[IAEP] RFC: Supporting olpc-ish Deployments - Draft 1

[Johncn]

Hello,

I'm one of the project people at Bering Strait School District that has been
working with DART.  

Although I've exchanged some emails with Gregdek and Jef about DART's
ability to track
standards progress, and link needs to a MediaWiki instance, they have not
seen the latest
version of the system.

The newest features and bug fixes really expand the DART / Wiki combination
into complete
student information AND collaborative curriculum development system for
managing our school district. 
We are about the size of Great Britain, but with less than 2,000 students.

The system runs well, and is very, very stable. Down time for us has been
almost a non-event. Training and roll out has been mostly unnecessary, and
handled with an hour so "overview", and a few PDF tutorials for teachers and
students. A bit more for school administrators. We get a very, very low
number of Help Desk requests compared to our other software packages in use. 
The most training has to go toward editing the wiki system, not to DART
itself.

Our current version has been our official system since August, and has
vastly improved "modules" that can be activated to track organizational
performance and functioning, such as a "Dashboard", Improvement Planning,
standardized test data analysis, and improved individual learner tracking.

I'm sorry to say that we're woefully short of help right now, and scrambling
to finish an installer package and an updated demo server so we can share
these features with groups like this.  To be honest, it's just our school
ditrict at the moment working to develop the project.  Others have expressed
an interest, but have not been able to help with programming or design work.

As soon as our installer package is done, we need an admin setup screen that
will allow easier setup for adjusting language CSS, logos and turning
modules on or off by need.  That will spur a wider adoption base that will
get some more partners, I think.  We have a table at CoSN conference in
Austin in March, and will handing out information to like minded school
districts and organizations...if we can find some! 

Like CATB says, "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow".  We'd LOVE to
have some others interested in moving this project forward, and I can set up
a DimDim demo session in a week or so if there is interest in seeing the
existing build.

Finally, on the collaborative development of our curriculum we are up to
about 11,000 pages. We are hoping to work with Palo Alto Research Center
(PARC) to test their fantastic WikiDashboard tool with DART and our Open
Content Curriculum.  This will allow us to track and measure the impact of
individual contributions to the curriculum in visual manner, and provide all
users with a "meta" view of that content as it develops.  This is PERFECT
for use in a curriculum system.

http://www.technologyreview.com/web/22076/page1/

http://wikidashboard.parc.com/

Teachers and students have created a number of spin off projects just this
year in the wiki that may interest educators doing OLPC rollouts, such as
Inupiaq and Yup'ik multimedia dictionaries:

http://wiki.bssd.org/index.php/Category:Yupik_dictionary
http://wiki.bssd.org/index.php/Meteghluk
http://wiki.bssd.org/index.php/Category:Inupiaq_dictionary

Thanks, folks, and please feel free to contact me at jconcilus at bssd.org if
you need more information, and thanks for the kind words in this thread.

Regards,

Johncn
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