Hi Alison (& Anil)
Due to my travels I may have missed an earlier post on the list -- Do we
have a "home-page" in the wiki where we are planing and discussing the
redevelopment? If not -- maybe a good idea to copy and past all the
points and thoughts over to a wiki page for the planning and
development.
A thought - We may be able to raise some external funding to help the
development along. For example, the Mozilla foundation may be interested
in helping us out with some funding on the Internet module which is
based on Firefox. Similarly, Sun or the Open Office community may want
to help out with the word processing, spreadsheet modules. Check out
the Funding Proposal page where we draft proposals as free content. Do
you think external funding would help speed up the development process?
I like the way you have reallocated my comments into the three areas :-)
Further responses in text below.
On Fri, 2009-04-10 at 21:08 -0400, Alison Snieckus wrote:
> 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.
Versioning shouldn't be too hard as long as we keep all related content
as sub-pages. When we need to develop a new version -- we simply copy
over all the relevant subpages to a new landing page for the relevant
version. We can ellimate the confusing url by using template
{{MyTitle|}} ( http://www.wikieducator.org/Template:MyTitle ) which will
remain in tact for the new version pages. It would also be a good idea
to use Categories for the different versions.
> 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.
That works for me
> 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).
Keeping with the official vendor release numbers makes sense.
> 3. Page titles include distribution names as appropriate, e.g., Ubuntu
> 9.0
Perhaps categories or a userbox-like feature embedded in a footer
template will do the trick.
> 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.
Agree -- thinking carefully about a modular design upfront will save us
lots of time down the track.
>
> 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:
For the record -- I'm not wedded to any name ;-), just wanted to make
the point that we are free to change the name. Folk who are more
creative than me usually come up with better names.
> 1. If our vision is to create instructional materials to support basic
> information and communication technologies (ICT) skills development,
> are we creating a "course"?
Good point -- these materials are not necessarily 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.
Easily achieved with the {{MyTitle}} template --- What about "Open
Computing" as the generic home page, then we can have Open Computing for
Beginners, Open Computing for ICDL etc.
>
> If you have some thoughts on this, please contribute.
>
> Alison
> http://www.wikieducator.org/User:ASnieckus
>
>
>
> >
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