[Server-devel] EduBlog Question

[Greg Smith]

Hi Walter,

I lost the context of your comment. I assume you are talking about the 
request for a workflow that passes the edit focus from one kid to the 
next to the teacher. Let me know if this doesn't answer your question.

We did evaluate the Journalism activity. You can see early Edublog ideas 
on the talk page at that URL which were put there after an exchange with 
some Journalism people. The original idea for the project came from 
Pablo who envisioned it as part of the journalism project. He wrote a 
Knights Challenge document which is available at the link "Original 
requirements definition: Blogs Knight Challenge" from: 
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Blog_Educativo_Plan_del_Proyecto

When I noted that they are already blogging from Uruguay (e.g. 
http://cardal-ceibal.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2007-10-25T09%3A47%3A00-07%3A00&max-results=7) 
and asked why that or Wikis aren't sufficient. He mentioned these things:
     * The need for good connectivity
     * Children getting confused with some options
     * The number of steps involved in creating a post
     * Difficulty in collaborating on a post
     * Difficulty with monitoring and viewing posts before being published

from: 
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Educational_Blogger_Project#Problems_with_Current_Blogging_Systems 
(Spanish original with more detail at: 
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Blog_Educativo#Desaf.C3.ADos_para_un_sistema_educativo_de_blogging)

So it was clear that we wanted to make blogging easier and include the 
ability of the teacher to review before posting. We evaluated Drupal, 
Moodle, Wikis, Wordpress and other options. None quite fit or it would 
take to long to implement modify them for our purposes and we weren't 
sure of good community support.

So we decided to create a simple web interface with some basic teacher 
review options. Add to that end APIs that post to many tools, starting 
with Moodle and blogger.com and you have EduBlog!

In the end it was easier to create the "simple" front end inside Moodle 
as we knew we would get great support from Martin :-)

The details of the work flow for multiple editors and review cycles is 
not done yet. I'm not sure if that will happen w/XO and collaboration or 
if we are close enough or if we need to build a more complete workflow 
into EduBlog in the future. That's all tbd.

For now I hope we solve 4 out of 5 of the top problems mentioned and 
maybe we can solve the collaborating on post problem too, depending on 
what the beta test results.

The other goals of the project are:
- See what it takes to build an educational/XO specific web app that 
runs on the XS
- See if we could build a relationship between real teachers and 
volunteer programmers by addressing specific requests from the teachers
- See what we can learn from running a bi-lingual and bi-cultural (in 
many senses) project

HTHs.

There's more history and background at the links of above if you dig 
deep enough.

Thanks,

Greg S

Walter Bender wrote:
> Maybe I am missing some subtly here, but isn't the functionality you
> are describing just as readily accomplished with a wiki? Also, in case
> you haven't seen it, I recommend Jack Driscoll's discussion in the
> OLPC wiki on journalism
> (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Learning_activities/Journalism). Most of it
> is applicable to any public writing exercise and is generally agnostic
> about the details of the tool itself. The important thing is to have a
> structure that affords editing: peer-to-peer and teacher-to-student
> (editor-to-journalist).
> 
> -walter
>