squeakland Blog from September, 2009

participants: John Stout, Randy Caton, Tim Falconer, Marta Voelcker, Christine Murakami, Cherry Withers, Kathleen Harness, Avigail Snir, Hilaire Fernandes, Cathe Galas, Rita Freudenberg

John told us that there is no funding for the GIS project yet, which affects mostly travel expenses for the colleague from Nigeria and cost of the maps. Randy already said he will work on the project further on, it will become part of the courseware. He has already some ideas for 5 units. We talked about these ideas, especially where to put it in the courseware. When we discussed categories, Tim listed the categorization issues in the chat window:
Timothy Falconer: 1. we pick categories and subcategories
Timothy Falconer: 2. tags are picked by everyone
Timothy Falconer: 3. we want to encourage category use so there's not lots of variations (as happens with tags)
Timothy Falconer: 4. we will have multiple-select categories, but not now
Timothy Falconer: 5. we will have sub-categories, but we're waiting for a uniform distribution
Timothy Falconer: 6. we can add subcats at any time
Timothy Falconer: 7. categories are updating into etoys whenever someone logs in (i just tested this and it works great)
Timothy Falconer: 8. better to add categories than remove or re-group them . . .we can do the latter, but it'll be difficult from a data management standpoint

Randy suggested a new category "information science". Tim suggested to make it a subcategory of science. Marta is interested in this project for Brazil, did some research on maps on the internet. John Stout told us, that buying a map could cost about $4000. In the discussion some related ideas were mentioned, like a map of water sources, average temperatures etc. Cherry suggested to look at the Aquafer project from Southern , CA?, if they would be willing to share their data? Cathie posted this link: resource for projects with Aquifers USGS: http://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/earthgwaquifer.html

Cathie did ask if it would be possible to drop data into Etoys. Tim suggested to open a ticket about that on the tracker.
Timothy Falconer: this might turn into a new etoys feature
Timothy Falconer: some concept of table of data
Timothy Falconer: as a central concept
Timothy Falconer: Excel import
Timothy Falconer: (just the facts)
Timothy Falconer: maybe a "table", scrollable
Timothy Falconer: the question would be how to reference the individual cells
Timothy Falconer: someone write up a jira issue and assign it to etoys 4.1

Randy pointed out that he uses color-coding for the maps, therefore he needs solid-colored maps.

Kathleen, Avigail, Hilaire and Christine had left by now, Marta and John left during the next topic.

Rita told the group that with the new Etoys version we have the opportunity to test the new showcase. As many participants as possible have to test the procedure to make sure everything works fine and is useable for kids and in the classroom. Tim will make a screencast on how to create an account and test, someone should write a summary to have it as text, too.

Tim asked the group if everyone, who registerson the website to get an account should be manually approved. Rita wants to make sure that kids are not allowed before the end of the test phase. Everyone should think about kids when testing.
Cathie asked for categorization and sorting, Tim explained the ranking process. This process will be written down on the website. Time suggests to have an Email every week with "top five projects of the week", everyone can subscribe to get it. Cathie suggested ideas on how to select these projects: design, color, aesthetics, educational value, correct information (researched)

The projects in the "featured" section of the website will be manually selected and not appear in the other sections. To create a group within the showcase one has to send a request to the admin.
For future versions Cathie suggested to have profiles on Squeakland connected with facebook, and even twitter.
Rita raised concerns about children using the website, Cathie pointed to whyville and webkinz
Cathie Galas: check out Whyville's site and look at how they check--they do a good job and have been doing it since 1999!
Cathie Galas: http://www.whyville.net/smmk/nice
Cathie Galas: Webkinz also encourages young children to use their site--http://www.webkinz.com/us_en/ check their policies

We should explain the rules to kids, teach them netiquette, how to use the internet safely. Also, there should be some explanations for teachers and parents about what we are doing on the website, how we are protecting the children. That should be in place before children can register.

Finally, we discussed consequences of certain behaviour of users on the website. What happens, when someone breaks the rules by writing inappropriate comments, for instance? Their was agreement to have consequences and then redemption. One idea was to let the projects and comments of this user disappear for some time. We will discuss that further in next meetings.

Rita will not be available for a meeting next thursday, so we could either find a new date or communicate via Email and have the next meeting in October. Since we are all busy testing the showcase we will probably send emails all the time

squeakland Blog from September, 2009

Blog Posts: September 2009