Education/StatusMeetings/2009-05-26

Mozilla Education Status Meeting - May 26, 2009

Teleconference System Info

• Tuesday May 26, 2009 11:00 am EDT, 8:00 Pacific, 1500 UTC (other time zones here)

• +1 650 903 0800 extension 92, conference # 7600 (US/International)
• +1 416 848 3114 extension 92, conference # 7600 (Canada)
• +1 800 707 2533 (password 369), conference # 7600 (US/Canada Toll Free)

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IRC Backchannel

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Agenda

• Review the recently-concluded Mozilla/Creative Commons Open|Web|Content|Education online course for educators: what worked, what didn't work, whether and how we might offer such a course again, and so on.

Participants

• Philipp Schmidt (course organizer)
• Frank Hecker
• Dave Humphrey
• Mark Surman
• James Boston

Notes

Comments from Mark Surman prior to the call:

1. Framing of the course was compelling and brought interesting people.
2. Delivery was chaotic (in good first course way), with good content in bits but I think a bit hard to follow as overall narrative.
3. Would do something with this mix of topics again, but worth thinking through how to deliver better. Probably: simplify, simplify, simplify.
4. Joi Ito has indicated interest in doing mix of course / unconferences that people can run locally on similar mix of topics to our course --> not just for education, but on open web, content, methodology.
5. Interested to know if FLACSO people plan to do a spanish version of the course based on what we've done so far.
6. Would be good to get a survey of what blueprint threads we still need to follow up.

Summary of discussion on Educourse:

• general thoughts
  • people say general outline of course excellent
  • combination of open content licensing, open web technologies and open teaching methods attracted a lot of people
  • want to keep Creative Commons participation in the future

• need to integrate themes more; blocks separate but could have had better connections; how?
  • teach around one or two example projects?
  • use case studies to discuss ideas
  • hard to balance between telling presenters what to talk about and letting them speak about what they find interesting
  • can't really tell presenters who are well known experts in a field what to talk about
  • presenters didn't think applications to tool and tool to applications was exciting idea
  • some way of getting people together in group ahead of time to see how presentation fit together?
  • maybe get a unified set of presenters who aren't the experts but people who had worked with those people
  • maybe have Q&A with experts
    • interviews with experts worked well
    • less effort than synchronous conversations
    • people better prepared for those sessions because they could prepare on own time

• recruiting successful?
  • if we had more time we could have put the barrier higher to participation
  • we could set the bar higher for participation
• how much lead time necessary next time?
  • 2 weeks open for applications, 1 week to evaluate applications, 2 or 3 weeks until course starts
  • too much lead time people put it off
• passive versus intensive course?
  • harder to get people to do one week intensive thing
  • if we do more classes consider doing intensive course for most promising candidates with travel sponsorship perhaps

• do course in context of one-day bar camp?
  • provide course people could use to do things on their own?
  • conern that bar camp would be too much talk without producing something real
  • organization in Netherlands that does source camps more useful model? (Tactical Technology Collective)
    • half tech people, half social justice people; perfected facillitation; 8 days; interesting projects implemented during camp
    • more intense, more facilitated
    • people come to event with real problems to solve
    • long curation process of who should come to event; travel sponsorship; people had to submit essays for application
    • huge amount of time dedicated to making sure people who need to talk do

• consider online program as feeder for something more intensive?
  • select a few people for more intensive
  • might motivate people to participate and put forth ideas and come up with ideas, plans

• couple days face to face but do it more local and self-organizing, not as high cost?
  • if we want to encourage people to put on own events need to do upfront work to build template people could use

• is this something that is worth doing again?
  • if we use interest from people as answer, yes
  • need to be critical, things that could have been done better
  • perhaps didn't manage to make link between education tech community and what's happening in Mozilla
  • Mozilla value perspective: weren't able to do what last course did
    • for Mozilla to make it more relevant with us need to go in with more specific goal (eg. a model for teaching in Mozilla context)
    • people coming up with own personal projects that may not have anything with Mozilla
      • becomes a constraint on getting Mozilla people to want to help
    • crisp challenge of some problem that people that would come to table to help solve

• how to create "innovation funnels" (channeling innovation from the course to the Mozilla community
  • much easier with a homogeneous group and specifying one target
  • needs hand holding and ongoing support
  • would have to more work to get to that

• crisp goal; homogenous group of tech educators; see what happens?
• be a bit selfish because that's where we provide the value and get Mozilla people interested and involved

• technical choices
  • frustration being able to participate because of technical issues
  • asynchronous approach needed? recorded resources needed like audio or video
  • ditch the web conference stuff and go to straight teleconference; more reliable
  • combine teleconference with chat
  • adopt technologies that Mozilla uses
    • would get Mozilla people more involved
    • would give people authentic open collaboration experience

• proposal to have Philipp (or similar) blog and feed into Planet Mozilla
  • because of some of the tech choices and high bandwidth of list it became sizeable commitment to follow it and not easy to follow from afar

• propose James Boston make landing page with backward narrative of the course for people to go

• one goal of promoting ideals of open participation
  • relevance to us not just promoting Mozilla way to educators but there are also problems we need to solve
  • trying to solve problem of educating people about Mozilla

• need to have discussion about broader skills for an open web
  • fork EdMo calls from open web skills
  • who will own those threads on next conversation?
    • David Humphrey volunteers to lead a discussion
  • think not in terms of values to promote but competantcies or skills that people in those industries need to work
    • if people bring that into their careers then we are successful even if people don't contribute to Mozilla

• propose Frank Hecker be in charge of scheduling 3 calls and write up upcoming topics:
  1. Mozilla technology
  2. open skills (led by Mark Surman)
  3. open pedagogy if it seems not to be covered in previous calls