homoLudens

Someone should start contributing to Tom Hoffman’s innovations:

“While I’ve been on one hand brainstorming a best-case scenario for a school website, I’ve also been cautiously testing some basic functionality with real students at school. I’ve got a Plone 2 instance set up that authenticates against the Windows directory, so all the students automatically have accounts that use their regular network password and home directories on the website. For a couple months, students on one of the teams have been parking their senior projects on the web site, so that they can access the files from home. It has apparently worked smoothly, ??? The link address???” [Tom Hoffman via Webloggy Websites for Schools - Recycled]

He’s exploring the frontier [sic] where Galileo is headed. Fact is that our Windows directory set up is excellent, except for the fact that it’s accessible only from school. What a waste! Almost every kid in the building has net access at home. An intra-net for school content is like a library card without borrowing privileges.

We’ve max-ed out our Manila hosting. It’s excellent for teachers doing three things: 1) informing the community of what’s happening in their classes (syllabi, grades, events); 2) directing students to resources (the “librarian” aspect of teaching); 3) publishing finished student work. But without major investment in hardware and local server admin training (And with Ken Dow gone, who’s going to teach intermediate Frontier programming?), Manila won’t scale as an internet-accessible student work space. Dreadful to say, but Blackboard beats it.

I just wrote a proposal on behalf of eBN and KCSOS for a significant upgrade to our present Manila hosting support and, more interestingly, some capacity for community experimentation with Plone and Bloxsom. It won’t get funded, but it jazzes things up to keep nailing digital theses to bureaucratic doors.