Re: [Server-devel] Server-devel Digest, Vol 81, Issue 23
Hi, I am taking a simplistic approach to this problem. KA-Lite has a simple coach report which basically shows a table with a row for each registered student and a column for each activity. The cell is blank for no attempts, a light green for attempts which did not reach 'proficiency', and a dark green to show proficiency in that task. I think this is adequate for teachers, particularly if they can click on a cell to get more detail (e.g number of items completed, number of questions answered correctly, and so forth). Many of the sites I am supporting do not follow the one laptop per child model. In one case, the teachers pass out laptops without regard to who used it previously. In other cases, a set of laptops are used in more than one class. This means recording data against the laptop serial number is insufficient. The implementation strategy is to have the site provide a list of students (currently first and last name with the username as a concatenation of the two). The student logs in (By using the Journal activity, login is assured at boot time. After that, students must login as laptops are passed from class to class). A modification to activity.py adds id, start, stop, and outcome to the metadata. The id is the db id of the student (not the username). The outcome is a string - empty by default. A procedure 'write_outcome' added to activity.py, analogous to read_file and write_file enables a Sugar activity to add specific outcome information (either a string or a json with one of the keys: 'comment':''). The ds_backup.py is modified to save objects in the datastore to the school server (item by item, not rsync). A data collection script on the school server can go through the saved Journals adding this information to a database so that reports (such as the coach report) can be created on demand. Similar to KA Lite, the goal is to make information available to teachers on the progress of their students so that teachers can provide extra help and encouragement as appropriate. Currently, KA Lite does not provide feedback directly to the students but the main Khan Academy site has many examples of this (badges, points, etc.). Tony On 01/12/2014 04:31 PM, server-devel-requ...@lists.laptop.org wrote: Send Server-devel mailing list submissions to server-devel@lists.laptop.org To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to server-devel-requ...@lists.laptop.org You can reach the person managing the list at server-devel-ow...@lists.laptop.org When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific than Re: Contents of Server-devel digest... Today's Topics: 1. Re: [Sugar-devel] The quest for data (Sameer Verma) 2. Re: [Sugar-devel] The quest for data (Walter Bender) -- Message: 1 Date: Sat, 11 Jan 2014 20:27:21 -0800 From: Sameer Verma sve...@sfsu.edu To: Martin Dluhos mar...@gnu.org Cc: Devel's in the Details de...@lists.laptop.org, XS Devel server-devel@lists.laptop.org, Sugar-dev Devel sugar-de...@lists.sugarlabs.org,Nina Stawski m...@ninastawski.com, Leotis Buchanan leotisbucha...@exterbox.com Subject: Re: [Server-devel] [Sugar-devel] The quest for data Message-ID: CAFoGK8Go=Fh+Z0v7u+cj8yBqNhnPPz8hMupi_ZcrHD-e0f=n...@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 We had our January meeting at OLPCSF (and our 6th birthday). We talked about contributions to this project. Introducing Nina Stawski to the thread. She works with HTML and Javascript and is familiar with visualization. She suggested d3js.org as one of the options. Has anyone created the wiki page as yet? cheers, Sameer On Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 12:37 PM, Sameer Verma sve...@sfsu.edu wrote: On Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 3:26 AM, Martin Dluhos mar...@gnu.org wrote: On 7.1.2014 01:49, Sameer Verma wrote: On Mon, Jan 6, 2014 at 12:28 AM, Martin Dluhos mar...@gnu.org wrote: For visualization, I have explored using LibreOffice and SOFA, but neither of those were flexible to allow for customization of the output beyond some a few rudimentary options, so I started looking at various Javascript libraries, which are much more powerful. Currently, I am experimenting with Google Charts, which I found the easiest to get started with. If I run into limitations with Google Charts in the future, others on my list are InfoVIS Toolkit (http://philogb.github.io/jit) and HighCharts (http://highcharts.com). Then, there is also D3.js, but that's a bigger animal. Keep in mind that if you want to visualize at the school's local XS[CE] you may have to rely on a local js method instead of an online library. Yes, that's a very good point. Originally, I was only thinking about collecting and visualizing the information
Re: [Server-devel] Server-devel Digest, Vol 81, Issue 23
Tony, I don't want to speak for the teachers in Nepal, but I think, Speaking as an educator, that more real data is better than the red light green light scenario you propose. I would be happy to participate in the design if that would be helpful. Gerald On Sun, Jan 12, 2014 at 11:13 AM, Tony Anderson tony_ander...@usa.netwrote: Hi, I am taking a simplistic approach to this problem. KA-Lite has a simple coach report which basically shows a table with a row for each registered student and a column for each activity. The cell is blank for no attempts, a light green for attempts which did not reach 'proficiency', and a dark green to show proficiency in that task. I think this is adequate for teachers, particularly if they can click on a cell to get more detail (e.g number of items completed, number of questions answered correctly, and so forth). Many of the sites I am supporting do not follow the one laptop per child model. In one case, the teachers pass out laptops without regard to who used it previously. In other cases, a set of laptops are used in more than one class. This means recording data against the laptop serial number is insufficient. The implementation strategy is to have the site provide a list of students (currently first and last name with the username as a concatenation of the two). The student logs in (By using the Journal activity, login is assured at boot time. After that, students must login as laptops are passed from class to class). A modification to activity.py adds id, start, stop, and outcome to the metadata. The id is the db id of the student (not the username). The outcome is a string - empty by default. A procedure 'write_outcome' added to activity.py, analogous to read_file and write_file enables a Sugar activity to add specific outcome information (either a string or a json with one of the keys: 'comment':''). The ds_backup.py is modified to save objects in the datastore to the school server (item by item, not rsync). A data collection script on the school server can go through the saved Journals adding this information to a database so that reports (such as the coach report) can be created on demand. Similar to KA Lite, the goal is to make information available to teachers on the progress of their students so that teachers can provide extra help and encouragement as appropriate. Currently, KA Lite does not provide feedback directly to the students but the main Khan Academy site has many examples of this (badges, points, etc.). Tony On 01/12/2014 04:31 PM, server-devel-requ...@lists.laptop.org wrote: Send Server-devel mailing list submissions to server-devel@lists.laptop.org To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to server-devel-requ...@lists.laptop.org You can reach the person managing the list at server-devel-ow...@lists.laptop.org When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific than Re: Contents of Server-devel digest... Today's Topics: 1. Re: [Sugar-devel] The quest for data (Sameer Verma) 2. Re: [Sugar-devel] The quest for data (Walter Bender) -- Message: 1 Date: Sat, 11 Jan 2014 20:27:21 -0800 From: Sameer Verma sve...@sfsu.edu To: Martin Dluhos mar...@gnu.org Cc: Devel's in the Details de...@lists.laptop.org,XS Devel server-devel@lists.laptop.org,Sugar-dev Devel sugar-de...@lists.sugarlabs.org, Nina Stawski m...@ninastawski.com, Leotis Buchanan leotisbucha...@exterbox.com Subject: Re: [Server-devel] [Sugar-devel] The quest for data Message-ID: CAFoGK8Go=Fh+Z0v7u+cj8yBqNhnPPz8hMupi_ZcrHD-e0f=N o...@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 We had our January meeting at OLPCSF (and our 6th birthday). We talked about contributions to this project. Introducing Nina Stawski to the thread. She works with HTML and Javascript and is familiar with visualization. She suggested d3js.org as one of the options. Has anyone created the wiki page as yet? cheers, Sameer On Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 12:37 PM, Sameer Verma sve...@sfsu.edu wrote: On Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 3:26 AM, Martin Dluhos mar...@gnu.org wrote: On 7.1.2014 01:49, Sameer Verma wrote: On Mon, Jan 6, 2014 at 12:28 AM, Martin Dluhos mar...@gnu.org wrote: For visualization, I have explored using LibreOffice and SOFA, but neither of those were flexible to allow for customization of the output beyond some a few rudimentary options, so I started looking at various Javascript libraries, which are much more powerful. Currently, I am experimenting with Google Charts, which I found the easiest to get started with. If I run into limitations with Google Charts in the future, others on my list are
Re: [Server-devel] [Sugar-devel] The quest for data
Just to add my $.02, I agree with Walter and Claudia's approach in this paper. Making the specifics of learning visible to teachers and students, and doing the development from this perspective, I think is the best way to go. Thanks. Gerald On Sun, Jan 12, 2014 at 9:33 AM, Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.comwrote: On Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 3:37 PM, Sameer Verma sve...@sfsu.edu wrote: On Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 3:26 AM, Martin Dluhos mar...@gnu.org wrote: On 7.1.2014 01:49, Sameer Verma wrote: On Mon, Jan 6, 2014 at 12:28 AM, Martin Dluhos mar...@gnu.org wrote: For visualization, I have explored using LibreOffice and SOFA, but neither of those were flexible to allow for customization of the output beyond some a few rudimentary options, so I started looking at various Javascript libraries, which are much more powerful. Currently, I am experimenting with Google Charts, which I found the easiest to get started with. If I run into limitations with Google Charts in the future, others on my list are InfoVIS Toolkit (http://philogb.github.io/jit) and HighCharts (http://highcharts.com). Then, there is also D3.js, but that's a bigger animal. Keep in mind that if you want to visualize at the school's local XS[CE] you may have to rely on a local js method instead of an online library. Yes, that's a very good point. Originally, I was only thinking about collecting and visualizing the information centrally, but there is no reason why it couldn't be viewed by teachers and school administrators on the schoolserver itself. Thanks for the warning. In fact, my guess would be that what the teachers and principal want to see at the school will be different from what OLE Nepal and the government would want to see, with interesting overlaps. You left out one important constituent: the learner. Ultimately we are responsible for making learning visible to the learner. Claudia and I touched on this topic in the attached paper. Just to place all my cards on the table, as much as I hate to suggest we head down this route, I think we really need to instrument activities themselves (and build analyses of activity output) if we want to provide meaningful statistics about learning. We've done some of this with Turtle Blocks, even capturing the mistakes the learner makes along the way. We are lacking in decent visualizations of these data, however. Meanwhile, I remain convinced that the portfolio is our best tool. regards. -walter cheers, Sameer ___ Sugar-devel mailing list sugar-de...@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel -- Walter Bender Sugar Labs http://www.sugarlabs.org ___ Server-devel mailing list Server-devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel ___ Server-devel mailing list Server-devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel
Re: [Server-devel] [Sugar-devel] The quest for data
On Sun, Jan 12, 2014 at 3:32 PM, Sameer Verma sve...@sfsu.edu wrote: On Sun, Jan 12, 2014 at 6:33 AM, Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 3:37 PM, Sameer Verma sve...@sfsu.edu wrote: On Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 3:26 AM, Martin Dluhos mar...@gnu.org wrote: On 7.1.2014 01:49, Sameer Verma wrote: On Mon, Jan 6, 2014 at 12:28 AM, Martin Dluhos mar...@gnu.org wrote: For visualization, I have explored using LibreOffice and SOFA, but neither of those were flexible to allow for customization of the output beyond some a few rudimentary options, so I started looking at various Javascript libraries, which are much more powerful. Currently, I am experimenting with Google Charts, which I found the easiest to get started with. If I run into limitations with Google Charts in the future, others on my list are InfoVIS Toolkit (http://philogb.github.io/jit) and HighCharts (http://highcharts.com). Then, there is also D3.js, but that's a bigger animal. Keep in mind that if you want to visualize at the school's local XS[CE] you may have to rely on a local js method instead of an online library. Yes, that's a very good point. Originally, I was only thinking about collecting and visualizing the information centrally, but there is no reason why it couldn't be viewed by teachers and school administrators on the schoolserver itself. Thanks for the warning. In fact, my guess would be that what the teachers and principal want to see at the school will be different from what OLE Nepal and the government would want to see, with interesting overlaps. You left out one important constituent: the learner. Ultimately we are responsible for making learning visible to the learner. Claudia and I touched on this topic in the attached paper. Thanks for the paper. While we did point out to Portfolio and Analyze Journal activities in our session at OLPC SF Summit in 2013, I didn't include it in the scope of the blog post. I'll go back and update it when I get a chance. Just to place all my cards on the table, as much as I hate to suggest we head down this route, I think we really need to instrument activities themselves (and build analyses of activity output) if we want to provide meaningful statistics about learning. We've done some of this with Turtle Blocks, even capturing the mistakes the learner makes along the way. We are lacking in decent visualizations of these data, however. I haven't had a chance to read the paper in depth (which I intend to do this afternoon), but how much of this approach would be shareable across activities? Or would the depth of analysis be on a per activity basis? If the latter, then I'd imagine it would be simpler for something like the Moon activity than the TurtleBlocks activity. Meanwhile, I remain convinced that the portfolio is our best tool. I think the approaches differ in scope and purpose. In the RFPs I've been involved in, the funding agencies and/or the decision makers either request or outright require dashboard style features to report frequency of use, time of day, and in some cases even GPS-based location in addition to theft-deterrence, remote provisioning, etc. The same goes for going back to an agency to get renewed funding or to raise funds for a new site expansion. In a way, the scope of the learner-teacher bubble is significantly different from that of the principal-minister of edu. One is driven by learning and pedagogy, while the other is driven by administration. Accordingly, the reports they want to see are also different. While the measurements from the Activity may be distilled into coarser indicators for the MoE, I think it is important to keep the entire scope in mind. Don't get me wrong: satisfying the needs of funders, administrators, etc. is important too. They have metrics that they value and we should gather those data too. My earlier post was just to suggest ultimately we need to consider the learner and how making learning visible can be of use. That theme seemed to be missing from the earlier discussion. I am mindful of the garbage in, garbage out problem. In building this pipeline (which is where my skills are) I hope that the data that goes into this pipeline is representative of what is measured at the child's end. I am glad that you and Claudia are the experts on that end :-) cheers, Sameer regards. -walter cheers, Sameer ___ Sugar-devel mailing list sugar-de...@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel -- Walter Bender Sugar Labs http://www.sugarlabs.org -- Walter Bender Sugar Labs http://www.sugarlabs.org ___ Server-devel mailing list Server-devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel
Re: [Server-devel] [Sugar-devel] The quest for data
Agreed. On Sun, Jan 12, 2014 at 6:02 PM, Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.comwrote: On Sun, Jan 12, 2014 at 3:32 PM, Sameer Verma sve...@sfsu.edu wrote: On Sun, Jan 12, 2014 at 6:33 AM, Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 3:37 PM, Sameer Verma sve...@sfsu.edu wrote: On Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 3:26 AM, Martin Dluhos mar...@gnu.org wrote: On 7.1.2014 01:49, Sameer Verma wrote: On Mon, Jan 6, 2014 at 12:28 AM, Martin Dluhos mar...@gnu.org wrote: For visualization, I have explored using LibreOffice and SOFA, but neither of those were flexible to allow for customization of the output beyond some a few rudimentary options, so I started looking at various Javascript libraries, which are much more powerful. Currently, I am experimenting with Google Charts, which I found the easiest to get started with. If I run into limitations with Google Charts in the future, others on my list are InfoVIS Toolkit (http://philogb.github.io/jit) and HighCharts ( http://highcharts.com). Then, there is also D3.js, but that's a bigger animal. Keep in mind that if you want to visualize at the school's local XS[CE] you may have to rely on a local js method instead of an online library. Yes, that's a very good point. Originally, I was only thinking about collecting and visualizing the information centrally, but there is no reason why it couldn't be viewed by teachers and school administrators on the schoolserver itself. Thanks for the warning. In fact, my guess would be that what the teachers and principal want to see at the school will be different from what OLE Nepal and the government would want to see, with interesting overlaps. You left out one important constituent: the learner. Ultimately we are responsible for making learning visible to the learner. Claudia and I touched on this topic in the attached paper. Thanks for the paper. While we did point out to Portfolio and Analyze Journal activities in our session at OLPC SF Summit in 2013, I didn't include it in the scope of the blog post. I'll go back and update it when I get a chance. Just to place all my cards on the table, as much as I hate to suggest we head down this route, I think we really need to instrument activities themselves (and build analyses of activity output) if we want to provide meaningful statistics about learning. We've done some of this with Turtle Blocks, even capturing the mistakes the learner makes along the way. We are lacking in decent visualizations of these data, however. I haven't had a chance to read the paper in depth (which I intend to do this afternoon), but how much of this approach would be shareable across activities? Or would the depth of analysis be on a per activity basis? If the latter, then I'd imagine it would be simpler for something like the Moon activity than the TurtleBlocks activity. Meanwhile, I remain convinced that the portfolio is our best tool. I think the approaches differ in scope and purpose. In the RFPs I've been involved in, the funding agencies and/or the decision makers either request or outright require dashboard style features to report frequency of use, time of day, and in some cases even GPS-based location in addition to theft-deterrence, remote provisioning, etc. The same goes for going back to an agency to get renewed funding or to raise funds for a new site expansion. In a way, the scope of the learner-teacher bubble is significantly different from that of the principal-minister of edu. One is driven by learning and pedagogy, while the other is driven by administration. Accordingly, the reports they want to see are also different. While the measurements from the Activity may be distilled into coarser indicators for the MoE, I think it is important to keep the entire scope in mind. Don't get me wrong: satisfying the needs of funders, administrators, etc. is important too. They have metrics that they value and we should gather those data too. My earlier post was just to suggest ultimately we need to consider the learner and how making learning visible can be of use. That theme seemed to be missing from the earlier discussion. I am mindful of the garbage in, garbage out problem. In building this pipeline (which is where my skills are) I hope that the data that goes into this pipeline is representative of what is measured at the child's end. I am glad that you and Claudia are the experts on that end :-) cheers, Sameer regards. -walter cheers, Sameer ___ Sugar-devel mailing list sugar-de...@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel -- Walter Bender Sugar Labs http://www.sugarlabs.org -- Walter Bender Sugar Labs http://www.sugarlabs.org ___ Sugar-devel
