Feeling like you need a little extra help to feel confident about your writing? Today, Municipal Liaison and librarian Jordan Draves talks about Peer 2 Peer University, which they used to create their own personalized writing courses:
As a librarian who loves writing and has participated in NaNoWriMo for eons, it only made perfect sense to teach the craft to others looking to write a novel. After all, who doesn’t want free writing classes at the library?! Enter Peer 2 Peer University. P2PU is a nonprofit organization that seeks to get free online courses into libraries and community centers as Learning Circles.
What’s a Learning Circle? These are lightly facilitated online courses that cover a wide variety of topics from creative writing to computer languages and even social justice issues. Students take the classes at home or in the library, then meet with their classmates to discuss the work and help each other succeed. This model of learning increases the chance they will finish the course, compared to taking it alone.
P2PU has several online courses related creative writing, but I took the opportunity to create my own course based on what I was looking for in a writing class with the Learning Circle model in mind. The class, entitled “Learn To Write Fiction Beginner Course”, can be found on P2PU’s list of courses. It uses online articles combined with writing exercises to teach topics such as character development, writing dialogue, and plotting your novel. Basically, it’s an 8-week intensive course geared toward teaching you the real nuts and bolts of the craft and get you writing!
When I facilitated it for the first time I advertised it as a way to prepare for National Novel Writing Month, tapping into my Municipal Liaison powers and messaging all of the participants located in my region to let them know about it. Being able to email so many writers in the area brought instant success as the class quickly filled up and we needed to close registration early! If you’re not an ML, but you want those super powers, contact your local ML and they can get the word out for you.
“What’s a Learning Circle? These are lightly facilitated online courses that cover a wide variety of topics from creative writing to computer languages and even social justice issues.”
For those who have a love of writing, this class is a lot of fun. I have now facilitated it twice, and both times it was wildly popular with many students staying in contact with each other and continuing to meet as a writing group long after the class ended. Most of the students were NaNoWriMo participants but not all of them were.
This probably sounds a bit daunting for the first time facilitator. But it’s not as scary as it sounds! As a facilitator, you don’t need to know anything about the topic because you’re not the one teaching the material and P2PU offers lots of advice for new facilitators so you’re never left feeling alone or confused. The great thing about the P2PU website is that they have a registration page for participants to register their intent to take the class. Students will also get reminder emails every week, and facilitators get a way to email the entire class at once.
As far as my own writing classes go, students have asked for more classes on other writing topics, so I have created a second course available through P2PU entitled “Learn To Write Fiction: World-Building” which uses the same model to teach the basics of world-building for those interested in writing fantasy or science fiction.
I’m excited to bring more writing courses to the writers who need them and I hope my experiences have inspired you to try out one of the Learning Circles at P2PU, or something similar.
Jordan is a librarian in Boston who enjoys recommending good books to patrons and facilitating writing classes at the library. Their favorite food is spaghetti and their favorite cookie is chocolate chip. In 2016 they adopted a retired racing greyhound, renaming her after the main character in Josh Lanyon’s Adrien English Mystery Series, because why not name a beloved dog after a favorite character?! Jordan identifies as agender/ace and has no preferred pronouns. They also go by Anna.
Top image licensed under Creative Commons from charlesflickr on Flickr.
Peer to Peer an open learning community If you are looking for an online community where you can learn, share and discuss on your course topics, then you can do it here at P2PU. Participate in courses as well as create the courses, engage in study groups, share your knowledge on a topic. Peer to …
One of the best thing you can get from Mozfest It’s the eagerness on useful and DIY kits (and a compilation of them). From DIY app (coming soon), badge bingoo or this guide for building your open course starting now.
So this is my first post and I'm not really sure where to start.
I spend a lot of my free time on the internet, more than I would like to admit actually, and a great percentage of that time is spent looking for "lolz".
I graduated from high school a year ago and until I have money for college I'm working as a part time cashier. I don't want my mind to become so lazy and unused that the best way I can spend my time is by looking at pictures of cats. I'd like a challenge and something to really work out my mind and stretch those thinking muscles.
So here I am, ready to learn :)
Some facts about me:
My name is Kat and I'm 19
I love reading and writing.
I would love to have my own business someday.
I enjoy organizing and planning things. (Except my closet. I don't really keep that organized...)
After a few days I've finally completed the rest of the challenges in P2PU. I actually started these challenges last year sometime and time got in the way, among other things. After I revisited the challenges and found that a lot of these I've completed years ago. So this week I decided to quickly complete the Webmaking 101 course from P2PU. Everything went pretty smoothly the challenges weren't difficult they just involved lots of research and reading. Luckily for me it was like a review. If you'd like to check out my work in progress portfolio check out www.someguyinbaltimore.com
Over all the biggest challenge for me was actually staying consistent with completing the challenges. But now that I actually know this I hope to correct it in the near future. What I most look forward to is learning more than I know today and hopefully being able to put what I learn to use doing something I love.
Choosing and setting up a hosting provider can be a scary endeavor depending on your level of experience. This post is for readers who have never before setup web hosting. If you don't know what a domain name or DNS is, please have a look at my post about DNS. Okay cool you’re back. Now let's get started.
By this point you should have a domain name www.whateveryouwant.com . If not, go check out www.namecheap.com or www.gandi.net . If you’re wondering I used Namecheap to register my latest domain. For my web host I chose Hostgator. I like host gator because they use cPanel and the support staff are very helpful and they’re available via IM. This is one thing to keep in mind when choosing a hosting provider. As a newbie you’re going to have lots of questions and problems, and a dedicated and empathetic support team is a very useful early on in your career. So be sure to read their support documentation and their reviews before buying.
After getting a domain name and a host there are still a few steps we have to complete to get everything working correctly. We first have to tell our domain registrar which name servers to use. If you remember from the post about DNS, the name servers will tell the DNS server which ip address our site is using. To do that, we must change the name server for our domain name. I use name cheap. If you use another provider I will include links to those providers pages for setting up your dns.
First Sign into your Namecheap account.
On the right menu click on Your Domain / Products.
Click on the domain you wish to modify.
On the left menu click Domain Name Server Setup.
Click on Specify Custom DNS Servers.
Enter in the name servers from your hosting provider.
e.g. ns5555.yourhost.com and ns6666.yourhost.com
Click save changes
That’s it! It can take 24-48 for the DNS servers to populate. If you’re like me and can’t wait that long and are eager to get started. You can follow this guide for changing your hosts file so that you don’t have to wait for the DNS change.
If you're using another host. Here is a list of providers with links to how to update the Nameservers of popular registrars.
LaunchPad
Domain.com
Bluehost
FastDomain
eNom.com
Registry Rocket (eNom Resellers)
GoDaddy
Network Solutions
Tucows
Hover
1&1
Name.com
Register.com
Public Domain Registry (PDR)
Wild West Domains
If you have any questions feel free to leave a comment below. I'll try to help as much as I can.
P2PU Challenge #5.3 - What is DNS? How does it work? Why is it useful?
You may have heard about this DNS mambo jambo being thrown around the internet and wondered what it was. You may have even Googled "What is DNS?" . After I purchased www.someguyinbaltimore.com I came across a wikipedia entry that tried to explain it. Admittedly a wiki entry that, after reading it, makes you want to stab your eyes out with forks.
Don't stab your eyes yet. Hopefully I will be able to explain in a simple, clear, explain-it-like-im-five kind of way. So here goes.
Simply put, DNS is a phonebook system for the entire internet. It stands for Domain Name System and it's how your browser knows when you type www.google.com you really mean http://74.125.224.72/ . Those numbers are called the IP address. This is the number that identifies a computer on the internet. Think of it like a phone number. DNS is one of the most essential parts to the functionality of the internet.
We all know how hard it can be to remember a phone number. This is where DNS comes in. Instead of having to remember a number, we now have an easy to remember name. So how does it work?
There are root servers at the top of the internet keeping track of all the name servers. For each domain there is a name server. The name server is the component that takes the domain names and translates it to the corresponding IP address to locate it on the internet.
The flow looks a little like this.
You type www.google.com into your browser.
Your computer then asks the router for a DNS record.
Your router then contacts your ISP
ISP contacts the Root server for the Name server.
ISP then asks the Name Server for the DNS record
The Name Server gives your ISP the DNS record.
ISP give the DNS record to your router
Router gives the DNS record to your computer
Your browser now shows the page you requested.
If you're having trouble visualizing this. The folks at Rackaid have provided a nice infographic. I hope this was helpful.
P2PU Challenge #4 - Hunting HTML in the world around me.
For this exercise I had to reset check a list of tags and go out and try to find visual representations of these tags. Lucky I didn’t have to go far better because of my messy desk-cube at work.
A quote on my pin board looks wildly similar to a <blockquote>.
One of my dream cars. This is an <img> if I've ever seen one.
The schedule of the only team that matters. <ol> <li> <div> This could be mocked up with any of those.
