[Server-devel] Server-devel Digest, Vol 81, Issue 23

Tony Anderson tony_anderson at usa.net
Sun Jan 12 11:13:18 EST 2014


Hi,

I am taking a simplistic approach to this problem. KA-Lite has a simple 
coach
report which basically shows a table with a row for each registered student
and a column for each activity. The cell is blank for no attempts, a 
light green
for attempts which did not reach 'proficiency', and a dark green to show
proficiency in that task.

I think this is adequate for teachers, particularly if they can click on 
a cell to
get more detail (e.g number of items completed, number of questions 
answered correctly, and so forth).

Many of the sites I am supporting do not follow the one laptop per child 
model. In one case, the teachers pass out laptops without regard to who 
used it previously. In other cases, a set of laptops are used in more 
than one class.
This means recording data against the laptop serial number is insufficient.

The implementation strategy is to have the site provide a list of 
students (currently first and last name with the username as a 
concatenation of the
two). The student logs in (By using the Journal activity, login is 
assured at boot
time. After that, students must login as laptops are passed from class 
to class).

A modification to activity.py adds id, start, stop, and outcome to the 
metadata.
The id is the db id of the student (not the username). The outcome is a 
string - empty by default. A procedure 'write_outcome' added to 
activity.py, analogous to read_file and write_file enables a Sugar 
activity to add specific outcome
information (either a string or a json with one of the keys: 'comment':'').

The ds_backup.py is modified to save objects in the datastore to the school
server (item by item, not rsync).

A data collection script on the school server can go through the saved 
Journals
adding this information to a database so that reports (such as the coach 
report) can be created on demand.

Similar to KA Lite, the goal is to make information available to 
teachers on the
progress of their students so that teachers can provide extra help and 
encouragement as appropriate. Currently, KA Lite does not provide feedback
directly to the students but the main Khan Academy site has many 
examples of
this (badges, points, etc.).

Tony

On 01/12/2014 04:31 PM, server-devel-request at lists.laptop.org wrote:
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> Today's Topics:
>
>     1. Re: [Sugar-devel] The quest for data (Sameer Verma)
>     2. Re: [Sugar-devel] The quest for data (Walter Bender)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Sat, 11 Jan 2014 20:27:21 -0800
> From: Sameer Verma <sverma at sfsu.edu>
> To: Martin Dluhos <martin at gnu.org>
> Cc: Devel's in the Details <devel at lists.laptop.org>,	XS Devel
> 	<server-devel at lists.laptop.org>,	Sugar-dev Devel
> 	<sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org>,	Nina Stawski <me at ninastawski.com>,
> 	Leotis Buchanan <LeotisBuchanan at exterbox.com>
> Subject: Re: [Server-devel] [Sugar-devel] The quest for data
> Message-ID:
> 	<CAFoGK8Go=Fh+Z0v7u+cj8yBqNhnPPz8hMupi_ZcrHD-e0f=NOQ at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> We had our January meeting at OLPCSF (and our 6th birthday). We talked
> about contributions to this project. Introducing Nina Stawski to the
> thread. She works with HTML and Javascript and is familiar with
> visualization. She suggested d3js.org as one of the options.
>
> Has anyone created the wiki page as yet?
>
> cheers,
> Sameer
>
> On Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 12:37 PM, Sameer Verma <sverma at sfsu.edu> wrote:
>> On Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 3:26 AM, Martin Dluhos <martin at gnu.org> wrote:
>>> On 7.1.2014 01:49, Sameer Verma wrote:
>>>> On Mon, Jan 6, 2014 at 12:28 AM, Martin Dluhos <martin at gnu.org> wrote:
>>>>> For visualization, I have explored using LibreOffice and SOFA, but neither of
>>>>> those were flexible to allow for customization of the output beyond some a few
>>>>> rudimentary options, so I started looking at various Javascript libraries, which
>>>>> are much more powerful. Currently, I am experimenting with Google Charts, which
>>>>> I found the easiest to get started with. If I run into limitations with Google
>>>>> Charts in the future, others on my list are InfoVIS Toolkit
>>>>> (http://philogb.github.io/jit) and HighCharts (http://highcharts.com). Then,
>>>>> there is also D3.js, but that's a bigger animal.
>>>> Keep in mind that if you want to visualize at the school's local
>>>> XS[CE] you may have to rely on a local js method instead of an online
>>>> library.
>>> Yes, that's a very good point.  Originally, I was only thinking about collecting
>>> and visualizing the information centrally, but there is no reason why it
>>> couldn't be viewed by teachers and school administrators on the schoolserver
>>> itself. Thanks for the warning.
>>>
>>>
>> In fact, my guess would be that what the teachers and principal want
>> to see at the school will be different from what OLE Nepal and the
>> government would want to see, with interesting overlaps.
>>
>> cheers,
>> Sameer
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Sun, 12 Jan 2014 09:33:07 -0500
> From: Walter Bender <walter.bender at gmail.com>
> To: Sameer Verma <sverma at sfsu.edu>
> Cc: XS Devel <server-devel at lists.laptop.org>,	Devel's in the Details
> 	<devel at lists.laptop.org>,	Sugar-dev Devel
> 	<sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org>,	Leotis Buchanan
> 	<LeotisBuchanan at exterbox.com>
> Subject: Re: [Server-devel] [Sugar-devel] The quest for data
> Message-ID:
> 	<CADf7C8tuPYwCQEWx0P5M87dykecjNaRT+DYhzrJf6=y7rCgyEA at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
>
> On Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 3:37 PM, Sameer Verma <sverma at sfsu.edu> wrote:
>> On Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 3:26 AM, Martin Dluhos <martin at gnu.org> wrote:
>>> On 7.1.2014 01:49, Sameer Verma wrote:
>>>> On Mon, Jan 6, 2014 at 12:28 AM, Martin Dluhos <martin at gnu.org> wrote:
>>>>> For visualization, I have explored using LibreOffice and SOFA, but neither of
>>>>> those were flexible to allow for customization of the output beyond some a few
>>>>> rudimentary options, so I started looking at various Javascript libraries, which
>>>>> are much more powerful. Currently, I am experimenting with Google Charts, which
>>>>> I found the easiest to get started with. If I run into limitations with Google
>>>>> Charts in the future, others on my list are InfoVIS Toolkit
>>>>> (http://philogb.github.io/jit) and HighCharts (http://highcharts.com). Then,
>>>>> there is also D3.js, but that's a bigger animal.
>>>> Keep in mind that if you want to visualize at the school's local
>>>> XS[CE] you may have to rely on a local js method instead of an online
>>>> library.
>>> Yes, that's a very good point.  Originally, I was only thinking about collecting
>>> and visualizing the information centrally, but there is no reason why it
>>> couldn't be viewed by teachers and school administrators on the schoolserver
>>> itself. Thanks for the warning.
>>>
>>>
>> In fact, my guess would be that what the teachers and principal want
>> to see at the school will be different from what OLE Nepal and the
>> government would want to see, with interesting overlaps.
> You left out one important constituent: the learner. Ultimately we are
> responsible for making learning visible to the learner. Claudia and I
> touched on this topic in the attached paper.
>
> Just to place all my cards on the table, as much as I hate to suggest
> we head down this route, I think we really need to instrument
> activities themselves (and build analyses of activity output) if we
> want to provide meaningful statistics about learning. We've done some
> of this with Turtle Blocks, even capturing the mistakes the learner
> makes along the way. We are lacking in decent visualizations of these
> data, however.
>
> Meanwhile, I remain convinced that the portfolio is our best tool.
>
> regards.
>
> -walter
>
>
>> cheers,
>> Sameer
>> _______________________________________________
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>> Sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org
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>
>



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