squeakland September 2009

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20 participants
48 discussions

Re: [squeakland] on having two squeakland websites
by Timothy Falconer 04 Sep '09

04 Sep '09

On Sep 2, 2009, at 7:16 PM, Nevit Dilmen wrote: > As an eToys user you can count me as this "few". I strongly agree > with this idea, and believe eToys has been pretty late in this > decision. The websites does not necessarily be hosted on seperate > domains. But all can be handled with subdomains. > > village.squeakland.org, projects.squeakland.org, > forum.squeakland.org, wiki.squeakland.org, blogs.squeakland.org, info.squekland.org > , www.squeakland.org . etc. > >> As with all suggestions, I'm open to ideas, but in this >> particular case, I'd like some serious community discussion >> about this. I'd like there to be solid, compelling, >> reasons for such a move. > >> Here are the reasons I'm against "splitting the baby", as >> IMO would happen if we make two sites. I'll >> distinguish as squeakland.org (official) and etoysville.com >> (community). > > I will not go in details below, one by one as you suggested. I would > instead compare eToys with Scratch which is a project launched later > than eToys and based on Squeak code. > > Scratch has been a huge success perhaps because of it's community > website. The community website is not a separate domain as suggested > above but is the main site. It includes areas for official > announcements but the majority of site is composed of project area > with more than 500.000 projects hosted. The second major part of > the site is forum and both use unified login. Projects are uploaded > right from within the application. Projects are shared and hosted > with Creative Commons licence which allows recycling and use for > educational purposes. > > The official areas of the site include blog, downloads, > translations, research, info, credits, quotes, news, store, > donations, conference, scratch day & learning materials. > > The important question to be answered is does VPRI or sponsors > behind eToys project have enough financial and man power resources > to launch such a major project with huge design, hosting and > maintenance demands? And are they willing to do so. Nevit, We *will* be launching a public showcase in the next two weeks, where users can share directly from Etoys. This is a major feature of the new release. The debate is about whether these public projects show on a separate website or seperate-looking section. I'm in favor of the Scratch way (integrated as a major part of the main site). Others want the look and navigation to be different than the main website, to feel like a separate place than the main website. I agree that a public showcase has been a long time coming. Our proposal for last year's website redesign included a Scratch-like public showcase, with features such as curriculum overlays. This part was cut largely because VPRI didn't feel they had the manpower to moderate a public showcase effectively. Now that control has been passed to Squeakland Foundation, we're creating this public showcase as one of our first, top, priorities. Take care, Tim

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Re: [squeakland] Etoys documentation TOC
by Rita Freudenberg 04 Sep '09

04 Sep '09

Timothy Falconer wrote: > On Sep 3, 2009, at 7:23 AM, Timothy Falconer wrote: > >> On Sep 3, 2009, at 7:01 AM, Rita Freudenberg wrote: >> >>> Hi all, >>> >>> as you all know we don't really have an Etoys documentation. So >>> let's start writing it. As I wrote earlier I propose to use FLOSS >>> Manuals. It is used by the olpc and sugar community for writing >>> manuals and books. To get started we should have a TOC outline. Here >>> are my suggestions: >>> >>> 1. Introduction (short description what etoys is about) >>> 2. Getting started (technical description on how to install and >>> start etoys on different operating systems) >>> 3. User Interface (painting tools, halo, viewer ...) >>> 4. Tiles (describing every available tile) >>> 5. Objects (everything from the supplies bin and object catalogue, >>> flaps) >>> >>> What am I missing? Of course we can have subchapters and also later >>> add main chapters if we find out we need it. Here is the manual for >>> TurtleArt so you can get the idea what our documentation could look >>> like: >>> http://en.flossmanuals.net/turtleart >>> >>> What do you think? If we come up with a TOC outline I can send it to >>> Anne Gentle from FLOSS manuals to set it up and we can start writing:) >> >> It's a good list. So this would be more of a reference manual than a >> getting started guide? (with tutorials) Yes, a reference manual is what I had in mind. I'm sorry for not making that clear. >> >> We could link back to the Etoys unit of the courseware for the >> gentler intro. > > Also, just want to highlight that we actually do have some > documentation (with even a big PDF): > > http://squeakland.org/tutorials/guides/ > > Kathleen's work is concise and useful, and should be used where > possible in the FLOSS version. Definitely, I will not have the same things written again, but collect it at one place. And since it is a reference manual, it will be shorter than other materials, but complete. As Bert pointed out "it defines the boundary of what we consider officially supported, and what not." Rita > > Tim -- Rita Freudenberg FIN-ISG Otto-von-Guericke-Universität Magdeburg http://isgwww.cs.uni-magdeburg.de/isg/rita.html

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on having two squeakland websites
by Timothy Falconer 04 Sep '09

04 Sep '09

Hi everyone, A few people have been suggesting that Squeakland should have two websites, the "official" site we have now, and a new "community" website with a different look & navigation scheme. As with all suggestions, I'm open to ideas, but in this particular case, I'd like some serious community discussion about this. I'd like there to be solid, compelling, reasons for such a move. Here are the reasons I'm against "splitting the baby", as IMO would happen if we make two sites. I'll distinguish as squeakland.org (official) and etoysville.com (community). 1. etoysville.com would siphon away a significant number of visitors from squeakland.org The single biggest boost in squeakland.org website traffic will be the public showcase, because of its social networking potential. When everyone can upload Etoys projects and easily email their friends and family and post on facebook and myspace about it, etc, our traffic numbers will grow exponentially from what we're experiencing now. IMO, it is to the benefit of Squeakland that these new visitors come to squeakland.org, where they can see "download", "contact", "about", "tutorials", "donate", etc. They will be much more likely to click such links than they would if there was a single "squeakland" link from etoysville.com back to squeakland.org. 2. squeakland.org will be able to have callout boxes around the site with random public projects It's very easy to have projects appear on the home page and perhaps even within a sidebar on all pages on the official website. This will draw people to the showcase and keep the site looking fresh and alive, which is always a good thing. The more people see fresh content, the more they will return to the website. Yes, we could achieve the same thing with RSS between sites, but there's two problems here. First, clicking the link draws visitors away from squeakland.org , which decreases the chance they will click "donate", "come to squeakfest", or any of the other links we want them to see. Second, clicking such a link and finding yourself at a different website with a different look & feel is confusing to new visitors. Remember that our target audience is largely non-technical. We could make it somewhat clear from the callout box, but my first point still applies. 3. "squeakland" as a name is already well suited to connote community From the start, I've always seen squeakland.org as a shared website for everyone, not just the sandbox for arbitrarily selected team members :) Having hundreds of new voices scattered throughout the site is a very positive move. It will generate a strong feeling of community for anyone that first visits the site (and we want first time visitors to show up where the "download" and "donate" links are. Put another way, I want squeakland.org to resemble New York City more than Los Angeles .... the former has lots of people walking the streets, the latter has almost no pedestrians in evidence. I *want* to see the people. 4. having *lots* of fresh, compelling content is good PR for squeakland foundation As we try to raise money from corporations, government organizations, and individuals, it would hurt us to have the "10,000+ projects" number located on another website with a different look and apparent group. If there's two sites to choose from, there will always be the "who should I give money to" confusion, or more likely, "I don't need to give money because it looks like they're volunteer community is much stronger than their official representation." One of the most impressive things about the Scratch site is the "number of projects" box, which simply says "SUCCESS" to new visitors. Their large number of projects, and the way it's integrated into their main site, is IMO a big reason for their success. People see people using it, and so they say, "neat, I'll try it." 5. having the showcase allows us to integrate with other squeakland.org functionality Everyone who creates a showcase account has an option to subscribe to our newsletter. The more subscriptions to our newsletter, the better our ability to keep Etoys in people's minds and promote events like Squeakfest. My plan was to have a weekly "best of" email that goes out to interested people that contains five or so new projects from the showcase. This can already be done with the current website. Also, anyone who clicks through such emails will go to squeakland.org, not etoysville.org, which means we're driving traffic to the site we want action from, not a separate site. Other functionality includes the ability to make multi-language descriptions for all projects, etc, etc. 6. having two sites will make ongoing maintenance more difficult or less likely to happen People tend to improve what's right in front of them, so if the bulk of the time from our community is spent on a separate community site, then they'll spend less and less time on squeakland.org, hence they'll be less likely to volunteer to improve content, see typos, or whatever. Also, there will be a natural "us vs them" vibe that gets started, where squeakland.org will be seen more as the "suits" site that's not really the real volunteer site. (as with OLPC) 7. duplication of content is inevitable with two sites Splitting efforts like this generally leads to duplication of effort, where, for example, someone down the road decides to add a community blog on etoysville.com and it ends up drawing attention (and life) from squeakland's blog, etc. As much as we say "we won't compete, we won't duplicate", it's pretty much inevitable, particularly when the new site gets several orders of magnitude more traffic than the official one. 8. it's just confusing to have two sites People will always end up on one site or the other, wondering where something on the other site is. People won't know which site to go to, or where to put content, etc. You can say, "this is the project server" as loud as you want, and there will always be people who get confused by two sites. 9. the new site will draw google rank away from squeakland.org With google, who links to you is what determines how high up on the list you place. Having LOTS of people linking to their projects on their blogs, facebook, etc, will help squeakland's google rank immeasurably. You'll be able to type "educational software" in Google and actually show up in the first or second page. Not so if we split the sites . . . the community one will always win. Also, having two sites makes it confusing for other sites when determining which site to link to. Schools will want to link to their group on the project server . . . requiring them to put both the squeakland website and the community site is cumbersome, and won't always happen 10. having one site helps us enforce a simple & clear navigation structure One of my primary roles at my work is warning clients about making their site architecture & navigation too cluttered. The general trend is always to add this page, and this section, and this other thing, all of which sounds like a good idea at the time, but people forget the big picture . . . the first time visitor. I force them to keep things within the "rule of fives", where the top three levels of navigation must fit within logical groupings, so that there's only so many misclicks before people find stuff. Usability is the "art of the obvious", and it's HARD to imagine how people use a site. You need hallway reviews, and stats analysis, etc, etc. With a separate community site, there's a greater danger that it'll turn into the OLPC wiki, where it's much too hard to find things of value. Yes, you can say, "the community committee can enforce usability", but I'll just point you back to #6 above. They can help squeakland.org too. Anyway, these are my major points. There's other ones like scalability, stats gathering, load balancing, ease of updates, single point of monitoring, etc, but these are really extensions of #6. Also, we already have a wiki, which is community generated, so we're really talking about THREE squeakland websites, not two. (and yes, I know that #8 applies to having a wiki ... it's a concern of mine) What reasons are there for having two sites? I can see five possible reasons so far: A) it will make the volunteer community feel more empowered to have their own garden to grow, leading to more effort by these volunteers. My response to this is that we should make squeakland.org more appealing to volunteers, if it isn't already, primarily for the reasons above, particularly #6. B) not invented here Some of us want to design & write the software underlying the community site, or at least customize some other software, because it's fun and fulfilling, and would be good for local installations. As with SuperSwiki2 and Michael Rueger's system, Squeakland encourages such efforts and will help promote their use in local installations. For the reasons listed above, I'd still prefer to have the centralized project server be integrated with the primary website. Also, do the wants of a handful of developers really outweigh the needs of a much larger community? I need a more compelling reason than "because I just want to". C) squeakland is built on storymill, which is not "free and open source" or written in Squeak itself My company, Immuexa, is not charging Squeakland for Storymill, and we've given quite a bit of free labor to add Squeakland specific enhancements, such as requests by the folks in Brasil for their Squeakfest site. Immuexa has a team of paid developers that continually enhance Storymill as they work on other client projects . . . in other words, Storymill's continued improvement is paid for by corporate clients. Storymill is production ready, using the same technology as used by such sites as Bank of America and Travelocity, etc. We can make *need-based* changes to Storymill very quickly, and safely . . . either by me or any of my staff. There's LOTS of functionality in Storymill that we're not yet using, it combines elements of many social networking, CMS, email & contact marketing sites ... lots of stuff. If things were switched to Squeak and Seaside, me and my staff would no longer be able to help in this way. That said, if the larger community really feels strongly that all things Squeakland should be free and open source, and written in Squeak, then I'd at least ask: 1. that the replacement(s) is immediately capable of replicating all of the functionality of the existing Squeakland website 2. that someone else spends the time needed to migrate all existing data to the new system (we'll give you database access & SSH, of course) 3. that you carefully consider that the vast majority of our users really don't care what's under the hood . . . it's a tool like Dreamweaver or JIRA. 4. that you consider that the effort needed for such a switch could be better spent on improving Etoys itself And the last reason, which has not been publicly stated, but I suspect exists . . . D) some people are frustrated with me personally and want the freedom to change things without me saying "well, what about so and so" In the end, it usually comes down to personal feelings about creative control and interpersonal dynamics. In the last nine months, I've had many people express appreciation for the way I'm doing things, but also a few who seem to bristle whenever I open my mouth. My style of spoken delivery is strong, and people can often mistake passion for arrogance or the need to be right. I'm fully aware of such things. Behind the passion and apparent obstinance, there's actually a great willingness to listen to other opinions and change my opinions completely, which if you listen long enough, you'll see happen often. I'm a proud flip-flopper. I tend to see many, many factors all at once (as this email may show), and my ability to express them in person is not always up to the task, so people sometimes assume that I'm just being difficult and, even worse, not respecting their opinion. I really do respect all opinions (even the anti-OLPC guy). My willingness to put other opinions to the test is really a sign of respect, not disrespect. And of course, I can completely disagree and still respect your opinion. Why people link the two is a mystery to me. Since the most negative remarks seem to come from the people who have already given the most to Etoys, I tend to believe what someone told me a while back, that "we're all going through different kinds of separation anxiety", and that at least a part of the negativity comes from a "who is this guy, and why is he telling me what to do" feeling. It hasn't been easy taking the reins from such a talented and selfless group. And of course there's always "I just don't like him" too, which is inevitable in some cases. My answer to all of this is simply: let's talk about it. I'd rather hear that you don't like me, then perceive it in your body language or tone of voice. Such disagreements are usually helped by frank and honest conversation. They usually stem from misunderstandings, which can only be helped by talking things out. So Skype me and say, "You piss me off because . . ." and I'll be glad to hear it. Anyway, this is a long email. If you've read the whole thing, I'm impressed. Thank you. Let us know what you think about the two site plan. I really am open to the idea, but want my ten points above countered before making such a drastic step. Take care, Tim

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we have officially overtaken etoys.com in google
by Timothy Falconer 03 Sep '09

03 Sep '09

Hi everyone, Something surprising and new . . . http://www.google.com/search?q=etoys We're #1, ahead of etoys.com. This is a pretty clear indication of word spreading about us. (Yes etoys.com still sells toys.) We're still very low in "educational software" and similar searches (Alice is on page 6, Scratch much further down). Keep linking to us, that's how it works. Take care, Tim

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Etoys documentation TOC
by Rita Freudenberg 03 Sep '09

03 Sep '09

Hi all, as you all know we don't really have an Etoys documentation. So let's start writing it. As I wrote earlier I propose to use FLOSS Manuals. It is used by the olpc and sugar community for writing manuals and books. To get started we should have a TOC outline. Here are my suggestions: 1. Introduction (short description what etoys is about) 2. Getting started (technical description on how to install and start etoys on different operating systems) 3. User Interface (painting tools, halo, viewer ...) 4. Tiles (describing every available tile) 5. Objects (everything from the supplies bin and object catalogue, flaps) What am I missing? Of course we can have subchapters and also later add main chapters if we find out we need it. Here is the manual for TurtleArt so you can get the idea what our documentation could look like: http://en.flossmanuals.net/turtleart What do you think? If we come up with a TOC outline I can send it to Anne Gentle from FLOSS manuals to set it up and we can start writing:) Greetings, Rita -- Rita Freudenberg FIN-ISG Otto-von-Guericke-Universität Magdeburg http://isgwww.cs.uni-magdeburg.de/isg/rita.html

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vote for panel about children making their own games using tools like Etoys!
by Rita Freudenberg 03 Sep '09

03 Sep '09

Hi all, you can make this panel part of SXSW 2010 if you vote for it here: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/3899 Voting closes tomorrow, September 4! Greetings, Rita -- Rita Freudenberg FIN-ISG Otto-von-Guericke-Universität Magdeburg http://isgwww.cs.uni-magdeburg.de/isg/rita.html

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Biology and computing and education for kids - interesting interview
by David T. Lewis 02 Sep '09

02 Sep '09

This is a fascinating interview (audio and text) that may be of interest to Squeakers: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=3 >From the NPR web page: "Will Wright, the mastermind behind the wildly successful computer game The Sims, ponders life, games and evolution with double Pulitzer-winning ant expert E. O. Wilson." They discuss art, science, education, biology, and more. Kindred spirits from seemingly different walks of life, both sharing insights that will resonate with many Squeakers. Dave

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educational content mapping
by Timothy Falconer 01 Sep '09

01 Sep '09

On Aug 31, 2009, at 2:36 PM, antonio wrote: > Hello, > The Public Education Departments are complaints from teachers about > how to find digital educational materials that may concern them, so > they try to unify criteria and establish standards for storage ... > As far as I know there are two widely used standards: SCORM, > cataloging more oriented to test-type material, yes/no exercises > etc., and IMS (http://www.imsglobal.org/), much less "behaviorist". > IMS Common Cartridge is basically a standard digital learning > content that defines a usage profile of four existing specifications: > 1 .- IEEE LOM (metadata) > 2 .- IMS Content Packaging v1.2 > 3 .- IMS Question & Test Interoperability > 4 .- IMS Web Authorization Service v1.0 > We're not talking about fun subjects at all, but in my opinion, to > facilitate the integration of projects done in Squeak in these > public servers is very important. > European Community is trying this: > http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/econtentplus/index_en.htm > A little more: > http://www2.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-much-info-2003/execsum.… > > Of course, nor teacher neither children can fill a big questionnaire > with dificult questions at save project moment, but this two > materials (metadata packaging by code at save moment and the > information introduced by the project's creator) could approach to > IMS standard. We have a page on our wiki called "curriculum mapping" here: http://confluence.immuexa.com/display/sq/Curriculum+mapping Can someone volunteer to extract outlines from IMS and others sources and summarize on that page? Feel free to restructure the page in any way you like. This would be a useful starting point for discussion. I also know of IB (International Baccalaureate). I'm sure there are many others, probably the UN, etc. Take care, Tim

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squeakland September 2009