Post TPAC plans - moving forward

Hi there everyone!

Below is a huge mail showing where we are right now, with lots of actions, mostly for me ;-) I will start getting these actions sorted and approaching people about different tasks very soon, but I thought you'd appreciate the big picture first. Let me know if these is anything you feel I'm missing, or anything you are troubled about. This is by no means set in stone.

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Again, apologies for taking so long to get things moving on the community group activities. There have been good reasons for the delay, which I'll explain now...a lot of necessary discussions were carried out at the W3C TPAC conference, 31 October - 4 November.

For a start, let me just explain that the eventual goals of the Web Edu CG remain the same - we are still planning to do:

1. Learning material
2. Curricula
3. Outreach
4. Training and curricula
5. International groups

However, these need to be tackled in a sensible order - it doesn't make sense to try to do them all at once. Let's look at where we are here:

1. Learning material

This is really the first goal - to get a first-rate body of learning material created and out there for people to use. This has been the main stalling point, as we wanted to work out the best way to approach this, and also try to get support for this resource from all the major browser vendors and other companies besides. This will ensure that we work together to create a single canonical resource, and don't end up creating competing resources, which at the end of the day harms the learners/educators who want to make use of the material, and limits the effectiveness of all the individual projects.

We have decided to create the learning material by:

a. Looking at what material we need, and drawing up a big spec for what articles we should have (see http://www.w3.org/wiki/Web_Standards_Curriculum for the current state of this - THIS WILL SOON BE MOVED TO http://www.w3.org/community/webed/wiki/Main_Page).
b. Finding out what material already exists out there that we could bring into this project, eg We already have the Opera web standards curriculum transplanted inside the W3C, Microsoft have potential content in MSDN, W3C have fantastic HTML and CSS reference material, Adobe have potential material, Mozilla have the MDN, which we could potentially take from. It makes sense to not reinvent the wheel on this (WE WILL SOON ASSEMBLE A LIST OF THESE).
c. Adding existing material to the spec - again, see http://www.w3.org/wiki/Web_Standards_Curriculum
d. Creating new material to fill up the holes that are left
e. Updating/editing/proofing all the material as necessary to make sure it is of sufficiently high quality, and has a reasonable consistent voice.

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ACTION: CHRIS - Write a guideline document including information on style, tone, voice, and other standards material should conform to (eg accessibility standards and i18n standards, which EOWG and Richard Ishida can advise on)
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The Web Edu CG wiki (http://www.w3.org/community/webed/wiki/Main_Page) will be the place where we will develop all the material, collaboratively, as a Wiki is ideal for this purpose. However, a Wiki is not so great as a publishing platform for the final product, as we want it to look as polished and attractive as possible. Therefore, we are looking at creating a dedicated learning platform hosted on a separate domain to promote the material to, when it reaches the desired level of quality. These articles will not be editable by anyone, but we will have a commenting/feedback function allowing anyone to notify us of suggested changes.

The dedicated learning platform is currently a long way off at the moment, as a number of things need to be agreed (we'll share plans soon and solicit feedback from you) but we can start getting the raw material sorted out immediately. Eventually the learning material will link intelligently to the W3C specs, so you can always find the relevant bit of spec for the subject you are reading about. This will also work the other way around - with specs linking to relevant documentation for easier explanation, examples, etc. It would be great if this could work in similar way to the HTML5 developer mode.

To start with, we are going to aim material squarely at web designers and developers, at look to cover a limited scope of subjects. This is so we can get something concrete in place and published in a reasonable timeframe. We will then look to publish additional modules that widen the subject and audience scope at a later date.

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ACTION: CHRIS, PROJECT GROUP - Finish up migrating the Opera WSC material and HTML/CSS references to the Web Edu CG Wiki asap, and put the current contents of the Web Edu CG Wiki in an "Admin"/"Planning" subpage
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ACTION: CHRIS, PROJECT GROUP - Talk to all the vendors to see exactly what material they have available for using in this project (MS, Adobe, Moz, Google, W3C, Opera, Facebook, etc.?)
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ACTION: CHRIS, PROJECT GROUP - Send out more specific requests for participation in the learning material
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ACTION: CHRIS, PROJECT GROUP - Write a document explaining the best way to migrate content over to the Web Edu CG Wiki
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ACTION: CHRIS - get all the vendor representatives to join the Web Edu CG, so they can see what is going on in terms of the content.
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ACTION: CHRIS, ELIOT GRAFF, JANET SWISHER - continue conversation about the documentation architecture that will be used on the dedicated learning platform. also put this somewhere on the Web Edu CG Wiki. Get it put in public.
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2. Curricula

We have agreed a plan with the WaSP Education Taskforce, to use their InterACT curriculum as the basis for this (see http://interact.webstandards.org/). This has been a long time coming, as we needed to get all InterACT contributors to agree to their material being used in this way. But the agreements are nearly all in, and we can start this going forwards in earnest very soon.

We will put this on the Web Edu CG Wiki, and start updating and developing it from there.

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ACTION: PROJECT GROUP - migrate the WaSP InterACT curriculum over to the Web Edu CG Wiki pages, and make sure links to recommended reading are updated to the new locations (for example, the WSC stuff)
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ACTION: CHRIS - Create planning document looking at what material we need to add to the InterACT curriculum in the first phase of the project.
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3. Outreach

For the most part, outreach will be largely on hold until we have got the learning material and curricula first phase completed.

For now, we can definitely start getting appropriate resources and materials created. We should aim to:

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ACTION: PROJECT GROUP, ANYONE - Create an alphabetical list of universities, schools, colleges and training companies that we should look to approach about the resources we are creating, when the time comes. If we are including contact names and their contact details, this really shouldn't be a public document.
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ACTION: ALEXANDER DAWSON? - create outreach resource
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ACTION: CHRIS - develop "train the trainers" resource, and create call to arms material, to ask the whole community to evangelise open standards to their local school or college.
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4. Training and certification

This is at an early stage, and can come later. There is some movement inside the W3C to try to create full training and certification programs (led by Anne Marie Forgue?), but there are also a number of people inside the Web Edu CG who believe that to create all of our own training and certification is possibly a bit ambitious, so perhaps instead we should just have a system whereby we can validate university/college courses and give them a W3C stamp of approval? Maybe both approaches can work together in tandem?

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ACTION: ANNE MARIE AND WHOEVER ELSE - have a conversation about this, and think about exactly how the different approaches can work, separately or together 
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5. International groups

The international groups can be started up asap, and will come in very handy for translating all the educational material into other languages, and doing outreach towards non-English-primary-language educators and communities.

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ACTION: CHRIS - liaise with Kimmy about giving a shout out to the ILG about coming over the Web Edu CG and forming international groups
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ACTION: CHRIS - create schemas/pages for the different translations, eg Japanese, French, Spanish
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ACTION: CHRIS - get project leads assigned for the different international groups, set up mailing lists for own language discussions?
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OTHER ISOLATED ACTIONS

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ACTION: CHRIS - SEND OUT THE BIG INVITE MAIL. ALSO INVITE COPY WRITERS. GET PEOPLE ON BOARD TO HELP WITH PROOF READING, AND GENERAL COMMENT ON LEARNING MATERIAL STRUCTURE. ALSO NEED TO GET EDUCATORS LOOKING AT THE LEARNING MATERIAL AND CURRICULA, TO MAKE SURE IT IS AS USEFUL TO THEM AS POSSIBLE.
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ACTION: CHRIS - TALK TO INDIVIDUAL EDUCATORS ABOUT COMING ON BOARD EARLY WITH USEFUL PLANS/TEMPLATES.
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Chris Mills
Open standards evangelist and dev.opera.com editor, Opera Software
Co-chair, web education community group, W3C

* Try Opera: http://www.opera.com
* Learn about the latest open standards technologies and techniques: http://dev.opera.com
* Contribute to web education: http://www.w3.org/community/webed/

Received on Monday, 7 November 2011 21:57:29 UTC