VUSSC/Trinidad and Tobago Boot Camp/Report on Day 4

COMMONWEALTH OF LEARNING VIRTUAL UNIVERSITY OF SMALL STATES OF THE COMMONWEALTH

REPORT ON TEAM LEADER ORIENTATION MEETING, VANCOUVER, IN PREPARTION FOR BOOTCAMP 3 (JUNE 4 – 20, 07 HOSTED BY MINISTRY OF SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY AND TERTIARY EDUCATION IN TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO)

The Team Leader Orientation Meeting took place from May 7 - 10, 2007 at the COL Office at 1055 West Hastings Suite 1200. The Team was wonderful and comprised : Ms. Andrea Airall – Antigua and Barbuda Dr. Ravhee Bholah – Mauritius Dr. R. Kavena Shalyefu – Namibia Ms. Lumaavava Sooaemalelagi – Samoa Ms. Ceronne Prevatt-Wiltshire – Trinidad and Tobago (Coordinator)

Day 1: We were welcomed by the President and CEO Sir John Daniel and Vice President Asha Kanwar. The Introduction and orientation on VUSSC was conducted by Paul West, Director of Knowledge, Management and Information Technology. Wayne Mackintosh, Education Specialist, eLearning and ICT Policy, conducted an orientation to WikiEducator and Web2. The team also met Joshua Mallet, Education Specialist, Learning & Livelihoods and Helena Fehr, Board Secretary and Gender Officer. Helena will be participating with the group online, while Joshua will be participating in the boot camp in T&T.

Handouts of Life Skills materials (207 pages) developed by the Coordinator with her assistants at the Ministry of Science, Technology and Tertiary Education were used to introduce the five (5) Life Skills themes and 24 topics. Handouts of the course description of the American Association of Family and Consumer Sciences was presented by Andrea Airall. The team modified the titles of the 24 units and added another, Consumerism.

Participants of Bootcamp 3 were e-mailed and asked for their responses and suggestions to a short Introduction and basic goals and objectives.

Day 2: Richard Nielson of Denrich Consulting conducted an orientation to Project Management for the team, who then applied the principles to planning for the VUSSC Bootcamp 3 and with Paul West, the group decided on the sequence of activities for the Bootcamp 3. The team allocated one of the 5 Life Skills themes to each and used the list of 19 participants, given by Helen Askounis, Knowledge Management Coordinator, to allocate 3 or 4 participants to each group.

These groupings were e-mailed to participants who were asked to let the team know of any particular preferences they may have for any particular theme by the following Thursday. They were also asked to begin collecting additional content, activities and support material ideas to enrich the curriculum material.

Day 3: Paul West introduced Andrew Lachkovics. to the team as the IT expert (programmer) who would be transferring the eXe material to the Wikieducator format, which would allow for our collaborative work in preparation for Bootcamp 3 and at the actual Bootcamp. The Coordinator presented to him and to the team the sequence of the eXe curriculum material with links and graphics relating to the 5 themes and 24 modular units. Later in the day, the new unit,’Consumerism’ was created using the course description of the American Association of Family and Consumer Sciences, and e-mailed to Andrew to include.

The schedule of peer review of work done during Bootcamp 3 was decided by the team.

The team also came to consensus on having an overview, general objectives and instructional template of the names of the topics, after the name of each theme, and before each of the topics is dealt with, using the Wikieducator, which is similar to that of the eXe curriculum document. (Appendix 6). Each team leader began work on the sub-titles of the specific theme.

Day 4: Paul shared technologies and tools with us: Virtual world: Second Life (www.secondlife.com/) and project management tools – Base Camp (www.basecamphq.com), and others (www.thinkfree.com & http://docs.google.com/) and the possibilities of the chat room for our communication (http://wikieducator.org/cgi-bin/irc.cgi). Work continued on the curriculum materials and on the schedule for the Bootcamp, detailing the leadership tasks of the team leaders on specific days to forward the work process of participants. Team Leaders discussed the pre-Bootcamp activity with participants and our task to motivate them to complete the Wikieducator Tutorials and to locate Life Skills materials, activities, ideas of support materials e.g. comics, Powerpoint presentations, animation etc. The Bootcamp Plan was finalized and presented to COL by the team leaders and Coordinator.

The Orientation meeting ended with an evaluation of our work and expressions of thanks to the COL staff who went beyond the call of duty to make this meeting a success.

The Coordinator has communicated with the Preparation Team in Trinidad and Tobago about technical and support requirements, including short presentations and interactive practicals on computer graphics and powerpoint presentation skills. The team leaders and Coordinator are optimistic about Bootcamp 3 and thank Paul, Wayne and Helen in particular and all the COL staff who interacted with us in our meetings and shared their expertise with us.

Ceronne Prevatt-Wiltshire Coordinator

LIFE SKILLS MODULES GROUP WORK: Group 1 Intrapersonal Relationships Group 2 Interpersonal Relationships Group 3 Communication Group 4 Financial Life Skills Group 5 Employability Skills

Team Leaders - and participants in brackets:'''*1.Dr. Ravhee Bholah( Sonia Mc Phail, Ms. Badeli D Ginindza,Ms. Gill Grill,Ms Lilly Gomez) *2.Dr R. Kavena Shalyefu(,Mr. Ruhmatoolah Joorawon, Mrs. Barbara Carolus -Andre,Sis. Lucine Edwards) *3.Ms Andrea Airall(Mrs. Monica Holiness, Ms. Elizabeth Kendrun, Ms. Valisi Tovai)  *4.Mrs Ceronne Prevatt-Wiltshire (Ms. Bothephana Makhakhane,Dr. Said Mounini Soidiki, Allan Pierre)	*5.Ms Funealii Lumaava Sooaemalagi (Ava) (Dr. Rebecca Lekoko, Mrs. Hermena Veronica Daniel-Davidson, Ms Lynette Noel)'''

Dear Participants,

Thank you for all the responses to our first email.

Following today’s planning session, the life skill themes were distributed amongst the five team leaders. We also allocated each participant into one of the groups as given above. If you have a particular preference regarding a specific theme, please inform us by Thursday 10th May.

At this stage our planning has been divided into three (3) stages: 1.	Pre-boot preparation 2.	Boot camp 3.	Post-boot camp As part of stage 1, all participants are expected to have: 1.	Completed wikieducator tutorials. This process will be facilitated by Wayne Mackintosh through the wikieducator site www.wikieducator.org. Please click on the help icon to access tutorials. Each tutorial topic is about 20mins long and it is advisable that all tutorials are completed by the time you arrive at the Boot Camp.

2.	Received an email inviting you to participate in the group discussion of the content for the Boot Camp. It is imperative that you join and contribute to these discussions as they will better inform the Boot Camp planning process.

3.	Gathered relevant resource materials (activities, assessments etc), relating to the theme and subtopics of your group. You can also send materials to other groups with different themes. Please remember that wiki is an open-source (i.e. free) website authoring tool, and therefore permission must be sought from the author/institution for all copyright materials.

Best regards, Team Leaders