On 14 June 2012 07:41, Gordon Joly <gordon.j...@pobox.com> wrote: > On 13/06/12 18:05, Charles Matthews wrote: >> >> On 13 June 2012 17:51, Gordon Joly<gordon.j...@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 _______________________________________________ Wikimedia UK mailing list wikimediau...@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l WMUK: http://uk.wikimedia.org
