Hello,
personally I have the feeling that the real problem, rather then the
quantity, is the classification of reports (or other material) and how
they are indexed.
The system now does not support any automatic classification, and
relative index, based on the activities brought forward. We only have a
subdivision into groups, but if we browse groups web pages, it is hard to
understand what is going on. In most cases the only way to access to
reports is via the automatic index in the relative report page; such
automatic link does not give any help to the user who wants to browse the
reports and understand what is going on. As a consequence, for the
moment, the only way to inform a visitor on what is going on, is to
describe experimentation, and classify reports manually, thus including
them in the groups pages, which are (I suppose) the first pages a visitor
would visit.
Among the various groups present in our plone, only a few of them attempt
to guide visitors in browsing their pages, below I put a list of links to
the pages that present such attempts, we could draw from some of this
examples in order to suggest policies for all the groups.
Topic Groups:
out of 8 group pages, only 3 of them
attempt to present information on what they are doing, 2 of them attempt
to classify their reports and present structured indexes.
http://www.weblabs.org.uk/wlplone/Groups/infinity/group_index_html
(link to references)
http://www.weblabs.org.uk/wlplone/Groups/sequences/group_index_html (link to a report describing an activity with links to pupils' reports)
http://www.weblabs.org.uk/wlplone/Groups/randomness/group_index_html (index of relevant material concerning the ongoing experimentation, it includes: the randomness weblabspaedia, a diary of the experimentation, table of documents which are available also in english, index of pupils the reports produced by the teacher and by pupils classified according to the proposed activities)
Participating Schools
:
out of 12 school groups, 6 of them present their work, some of them attempt to classify their reports and present structured indexes.
http://www.weblabs.org.uk/wlplone/Groups/school_camden/school_index_html (Presentation of activities, but not structured links to published material)
http://www.weblabs.org.uk/wlplone/Groups/school_corroios/school_index_html (Presentation of activities, but not structured links to published material)
http://www.weblabs.org.uk/wlplone/Groups/school_peter/school_index_html (Presentation of activities, but not structured links to published material)
http://www.weblabs.org.uk/wlplone/Groups/school_peter/school_index_html (Presentation of activities, but not structured links to published material)
http://www.weblabs.org.uk/wlplone/Groups/school_sarpi/school_index_html (Index of work in progress with links link to a structured index of teacher's and pupils' reports and class' reports, plus a link to other documents used in the experimentation)
http://www.weblabs.org.uk/wlplone/Groups/school_sofia/school_index_html (Index table of reports, classified as group reports, individual reports, and related)
The issue of language:
Yishay wrote:
"Another issue is language. Should we enforce a common language for all
published reports? I'm not sure. I think having multiple languages on
the system is a virtue. Yet, we should strive to have all published
GROUP reports translated to English, and I think we can request that all
published personal reports have at least a summary / abstract in English."
Personally I do not agree with the idea of requiring a summary in english for every published report. There are reports who are written to be read by everyone, also people from other countries, and there are reports that are written for smaller communities. I believe that a report should be written in a language which is understood by its target community; so for instance, if an italian pupil writes a report targeting his/her class, he/she should be free to write it in talian, without then being required to translate it. I think compulsory abstract in english could be a heavy and inhibiting work, a pupil could always wonder "why do I have to write a summary in english when my report si to be red by my class mates, or by other people from my country?". Plus I don't think that only reports written in english should be considered worth publishing; if we are a multilangual communit
y, then we have to show that we are such, and we have to show that we use english as a common language only when it is needed, in oerder to exploit the richness of mother tongues.
In our experimentation, for the moment, we followed the policy that every individual document produced by the the class as its internal activity, was published in Italian;
we sistematically translated pupils' group reports, and other reports describing tasks and other issues of the experimentation. Further on, the Encyclopaedia documents (which we call Randomness Weblabspaedia http://www.weblabs.org.uk/wlplone/Groups/randomness/Folder.2003-12-02.1157/index_html/en/), are produced by pupils in italian, but thet know that the target is the plone community and that such documents will be translated for them by us. So we can classify report, in terms of their targets, in the following way:
1. reports targetting a local community
2. reports targetting an international community
The second kind of reports, requires to be translated in english, the first does not, nevertheless it has the dignity to be published (our pupils were very happy to know that their reports were published and visible by relatives and friends). Beside this, in the limit of our possibilities, us researcher can translate (or write english summaries), or organize the material on the plone in a way that makes possible for a visitor to understand what is going on; then, if interested visitors require translations of specific documents, those can be done on demand.
Personally I think that to limit the production of reports would be a loss and would not solve the problem: this is a project which inhevitably will produce loads of reports in the next 2 years, even if we limit production.
A suggestion:
I would suggest that we add to the system a feature allowing a teacher to add activity entries (with at least a title and a brief descriptio), so that, when one wants to write a report, he/she is presented with a menu in order to chose the activity (which could also be none, of course) to which the report is associated.
If we do so, then the system could automatically index reports according to the activities of each group (or school); so a visitor could easily grasp the sequence of the activities, see their descriptions, and eventually read pupils reports.
I hope I did not add confusion in this isse,
best wish, Michele
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