Plan for moving forward with web ed community group

Hello again!

So, I have collated a lot of feedback and come up with the following plan of what I will I will do next to get this moving forward! Let me know if you have any further feedback! I have run out of time today, but I will get on this tomorrow.

Plan for web ed community group
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ASCERTAINING SKILLSETS

I will contact everyone individually, and work out who wants to be actively involved, and what with, and who wants to just lurk. Just lurking is fine, but it is useful to know who I can approach with tasks, and who to leave alone.

Questions I will ask:

1. Are you just lurking, or do you want to actively contribute?
1a. Is this likely to change soon?

2. If you want to actively contribute, how much time can you contribute, in general?
	a. A few hours a week of my employer's time
	b. A few hours a week of my own time
	c. a. and b.
	d. A few hours a month
	e. An occasional time slot, not regularly.	

3. What do you want to work on? You can choose more than one, but list them in order of preference if possible.

	a. Writing tutorials, and reference material
	b. Writing slideshows, curricula and other teaching material 
	c. Technical editing of other people's technical material 
	d. Proof reading material (checking for language errors)
	e. Doing outreach to educators - getting them interested in using our resources
	f. Investigating training and certification
	g. Translations (state languages)
	h. Outreach into specific non-English communities

4. If you have any specific skills, ideas or resources that would be useful to us, please list them here.

5. Why are you involved - what do you hope to gain out of contributing to the Web Ed CG?

HAVING A FORUM TO DISCUSS THINGS

A couple of people have raised concerns that the e-mail list is proving hard to follow. Would a forum be more effective? We could tag content so that you could follow different conversations and different subjects as you wish, and find them easily. Would this be easier than the e-mail list?

I will research and discuss this. I think it would definitely be useful for getting feedback about things from occasional contributors who don't want to join the group and be involved all the time. For example if we have a wider list of teachers that we want to ask for feedback about a specific idea.

MORE MICROMANAGING

After I have done the skill set ascertaining part, above, I will start micromanaging more - sending people really specific tasks to do with deadlines, that I think matches their skill set

MOTIVATION FOR BEING INVOLVED

I will write some notes up on what contributors can get out of contributing to the web ed CG. Having a clear idea of what you can gain will be a good motivator.

Some related ideas from Ben Friedman:

- how about setting up a kickstarter for funding - http://www.kickstarter.com/blog/kickstarter-awards-by-the-numbers
- how about providing a certificate that people earn for their contributions - the idea (besides thanks and/or basic gamification if we had contribution levels), could then be shared with people's bosses and maybe that would help to get "official" time to work on this while still on-the-clock.

PROTOTYPE OF TEACHING MATERIAL

A few people have raised concerns that the tutorials as they stand are not immediately useful for actual teaching.  So maybe we should treat the tutorials as learning material for people whom that approach suits, and background learning for teachers to read before the class, and for advanced students  but then create a set of bridging materials for actually teaching the classes with? 

These could take the form of slideshows that teach the syntax and basic concepts in a very visual and non-wordy way, coupled with exercises to give the students to do, to actually learn the stuff in practice. (And their solutions of course). This would probably fit in well with the curriculum structures.

I will create a prototype to share and get feedback on.

Other notes from talking to Anna Debenham:

* Build visual slideshows for teachers to use, 
* Spoon feed students
* Use existing articles as background knowledge for teachers, and further reading for advanced students
* Provide advanced tasks for the clever students
* Provide basics FAQ for really low level students - how to right click, how to install a new browser, how to type in a web address to load a web page.
* Look at Anna's lesson plan for inspiration http://hackbook.hackasaurus.org/learn.php
* Think about using things like JSBin and JSFiddle to do examples in, so you don't have to worry about students installing stuff.

PROVIDING ANSWERS TO ASSIGNMENTS/QUESTIONS

This concern was raised by Mark DuBois during his recent proof reading. I agree that answers need to be provided.

CAPITALISING ON THE RECENT UK GOVERNMENT ICT REORGANIZATION

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-16509298

This news is being received well by some teachers (as a lot of current ICT lessons are rubbish and outdated), but badly by others (teachers will need to retrain and develop new curricula with very little warning, they are not sure what to teach, etc.)

We could reach out to these teachers, help them to organize their lessons, work out what programming languages to teach, and guide them in general. Basic programming could be taught in the context of JavaScript.

For example, look at some of the questions being asked on forums such as http://community.tes.co.uk/forums/22.aspx

Ideally, curricula should be balanced between the basics (such as how to right click, how to install a program, to how access a web page using a web browser), and the more advanced stuff such as programming, as students are going to be at such different levels.

Other notes from talking to Anna Debenham:

* UK academies - they can teach what they want, and don't have to follow the curriculum
* Mentorship scheme might also be good - pairing up professionals with schools

Received on Monday, 30 January 2012 18:23:09 UTC