Weeknotes #3
Back when ‘Teaching Public Service in the Digital Age’ (TPSDA) launched, we had spent a bit too much time debating and drafting the wording of our eight Digital Era Competencies, and not quite enough time writing explanations of why, as a group of ten people in six countries, we’d actually agreed to them.
As a consequence when we launched there were just five explanatory mini-essays, not the full set of eight. Somewhat flatteringly people actually noticed - I’ve been asked repeatedly and from various different countries where the missing three are! Furthermore, all five bore the signs of having been written in a bit of a hurry - the explanations weren’t as good quality as the competencies themselves.
Over the last three weeks myself and my co-editors, University of Konstanz Professor Ines Mergel and Harvard Kennedy School professor David Eaves have put a lot of time into producing a full set of better-written eight explanatory essays. The revised essays are now being inspected by our eighteen person, ten country collaborators group, and next week we will try to advertise and celebrate the new work, as well as trying to explain how we hope people can use these assets to make change in their own institutions.
Lotsa countries
One of the most rewarding things about working on this project is just how many chances we get to have calls with people from outside the anglosphere. In the last week we’ve had conversations with people in the Philippines, Brazil, Vietnam and various parts of Europe. It’s really nice to talk to people struggling with some of the same teaching challenges we are, in different corners of the globe, and it’s great to learn from them.
These conversations are fascinating and sometimes challenging, and have put a question on the table that we will have to deal with seriously in future: are our competencies suitable for all countries, or just relatively wealthy ones? There’s no doubt that our original core group consisted of people from some of the world’s most successful economies, and we will need to be careful to avoid the classic case of saying ‘This will work everywhere’ when the world is a very big place containing vastly differing contexts.
On the tech side
This week I had a conversation with South Africa-based web development agency ‘Electric Bookworks’, about possibly working with us on the web production of our teaching materials.
They’re the team which builds the technology and design for CORE economic’s wonderfully presented online book ‘The Economy’. It turns out that this is built on their own open source system (built on top of the highly popular static page generator Jekyll) that is optimised for turning source markdown texts into lots of different types of material, so you can have one source that produces attractive web pages, PDFs, ePubs or printed books. If you’re ever producing something that needs to be in multiple formats, this might very well be worth looking at.
Next week
There’s now only six weeks to go before our target date of publishing our syllabus online. With all the work we’ve put into the competencies we’ve got a bit behind on the production of each unit, so next week we’ll hopefully be producing alpha versions of the first two weeks or ‘units’ of the syllabus, ready for our Contributors to take a look and help us to improve them.