Definitely feeling some excitement — we soft launch tomorrow! The OAME webmaster set up the page and I did some quick testing to make sure it all worked well together. Still one small fix before tomorrow night’s presentation.
I have SO much writing to do on all of this — documentation, examples, support, reflection, next steps. Unfortunately, I’m working the next two weekends for Christmas so I’ll still be burning the midnight oil trying to keep this all in line. And that’s assuming everything goes well (knock wood!)
One of the next big steps is the development of a rubric to determine whether a particular resource (book, article, website, etc) reflects the Mission and Vision of OAME sufficiently to include it within the file collection we already have (which is all OAME and Ministry content, with some pre-vetted content like from Dewey, Piaget and well-respected Ontario educators). There’s a lot of great content out there whose perspective will broaden the intelligence, so to speak, of our chatOAME.
And then there’s the documentation. I’m a firm believer that you can get hit by a truck any minute, so it’s important to have sufficient documentation that someone else can take over with relative ease. So that’s high priority, too. Right now, it’s just been me plugging away and since the first beta version is being handed over to OAME, it’s time to let someone else know how the sausage was made.
And that sausage-making is meant to be public too — remember, one of the reasons why I put this project together was my concern that business-oriented groups would put together an opaque resource like this and we wouldn’t know what it was “thinking”. chatOAME, on the other hand, will be clear on what it contains so that people can feel confident in its (attempts at) answers.
