I just wanted to check-in with you both and see how you are finding your new project home. Do you have any questions, or require any assistance as you get set up?
You already seem to have a good group of collaborators from your districts and community of practice, which is great to see. If you had specific tasks or roles that needed to be filled, or would like to grow the team, please feel free to post a call for participation which we will gladly amplify. Looking forward to seeing how you get on.
Hi @swhalen and @cdobson – how are you both doing? I hope that you’ve been able start gathering the team around the project! Since you already have a small group around the project, I wanted to share the “Engagement Guide”from The Rebus Guide to Publishing Open Textbooks (So Far) as it includes some tips for how to foster good team communication and keep others motivated and excited to be part of the project.
And if you were looking for more collaborators to join the project, you can post a call for participation that we will be happy to share in our newsletter. We have a dedicated space in our newsletter for just this, and give anyone the opportunity to take advantage of our reach. If you would like your call included in this section, post in the Contributor Marketplace. Create a new topic for every call, and include the role you wish to fill and the subject of your book in the title. In the body of the post, provide:
Project Name
Subject
What you need
Contributor requirements
See this example post for a better idea of what we’re looking for.
When your call is ready for promotion, let us know in this thread. @LeighKP, our communications specialist, keeps tabs on this thread. She shares calls on our Twitter and in this newsletter.
We’re excited to hear more about how you’re getting on!
Hi! We have most all of our content from over 30 collaborators in Google Docs at this point, and we are ready to access Press Books and put it in. At that point, I think we would reach out via Rebus community to ask people to add more content, narratives, etc.
I know you said you are reworking the way we access Press Books. Is there any way Chris and I could access it soon?
That’s excellent! Wow 30 collaborators is quite a lot – kudos to you and Christopher for getting so many people together on this project. How has everyone been finding the project so far?
When do you expect all the content to come in? This may help us better coordinate on the work we’re doing on the Rebus Press and timing around it. And how extensive would the additions to content and narratives be? This is mainly because if it’s very extensive, it may be worth waiting before formatting, so I’d suggest taking this into account to answer the first question.
We have bios, narratives, and a chapter for each topic with terms, definitions, and research (religion, race/ethnicity, gender/sexuality, immigration status,
ability/disability, class) in Google Docs. We plan to add narratives for each chapter from interviews of people involved in the local schools. Our goal is to have the online OER resource done in the Fall 2019 semester and then plan workshops as a collaborative
in the Spring 2020 semester. We would want to being putting our materials into the online resource no later than September if possible…but could be persuaded to wait if there is a good reason. We envision that people can continue adding terms, research, narratives,
etc. after we get the initial resource put together. When do you anticipate having Rebus Press available? We can do some editing in Google Docs in the meantime. Please advise!
Thanks,
Stephanie
Stephanie Whalen, Ed.D.
Chair, The Academy for Teaching Excellence
Associate Professor, English and Interdisciplinary Studies
Hi Stephanie – it sounds like you’ve got a lot of great content already and a very solid plan to add to it! I really like the idea of the collaborative workshops in Spring as another way to bring the community around this book together while also adding to it and expanding on what you already have.
Seeing that you’re moving forward fairly quickly, I’ve shared some details over direct message to see if we can coordinate sooner to help you get your OER resource done in Fall 2019!
Hi, Apurva,
We are trying to add some of our colleagues as authors on the project, and we are encountering an error message. For example, Matt Hamilton from high school district 214 created an account in Rebus community with his email matt.hamilton@d214.org, but when we go to add him as an author in Pressbooks, we get an error message that says that email is not allowed. We are trying to understand why we cant add him. Please help!
Thanks,
Stephanie and Chris
Hi Stephanie & Chris, thanks for your message. Glad to hear that you’re making progress on the book!
Account creation on Rebus’ Pressbooks network is restricted to those project participants with an institutional email, and typically requires us to whitelist these institutional domains first. I’ve gone ahead and added the d214.org domain to our whitelist, and you should now be able to add Matt as a user on the book. If there’s anyone else that you’d like to add to the book who is not registered on the d214.org domain or the harpercollege.edu domain, you may need to contact us again.
Please let me know once you’re able to add Matt to the book or if you need any more help.
Looking forward to seeing how you get on.
