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

[Samuel Klein]

Dear Johncn,

The bssd wiki is the best thing I have seen in a while.  Congrats on
what you've accomplished so far.  I would love to take part in a
session next week to see a demo of what you are developing.

As for the Yupik and Inupiaq dictionaries -- they are quite nice.
Have you been in touch with anyone from the Inupiaq Wiktionary?
Piolinfax may be a helpful resource for expanding such projects.

http://ik.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:AllPages
http://ik.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Piolinfax

Regards,
SJ

(And: have a great time at cosn.  is anyone else on the list going?)


On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 12:24 PM, Johncn <jconcilus at bssd.org> wrote:
>
> 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
> --
> View this message in context: http://n2.nabble.com/RFC%3A-Supporting-olpc-ish-Deployments---Draft-1-tp2351291p2360168.html
> Sent from the It's an education project, not a laptop project. mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>
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