily digestible educational exercises, resources, and professional development courses that help individuals and institutions learn about and employ open tools, such as the CC licenses. You can find out more at this wiki page.

During the second half of 2012, Creative Commons is holding School of Open workshops around the world, including Berlin, Palo Alto, Mexico City, London, and Jakarta. The idea behind these workshops is to bring together those interested in spreading the word about open knowledge, teach them about peer-learning and the role it can play in this, and (hopefully) start them down the track of creating their own peer-led course on open.

The Helsinki workshop, which ran on the Wednesday of the festival, was a joint project with the School of Data, a similar initiative run by P2PU and the Open Knowledge Foundation to promote data literacy and data ‘wrangling’ skills. The workshop was a great success, with a full house of more than 25 attendees, including educators, programmers, digital technologists and enthusiasts. After introductions and explanations, about 12 chose to work on projects for the School of Open, while the rest broke off to take School of Data courses.

Helsinki Class Photo / Timothy Vollmer / CC BY

In just four hours, this School of Open team managed to complete the “Teach someone something with open content” challenge and get a good way through the “Make a P2PU course in half an hour” mini-course. The result were outlines for several new P2PU courses, designed to teach people new skills entirely through CC-licensed and other open materials including “How to share and distribute a song”. You can find all related notes and materials from the workshop here.

Feedback from the participants in the workshop was great – everyone felt that by the end of the day they had a good understanding of the workings of the School of Open and the potential it had to provide learning resources for anyone and everyone. They also had some great feedback on ways to improve the school’s web interface, materials and structure, based on their own experiences and expertise. And they were all keen to continue to work on their courses and the School of Open.

Congratulations to all those who participated in the workshop on achieving so much in such a short amount of time. We look forward to seeing you around the School of Open discussion lists and events. For anyone else who wants to get involved, the best way to start is to join the discussion list and/or sign up for announcements. You can also email the Project Manager directly.

We are particularly interested in and helped to shape the Open Research and Education topic stream, where we are leading an “Open Peer Learning” workshop on Wednesday (Sept 19) from 11:30am to 3:30pm. For the workshop the School of Open (co-led by Creative Commons and P2PU) is combining forces with the OKFN’s School of Data to explore, test and develop learning challenges around open tools and practices in data, research, and education. Participation in the workshop is free (you don’t even have to buy a festival ticket), but space is limited, so RSVP at: http://peerlearningworkshop.eventbrite.com/

The workshop will be held in this awesome space, reserved for four HACK workshops:

hack-2 / juhuu / CC BY-NC-SA

For those of you able to come to Helsinki, look out for our CC staff reps, Jessica Coates and Timothy Vollmer, along with many of our European affiliates who will be holding a regional meeting on Day four of the fest.

For the rest of you, you can still participate in helping to build initiatives like the School of Open from wherever you are by visiting http://schoolofopen.org/ and signing up for the mailing lists there.