Anil, Thanks for the kind words. I am happy to help.
Wayne, Thanks for posting your thoughts. I've reallocated your comments into three areas for our continued consideration: *Audience* I want to start by commenting on a point Wayne makes throughout his post -- Who is the audience for instructional materials designed to help beginners learn how to use a computer and select open source software tools? A few statements in Wayne's post, --"my passion is to see the development of high-quality teaching materials supporting basic ICT skills development using free software." --course materials should be "available for use in multiple contexts." --"A key question for our group to consider will be whether the course materials should meet the requirements of the ECDL/ICDL curriculum." support the creation of instructional materials for all who might need them, and not limiting our scope to the purposes of ECDL/ICDL -- European/International Computer Driving License -- certification, that we should consider creating a collection of instructional materials on how to use a computer and select open source software tools, and design it such that relevant modules meet the needs of ICDL. I like this idea. It fits well with my broad educational vision (a pool of well-designed modular instructional content from which users/learners take what suits them). *Versioning* One of the issues we have is how to structure content modules that we know will be updated regularly in the future (e.g., software applications), and where we suspect that users will move to the newer versions of software/hardware at different times. In our discussion of revamping CCNC we had taken the approach that maybe the whole project should reflect the fact that the instructional materials reflect Open Office 3.0. But Wayne's comment about "...confusing subpages like Version 2, Version 3..," suggests that users will find this aspect confusing. But we need to have some sort of mechanism to manage the content written for different versions of software. Let's say we want to create a structure that has no WE-imposed version numbering, what guidelines might we implement to maintain such a structure into the future? Some thoughts: 1. Top page points to most current content first, older content is referenced in later sections of the page. 2. Page titles include version numbers according to publisher's naming convention, e.g., OpenOffice 3.0, Firefox 3.0 version. (Although we may want to use #.x for these to indicate that conent is kept relevant for most recent release within major version). 3. Page titles include distribution names as appropriate, e.g., Ubuntu 9.0 4. For instructional materials designed to be generally applicable to many applications (maybe file managment and printing fall into this category?), content is regularly updated to keep it current and appropriately general and new pages are started when content seems to be a somewhat large break from previous content. Avoid using version numbers in titles. My expertise is not in computer hardware and applications, so please comment on these guidelines. I believe that we will be much more successful in creating these instructional materials, if we can establish a shared vision for how to structure and manage them. *Naming* Wayne suggested "Open Computer Navigator's Course (OCNC)" as an alternative name. It's a good beginning (I like the inclusion of "Open"), but let's consider more options before we settle on something. Here are a few issues for us to think about: 1. If our vision is to create instructional materials to support basic information and communication technologies (ICT) skills development, are we creating a "course"? 2. The name is long and probably should include an apostrophe (although Wayne didn't include one), not practical for a url.User's may find it more difficult to work with long urls. 3. New, and therefore uncommon, abbreviations, e.g., OCNC, contribute to a steeper learning curve. The audience for this content is beginners. Other options here? I think we want something simple and direct, that clearly communicates the instructional contents within, which is "how to use a computer and select open source software tools for beginners". Let's not dwell on these issues too long, but rather have a bit of discussion and then decide. Of course WE can always change it later. If you have some thoughts on this, please contribute. Alison http://www.wikieducator.org/User:ASnieckus --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "WikiEducator" group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
