Re: Follow up to today's meeting

That's the same for me. I don't think I can look at C3 in detail until Thursday afternoon. I will try to take a look and add my two yuan.

On 2/6/08, Owen James <okokoj@gmail.com> wrote:

Dear Bill,

Thank you as always for the invaluable follow up you provide on meetings. There is a lot in this one and I may not have much opportunity to 'unpack' and respond to the ideas and issues raised until tomorrow.

Best,

Owen

On Feb 5, 2008 9:57 PM, Bill Harshbarger <billh@icu.ac.jp> wrote:

Owen's revisions to my draft "Set up standards and checklist", now entitled "ELP C3 Network roll out" in all your googledocs accounts, illustrate the main points of what we discussed today. 

Owen's perspective, as I understand it, is that our plan to simply get Google and Delicious accounts set up and Firefox downloaded for all ELP staff by April 1, goes against the preferred pedagogy of providing these tools as part of  a more comprehensive series of face to face training sessions.  In such training sessions an awareness and understanding of the value and ultimate utility of the tools and Networking literacies would come first and then we would make the tools available as people understand their purposes and potential. 

This leaves us with a crucial decision -- whether to continue implementing phase one of our C3 plan as we presented it last month, or to revise the plan.  A possible revision to our plan would be to limit our training and educating efforts to a smaller number of ELP staff -- the volunteer beta group -- and then enlist those people in further training and educating of others.  How much time this would take is uncertain, but it would not achieve uniform availability of any C3 tools by April 1.  Owen has also suggested that we should add Ning, blogs and an ELP wiki to the list of basic tools and practices we would train people to use as part of phase one.  These additions would provide a much fuller realization of our goals from the outset.

I understand the value of the approach Owen has recommended, but I feel that it may be better to provide some tangible and uniform results to everyone ( e.g. access to the ELP calendar on line) by April 1st, than to tell most people that we miscalculated and they will have to wait until we get around to them. By giving everyone a sense of at least some participation in our plan now, we can take advantage of the interest that exists now.  Also, only 3 people have indicated an interest in joining the beta group, so we would initially be working with just 8 people until we were satisfied that we could all understand and use the expanded array of tools and practices well enough to train others. 

I also agree with Owen that an expanded array of tools and practices will ultimately be needed for maximum achievement of our goals, but only if we don't end up confusing and overwhelming people so that they turn off to the whole effort.  Even if it is slower and less efficient in the long run, I think building gradually toward our ultimate goals has merit in terms of overall morale and buy in.  I think adding Ning, blogs and wikis to the mix from the outset will add considerably to the learning load and could discourage some  people before they even get started. Based on my own experience, I think some people need to build confidence in doing relatively minor (and possibly not very valuable things in light of our ultimate goals) before they are ready to tackle truly revolutionary tools and practices.

My proposed plan would be to do both -- continue with a minimalist set up of Firefox, Google apps and Delicious for everyone and add the 3 volunteers to our beta group that will work on the fuller array of tools and practices, ultimately help spread those practices as others are ready for them.   This represents a lot of work, and we will need to set it up so that we don't overwhelm ourselves, but adding the 3 volunteers should help with some of the workload.


Finally,  here are my recommendations for the minimal set up specs and the order in which they should be carried out:

1. Sign up for a Gmail account (this automatically creates a Google account).  People should think about possible names and passwords in advance.  They will need to list their icu email as the backup as part of signing up for Gmail.   Then look at other basic Google apps -- calendar, reader, google docs, ( iGoogle optional)

2.  Sign up for a Delicious account.  Use Gmail address.  May require a different user name from Gmail.

3. Install Firefox and add Delicious extension from tools, add ons/get extensions menu.

4. Set up tabs on Firefox for Google apps -- Gmail, Googledocs, Google Reader and Google Calendar (iGoogle optional)

5. Send email to me listing Gmail address and Delicious user name. 

6. When addresses are received, I will send an invitiation to the ICU ELP calendar and a list of ELP tags for use in delicious bookmarking (this may be a google doc or a wiki page, this still needs work)

7. Additional follow up will include a version of Owen's training materials that people can use to begin exploration of the tools.

I suggest that I send out a somewhat expanded version of these basic directions to everyone along with a request to contact me if people want someone to work with them as they go through the steps.  I will coordinate matching people who request this help with one of us or a volunteer on a case by case basis according to the needs of the person requesting the help and our availability.  I may also try to schedule one or two lab times when people may be able to work with one or more of us in groups between now and April 1.

As this goes on, we will start working on a fuller implementation of networked work among ourselves and the three volunteers.  That will probably necessitate a meeting as soon as that can be arranged.....

As always, please let me know how we can improve on these ideas.

Bill

--
Bill Harshbarger, Ph.D.
Director, English Language Program
International Christian University
3-10-2 Osawa, Mitaka-shi
Tokyo 181-8585
+ (81) 422-33-3219
billh@icu.ac.jp
http://indirector.blogspot.com

--

ELP, International Christian University,
3-10-2 Osawa, Mitaka-shi, Tokyo 181-8585.
Office ph: +81-(0)422-33-3371
Home 0.5: http://okoj.net/james/
Skype ID: owen_james
Delicious ID: okoj

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