Hello! First off, thanks for taking the time to read up on education. We’ve got some fantastic things coming up and I couldn’t be more excited about the way the sphere is shaping up. Before I dig into all of that, I’d like to thank Nicolette Apraez, Eliana Rabinowitz, and Nicholas Zitomer for agreeing to help me out as we shape education. Their opinions are truly invaluable, and I look forward to forging a fantastic direction.
Please allow me to clarify my role here. I think you can split up my duties across four specific areas:
1. Facilitate. Part of my job here is to help you. If you want to run a project, we can help with that! If you want to know if an effort is in motion, we can tell you! If you want help organizing a project in motion, we can certainly do that as well! I am here to make your lives easier.
2. Coordinate. I’ll be coordinating efforts across projects, and if need be across spheres! I’ve already been chatting with Juan (translations) and David (social media) about various things, and I expect to have chats with Lems and Alfonso in the near future. As it turns out some of my projects had already been coordinating already (Bryan and I on AMTR and AIPG). My favorite part of coordinating, we can cut down on duplication of effort!
3. Being a sounding board. I’ve run projects successfully. I’ve also run some projects that were not so successful. I’ve helped build up a group, and I’ve seen some strain. Again, I’m here to help kind of be a catch-all if you need someone to talk to about education stuff.
4. I kind of lied. This last one is what I’m not here to do:
- Take over someone’s project. (I can help find a replacement by request if needed, see facilitate above.)
- Remove a project lead. I’m here to help, not enforce some phantom standards. Your projects are your own. I can offer as much or as little help as requested.
- Reassign resources. I’m again not here to poach people, steal work, etc. That’s not the intention, and should not be a fear you have!
- Censure projects. I will not tell you no. If your goal is to run a project on the most corner cases have a blast. It’s not my place to tell you no, you can’t work on your passion project.
Excellent, now that we’ve got my particular role out of the way (and by extension, my team’s role), let’s look at some of our goals for the next year.
Goal one is going back to the basics. I have noticed that for quite a while the program has been something of a rudderless ship, and I aim to change that. I would like for us to have a firm foundation to build on. That necessitates the creation of a variety of things, and you should see those start to appear before the end of December. Some of those will take the form of projects, others may be some “user notes”, or best practices documents. In any case, we want a solid rock to build on!
Goal two, and this is a goal that may overlap with other spheres, and work done by a few others already, we would like to delineate the most important topics for level one and level two. Going back to that solid foundation idea, realistically the different levels have different foundational needs. Realistically, different levels have different scopes of knowledge. I’d like to define some baselines and move on from there. To be clear, I’m not saying someone should only learn the minimum (I’m all for learning!), I just want to define areas of focus, and how to grow.
Goal three, I strive for accessibility. I want to be easy to reach, and easy to communicate with. Perhaps more important, I want education to be easy for others to both give and receive. Some of what will help with this will be coming soon (L1 classes, L2 classes, MOOCs for L1 and L2), and some of it is already here (I’m easy to reach and talk to, I promise!). As a final note, a MOOC is a massive open online course, so think online judge classes, comparable to taking an online course at university.
My last two goals are things that will be done in a much shorter time frame. We are working on compiling a list of projects that fall under, even if in part, the scope of education. In the next few days, if not sooner, I will be reaching out to those leads. If you have not heard from me by the end of December and you believe your project falls under education then I would love to hear from you! Also of note, Alfonso is working with a group to create a more comprehensive list of projects, so he may be reaching out to you for questions!
Last, and certainly the most visual, I have taken David de la Iglesia’s offer of having a standing page with leads, contact info, projects, and essentially everything else we could want. In fact, projects will be posting up on the page very soon. Expect a few posts coming soon explaining the ins and outs of my processes. Until then I hope you are as excited as I am about the future of education!