squeakland October 2009

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22 participants
67 discussions

education team meeting notes
by Rita Freudenberg 06 Oct '09

06 Oct '09

Hi all, here are the meetings notes from our education team meeting from lst week: http://wiki.squeakland.org/display/sq/2009/10/02/education+team+meeting+Sep… Rita ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Kathleen, Avigail, Randy, Cherry, Bert, Tim, Rita 1. Release notes The release notes for the new Etoys version have to be written. There is a list of what has changed in the new version: http://etoys.laptop.org/src/ChangeLog And then there are some other changes (like added languages ec.) which is here: http://etoys.laptop.org/src/NEWS http://svn.squeakland.org/installers/NEWS Our task as the education team would be to tell the users what has changed in the new version, but in a way they can understand it. This is what Kim wrote for the last Etoys version: http://squeakland.org/download/releaseNotes.jsp Rita will go through the list and write up a first version. 2. Showcase The second part of the meeting was devoted to discussions about the showcase. Randy suggested to have an explanation on the top of the screen about how to vote and to have a submit-button on the page. Tim pointed out that this is related Issue SQ-472 in the tracker. http://tracker.squeakland.org/browse/SQ-472 Cherry asked, if there will be a button to enable or disable ranking. We then had a longer discussion about if we want to rank projects or not. Kathleen and Avigail are strongly against ranking (mostly because they don't want to discourage children, and it is very difficult to rank a project from a child and a project from an expert because these cannot be compared to eachother), Randy, Cherry, Bert and Tim are in favour of it (feedback will help children to learn more, ranking will help users to find good projects easily). Rita would like to not haveevery project ranked. Tim pointed out four points without consensus yet: 1) whether the "featured" and "everyone" sections should have different names, different looks, different rules, and different navigation 2) whether "everyone" projects should be ranked at all Kathleen wrote an email where she explained the reasons why ranking projects could be dangerous. Rita pointed out that submitters should decide if they want their projects ranked to lessen the burden of the rankers. 3) whether moderation (hiding a project due to inappropriate content) should be separate from ranking (giving points to projects to allow sorting) Tim asked, if just moderating really could be faster then ranking. 4) whether to show account levels with colored dots, and if so, how to calculate them We didn't get to this point in the meeting. Regarding #1: Randy suggested to follow Kim's idea of having the best projects with proper guidance and explanation in the featured section. The teams agrees on that. There is no consensus yet about the other projects. Should they be ranked, and how? There was a lot of discussion. Tim explained that there will be groups, where all members of the group could put projects without any ranking (good for use in classrooms). We discussed about approving/unapproving projects some more. A suggestion was to rank with negative numbers could mean rejection. Bert strongly recommended not to mingle moderation and ranking, which would happen because these negative numbers would be used when calculating the rank. Tim agreed to put a veto-button in the ballots, which is used to reject projects, so that no other person has to look at that project. We agreed on this process: • when a project is uploaded, ballots are being send • in the ballots you find a veto-button to reject projects with inappropriate content (we will write down what is considered inappropriate). • The person, who rejects a project, has to write a comment why it has been rejected. • The project will be send back to the submitter, who will read the comment and a nice email that he/she please should change the project and upload it again • if the project is uploaded again, a new ballot for this project will be generated, so that not necessarily the same person will look at that project (but of course that can happen) To make ranking easier, Randy will write up a list of labels which can be used instead of just numbers. This last point is crucial and needs a bit more detail. Tim wanted to unify grading with moderation, so points were given from -10 to 10, and an overall negative score means the project gets rejected. The group said that rejection should be either-or, so another idea thrown into the mix was to rate from -1 to 10, where -1 would mean reject, and the non-negatives a rating. But even assigning points merely on a 0 to 10 scale was deemed difficult (5 should mean "average"). So Randy brought up the idea to do away with the numbers and rather have "rubrics", that is textual labels to choose from. And not surprisingly he was tasked with creating the list Three points further points that were made . . . 1) if we don't rank projects at all in "everyone", how will users find good projects when there are thousands of projects in "everyone". Both Cherry and Randy made points in favor of ranking within everyone ... Cherry, "I don't want to have to click on each of the 100 "geometry" projects to find one I like. Randy, "It'll make it easier for the ed team to pick projects to feature." 2) if we allow users to choose not to be ranked, what rank will we give them? Without a rank, they have a rank of zero unless we choose something else. In a list of 1000 projects, 900 of which are ranked and 100 that are not, where do the 100 get put? If the bottom, is this fair to the 100? If somewhere else, is this fair to the 900? 3) ranking is invisible to the project author. Yes, ranks control where in the various lists a project will appear (overall rank, subject rank, target age rank, region rank, tag rank). But these will be completely different. There is no obvious score apparent to any child or adult. Tim believes people are missing this point as they object to ranking, either in part or in whole. Rita Freudenberg rita(a)isg.cs.uni-magdeburg.de

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original authorship now works
by Timothy Falconer 05 Oct '09

05 Oct '09

Hi all, With Scott's fix to "prev-URI" which should be in the next release candidate (due tomorrow), we have a chain of previous authorship for modified projects, such as found here: http://squeakland.org/showcase/project.jsp?id=7109 So modify away, without need to cite earlier examples (but wait for RC3 :) Tim

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Looking for Tutorials
by lduggan123 05 Oct '09

05 Oct '09

Hi, I'm a new user/member here, preparing for an 8th grade technology class I will teach next semester. I love the screencast tutorials on the squekland site, but there are only three, and it doesn't seem possible to get the rest. (The suggestion to go to Waveplace doesn't help as the only way to get all 30 is to sign up as a member, but the signup page doesn't let you create a user account.) is there any other place I could get the full set of tutorials. The ones I have seen look quite good. Thanks. -------------------- m2f -------------------- (from forum) http://squeakland.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=11613#11613 -------------------- m2f --------------------

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squeakland teams on the tracker
by Timothy Falconer 05 Oct '09

05 Oct '09

Hi everyone, I've just made three convenient tracker filters for the three Squeakland teams . . . http://tracker.squeakland.org/biz ... business team http://tracker.squeakland.org/ed ... education team http://tracker.squeakland.org/soft ... software team Each team meets weekly. Team members (with some exceptions) can be found on our people page: http://squeakland.org/about/people/ If you would like to volunteer for a team, please contact us: http://squeakland.org/contact/ Take care, Timothy

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New show case and new ballot system
by Nevit Dilmen 04 Oct '09

04 Oct '09

Hi, I have some comments and suggestions on new show case and new ballot system based on my limited experience. About half of the ballot requests arrived in my yahoo junk mail folder the other half arrived in mailbox. I do not know how yahoo decides to sort the mail but same position may be true for other public mail providers like gmail and hotmail. It should be nice to create some page on squeakland org and limit the mails to one per day. (You have 12 "tasks to do". Your projects recieved 2 comments today. ) Other isntructions like the projects to be evaluated could be given on site. This needs at least one private user page to be created. Unless there is also a public user page and another page sorting users by their rank there will too few points in all efforts needed for evaluating and ranking users. The voting page is poorly documented. What does region ranking mean? Am I ranking Europe itself or how this project suites to Europe? It happened twice that I was assigned projects in other languages that I do not know. It would be nice to assign projects to people who know the language of the project. The same principle could be applied to user expertise. Physics projects should be assigned to users with more physics background, math to math, etc. Project tags should be editable during review process and perhaps later. Sometimes a tag is missing sometimes it is present but is inappropriate. The same applies to target age, subject. In case of target age, multiple choice is better than single choice, since some projects are suitable to a wider age range. The voting page, requires 10 or more page refreshes to vote for multiple parametres. This is annoying. Single click form can be added to avoid multiple refreshes. Ajax is available to avoid refreshes at all. Replies on comments go as new comments. Replies should be seperated from comments. Remixes go unnoticed. I.e Yoshiki made a remix of my project and posted. Although he was kind to credit original project. There is no link on my project to Yoshiki's remix and no link on Yoshiki's to my project. On Scratch site these crediting links on remixes are automatically generated. Although I have no idea how they are generated, they are cool. Non-ASCII charecters in project names appear broken or sometimes cause problems... I suggest auto renaming A%20Bear%20Named%20Honey.003.pr to username-project_id.pr after upload. Regards, Nevit Dilmen ___________________________________________________________________ Yahoo! Türkiye açıldı! http://yahoo.com.tr İnternet üzerindeki en iyi içeriği Yahoo! Türkiye sizlere sunuyor!

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featured showcase changes
by Timothy Falconer 04 Oct '09

04 Oct '09

Hi everyone, I've removed the projects that are here: http://squeakland.org/tutorials/demos/ from the featured showcase, to free up room for featured stuff. (Also some of those projects don't really seem "feature-worthy" on their own, such as Just Painted Car.) Could the authors of the remaining featured projects please re-upload your projects under your own account? Here's what you do: 1. open up Etoys 4 2. click "Load" and then "login" 3. look under "showcase", "featured", groupName for your projects 4. open the project 5. click "Save/Publish" ... change any project info you like 6. click "My Squeakland" and then save Once this is done, I'll remove the duplicates. The reason for this is to give credit where credit is due, not "squeakland", and to allow these projects to be ranked just like everyone else. Take care, Tim

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ignore bad ballots
by Timothy Falconer 02 Oct '09

02 Oct '09

Hi everyone, I forgot to turn off the ballot flags on my local machine again, so another bunch of bad ballots went out. If you click through and it doesn't work, don't worry. I'm going live with the ballot expiring stuff . . . if someone doesn't click through a ballot in five days, it gets resent to another person. And for those now joining us, please make a showcase account at: http://squeakland.org/action/signup Thanks, Tim

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squeakland October 2009