Education/StatusMeetings/2009-02-16

Mozilla Education Status Meeting - February 16, 2009

• Updates from last week's call, movement on items since then
  • Bugs filed and waiting for MoCo IT to complete a few communication setup pieces. It was generally agreed that getting this scaffolding in place before we try to bring a lot more people in is a good idea.
  • #education is up and working. Has been slow to attract lots of community people, but this "channel inertia" is common, and we'll let it grow organically over the coming weeks. At the same time, some really interesting conversations with new people who have found their way in there.

• We should be blogging about #education and inviting more of the community to get in there so they can help introduce people to the Mozilla community, technologies, shepherd people into projects/bugs, etc.

• Surman updated us on his trip to FOSDEM, and specifically his time at EduCamp
  • Good meetings with people from Spain and elsewhere who are thinking about this stuff.
  • We see a lot of places teaching a more theoretical approach to open source, and we need to figure out how best to integrate them into what we are doing.
  • Discussion of his idea for an online course for educators on the open web, open content, and open learning/teaching.

• One thought for getting connected to more schools is to go through core Mozilla people who are connected, either as alumni, or are local, or know people, etc. Having a pairing of academic/mozilla-person is a good way to help bridge the start of those relationships. Edmo can pick up much of the work of mentoring these people, but we need the intros. We need some clear "Ways to get involved" or "What now?" actions so that once people arrive we can get them landed and moving.

• Discussion of the need for a comprehensive list of potential projects for students
  • Dave to blog this week and invite discussion of how to do it, as well as file a bug to get a new keyword added so that we can do this work within bugzilla.
  • Another thought was that we should do some work on the Education site to make these bugs obvious to non-bugzilla people (e.g., most students won't know how to find these until they are already aware of the use of bugzilla). In addition to highlighting that they are there, we also want to try and stratify and classify them so people can find work appropriate to their skill level, amount of time to spend, technical skill set and interest.

• Mead told us about his experience at the University of Tasmania, and we explored potential for getting undergrads there involved. Could we tie the NZ office in as well, and try to build more of a presence in this timezone?

• Discussion of what should go on the Education site.
  • List of potential projects that students could work on, professors could get their students involved with
  • List of who is currently working on things (students) with bug #s.
  • List of who is involved in teaching or otherwise "educating" people in Mozilla.
  • We should come up with some sort of template that people can follow when listing themselves and their work--perhaps getting our current set of students to do this will help us identify what is a good basic level. This should include some sense of time frame so that we can keep the lists current and archive things that are historical.
  • Dave is going to focus on migrating content over to the edmo web site this week from Seneca's wiki.
  • Surman to work on a first draft of the stuff for the front page of Education.

• We should attempt some sort of census to find out who is out there now, and get them:
  • on the education planet
  • listed on the edmo web site
  • get them in #education and connected to each other