Open Education News Planning

Conference Call
Date: Thursday, 15 May

Time: 9:30 AM (Utah) / 11:30 AM (NY) / 5:30 PM (Cape Town)

Agenda Items

 * 1) Introductions
 * 2) Objectives
 * 3) strategic
 * 4) maintenance
 * 5) Team - who will do what
 * 6) Funding
 * 7) Questions
 * 8) Timing
 * 9) To-do list

Introductions

 * Melissa Hagemann, Open Society Institute (OSI), MHagemann@sorosny.org
 * Karien Bezuidenhout, Shuttleworth Foundation, karien@shuttleworthfoundation.org, karienbez@gmail.com
 * Phillip Schmidt, University of the Western Cape (UWC), pschmidt@uwc.ac.za, phi.schmidt@gmail.com
 * Eve Gray, University of Cape Town (UCT), Eve.Gray@uct.ac.za, eve.gray@googlemail.com
 * Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams, University of Cape Town (UCT), cheryl.hodgkinson-williams@uct.ac.za, chodgkinsonwilliams@gmail.com
 * Woldekidan Amde, University of the Western Cape (UWC), woldsha@gmail.com
 * David Wiley, USU, david.wiley@usu.edu
 * Jenifer Maddrell, Old Dominion University, jmaddrell@gmail.com
 * SaraJoy Pond,Brigham Young University, sarajoypond@gmail.com
 * Alliyah Geldenhuys, University of Cape Town (UCT), Alliyah.Geldenhuys@uct.ac.za, alliyahg@gmail.com
 * Mark Surman, Shuttleworth Foundation, mark.surman@shuttleworthfoundation.org

Objectives
David: There are two objectives, a primary objective and a secondary objective:


 * The primary objective is an observatory one, to monitor news / policy events / conferences through a variety of technical means like Google alerts and reading blogs and then pulling things together and republishing news items that we find most important, with a little analysis or commentary, but mostly republishing what is going on.
 * The secondary objective is to do some original analysis on our own and to publish some original work. But that is clearly secondary to the observatory function.

Mark: Another objective is to link to the Cape Town Open Education Declaration (CTOED). We haven’t looked back since the (CTOED) in terms of monitoring progress. We need to monitor the goals set out in the declaration, monitor signatures, keep the database clean, look at the FAQ on CTOED.

Team - practical considerations
David will essentially be leading the team, but we need to organise how this happens.


 * To begin with the observatory and analysis function everyone has to create accounts: openeducationnews.org. US student accounts have been created, others to send preferred username/ e-mail username to David so that he can create accounts for everyone to log in.


 * We will need to co-ordinate who’s looking at what / and who tracks what. That can be done by e-mail after this call, by send around the lists of blogs that we track.


 * We will also need to establish some tagging conventions for tagging things that relate to the objectives of the CTOED.


 * Once the writing starts, the role of the elders is to pay attention to what is being written, check links, clarify issues, ensure good blogging etiquette etc. Elders will play a mentoring role for the students. Mark said “ Elders, be the wise mentors that you are”.


 * CTOED maintenance:


 * 1) The minimum we need to do is to go in and clean up and check for:
 * 2) consistent formatting CAPS/Lower case
 * 3) displaying options eg. Institutions separately
 * 4) FAQ to be evolved over time.
 * 5) Patterns of people
 * 6) What are we learning from who is signing the declaration
 * 7) Who can we be contacting and what creative ways can we do this


 * CTOED Web team to give access to database.

Cheryl & Alliyah (UCT) will take on the maintenance of CTOED website as have worked with it before. Melissa to organise/ provide access to database. (As an aside David mentioned that the Open High School in Utah has been approved).

Funding

 * OSI is funding the US and Shuttleworth the SA bit.


 * Karien arranging with SA the contracts and hours.

Questions

 * Q: What do we as a group mean by open education (OE)? What is the scope of what we are looking at?


 * A: We defined what we mean by OE in the declaration,


 * Are these definitions working or not?
 * Use instincts to check against objectives of CTOED

Important to chart progress towards “openness” basically anything that is not closed, initially follow a broad spectrum. Also look at open practices, methodologies, technologies.


 * Q: How does Peter Suber differ and how is it the same as what we are doing?


 * A: Peter focuses on scholarly literature; this is more a focus on materials. The idea is not to overlap, Peter has gone very broad and does everything open. We might overlap with the new open student blog-Gavin Baker: openstudents.org. Try to do what Peter Suber is doing for OA for what we need to do for OE. David will be sending links for the OA Budapest Declaration for everyone to see. Melissa mentions that we want less volume, but maybe have a little more anlaysis and filtering.
 * There is a possibility for forming a community around CTOED, we have 1500 peoples email addresses and we need to be engaging with people on the list:


 * Eg. Inviting them to blog (loop this back )
 * Responding to comments
 * Provoking comments/ provoke


 * There’s not much done with feedback and comments at the moment.


 * Cheryl to speak to Tony Carr from UCT about guidelines and facilitating the building of a community of practice as he has experience with this, and has run a few online conferences.


 * Q: Is it best to put how roles are being divided up onto a wiki?


 * A: There is a mediawiki in oen.org

Timing

 * Check in in two weeks from now (approximately June 1, 2008)


 * Karien to send e-mails to David to start up google group.


 * Eve suggests that you launch something to begin with.


 * Within two weeks if we can all have blogged one thing and within 4 weeks we announce it. Jump in headlong for 3-4 weeks and then start publishing in the open and work out a strategy.

TODO

 * Send preferred username/ e-mail username to log in to David.
 * Who’s looking at what / tracks what, send around blogs being tracked.
 * Melissa to organise/ provide access to database of CTOED website.
 * David will be sending links for the OA Budapest Declaration for everyone to see.
 * Cheryl to speak to Tony Carr from UCT about guidelines and facilitating the building of a community of practice around CTOED.
 * Karien to send e-mails to David to start up google group.
 * URL to be looked at: openstudents.org.