On 14 June 2012 07:41, Gordon Joly <gordon.joly(a)pobox.com> wrote:
On 13/06/12 18:05, Charles Matthews wrote:
On 13 June 2012 17:51, Gordon Joly<gordon.joly(a)pobox.com> wrote:
On 13/06/12 16:02, Thomas Dalton wrote:
This sounds like a fantastic project. Thank you Charles for agreeing
to lead it and thank you WMUK for agreeing to support it.
What is the current budget?
I'm making business cases for deliverables individually. The overall
training budget is 20K?
Charles
So the distance learning is a fraction of £20K?
I believe you said that there would be volunteer effort, but in any case, I
would not expect much from such a small budget for such a difficult and
technical area (that is distance learning).
That comment being written in an expectation-lowering way, and also
not being within my remit to answer, I'll make some remarks. Firstly I
held off sending Jon Davies any concrete and costed proposals until I
had attended the "Training for Trainers": I thought it was premature.
I then hit the ground running about 74 hours ago; and posted to this
list as soon as I had figured out what I called the "interlocking" in
my first post.
I question the assumption that money is likely to be the limiting
factor in building the online community: I think "some things money
can't buy" is a really good general explanation of Wikimedia's
success.
And the other point is this: the genesis of this project was my
unsuccessful tender to train WMUK's trainers. In it I basically
suggested WMUK clone the Open University's OpenLearn project. I
consulted two people associated with the OU before doing that. The OU
are world leaders in distance learning. Against precedent, as I have
noted, my direction is to assume we can lift and adapt what they do,
conditional only on making sure that our community values are placed
front and centre.
I could go on, but we don't have necessarily to buy in advice except
the trainer-training. There is a Moodle community who may take it very
well if WMUK endorses Moodle rather than saying someone should
reverse-engineer it and write a MediaWiki extension, even if that
means junking years of development of the features that educators have
actually asked for. The OU possibly do not see WMUK as a rival, but as
on the same side. Who knows.
Charles