Education/StatusMeetings/2009-02-23

Mozilla Education Status Meeting - February 23, 2009

Gerv and Choffman planning to lead gsoc again this year
Date for students to apply is March 23
Google is reducing the overall number of students it takes (~1,000), so this might affect our numbers.
Last year we had 10 or 11 projects
In order for success, Mozilla-Gsoc requires: a) good project ideas; b) good students; c) willing and knowledgeable mentors
Ideas for overlap and cooperation with edmo:
- Edmo (planet, #education, wiki, etc.) can host the work being done by gsoc students and mentors
- Use "potential project" list for gsoc project ideas
If we end-up with lots of good project ideas, we could also consider looking at funding some additional projects via the Foundation (would need proper discussion/approval).
Dave/Gerv to communicate on this in the lead-up to March 23
Gary/Gerv to communicate about ways to extract bug lists from bugzilla using xml and bugzilla api

Idea is to partner (Mozilla and Creative Commons) and create a 6 week course (1 hour/week online + asynch communication/resources) targeted at educators who want to learn about how to do open teaching/learning, use and find open content, leverage open web techniques and technologies. Participants need not be Comp Sci, but should have some technical background (e.g., web, design, etc.)
- Mark has put up a good page on the Eduction wiki. We need to add more case studies.
- Each week a presenter will give an online talk on a topic, Frank/Phillip to co-ordinate technical aspects.
- Course starts Thursday March 19
We want to not only share this information, but also use the course as a way to learn more about how to offer such courses, engage a broader population in the "open education/source" worlds.
We also want to leverage the fact that Labs is doing a design course at the same time, in terms of back-end work, learning about what works and what doesn't.
We need to advertise, lock down details this week (Frank/Phillip)
Others should spread the word to people they know, and promote the idea into their various networks
People can sign-up on the wiki. We should get timezone information for people so we can figure out the optimal time of day for online sessions.

Work continues to get all the various edmo communication bits in place.
Planet is now setup and Dave has access to setup blog feeds. That will happen this week. We will require that those being added to the planet have a Mozilla project of some type, and that they give us a "tagged feed" so we don't fill the planet with off-topic content.
Dave will chase people for feeds
Surman populated top-level Education page, and will add a bit more language about Mozilla's vision. Others are encouraged to help iterate on this, as it is still in draft form.
Frank will look into how we should eventually hook this into the top-level mozilla.org site. However, we agreed that this shouldn't happen yet, as this site is still in flux and being developed.
Dave to follow-up on bugzilla keyword and populate Education/LearningMap.

Frank is trying to get an intern in place to help us with content for edmo. One thought is to have them work in MV or Toronto at the Mozilla office and do a 3 month full-time or longer part time internship. Frank to finalize a job description and details this week.
This person would ideally be education-focused, with some knowledge of open source and open web, but not necessarily technical.
they could work on:
- creating a Mozilla bibliography (resources are scattered on the web, across books) and need to be collected.
- work to create "printed" (PDF, Lulu print-on-demand) material from MDC (e.g., https://developer.mozilla.org/en/XUL_Tutorial).
- Mark filed bug 479827 to get infrastructure in place to make this easier.