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Meeting called off. Please take the time to review the draft content flow chart by @aimeegc (@gonza166) at https://make.wordpress.org/training/2017/09/12/content-flow-chart-draft/. Be prepared to offer comments on it next week.
Flow Chart
@aimeegc intro to flow chart:
“Ok this is a liiiittle bit overwhelming to look at because it’s consolidated into one space. My goal was to capture the pieces everyone has offered and what I’ve heard, and create thematic spaces with subflows inside them (each space). Then, I wanted those to be situated inside a newcomer’s POV, with the two areas they can jump in to participate/help. All of this is architected on the premise that we’re going to try Github, and knowing/planning for that made this task IMMENSELY easier (aka I got unstuck way faster). I hope that’s a sign that using Github will make organizing this flow IRL immensely easier. Accountability will be a different story, but I am confident that improved visibility of workflow and tagging others will improve accountability.”
Discussion about how to use github for accountability for various tasks.
@pbarthmaier suggested using projects as part of the organization and accountability. He has used it for bug tracking and thinks it could be used for tasks. Unsure about it’s use with free version.
General enthusiasm over using github.
@aimeegc If anyone has comments or questions they can DM her or add comments to the post at https://make.wordpress.org/training/2017/09/12/content-flow-chart-draft/.
Next Steps
The Hows and the Whos:
1. Organize tested lesson plans and tag WP version under maintenance
2. Assumptions tied to “Become a Tester under “testing.”
3. Assumptions tied to “Test and create feedback” under testing.
4. Assumptions tied to “Move to Maintenance and tag” under testing
5. “May want to revisit support flow in Github context.”
6. Who writes and edits lesson plans?
7. Who on the team gives feedback and assigns an editor?
8. Who edits the plan per the style guide?
@aimeegc: Members of the group with more institutional history should look at the chart and share ideas.
@bethsoderberg “I feel like we’re at a point where we have a lot of questions to digest/things to think through from this conversation. The only concrete action step I can think of other than “ruminate” is “look more closely at Github – both in terms of its general capabilities and in terms of how the parts of the WP project that use it already are using it”
@bethsoderberg: @melindahelt and @juliekuehl and I are figuring out who will set up github.
@bethsoderberg responding to “noisy, but there” resources: We can create documentation to help people know how to do the tasks specifically associated with how we will use it.
@pbarthmaier will be on the point of shepherding the transition to github for users with a wiki or some type of documentation.
Hi all, this was posted on the Training slack channel, but it’s also here for easier consumption and commenting/reference.
A word of preface:
Ok this is a liiiittle bit overwhelming to look at because it’s consolidated into one space. My goal was to capture the pieces everyone has offered and what I’ve heard, and create thematic spaces with subflows inside them (each space). Then, I wanted those to be situated inside a newcomer’s POV, with the two areas they can jump in to participate/help. All of this is architected on the premise that we’re going to try Github, and knowing/planning for that made this task IMMENSELY easier (aka I got unstuck way faster). I hope that’s a sign that using Github will make organizing this flow IRL immensely easier. Accountability will be a different story, but I am confident that improved visibility of workflow and tagging others will improve accountability.
The draft flowchart:
https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1OcxNtZ80UPn7JdGtiuUT4yRXN7TKEvIlk1hoUCttRts/edit
We also discussed this in the 12 September meeting, so be sure to check out the Meeting Recap for that date.
-AGC
Please join us later today at 19:00 UTC in the #training Slack channel for our weekly meeting! A brief agenda for today:
If you have any other items to add to the agenda, please list them in the comments. We’ll see you soon!
Welcome
@melindahelt noted that @conradhallauthor has completed his inventory and provided the link. It will be added to P2 later.
Comments and personas should be added to the post “Who Are We Creating For? (Personas) by @juliekuehl. https://make.wordpress.org/training/2017/08/29/who-are-we-creating-for-personas/
Please join us later today at 19:00 UTC in the #training Slack channel for our weekly meeting! A brief agenda for today:
Welcome
General updates
Continue to brainstorm on structural needs for lesson plans, review posts since last week.
If you have any other items to add to the agenda, please list them in the comments.
We will need a volunteer to take notes for today’s meeting. Please let us know in the comments or in Slack if you are interested/able to take today’s notes!
It can help a lot when we get lost in the details of a large project, such as the one the WordPress Training Team is tasked with, to remember why you’re doing it at all. Who are we trying to help? Who are we writing for? Who will be using these lesson plans? We tend to default to “someone like me.” That’s not a good default for this team.
We agreed to try to come up with 4-8 (or so) personas. A persona for our purposes is a description of a person (fictional or possibly anonymously real) that could include things such as:
I don’t have all the questions we should answer in these persona descriptions, so if you have ideas there, please make those suggestions too!
In a comment, please describe your persona. Give them a name so that we can refer to them easily. Describe them and their needs/motivation/challenges as best you can. All ideas welcome and let’s work together to make a really excellent list!
Structural Needs for Lesson Plans
@juliekuehl: I think one piece that we have been struggling with is who are our “users”. There has been some discussion regarding their level of experience/expertise with WordPress. And the environments in which these lesson plans are expected to be used. Testing at meet ups and eventually using them at meet ups is still on the table. I think one audience that we’ve been missing is the … “disadvantaged” workshops / areas / environments
@aimeegc: Could someone tell me more about this need’s reach? Is it nation-wide meet ups? I got an answer about how this need was identified last meeting, but I’m still feeling unclear as to how this became the most pressing use case.
She pointed out that she has never heard of learning WP classroom-style at meet ups.
@juliekuehl:: I don’t think meetups as we understand them in the U.S. is the most pressing use case. Convenient, perhaps. But not pressing. We were also tasked with providing materials for organizations such as Hack the Hood and such.
@pbarthmaier: Presenting one in WC Philly.
@juliekuehl: Suggested personas for the user.
1) Teach.org person leading an afterschool program.
2) Peacecorps worker trying to help a business owner run their own site.
3) High School Teacher who wants to bring WordPress to their classroom
General discussion over how the issue is differences in the teacher’s comfort level with WordPress.
@jcasabona pointed out that more familiar users might make their own lesson plans, but having something like “these are the topics you should hit” list would be good for consistency.
@aimeegc pointed out every teacher uses an LP regardless of knowledge. We are stuck on how detailed they need to be.
@juliekuehl:: I think we’ve got two ideas so far that we should hang on to 1) personas and 2) the modularity of lesson plans (Topics -> Outlines / Talking Points -> Full Scripts).
@pbarthmaier: I think we need two levels of copy editing: one for the flow of English and the other for the validity of code
@juliekuehl: I think we’ve tried to do that before, with varying levels of success. I’m not sure where we should go from here. Those few ideas seem like they might need to percolate a bit before moving forward.
@juliekuehl suggested coming up with 4-8 personas and get them fleshed out. One for each of our Instructor levels and a consideration for student experience and environment (like no internet connection).
@jcasabona answered a question that modularity of the LPs should mean that you can use them exactly as the instructions provided or take the parts and build your own thing (as in Legos).
@juliekuehl: I think one other idea that’s buried in what we said is the idea of taking a single lesson plan (or topic at least) and having different levels within it (beginner/intermediate/advanced or quick-and-dirty/detailed).
@juliekuehl: So the three ideas are: 1) personas and 2) the modularity of lesson plans (Topics -> Outlines / Talking Points -> Full Scripts) and 3) quick-and-dirty vs. detailed.
Please join us later today at 19:00 UTC in the #training Slack channel for our weekly meeting! A brief agenda for today:
If you have any other items to add to the agenda, please list them in the comments.
We will need a volunteer to take notes for today’s meeting. Please let us know in the comments or in Slack if you are interested/able to take today’s notes!
Recently the team has been talking about how to restructure and smooth out our processes moving forward. One thread of these conversations has centered around the fact that people are not actually using our lesson plans as a script when delivering the lessons. People are not reading them word for word (which we agreed is a good thing!). This leads to the question: does the format of the lesson plans need to change in order to facilitate easier and more effective teaching?
A bit of history on this: the lesson plan format dates to very early on the team where the general dictate was that lesson plans needed to be written as scripts to encourage everyone to be able to teach. Over time the lesson plans have gone through significant testing that shows that hardly anyone actually uses the plans as a “script” and that teachers of the lesson plans have/need some exposure to WordPress in order to effectively teach the lesson plans. The lesson plans as they exist now are being used, it is just a question of whether refactoring them into a different fact would be useful or not.
We will not be getting rid of the current lesson plans, but would like to brainstorm, over the long run, what format we want our lessons to have.
Once we determine a format, we will reformulate one or two plans and test those, in order to test our assumptions about the new format. THEN we may work on refactoring existing plans to fit the new, tested format.
Please record your thoughts on the lesson plan format here rather than in the Slack channel so that all of our ideas are recorded in one place. We are at a discussion stage with this particular question and no one has decided what exactly would be helpful to change. The sole goal of this conversation is to make sure that the format of the future lesson plans is as helpful to teachers as possible. All ideas/thoughts/constructive feedback are welcome 🙂
