Retrospectives 2019

PAR 1

• We want to run a MOOC to codesign a new way of learning together online.
• We develop an outline syllabus and budget, and submit our proposal to the Knight Foundation.
• The details of the syllabus are meant to be worked out with students when they arrive, which is somewhat confusing; the tasks and budget are more concrete.
• We have a budget breakdown for how we would spend $50,000.
• We should rework the syllabus around the target audience—possibly in a classroom rather than a MOOC.

PAR 2

• Could we fund our MOOC on Kickstarter rather than with a grant?
• We juggle the numbers, and get feedback from Kio Stark, who successfully crowdfunded her book, Don't Go Back to School (2013). She cautions: “on Kickstarter—if people don't immediately get what it is, they're not likely to stick around long enough for the explanation.”
• One of our collaborators suggests that we include time donations alongside monetary donations. We juggle the numbers some more.
• We have started to describe a value proposition.
• Kio tells us Kickstarter is a full-time job: proceed with caution.

PAR 3

• We facilitate an online workshop on. It doesn’t go well. We want to understand why.
• Participants have trouble installing the open source voice chat software Mumble that we suggested they use. There is little activity on the shared Etherpad.
• We briefly discuss trade-offs between community and individual projects. Conference organizers suggest a “good outcome” is just increased awareness of the discourse around peer learning and peer production.
• We strengthen our shared skills at working with risk by devising the PAR.
• We hope to establish a distributed “mutual aid society”—but we need to work harder to make sure that it’s really mutual.

PAR 4

• We bid for an Individual Engagement Grant to support engagement with the Wikimedia community.
• We propose to catalogue patterns of peer learning on Wikimedia sites. We get feedback Asking for more examples and clearer benefits.
• Our breakdown of tasks and deliverables is fairly precise, but doesn’t add up to an obvious “must have”.
• We get really excited about design patterns!
• Could we draw on our ongoing work with patterns with a new proposal that more clearly addresses the Foundation’s priorities? Could we improve our pattern writing workflow with a federated wiki, per Cunningham and Mehaffy (2013)?

PAR 5

• We prepare a submission for the 2018 Connected Learning Summit.
• We have a dialogue about the “what’s next” steps from our pattern catalogue, asking what makes our project a sustainable learning community.
• At the last minute, we realize we need to anonymize the paper. The content is too much about “us” to stand up well to those changes. We subsequently revise the text into a successful submission for Anticipation 2019.
• We should review the work that was accepted for CLS with more care and think about a future submission.