That is an excellent summary of what we discussed. Much better that I could have put it. -Matthew Lye You can do anything you set your mind to when you have vision, determination, and and endless supply of expendable labor. <No tree's were harmed during this transmission. However, a great number of electrons were terribly inconvenienced> <div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Oct 13, 2009 at 1:38 PM, Elizabeth Krumbach <<a href="mailto:lyz@ubuntu.com">lyz@ubuntu.com</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;"> Hi folks, There has been some discussion today over course development preferences, and I wanted to send out a general email to the list to clear up some things. All of the content of this email comes from discussions this evening. I will start out by saying that the goal of this project has been to develop some core material for use in 3 major deployment formats: * Live classes * Moodle * IRC As such, we seek to to create course outlines, collect resources and put together coursework that could be deployed on these multiple formats. To aid in this effort I was brought in from the IRC course world, Charles was brought in from the Moodle world and Martin was brought in based on his ongoing experience conducting live classes, and others on the team have focuses in these areas or a combination of them as well. The general plan for our workflow, at the most basic, consists of the following: A) Collaborative discussion and outlining on the wiki B) Further development and fleshing out in bzr+asciidoc C) Putting material from B into our 3 major deployment formats - live classes, irc, moodle Now, the obvious problem with this workflow is that people have different expertises and may not have time to devote to learning bzr+asciidoc and contribute that way. Instead, to draw from an example of my work with the Classroom project, we want to allow for someone to give an IRC session from material outlined in the wiki, but maybe they don't want to/don't have the time to formally put it in asciidoc - they're too busy being a brilliant kernel hacker. Similarly we want someone who may want to do development in Moodle to develop there if that's what they are most comfortable with, and we also want folks to give us notes and tips from live classes they give without requiring them to formally put it in asciidoc themselves. This is all very valuable stuff, so even if they skip step B, it can be our job to collect these great resources and put them into asciidoc for use project-wide. This would be the path of skipping B, and jumping straight from A to C. So if you choose to directly go from A to C, we'll allow it because we want to see good material come in and the project grow, but it's not the ideal since the material is of limited usefulness to folks using the other release formats and will require work from the team to make it as useful as possible. There will be the following basic responsibilities on the team regarding the core workflow: * Wiki maintainers keeping track of who is working on what outlines and formats * bzr+asciidoc experts pruning the core material in B (doing some backporting too - if a great course is published in Moodle we want to backport the core of it to asciidoc) * Moodle experts putting the documents from B into Moodle * IRC experts putting the documents from B into a format useful on IRC * Real Life session teachers putting documents from B into a format that can be taught offline * Course writers either using the set workflow, or developing directly for Moodle, IRC or Live sessions Obviously this is the dream land ideal - that the project will be so vast that we'll have development happening and backporting and everything. In reality I think we'll have some people developing for live classes and releasing PDFs, and folks developing in Moodle, and people giving IRC sessions - maybe it won't all get back to asciidoc and we'll directly pull from each others resources to teach our segments. But having goals is nice, and this is the structure we'd like to see for maximum usefulness of the core course material. We still have details to work out regarding precisely what belongs on the wiki, and in asciidoc and how much work we need to put into writing courses vs referencing existing reference documentation, but I wanted to make the basics clear before diving into all that too deeply. Charles is going to work on some of his ideas and give examples, and Martin has several great courses already developed in bzr that we're going to look at to see what our happy medium is regarding reference and rewriting. -- Elizabeth Krumbach // Lyz // pleia2 <a href="http://www.princessleia.com" target="_blank">http://www.princessleia.com</a> -- Ubuntu-Learning mailing list <a href="mailto:Ubuntu-Learning@lists.ubuntu.com">Ubuntu-Learning@lists.ubuntu.com</a> Modify settings or unsubscribe at: <a href="https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-learning" target="_blank">https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-learning</a> </blockquote></div>